I’ve just been thinking a lot about potential builds for this. In particular I’m interested in finding things that have some synergy that wouldn’t be possible or otherwise would be worse without getting to use both the 2h and the shield. Not just a 2h build that gets to sac some offense for defense or a 1h build that upgrades to 2h for more damage.
Some things I’ve thought of as potential combos so far:
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The new unique Phalanx obviously gets a lot better if you have a shield to get extra block stuff with. The maybe dumb maybe cool addition to this is Sigeon’s Reprisal to get shield throws and javelins from blocking stuff.
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Dreamthorn is a 2h unique sword with block chance and effect. I’d assume you’d need to get one with a decent amount of LP to make up for it being a low level base though.
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If you can make void stuff work in FG, which I guess might be a stretch, then you can run Bulwark of the Last Abyss alongside one of several 2h void damage uniques to take advantage of the void damage as well as the crit multi.
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World Splitter + Horns of Uhkeiros + Crushing Blows to try to really juice up the mana cost of an attack and get damage from that.
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Bastion of Honor + A Titan’s Femur (+all attributes affix) to maximize str stacking for the Bastion of Honor block chance. Maybe a step towards a red ring setup? As for skill, maybe shield bash? I’m not sure if I’d run that after just doing it as my main character last season with the dual shields, but it’s got hook ins with str and block chance giving it extra scaling.
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More general/reasonable: Master of Arms is gonna be insane almost always since it we get to have 2 of the bonuses that we normally couldn’t get together. This also means we probably don’t need as much Reduced Bonus Damage taken from crits. That opens us up to not using the helm or boots base if we really like a unique or other base in those slots for some reason. If we end up using a 2h with the crit reduction like Leviathan Carver as well, we definitely don’t need either of the bases.
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I have genuinely no idea if this makes any sense and at least none of the uniques jump out at me for this, but there is a weaver relic affix that gives added spell damage while wielding a shield and added spell damage while wielding a 2h axe. Now a reasonable person would conclude that those are only together so one mod could be used by 2 different kinds of builds. But if we’re not being reasonable people, what’s your 2h axe + shield Forgemaster’s Might double dip added spell damage build? None of the uniques of either category really stand out to me, but there’s got to be some way to abuse basically getting double the value out of an idol affix if we could slap it on a bunch of them. For skills I imagine it’d be some kind of melee that procs smite. Although some skills also just have a subskill in their tree that is a spell like Energy Wave on Rive, Ravaging Aura on Void Cleave, Void Beam Shield Rush, Void Bolts on Volatile Reversal, Furnace on Smelter’s Wrath.
It’s kind of a shame it isn’t any 2h weapon. Then we’d have a few more interesting unique options like Essence Weaver, Bane of Winter, Volcanus, Torch of the Pontifix, or Alluvion.
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Ok now we’re really starting to get into unhinged territory, but Black Blade of Chaos, Void Converted Rive that gives increased flat damage per dex with a sword, and then either Bulwark of the Last Abyss or the real curveball: We also run electrify Healing Hands and then run Coral Aegis for shock stuff. Then Ocearon for more damage per shock. Stack dex and str then take the Iron Reflexes Node to convert the dodge to armor. While we’re losing our minds, we add Mourningfrost boots for even more flat damage per dex, this time yet another damage type. As FG we actually are probably the best equipped for dealing with the downside because we already get so much phys res for free.
Honestly now that I’m talking about this, it kind of makes me wonder if there isn’t just a void knight build with Rive + Black Blade of Chaos forgetting the shield stuff. But that’s not important here. So we’re gonna pretend that option doesn’t exist.
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This isn’t a combo so much as it’s kind of funny: We double down on being slow turtles with less attack speed and no movespeed from haste by using Event Horizon to somehow be even slower. Perhaps we will find a way to achieve negative speed and this will somehow work out. /s
ok I think that’s as insane as I get for now. time for sleep.
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Updating with a few of the build planners I’ve tried to throw together for each of these. Don’t read too much into the specifics, I was really sloppy with stats and things. This is just to get a gist of the interactions:
Going down the list of stuff I mentioned:
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Phalanx build: https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/oRWNL44A
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World Splitter Horn: https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/Q92meEDB This one is super half baked because I wasn’t super happy with the options of high mana cost things. The 2 most expensive I can find are Shield Rush and Smelter’s Wrath, but both have you take spell or DoT stuff to get the mana cost increases. I was sad to learn Warpath doesn’t work with World Splitter, that would have actually been kind of cool. You would have gotten to take the insane increase to mana cost + area/damage and then could path over to the 2h stuff for mana while channeling. Oh well.
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I had made a planner for a silly high end stat stacker with last bear, titan femur, bastion of honor, vessel of strife + Wall of Nothing in FG, but I guess I forgot to save it. Some of those interactions sort of come up in some other builds, just not with titan femur.
