Forge Guard has several minion skills but very little minion support in the passive tree, would be nice to see some added.
I would love to see a node in Forge Strike specialization that allows more extreme focus on the minions. A node that reduces attack speed a little bit and reduces damage by a lot but reduces the mana cost and increases summon chance on hit to be 100%.
Iām sorry to say that this is very unlikely to happen. The Forge Guard is not currently designed as a minion class. The minions that it does spawn are designed to scale directly off of your gear as they are themed as manifestations of that gear. Our goal is that they donāt need minion affixes and passives to have those skills be useful. We also have to consider screen clutter, 100% spawn rate with an AoE attack can result in dozens of minions being spawned in an instant. Itās just too much with regards to visuals, networking and cpu usage.
Hi, I too wanted to create a minion build with forge guard.
So I take ring of shieldd, manifest armor and I wanted to unlock forge strike. As I donāt unlock it for now I didnāt see is spec tree.
If minion is not intended how is it possible to augment fire shield damage and shater from ring of shield?
Manifest armor is only a tank, you canāt make it do some real damage?
If all this āminionā skills must scale with your equipment (which is cool) do it at the max of it.
Actually health of the different minion scale with attribute and passive -> why not
So for the damage it scale with equipment -> ok, so I donāt have to get % pet damage.
But armor and shield damage must also scale with my equiment.
That would feel more logical.
PS: I did not see the spec tree of the armor, perhaps it already has node for damage scaling.
Manifest Armor and its tree are the best example of the type of scaling that we like for the Forge Guard. We really want them to feel like you can just take one if you want and have it be useful without needing to take minion focused passives and gear affix slots. You can still take multiple of the minion related forge guard abilities but because they are all individually still useful without those minion passives, having lots of passive skills that gave minion bonuses would make them overpowered, Then we would have to look at removing some scaling that comes from the gear. Thatās the main flavor of the skill so we donāt want to resort to that.
The current plan is to lean in to this scaling from your gear as a base functionality for Forge Guard minion related skills. I think that the best place to give customization of this is through the individual skill trees.
I need to push a bit more my forgeguard, but I found the mastery far away from other masteries regarding damage output. I will try to push with a build using a huge damage 2handed weapon so that manifested weapons and Armor have the best flat damage output. I am just wondering how good the scaling can be without any Minion affixes. (If you go full minion affixes then you wonāt deal lot of damage yourself and single target becomes really bad).
Thatās a big part of it, as a āminionā Forge Guard, you still have really good personal damage stats so youāre not useless. Lots of minion builds often leave the summoner feeling a little like a support character to their minions. Something weāre working to solve on those characters too, but thatās another topic all together.
I see, and this is a mistake I had when I tested it, I saw the forgeguard as a summoner when you specialize in the manifest skills but it is not ! With the addition of the skill tree for the manifest armor (and the passive that makes it use the weapon), I can definitely see a better use of this skill. I will explore this build and give feedback !
There questions crossing my mind:
I just donāt get the design philosophy behind it because it seems flawed and not in line with fundamental game mechanics. Beastmasters brag about being a pet statstick for a while now and the forge guards pets scale like Beastmasters want it for a while now and the system is counterintuitive to the fundamentals how pets work in LE. I realy just donāt get it why the forge guard is a special snoweflake but thatās most likely my fault ^^.
Minions getting bonuses and being overall different for different classes is not something new. PoE already did it with Herald of Agony. One of my strongest builds there was a Gladiator (a melee class based on blocking damage) which relied on the minion from Herald of Agony to deal damage. And it worked wonderfully.
The more variety the better I say.
My only complaint with Forge Guard is that it is predominately designed towards shields and block once you get past Mastery, but Forge Strike is the exclusive skill for choosing that Mastery. I have a Paladin that uses the Torch of the Pontifex 2H weapon to summon minions while using Manifest Armor and Holy Aura to buff everything, but Ring of Shields is useless for a 2H build, and Iād really want Forge Strike, but itās unavailable to me. It would have been nice for Ring of Shields and Forge Strike to have been swapped since youāre gimping yourself if you choose Forge Guard Mastery without using a Shield, but overall, once I got the right skill combinations, Iām enjoying the Paladin a lot. Special thank you for the performance improvements in 0.7.4, as my Sentinel was unplayable before the patch.
