Forge Guard

Resurrecting Fire Bro

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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.

Fire Bro On Hold

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Good Morning Friends! I hope you all had a delightful weekend. I spent most of my in Last Epoch and a shocking amount of it grouped up with friends doing some multiplayer shenanigans. That is really the piece of this game that works so much better than Path of Exile… grouping with my friends does not feel needlessly punitive. In fact, if you happen to die while grouped with friends… you can res up and port back into the instance just fine. I’ve mostly shifted back to playing my Void Knight but I will talk about the reasoning for that a bit later. Kodra has come back from his trip and recently we have been trying to get him caught up and through normal monoliths. Originally my Fire Bro was an attempt to keep a character at his level… but then it was just too damned fun and I rushed through to empowered monoliths without really meaning to.

As far as my Void Knight goes, I have added a few levels but have not really made any major gear changes since I last talked about the character. I keep farming 120+ Orobyss but have had zero luck in finding another Apathy’s Maw Axe… specifically one with legendary potential and have not yet seen a Shattered Chains belt. Similarly, I’ve farmed God Hunter Argentus a number of times and have yet to see another Wings of Argentus chest-piece let alone one with legendary potential. I have levers that I can pull to keep trying for better get, but have simply not been lucky. I did find an LP1 copy of Darkstride boots but didn’t exactly get lucky on the craft, but wound up with something better than nothing. If you are curious I’ve dumped a build over on Last Epoch Tools for the current state of my character.

One thing that I had to do this weekend was create a significantly more strict loot filter. I had been using one that started out as something that came from Maxroll and that I kept tweaking. I decided I just needed to blow that away completely and start out on my own. I’m essentially hiding all normal, magic, rare, exalted, and idols and then only showing very specific stats that I care about. I have a broader rule that shifts things to pink that I specifically want to keep track of for sharding. Then I have some super specific rules for the Sceptres and Two-Handed Axes that I am looking for on both Void and Fire builds. Lastly, I have a rule to show ALL Tier 7 Exalted items, and then the one I am showing in the above screenshot in an attempt to catch any Exalted item with two Tier 6 affixes. This was made more important since I am just about to ding Rank 8 with Circle of Fortune where EVERY Rare drop will have a 25% chance of upgrading into an Exalted.

As for Fire Bro…. in truth right now in its current state, this build is just not good enough. I was able to get all the way to Empowered Monoliths… with some help from Ace in killing Elder Gaspar. However in Empowered Monoliths I either need more damage or more survival… because the combination of what I currently have is simply not good enough. I could tweak this build in a number of ways but I was trying to stay pure to the original goal of using the Torch and lighting everything on fire. I want to spend some time pouring over the character sheet and playing with it a bit in Last Epoch Tools to see if I can find a way forward either through gearing or respeccing points. I need to spend some time looking at other ignite builds to see how they are working and what sort of gearing they are going for. I’ve not given up… I just would rather focus on my Void Knight for the time being.

I also have a bunch of alts waiting in the wings that I am probably going to level a bit as well. I have a Falconer, Bleed Wolves Beastmaster, Flame Reave Spellblade, and a character that I plan on trying to yolo my way into a Fire Damage Earthquake Shaman build. Still having a heck of a lot of fun with this game and trying out new characters that I have not played before.

Ignite Warpath in Monoliths

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Morning Folks! I am sure you are all probably sick of me talking about this build, but I think more than anything I am shocked it is still functional. I thought for certain that the wheels would begin to fall off as soon as I got deeper into Monolith Echoes. At this point, I am working on the level 75 Monolith and things still seem to be strong. In fact, as of this morning, I equipped a few new pieces of gear and the damage output seems to be even stronger. The only negative is that I feel like at some point I am going to have some survival problems. I have pretty bad resistance and not a ton of health. We struggle with some of the same problems as POE when you are trying to create a build with a bunch of uniques… you somewhat lack room for survival unless said uniques are already covering that.

