What are the most *interesting* Forgemaster's Might Combos?

Sentinel
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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:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • World Splitter + Horns of Uhkeiros + Crushing Blows to try to really juice up the mana cost of an attack and get damage from that.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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:

  • Phalanx build: https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/oRWNL44A

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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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 :slight_smile:

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.

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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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Well I dont use build planners. My fun is in testing so I am getting what I have avaliable in my stash (and that is full loat after 1500h) and just test it in battle :slight_smile: This two setups just came from swithing the suff around :slight_smile:
Endurance is very easy to get from passives and some extra block chance also. Even new idols give %endurance so it is hard to miss. Also boss that gives all these items is easily facetankable now with all the powercreep in 1.2 so… it should be quite fast to farm boots/shield. With t7 slamming it just free -50% dmg reduction to hits for FG for my taste :slight_smile:

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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.

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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 :wink:

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 :slight_smile:

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It applies the attack speed debuff and the damage debuff TWICE. It applies it once when you select the passive node and again when you equip a Shield.
Also the Haste-to-Block Chance doesn’t show in character sheet.

Javelin seems to do good damage, Shield throw proccing from Sigeon’s Reprisal is probably the best damage for that build right?

I’ve respecced and I’m using Dreamthorn 2H with Shield:

  • Void Cleave as movement and AOE with 2 charges.
  • Shield throw (Converted to Void) with the Siege Breaker node with ricochets on myself and the boss
  • Symbols of hope for block chance, converted to void damage and crit chance
  • Ring of shields for block chance and survivability
  • Rive/Vengeance for sustain etc, still can’t settle on this slot

It’s only level 71 at the moment but feels fun

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Yeah it is the thing that seems to be doing all the damage. The unfortunate thing mostly comes down to it just not proccing that often in some situations. It’s great when it works and absolutely garbage when you’re just sitting there waiting for the enemies to attack you.
I was kind of hoping I could get Vengeance doing something with the more damage on Phalanx, but I just can’t really get it to deal any notable damage. But maybe I’m just not building it right for that. Now that I’m looking at it, maybe I need to spec into iron blades. It gives bleed duration with spears so maybe there’s something to that. idk.

It’s really hard to tell, especially with a build like this where there’s no easy way to check it on the target dummy. It doesn’t seem like it from the limited testing I’ve done though. If I just stand there and let things hit me so I can see if the shield throw kills stuff it wasn’t terribly impressive. But again, maybe I’m just not leaning into it enough.

It’s really cool to hear the dreamthorn tech is working out. Maybe I’ll try it if I can find a decently high LP one.

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Did you try any of these Interactions out in game?

I’m at 100 corruption now and my damage is really low, takes 1-2mins to kill Rare enemies: https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/oX4kgPEo

Any ideas?

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I ended up only briefly trying out FG actually lol. My first build ended up being something else just because I dropped some items for it. My next build I swapped to FG to try playing with the Phalanx Sigeon thing and it was ok but had enough problems that I didn’t want to keep going with it. After that I just got distracted with other build ideas on different characters. I do think I’ll try going back to this soon though. I’ve picked up a few decent 2h I’m interested in playing with.

As for your setup, not an expert, but I’ll try to go through what I can:

  • The idea with using a low level unique like Dreamthorn is that it’s a lot easier to get more LP on it. So I think if it’s going to carry you into late game, you need to get one that at least has a good exalted damage mod you like and ideally a 2-3 LP one that has other mods you care about. Health gain on kill to me doesn’t seem worth it even if you’re building to be tanky since it doesn’t really scale up and doesn’t do much for you on bosses. Plus 2h weapons can roll much higher damage mods than most items, so it’s really important to use it for one of those.

  • Shield throw isn’t gonna benefit from any of the melee damage stuff, so the mods you can get for it are going to be limited to more generic things like increased damage, increased crit chance, penetration, armor shred, all attributes, etc. My build was using Sigeon as a way to get flat damage for it, but I’m not sure if I just didn’t invest enough into it, but the auto shield throws weren’t doing much damage. The more damage based on block stuff is great, but without the flat damage it’s gonna struggle. There is flat throwing damage in the tree though, so maybe it can be fine if you add that stuff. You could also be taking the crit chance and multiplier for throwing attacks.

  • A lot of the gear isn’t great at the moment, but that will improve over time.

