Some feedback regarding Forge Guard

Hello everyone,

I would like to give some feedback for the Forge Guard and especially all builds that revolve around manifested gears (Manifest Armor and Manifested weapons mainly).

  • First of all, I really like the concept of temporary gears summoned by the for guard this is really cool and unique.

  • The manifest Armor is awesome but I feel like it is a bit “empty”. The skills it is using when you unlock them in the skill tree are not really shiny and the cooldowns are too long imo.

  • I would add two major nodes in the Manifest Armor skill tree :
    – Lone guardian : If the manifested armor is the only manifested gear currently summoned, it gets X% increased damage, health and size. This could give some space for builds relying only on the manifested armor (and deter using the Manifested shields which is a trade off damage <–> protection)
    – Replicating guardian : The Manifested Armor replicated your melee skills but deal X% less damage (it replicates so benefits from skill trees) This one would make the Manifested Armor much cooler and interactive !

  • Forge Guard mastery lacks of manifested-oriented passives. It would be nice to add a few ones that create synergies between manifested gears and the player such as :
    – One for All : Manifested gears have X% increased attack speed while close to the player.
    – All for One : The player gets X% increased damage for every manifested gears around him. (Manifested gear are all summoned gear so weapon, armor, shields)
    – Infused gears : Manifested gears benefits from X% of the player stats (should be a pretty small number since it affects all stats)
    – Glorious Death : whenever a manifested gear dies or reach its maximum duration, every allies around it healed by X health and deals X added damage for the next hit.

  • It is something that has already been asked but I want to say it again : unique gears effects should all work on manifested gears, it can let people do funny/original builds with some cool unique interactions.

  • Manifested weapon don’t follow the player and it makes the management really messy. They should follow the player like other minions.

  • What about adding the skill “Manifest Weapon” so that it can have a full skill tree ? And every skills that can manifest weapons just act as casting this skill ? This would make manifested weapon less underwhelming.

  • Putting the Holy Aura as a Paladin-only skill was a bit rude for the Forge Guard that could shine with all his manifested gears. I can understand that Holy Aura stay as a Paladin-only aura but in this case another Aura would be nice for the Forge Guard.

Thanks for reading my post and I hope EHG will see it and have some talk about those points internally ! :wink:

2 Likes

I would also like buffs to the manifested weapon forge guard stuff. Although, as Manifest Weapon still needs its skill tree, I am holding back on potential buff ideas for those. As for manifested armors, I do agree that the cooldowns could stand to be lowered. Other than that, I honestly think the main issue with forge guard is that I feel there is not enough throwing/melee synergies in the game.

Forge Guard sort of is the throwing/melee equivalent to Spellblade’s magic/melee based on some of its passive nodes, but Spellblade has amazing self-synergies such as flame reave fireballs and mana strike lightning bolts all working with the “Gain X% spell damage after melee attacking.” For Forge Guard, the most synergy you could get out of that would be… axe thrower maybe? A neat melee/throwing hybrid skill would be very welcome, especially since forge guard has space for another skill, imo.

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I agree with you, and I feel like having a build as Forge Guard that completely ignores manifested weapons and manifested armor works just better than an hybrid build with them and it makes me feel sad ^^ I hope they can buff them by adding cool mechanics/synergies to make manifesting gears interesting and appealing !

This is something I have asked for in the past. I am testing out the helmet “Calamity” which provides 130% Ignite Chance “on hit with Fire Skills.” I thought Manifested Armor’s Firebreath would be perfect for putting large number of Ignite Stacks on the enemy, but due to how the helmet is worded, I don’t think this works at all. It’d be nice to have this interaction work, as on the surface, it looks like perfect synergy. I was really disappointed to see it not work out the way I thought it would.

It was really rough comparing Forge Guard and Paladin: Paladin has wonderful Ignite passives, but Holy Aura is just awful for Ignite builds and obviously lacks the Forge Strike Ability. Forge Guard has the great Exclusive skill, but absolutely nothing if you’re not using Throwing Attacks or Shields. +1 from me in hopes that Forge Guard gets a few more passives that make having a “minion-based” build worth it.

2 Likes

Agreed with all the points listed above, tried it out a month ago or so and it was great fun but required some very good gear (good summoner offensive gear to somewhat make up for lack of offensive passives).
Lastle one thing I felt needed upgrading was the whirlwind attack procced when using shieldthrow on manifest armour. I loved the concept, but for the heavy opportunity cost (the armor means you’re a summoner but want your main gear pieces to not be summoner but combat-type gear that’ll benefit the armor + the shieldthrow skill fully specced just as a ‘buffing/proccing’ tool), the benfits were lacking, especially… the area of effect. It’s tiny ! It felt in theory like a good way to give aoe to your single strong minion, but in practice its a tiny spin. Adding to its aoe and/or adding nodes to expand the aoe would do a lot of good to this fun playstyle (active summoner, fits the forgeguard theme : forge weapons with forgestrike, throwshield at manifest armor, not a lazy summoner waiting while minions do everything) !

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Don’t forget sentinel is the most OP class atm so dont be suprised if they hit it hard with the nerf hammer like they did to werebear.

Sentinel was always on the easy side of nerfs I would be suprised if they ever nerf the class meaningfull.

yeah the devs favorite class. Im willing to bet that lich and spell blade will be nerfed into the ground and sentinel will get another buff. I hope im wrong but i doubt it.

Right now it is just that sentinel has too many defensives layers that makes him extremely safe but also has too many super strong skills to deal damage. But I think the Forge Guard that relies on manifesting gears should not be hit by that since it is a bit weak.

Oh i see sorry i misinterpreted what you meant. The devs have mentioned on their Discord that they are working on making those kind of builds work better, same with BM.

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Compared to Sentinel only the aura of decay Lich needs a nerf because that’s even more dmg but only for the dmg to be fair. It’s just hard to tell how a class should be nerfed defensively because the glancing blow changes are on the horizon. It might be intresting to see if there is a possibility to touch different classes in their main strong points without ruining them.

Forgeguard thou… they said they want to improve it. I’m still not happy about how they do it but if it’s their only way to make the Forgeguard a special snowflake so be it.

AoD prob wont be changed. Dmg isn’t great and defensively it is impossible to compete on LB

Dmg isn’t great? Now I wait for the people who talked about their 20-35k poison ticks wit AoD :D. Lich almost “doubles” your HP and you have a lot of ways to gain ward. Sure the protections of the Sentinel mostly look better but he’ll never reach a possibly as high HP pool as a Lich. I think that’s the reason why you see a lot of palas and liches in the leaderboard. Werebears where up there for a month and got gutted Sentinels have always been up there and get a tap on the hand as well as liches lately. But I think we offrail the discussion pretty hard here and maybe should simply open a balance thread for stuff like this :).

oh, i hadnt seen those high of numbers. I haven’t been playing for a couple weeks people must have descent gear on their chars now. It’s hard to talk balance w/o characters being fully geared. You for definitely right about the off-rail discussions though. My apologies.

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