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Spell hybrid 2h axe + shield: https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/QWJaw02A Phys
https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/QJYmvGMA Fire
These are also fairly bare bones. I kind of just put in the basic stuff that jumped out at me. I didn’t finish the rest of it for now. The thing I was missing when thinking about this before was I was just looking at uniques. And yeah, none of them really do anything special. But if you look at regular bases, you find some axe bases that give you generic increases to a specific element. One gives increased Phys damage, the other gives fire pen. For the phys version there’s the shield base that gives increased phys damage and you can craft increased phys on it. (I just realized Sigeon’s has the same base, so maybe you could use that for auto shield throws to proc smites, but not super sure about smite when we’re investing so much into increased phys) For the fire version there’s Rahyeh’s Light for increased fire damage.
The phys version’s skill was pretty straightforward: Rive with Projections of War for Energy Wave. Phys, Str, Spell. So We get to use generic increases to phys and str to scale both parts of the skill and then get the spell damage from the relic.
The fire version… idk exactly what I want there. Warpath is the only attack that both has fire conversion and can natively cast smite on it’s tree. But since it’s channeled we can’t use healing hands with it. We could use Vengeance and then just rely on proccing smite through the axe throw + throwing hits cast smite interaction maybe. Smelter’s Wrath has a fire spell within it, but it seems difficult to proc smite with it and it seems like we’d want to do that for this fire version. So idk.
So there you have it, a bunch of ideas of varying reasonableness and completeness.
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Good thinking! I’m trying to make Forgemaster’s Might interesting too, we just need them to fix the current bug with it.
Currently trying Phalanx with Shield and it’s good, but I think predictable.
Going to try your Dreamthorn idea. Maybe with Void Cleave/Rive/Vengeance/Shield Throw converted to Void.
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Oh what is bugged with it? I was doing another build until last night and I just swapped to doing the Phalanx idea. The gear isn’t super optimized yet because I’m still using a few pieces from the other build which has some overlap but some wasted stats.
btw, with the Phalanx build, what do you think the primary source of damage should be? I was kind of hedging between all 3 abilities but that seems like it can’t be right. At the moment it seems like Jav is doing the most, but it’s always really hard to tell since tooltip DPS isn’t super reliable, especially for a build like this. I can tell that Vengeance isn’t doing much, but idk if I could make it work with more specific investment into it. The trouble is there aren’t a lot of ways to super scale up block chance. The best idea I have atm is to try using Face of the Mountain and stack endurance as much as I can. My other ideas to try using Bastion of Honor or Coral Aegis for block chance didn’t work out because those don’t actually increase the number on the sheet.
Ive been runing smth like this now:
https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/oP2N3ylQ
It is very easy to cap 100% block chance with just endurance so… it is quite tanky beast. Slow to move around though but thats not the problem if you can just facetank most crap 
Also tested this setup:
https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/Br679lyB
Both doing just fine to like 800cc for now, so seems quite optimal for my taste.
What would you say?
Ps. Bugged slow penalty is counted twice.
oh I thought these were Phalanx setups. When I say there aren’t a lot of ways to scale block like crazy, I mean like well over 100% for the more damage for Vengeance. But yeah face of the mountain looks like the way to go if I want to do that. I’m making a planner atm and you can get well over 200% block chance if you go all out on block chance and endurance everywhere. Is that gonna be good? idk yet. I don’t think I can really try this setup until I have a lot of the gear.
As for those builds, looks fine if they’re already doing 800c, but I don’t see the synergy beyond just getting to run a shield. I’ve never really pushed that high though, so idk.
Ah. I thought it felt slower than I expected.
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Hi Again, I’ve just uploaded short showcase of Phalanx/Javelin combo you were curious about.
This is 850cc, some random boss fight in the tomb, not slammed 2LP Phalanx, and 100% block chance from stacking endurance as before.
I think this king of build might be a thing when optimised, just take a look:
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Looks cool. It definitely seems like it makes more sense to lean into the thowing damage for Jav like you’re doing. Me trying to split the difference is kind of just making everything meh. I was a bit surprised by the damage when it did work though. It’s just that the problem a lot of the times is getting enough things to attack you. Things don’t chase nearly as fast or far as I’d like for a build like this. I also hadn’t really thought this through, but it doesn’t quite have the play pattern I was hoping for. In my mind I wouldn’t really have to do much while retaliations just happened, but since it requires using the vengeance pretty often to actually get the riposte procs I can’t just walk through the map and get much damage passively.
I might give this more of a go either with a setup like yours or perhaps trying to fully lean into the vengeance part of it, but for now I think I’m putting that on hold to level another character. I’ll probably come back to this either when they fix the bug or when I’ve farmed a lot with the other character.
It is a bit clunky I must say. It is hard to balance between shooting javelins and doing melee hits with vengence, they came after awhile when you retaliate and it is just kinda meh. It need some time to get use to it. For now I think I prefer Javelin+ shield throw version with spear that drops from mages. I dont have time to level up another FG just to develop both versions separetly… but maybe some day 
Edit after playing some more of falanx: not all rnemies trigger riposte which feels so bad… and it almost always some aoe dot attacks from birds etc. That makes this build kinda MEH… but the upside is you almost never dies even with under 4k HP and that is cool
