Its not a jack-of-all-trades mastery. The reason it has both 2h/1h-sword/throw options is because theyre suppose to be Support skills to your Manifest armor, so yes its definately a minion/hybrid mastery.
Let me be more specific about why :
Manifest armor minion : the nodes in FG makes it hit like a trunk (60 flat damage), and gives it 150% armor/health and 120 flat armor. Couple that with some minion life regen on relic and belt, and it will never die.
Melee support 2h axe : FG tree gives you 340% chance to bleed, couple that with Manifest armors 200% chance/150% dot damage, and make him use your weapon crafted with bleed chance/dot damage/phys damage. Then craft bleed effect/bleed duration on your armor/helm, and spec manifest to get extra % out of that. Everything will melt really fast.
Throwing support 1h/shield : Shield throw can make your Manifest do a sweeping attack when hit by your throw, so get some throw attack speed and see how he rips packs/bosses to shreds when he sweeps as fast as you can throw. You will also hit fairly hard yourself when taking the throw nodes.
Forge Strike support 2h : Forge Strike can spawn forged weapons which gets 40 flat damage each, couple that with Manifests 60 damage and take the bleed/ignite node, use a weapon with attack speed/minion damage etc, and you will have a serious minion army.
There are lots of other examples of this, but to me its quite clear that FG mastery is made for supporting your Manifest armor, since you can only do half the damage with the nodes compared to paladin/void knight, but the Manifest Armor is supoosed to be combined with that so it will make up for the missing damage.
I am leveling a FG to round out my sentinel character set and to be honest @ lvl 60 I am finding it surprisingly good fun to play so far.
I am going the forge strike forged weapon route - good skill rotations, very tanky, good damage, great mobility and honestly I chose it initially because I liked the forge strike animation… Lol - stoopid reason hey… I had intended to try out the shield throw route but decided to leave that for a possible respect after having so much fun smashing mobs…
Obviously I have a ways to go before I can decide for myself if I like it for end-game but so far I honestly cannot find much of a problem with Forge Guard design, there are some key decision points in terms of passives/skill choices but Ive been playing the game long enough to understand most of LEs mechanics so its not that hard to figure out what to spec…
I would however suggest that Forge Guard may not be the easiest character for someone new to LEs little nuances tho…
A minion build is defenitely viable for FG exactly as you stated.
But that leaves every passive that does not support minions useless. This all counts for all nodes of skills that don’t support minion playstyle.
I don’t think because theres one viable build branch, that the tree is in a good state.
If FG is meant to be mainly a minion class, it has the worst skilltree in that regard. And it would make build diversity for FG very limited.
Even if this was the exact intended build style it’s not very obvious. If it needs forum posts to explain people what identity the mastery has, the mastery has design flaws.
Edit:
Just to make clear, this is not about FG being week or something. There are different viable builds. But you need a lot of knowledge and experience with LE to come up with a build.
With every other mastery theres a clear identity for the mastery class. Ever LE noob exactly has a vision of what the mastery can look like. If you look at the FG it’s just “???”.
It can be fun for people to search for that viable builds, though.
When I first saw the Forge Guard my initial thoughts were: Its the blacksmiths side hussle…
Smashing, Crushing Armour shred/frailty type Damage type character… Hammers (blunt weapons specialisation, 2hander, even dw), Armour & Health Tank with Strength & Physical, secondary Fire based tags. Throwing hammers as a supporting skill for some range atk maybe. Maybe even some “throw some ash” in attackers faces kind of things.
At no time did I think of a Forge Guard using a shield, doing bleeding damage, summoning minions or anything like that at all - thought didnt occur to me in the slightest… and it was pretty surprising when I started reading through its skills etc…
To me everything with a shield etc would be paladin traditionally…
Didnt even expect a Forge Guard to have block abilities for the same reason.
bleeding - not really a sentinel skill at all imho… in a pinch maybe, but for a Forge Guard ignite makes much more sense.
minions - not a chance - to me thats a spell skill and mages in DnD traditionally summoned the animated armour/weapons not melee chars… The void Knight has the spell link in the sentinel set…
So yip… to me, FG is not bad - I am having a lot of fun playing it right now… but imho, it is suffering from an identity crisis when faced with the existing role playing character class identities… and I am not saying LE needs to stay in the box re character design (in fact its great to have new ones), but even if you are trying to be creative, there is still that point at which you begin to wonder what flavour of sock was smoked when the mind map of the FG was first chalked up somewhere…
It can also be played as you being the main damage, and the minions as sidekicks. What i was trying to get at was that when manifest/forged weapons are thrown into the mix it will come (somewhat) on par with paladin/vk.
But i completely agree with everything you said, its kinda hard to figure out what the tree is about, and it took me a long time to figure out how to make it work.
