[2019] Forge Guard/Forge Strike Feedback

I’m 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 don’t 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. It’s just too much with regards to visuals, networking and cpu usage.

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. That’s the main flavor of the skill so we don’t 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.

That’s a big part of it, as a “minion” Forge Guard, you still have really good personal damage stats so you’re not useless. Lots of minion builds often leave the summoner feeling a little like a support character to their minions. Something we’re working to solve on those characters too, but that’s another topic all together.

The Beastmaster pets do a lot more to help the player do more damage. It’s a tight balancing act of theming and well, balance. It’s 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 we’ll 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 “you and your minions gain…”. It’s 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 manifestations’ power are directly derived from the gear itself. As their gear improves, the manifestations also improve accordingly.

I know we aren’t quite hitting this fantasy yet but those are the feels that we are attempting to hit with each minion style.