Putting aside the fact that Torch of the Pontifex is a much worse weapon than the other summoning 2H weapon Bone Harvester (20% is much better for minion play than 10%), how does Forge Strike / Manifest Armor / Ring of Shields work with Unique equipment? If the Unique has a chance of a certain effect, like the Keeperās Glove summoning bees, does Manifest Armor have a chance to summon bees as well if you take the node that scales off your gloves?
If the unique has a special effect, manifested gear wonāt proc it. However, any stats/attributes from uniques work. This is at least what I understood the last time I asked devs in the discord.
PoE has a different approach for almost anything but LE had minion stats to scale minions with forever. A lot of Beastmasters whish for such a change so pets scale with player stats rather then minion stats so it feels less like the beastmaster follows his pets. Now the forge guard get it becauseā¦ reasons?
More variety is nice but not in a way that changes one game mechanic into a complete different thing. If they change this even more and the forge guards pets perform as well as pets of people who have to invest heaviely into pet stats thing would even look worse from my point of view. Iām totaly fine for the forge guard to have pets but I donāt understand why they change a running fundamental system for it and donāt ant to use this system for other classes who wish to have something like this.
Sure this is all work in progress an what not but itās a strange move. We can agree to disagree on this no problem but itās still concerning to have a whole class as an exeption to fundamental game mechanics.
Well I understand why itās not the same mecanism.
In fact, they are not minion, but for manifest armor, shield and weapon. They are decoy, and so need to get their own hp bar, so they are technicaly consider as minion. Exaclty like illusion from the mage teleport.
Forge guard has no passive for minion and thatās normal. Only some to augment hp of decoy.
For the damage, they have node to make then scale damage from the model equipment, that great itās really the ability to manifest from the forge guard and no minion.
So you canāt compare with minion of others classes.
In diablo 3 you have the same with illusion from the sorcerer that create decoy taht mimic your skill at 10% damage. Itās the same.
The āminionā of the forge guard are temporary and not companion like beast master. Itās cool and normal that is not the same mecanism.
My only concern is how to scale damage from fire shield
Sintinel minions will still be affected by minion affixes on gear.
The Beastmaster pets do a lot more to help the player do more damage. Itās a tight balancing act of theming and well, balance. Itās not finished at all. We do intend to work unique effects in to the manifested weapons and armor too. Possibly not all of them but weāll do our best to get all of them working.
The Beastmaster has primal companions that he has made a connection with. Part of his character specialization is around his connection to his companions. Many of the nodes say something along the lines of āyou and your minions gainā¦ā. Itās all about growing as a team.
The Necromancer has minions to do her bidding. Tools to be utilized as she sees fit to achieve a goal. Her skeletons can be broken and rebuilt to serve that end. They are a manifestation of her magic animating inanimate objects or drawing upon the power of lost souls of the lost. She has no connection to her pets except as an expression of her power.
The Forge Guard is an artist in steel, a man who has perfected his connection to his craft. He has achieved the ability to create manifestations of his gear to assist him in his fight. Those manifestationsā power are directly derived from the gear itself. As their gear improves, the manifestations also improve accordingly.
I know we arenāt quite hitting this fantasy yet but those are the feels that we are attempting to hit with each minion style.
I really like the fantasy around this three masteries.
I, at last, unlock the tree for manifest armor and forge strike.
Now I understand why forge strike is the mastery skill. I really like this skill and his tree.
It offer quite some possibilities.
Manifest armor tree is also awesome, it really match the fantasy and is very different of the other minions.
I really feel like the āforge summonsā offer quite some versability and possibility for really different gameplay.
And the one where you concentrate on āforge summoningā seem viable without minion passive. Minion affix on ring and amulet is sufficent to up them insteed of you.
Really great job here. I canāt wait for the manifest weapon skill tree 
It has been a while since this discussions last post. But I joined the Forge just a few days ago.
One thing I found out that is very cool. Donāt know if itās a bug or intended:
The manifested armor has a skill node that allows him to do a spinning attack when hit by shield throw. When ring of shields and manifested armor both are active the thrown shield ricochets to the shields and they perform a spinning attack, too.
Itās not in the tooltips but should be added 
.
I found the manifested armor very nice. I gave him a hammer and a shield through his skill nodes and skilled the fire attack in the lower left corner so that he also is burning. Looks very cool.
I despecialised the skill because I was asuming that the armor would not scale well for endgame without me maxing minion stats. After reading Mikeās posts Iāll definitely give it a try.
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