It could definately use some tweaks/rework, and a clearer vision of how to play it.
I bet it was “forged” in the fires of Mount Doom by hobbits smoking herbs
Yes, the Folded Steel node is very strong. How much stronger is it than Holy Aura though?
Folded Steel is; +60 flat damage for Manifest Armor
Holy Aura is; 80% increased damage and 16% increased attack speed.
Paladin and Forge Guard both seem to have the same Bleed chance amounts in the nodes above the mastery. Paladin even has extra stuff with Redemption (It takes more point investment than FG).
The biggest issue is what FG has available above the threshold. FG as a mastery is made worse when its best nodes can be taken without picking it as a mastery, with the exception of Folded Steel. Maybe moving Smelter’s Might above the threshold would make not taking FG for Manifest Armor a much more questionable choice.
FG is my favorite in concept with the forged minions. Implementation doesn’t seem great. Especially when Paladin can make the manifest armor just as strong, if not stronger.
For a hit build im quite sure the FG manifest will come out on top, as the %melee damage from armor/helm will benefit base damage alot more.
Ill try make an example :
Lets say we have an axe with 90 base damage and no other stats.
We craft a helm with Level 5 Manifest armor and Level 5 Vengeance (thats 60%minion damage/60%melee damage)
We craft a Armour with Level 5 Lunge and Level 5 Warpath (thats 180% melee damage)
For a FG with “folded steel” and max points in Manifests armour/helm skill that would mean :
Thats 840%(+80%holy aura) added to a base damage of 90(weapon) Total = 918
Then theres the 16% attack speed (i will count that as 16% damage) Total = 1064 Damage
My math may be wrong, but i think it shows the point, and furthermore minion damage on gear will enhance the “folded steel” even more.
For a pure Bleed/minion build i have no idea who would come out on top. It probably would be the Paladin in terms of damage, but with the cost of 20% chance of bleed stacks on you, and a somewhat more fragile Manifest due to not having acces to “shield crafter” node in FG which is 150%health/armor. Also it might not be able to get points enough for both the 25% damage reduction node + the bleed/ignite in FG (im not sure tho havent calculated it).
What do you think of giving the fg the ability to aggro. That way he could fill out better the role of a tank in multiplayer. Would also go well with a “thorns” theme.
I think that would only work if he were reworked a bit to have some of the suggested abilities. The ability to buff defenses. Thorns is also very bad on characters with high mitigation.
What COULD be interesting, is building the Forge Guards tree in a way that buffed the regen/hp/armor of allies, item type minions like animated armors and weapons, and thorns. Those mostly seem on theme with the existing class. What they could do to tie a lot of it together would be to allow the Forge Guard to “mitigate” damage by having abilities where x% of damage taken is instead taken by your minions. That could allow the Forge Guard to take “full damage” for the purpose of thorns, but then mitigate the damage actually dealt to his HP.
Then you could give him some abilities that pull aggro.
That would be very interesting and fun actually. He would also be a great addition to a party for multiplayer.
I view the Forge Guard and Paladin being people that buff different things. Forge Guards just seem like that class that would be working the forges. They deal with armors and weapons. They could buff things that have to do with gear.
Allies get +x% armour.
Allies get +x% melee weapon damage
Allies get +x% crit strike chance/multiplier (keen edge)
Paladins seem to be more about Holy/Blessing type buffs. They should have ways to buff non-gear related things. Holy Aura already does this mostly. It allows the buffing of Resistances and HP and Ward.
I think this is the fundamental problem. Paladin has stolen FG’s identity or Vice Versa. FG makes sense that its core elements are Fire Phys. I think Paladin should move away from Phys/Fire to Lightning/Fire or Lightning/Phys. It feels like the right move thematically.
Physical is a pretty generic damage type. Fire may be a bit ubiquitous though. I definitely see Forge Guard as Physical/Fire based. I am fine with paladin being Phys/Fire as well. I could also paladin getting into Lightning more, or just create a new damage type and resistance… Holy.
I don’t think the damage type should matter as much to the Forge Guard as it does to Paladin. Paladin seems like it would care more about dealing Fire damage.
Haven’t touched my FG in a while but I changed from a 2H build to a sword/shield build in order to maximise the FG-specific skills, and saw my clearing efficiency drop. TBF, I have not look at FG build guides so I am not sure if there is some balance further along when I level up my FG skills more. However, I do like the idea of having FG wield a 2H in one hand with a shield in the other.
For me the problem of the FG is really its talent tree, these skills look really cool, it makes me want to try, but I look at the talent tree I say no thanks …
There are far too many points for Throwing Attack, so few of these attacks benefit from throwing hammer, and picking ax from the forge strike tree. While personally that’s not what I’m interested in taking, but in short, there is very, very little damage increase in the tree I find.