  • idk enough about void cleave to really say how it should be played, but it seems tough scaling both it and a throwing attack without some stronger synergy linking them together like getting more void damage stuff from VK, which you won’t have as much access to for FG. I think if we want to go down the Void FG route with a setup like this, it kind of has to be focusing on a specific melee attack like Void Cleave, Voide Converted Warpath, Rive, or Lunge. Some of these actually have hook ins to void cleave too. Or you could go more down the block chance/effect route and go deeper on shield bash or shield throw and scale those specifically, probably without worrying as much about the void damage, but idk.

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Look forward to seeing your Sentinel builds, make sure to post them haha

Just before I logged off, Monolith boss dropped ‘Eternal Eclipse’ 2H Sword. This seems insanely good for Void Cleave, I’m going to try it with the Riftflame node which gives it the Void & Fire tags. There’s old forum posts describing that this works together so that Void Cleave gets both lots of flat damage from the weapon

I just need to figure out what other damage skill to use in-between Void cleaves cooldown, it can’t be a melee attack with ‘Void’ or ‘Fire’ or it will steal the proc of the weapon

Maybe just Rive (not converted), with Ignite etc

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Oh do both procs go off at once or does it alternate? I kind of assumed they alternated, but looking at it again it looks more like they can trigger at once with the fire/void attack and just both go on CD.

Some options at a quick glance:

  • Multistrike has a node that causes void cleave to consume all stacks of armament to deal more damage and AoE.
  • Abyssal Echoes can cause your next void cleave to do more damage. (Also void cleave can auto cast it, so you don’t even have to press the button.)
  • Lunge can reset the CD of Void Cleave when it kills something and it has kill threshold to do that, but not sure how reliable that is or if it matters since you have to wait the 2 seconds regardless.
  • Vengeance can buff your void cleave, but it has to be void converted first. I guess technically you don’t have to make the filler attack not void, but it would be janky to have to keep track of the 2 second CD to make sure you don’t accidentally use it after it resets. It also has a global more multiplier in the tree.
  • Forge Strike has a global more multiplier but perhaps using a mana heavy ability as a filler for another costing thing as filler for another isn’t the best.

EDIT: Oh another synergy I didn’t realize because it was in Void Cleave’s tree, not Warpath, but Void cleave has something that says it gets more damage after channeling Warpath for at least 2 seconds. So maybe that’s a plan? You Warpath around for 2 seconds, then void cleave, then warpath around, then void cleave. Plus this has the benefit that I’d assume that the sword’s buff doesn’t apply to Warpath while you’re channeling it, just if you stopped and started again, so it could be safely fire or void converted without worrying about wasting the buff.

I’m wondering if you can get enough CDR to bring Void cleave to just above 2 second CD to optimize how often you get to line up the buff. Although I guess with the multistrike route depending on how quickly you can stack up Arnaments 2 seconds might be too frequent anyway. Assuming this is another Forgemaster build, you’d have slower attack speed.

As for me, I’m a little stuck atm for trying more FG. I swapped back to Paladin to try another idea. I wanted to see if I could make Divine Flare, the damage node from Symbols of Hope, into a main damaging ability and… I mean I didn’t try THAT hard, but conceptually it seems difficult to use without filler since the limiting factor is waiting for the symbols to regenerate, which there are only so many ways to affect that. I also had the idea of using Smites costing my health to proc it automatically from the rings, but
a) It only procs on damage and Smite’s health cost doesn’t actually damage you. There are some ways to cause that self damage
b) but it’s not super reliable and the problem with smite ends up being that it ends up healing too much to actually bring me low.
c) It doesn’t solve the symbol stack issue.

I could maybe settle for it just being a bit of extra damage in an otherwise smite focused build, but that’s just less interesting to me. So I swapped over to another character.

Unfortunately since my mastery respec cost is so high and I’ve already done it twice, it’ll be a bit before I can swap back unless I just level a new character. I do think the cost is too prohibitive for my purposes.

Although I suppose I have my offline characters. Maybe it’s just time to stop playing online. I’ve gotten the gist of things and my stash is now just as cluttered on both modes lol.

EDIT: Oh another thought: It doesn’t HAVE to be void cleave. You could use a void rive for example and then the fire attack would be healing hands. That said, that’s probably worse than just getting the one big hit, so idk.

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Yes, iirc the only skill currently that can do this is void cleave as it can get a fire tag while keeping its void tag triggering both effects.

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Maybe something like this?:
https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/Qb41KZpo
(As usual, the actual details of the passives/skill points/stats aren’t precise, but you get the gist.)