I recorded a fresh video this morning of me doing a level 75 Monolith Echo, showing off what the gameplay looks like. For the most part I am just lighting everything that gets near me on fire, and that fire damage over time is eventually killing things. That which I don’t kill outright, my Manifest Armor minion or the trail of flame behind me tends to finish off. For those curious, I found out how to dump my build to Last Epoch Tools this morning, so you can see the current state of the build and the gear that I have equipped here. I would not follow directly in my footsteps though, because nothing I am doing is clean enough to be considered a proper build guide. I still feel like I need to rework most of my passives for example which is something I will probably do in the coming days.

I am still leaning heavily upon Firestarter’s Torch and the chance to inflict spreading flames. This does a lot of the work in making sure that everything is catching on fire. This morning I added Rahyeh’s Light which is a shield intended for a Judgement build but has stats that we care about and a heck of a lot of block chance and block effectiveness. I hope to find a version of this with Legendary Potential so I can maybe throw on all resistances or health on block. Sunwreath continues to do a lot of work in giving us melee ignite chance and fire damage over time. Sadly the flame reave lines are useless for us, but everything else works and again my hope is to stack on some sort of survival. Fiery Dragon Shoes are another new addition that gives us a bunch of fire penetration, and reduced bonus damage taken on crit… but the trade-off is it makes it so we get crit slightly easier. However, when we are crit it leaves a fire trail which is pretty slick.

All told I am pretty freaking happy being a walking inferno, and I am curious if this continues to scale as I level into empowered monoliths. I know there are some issues to solve here… specifically resistances and packing on more health and general survival… but for the moment I am having a blast having a super chill mapping experience. Last night I put on an audiobook and just kept my head down grinding through echoes all night. Mostly my goal is to pack on some more levels and start getting into empowered monoliths where hopefully I can finally test the build and see how longterm viable it is. Bossing is not amazing, but also not the worst thing I have ever experienced. Having 16 potions makes up for a lot of mistakes.

It isn’t like I stopped playing my Void Knight either. I am still using it to farm prophecies pretty regularly and working towards trying to get a handful of items with legendary potential to take that build to the next level. I’ve tried making a few legendaries and so far I have mostly wound up with duds that did not hit any of the stats that I had hoped for. This means that I need to farm up more legendary potential items and more exalted items to make additional attempts. This is probably where playing in the trade side of the cycle makes a bit more sense because you can just keep buying more items to try and craft into legendaries or simply buy the finished legendary rather than farming random content and hoping. The amount of loot that you get from Circle of Fortune though is outrageous.

Still having a freaking blast with this Last Epoch Cycle. Are you playing? If so what build did you go with? Drop me a line below.

Almost Righteous Fire

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Hey Folks! I’ve been down a rabbit trail for the last few days in Last Epoch where I started a brand new character. Initially, it started out as a “I lapped my friends, so I should start something new so I can play with them” which led me to start a Forge Guard character. Forge Guard is in the same Sentinel class that Void Knight is but in theory, its tree is all about minions and catching things on fire instead of purple damage. I thought it might be fun to play around with some of the minion options there as something a bit different from the Necromancers and Beastmasters that I have played before. However, while I do have a large lad that follows me around… I wound up going down a slightly different path. I should note this build is a sort of “yolo” from start to finish and I didn’t really set out with a clear plan in mind.

Yesterday I recorded a video because I was afraid this nonsense that I had created would not stay viable for long. It all started when I made the fateful decision to use a level one equippable unique called the Firestarter’s Torch. This essentially is a relatively mediocre item save for the percent chance to apply spreading flames. For anyone who has played Last Epoch, this is essentially ignite proliferation, and very rapidly I noticed that this could catch the entire screen on fire. So I leaned into this nonsense and before long I was wearing Calamity, 2 Sunwreaths, and a bunch of other random uniques and just dealing all the fire and ignite damage that I could. The above video shows some of the gameplay around level 29ish of me just setting the world on fire in a very Righteous Fire feeling manner.

