Resurrecting Fire Bro

Good Morning Folks! I know a few days ago I stated that I was going to be putting my Ignite Warpath Forge Guard aka “Fire Bro” on hold. However yesterday I ended up ripping the bandaid off and completely rebuilding the character into something slightly different. I am not sure how interesting this post is going to be for most people, because I am going to be diving into the changes that I made. I decided to go ahead and write about it mostly to show how easy it is to shift gears within Last Epoch. I’ve said this before, but the only thing that is absolutely set in stone is your mastery. So no matter what I would be doing from this point out, I would be doing it as a Forge Guard. Within that mastery, there is a heck of a lot of leverage to move around and change things up significantly.

For anyone who has not been following the saga of “Fire Bro” let’s do a really quick recap. The above video shows some Monolith gameplay of the build as it stood at the beginning of yesterday. I was focused on shifting Warpath to fire damage, and then using Lunge also shifted to fire damage as my movement ability, generating Sigils of Hope on kill, and proccing Smite every second while spinning to deal additional fire damage and some splash healing. It worked phenomenally well… up until the point that it didn’t. I had put almost all of my eggs in the block mechanic basket and did not have enough health or general survival to keep pushing forward. While I got to Empowered Monoliths aka the level 100 + 100 Corruption version of the endgame system… I spent most of my time just getting overwhelmed by incoming damage. For anyone curious here is a Build Planner for the state of this build before the impending rework.

Yesterday started largely as me sitting down and trying to figure out how to work Healing Hands into my build. This is an ability that received a new talent tree with 1.0 and offers a ton of utility. Firstly you can have melee attacks proc healing hands 100% of the time generating a burst of direct healing and some healing over time. On top of that you can shift the ability to scale based on melee damage with Seraph Blade and if you have enough points left over you can turn it into a movement ability when directly cast and even give it the same invulnerability frames that other movement abilities have. A huge positive side effect of this interaction is the splash healing is not only keeping me alive but also keeping my Manifest Armor minion topped off. The problem with all of this… is it does not work terribly well with Warpath. It will proc once per channel, meaning that you need to constantly “pulse” Warpath meaning that you are losing some of the benefits that I had stacked for “channeling” constantly. Essentially I needed a new main damage-dealing ability.

Without Warpath smite was out the window as well, but I landed on another favorite of my abilities Rive. Essentially Rive is a 3-strike combo and the talent trees allow you to tweak which of the strikes is the most important. For me I wanted to go with Focused Strike which means that the third large AOE strike will always be a critical strike. On top of that while I can’t shift the damage of Rive to Fire… I can pick up three points into Savagery meaning that I am dealing 45% more damage against Ignited Targets and both my Manifest Armor and I are always igniting targets. Lastly, there is Coup De Grace which means that rive has a 15% kill threshold so that it simply deletes any target when their health drops to 15% or below.

Since I removed… Smite, Warpath, and Lunge… that left me with an open slot. As uninteresting of a choice as it is… I ended up going with the good ole swiss-army-knife of damage dealing… Volatile Reversal. I do not care at all about void damage, but this ability creates a rift at the start of my movement rewind and a rift at the end of my movement and causes everything touched by either rift to take 30% more damage. Additionally, I gain a boost in global attack speed meaning I burn through my 3-hit combo faster causing more ignites and dealing more critical damage on that third hit. The cooldown is lowered to the point where I can basically be constantly pressing it while in combat pending the “rewind” functionality does not screw things up.

With all of these changes also came a significant rework of some of my gearing. You can see the totality of the changes with this new Build Planner export, but I will talk through a few of them specifically. Firstly this build is still based around Firestarter’s Torch and the interactions with that weapon and ignite damage. I’ve managed to craft an amazing legendary version with T7 Hybrid Fire Penetration, and T5 Ignite Chance. I swapped out Rahyeh’s Light for the best rolled Cradle of the Erased that I have managed to pick up so far. Golden Aegis is a ton of survival, and the stats on this shield work pretty well with what I am trying to do. I had to swap out my helm and chestpiece trading Manifest Armor and Warpath for ones focused on Healing Hands and Rive. I am sticking with Solarum Plate as it gives me a nice boost in Fire Damage along with decent armor and endurance. Lastly giving up Warpath meant that I lost my ability to convert bleed into ignite, which means that I had to swap out my gloves for a pair of Maehlin’s Hubris which I managed to craft into a legendary with T6 Hybrid Health.

I can now rip through Empowered Monoliths, but that is not to say I don’t still have some issues. I am still using seven uniques and at some point, I would like to replace my Sunwreath and Fiery Dragon Shoes with either a good legendary version of either or a really well-rolled Exalted. Neither are doing anything that I could not pick up off another item and several of the lines on Sunwreath specifically only apply to a spellblade. I need a lot more health in order to be really comfortable as I am still sitting at around 1800. From an offense standpoint, I have 530% Fire Damage and 1 point shy of 300% Chance to Ignite which feels really good. I could use some more flat physical damage however to buff the moment-to-moment combat with Rive. There are still levers to tweak with this build, and I will likely be slowly poking at it until the next Path of Exile league.

Is it as fun as the previous version? Honestly… no. There was something so chill about rolling over the top of things and watching them burn to death in my wake. That aspect of the build is gone, but I am not sure what I could have done to keep making that sort of gameplay work. What I wanted was a pseudo Righteous Fire gameplay style with super chill Monoliths and so long as I stuck to the level 90 non-Empowered ones it worked well enough. I needed to do something to make things work for Empowered and my series of significant revisions to the build have done that. Is it still enjoyable? Yeah, it absolutely still is, but combat does not feel anywhere near as fluid as it did before. Needing to cycle through the three-hit combo of Rive gives everything a stutter-step feel which is nowhere near as smooth as spinning around and clipping through mobs constantly. My Void Knight continues to remain my “main” and I dinged 97 last night and continue pushing towards 100. However “Fire Bro” will likely stay here as a pet project.