Plan would probably be something like Void Cleave to use the first buff and cast an Abyssal Echoes → Warpath for 2 seconds for the buff → Void Cleave. Rinse and Repeat. I’m hoping some combination of the mana gen from Warpath and Void Cleave nodes sustain all this. But It could take some adjusting. Getting Void cleave down to 2 sec CD seems possible with double exalted CD reduction affixes. I suppose it doesn’t NEED to be exactly 2 seconds, but the closer the better I guess. I suppose we just don’t want it to be less than 2 seconds so we don’t accidentally use it before we’re done warpathing.

EDIT: That said, there’s nothing in this that is necessarily makes this best in FG. Basically it’s a question of if we like getting to use the shield or if we want the vitality scaling and various void damage buffs in VK. Idk.

EDIT: Also, there are some different directions you could take the gear. The chest could be a titan heart, although I dislike using titan heart with Bulwark. Alternatively the helm, body, gloves could be the good exalted bases with last bear set. Rings could be Opal Rings for the CDR. Gloves and helm bases could also be CDR but they’re much worse defensively.

EDIT 2: I’m trying it out now. Not particularly optimized gear and no LP slams yet, but my last character’s gear wasn’t that far off what you might want for something like this. It feels pretty weak at the moment, but I’d have to see how it feels with more gear. That said, there is kind of a critical flaw with the plan logistically. The between the mana cost of void cleave and abyssal echoes, it costs a surprising amount to sustain a void cleave every 2 seconds. More specifically though, the issue with using the mana gen from Warpath is that it’s per 3 seconds, not per second. And that’s not smoothed out in any way, so you have to channel warpath for 3 seconds before you get the mana, otherwise you get zilch. This means either you don’t need as much CDR and you’d just use this once every 3 seconds or perhaps it has to be one of the vairants that lets you use time and faith for mana.

EDIT 3: So with enough crit chance you can kind of sustain the Warpath version against clear when you can hit a lot of enemies with Void Cleave to crit them for mana. On single target you need to use Multistrike for mana. Honestly in general the build is a bit clunky. Needing to void cleave every ~2 seconds between doing whatever else and having it move you is just really awkward even with the mana management solved. But again, maybe it’d feel better if I was making it kill things in one hit.

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Here is a build I had put into the planner (haven’t made it in game yet).
Comments appreciated.
https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/Qk1Z321o

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Looks fine mostly. I’m assuming you’re building around hit based Javelin based on most of the stuff you have so I’m guessing the bleed duration on the chest is a mistake.

If you’re not going to manually throw Javelin then the attack speed and mana don’t matter, so you can drop points in those nodes for Strategic Patience and Spiked Bombardment.
(The mana thing isn’t necessarily intended, but when asked about it they said they’re leaving it as is at least for this season.) If you are going to manually throw sometimes then I guess those are fine. From my time trying something like this I was a bit torn. It’s kind of inconsistent getting the free procs, so maybe sometimes just throwing it is better, but personally I don’t like having to weave together abilities, so I mostly just held down Vengeance.

You probably don’t need as much crit chance as you’re getting (but I’m not great for figuring this out) so It would probably be better to run some good bases instead of stuff like Prismatic Gaze, Phantom Grip, or Mymidon Plate long term. Changing these could also help narrow down your sustain a bit. If you go all exalted bases you can use The Last Bear set to get a bunch of HP regen from your STR. If you want to go leech then you might as well run a Titan Heart for DR. The rings can be whatever. Good exalts, Red Rings, Sun Seals to auto-proc Symbols of Hope when you get hit too hard, etc.

With the passives, I feel like Master of Arms makes a lot of sense in a Forgemaster build. Not only is it 2 str per point but we get to double dip it’s effect and get frailty/reduced crit damage taken, especially if you don’t want to have to run the crit reduction helm base.

Also while we’re adding new things:

This was something dumb I thought of because I dropped some 2h maces with a lot of stun chance:

https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/oY4RNJDB

Forge Strike has stun chance → increased ailment damage. Get all the stun chance I can. Get all the bleed I can… profit? One really obvious problem I need to deal with is Boulderfist both stops health leech AND blocks me from using the HP regen affix from Last Bear, so I’d need some other sustain. Either more direct investment into HP regen or perhaps some other healing route. idk.

Also as funny as it would be to go full stun chance with the 2h mace, the fact that it can’t roll bleed chance kind of sucks. 2h axes get bleed base and bleed chance affixes AND can still roll both stun chance and melee stun chance. Plus more bleed chance from the Weapon Master passive. So idk. It would kind of kill the original reason I made the build, but it might be better.