The real “star player” of the build revolves around leaning upon Warpath once again to do spinning nonsense. I picked up the mandatory nodes to make the ability no longer cost mana, and then immediately dove into the path that causes Warpath to bleed… and then converts all bleeding damage to ignite chance and the base damage type of Warpath over to Fire instead of Physical. From there I made it so that every second I am casting Smite, and specced into the fire path of that ability as well so that I am constantly lighting everything on fire. Making it even more nonsensical I equipped Vortex Pennant that makes it so that while I am channeling Warpath I am throwing axes in random directions… and the axe hits themselves also ignite. For bonus nonsense, at some point, I am going to try and get some of the Idols that make it so that thrown axes cause Smite on hit.

The end result is this rolling inferno that ignites everything I touch, as well as a lot of things just off-screen through either the interaction with spreading flames, or when one of my axes makes contact with something and ignites it and everything it passes through. I’ve been building more and more into fire penetration which is making everything go so much faster. Like even one point of fire penetration chance was a noticeable difference and the next few points in Warpath are going to go for another fire penetration node as I am wielding a sceptre.

At the moment I am still running the same no-LP Firestarter’s Torch, but now that I am starting Monoliths I am going to be trying to farm one with at least Legendary Potential on it. I dropped one Sunwreath for a well-rolled exalted ring with some survival on it in addition to fire damage over time and fire damage. I am trying to find some All Resist on Channeling relics to try and create a Legendary out of Vortex Pennant because I am going to really need that affix to fix some of my resistance problems. Right now honestly the biggest thing that I need are some more levels. I have a pair of Fiery Dragon Shoes and a Rahyeh’s Light Shield that I plan on throwing on once I can equip them. I’ve also got a Solarum plate Exalted that I am going to throw on for some survival, +2 Warpath, and the implicit fire damage mod.

I can’t say this is the best bosser in the world, but I certainly ripped through Lagon without any issues. At this point I am in the Black Sun Monolith and am still Deathless, so that is at least something. My clear speed still feels pretty solid given that I am never running out of resources and can just keep rolling forward over top of things. I am kinda in a weird place ability-wise because right now… the only things that truly matter are Warpath and Smite. For the moment I am running Ring of Shields, because I thought it might be a nice damage booster with some survival baked in. The big problem there is that it just does not last long enough, and costs way the hell too much mana to cast. Since I am not regenerating mana at all while channeling… and I am always channeling… nothing has great synergy with Warpath. The proc at the end of the Forge Guard tree is only a 3% chance on hit and that just never seems to be up. The node is still worth it because it gives my minion a ton of health though but I plan on speccing out of Ring of Shields entirely and picking up Sigils of Hope at some point.

That leads me to Manifest Armor, the only minion available to a Forge Guard that I am actually using. Right now he is essentially a giant walking flamethrower. I am tanking for him and that is mostly working out fairly well. I’ve put points into inheriting stats from my Helm, Body Armor, and Shield and everything else has gone into the fire line making him ignite everything. He does a non-zero amount of damage because when I forget to summon him it is a noticeable difference. However, I am mostly playing a Warpath build that happens to have a DPS pet, and not necessarily playing a true Minions build. His survival is good enough to keep him up through almost everything, and it doesn’t cost a ton to summon him in the middle of combat if he happens to fall down. It honestly reminds me of the way that Beastmaster felt in Rift, where you mostly just had a pet following you as added damage and not necessarily a tanking scenario.

All told though I am really freaking happy with the current state of the build and am interested to see how it evolves as I get through the normal monoliths and move into empowered. At the moment with a mix of health, armor, block, leech, and middling resistances I seem to have really solid survival. That all may change once the damage and health pools increase significantly. I think I am going to take it pretty slow though on getting through monoliths. I say that… and then this is a character that I created late Sunday night and is now in Monoliths as of Tuesday evening. I may or may not know what “take it slow” means.