A guide on how to go from Act 1 all the way to endgame mapping using the power of friendship…and your fists!
Guide to Forged Blood Drinker Rapid Strike
All credit goes to Grumpy!
Intro
If I were to rank the T3 characters based on power, Sharpshooter would be top followed very closely by Railmaster and Dusk Mage and then Forged however they would all be A tier or higher because every class in T3 has the potential to be super strong. Even though you are reading this guide on how to build your Forged there is no need to look at other classes and think “man I wish I was playing them instead” as every class can break the game in their own way.
With that said there is something inherently fascinating about punching bad dudes in the face because no matter how many games let you punch dudes, it somehow never gets old which is probably why you are here. That or JoJo references because you can never escape those JoJo references! Oh you thought we were done? Well you were wrong because…
Come on now, don’t you get tired of JoJo references? Anyway our relic of choice is Blood Drinker for a few reasons. The first and more obvious reason is because it heals us and being melee oriented that is a huge boon for us for all the damage we will take while the second less obvious reason is because Blood Drinker has an active skill that we can trigger as a passive which is very useful for boosting our damage as we will be using our relic energy whenever we get into a boss fight for self healing so unlike other classes we want to hold onto as much relic energy as can.
Leveling
Level 2
Rapid Strike or Vent: Vortex Bomb. The goal here is quality of life as you either want to get into the swing of punching things so you know how it feels and if it is the playstyle for you or if you are already sure you want to do this then take Vortex Bomb so you can vent heat as that is important to playing Forged. You will reach Level 3 really soon to take the other skill you didn’t take here anyway. You don’t want to invest any points into Vortex Bomb as we won’t be using it any longer in a few levels.
Level 5
Place a single point into Blood Seekers as this will supplement your potion usage and going forward will be your bread and butter skill in every boss fight and for keeping yourself alive in general. We will max this out eventually but for now the difference between having or not having this skill is night and day.
Level 10
This is where we will replace Vortex Bomb with Fracking Strike. Fracking Strike does not use up all our heat but has two advantages; it has no cooldown which by now will be music to your ears since the cooldown on other venting skills is always just slow enough to disrupt the flow of punching things but the second more important advantage is that it also hits multiple times, has range on it and hits really hard while having a very short animation! Trust me, if venting skills have made Forged fustrating to play, this will remedy that for you.
You will also want to place a single point into Living Barrier as it will be your second healing skill but this one uses no resources so there is no reason not to have this as well although be advised that taking this skill to level 3 will push enemies away on activation and taking it to level 6 makes it heal for 1 more second bringing its total heal from 60% max health to 80% max health. I personally don’t feel that’s worth the extra 5 points as Blood Seekers already does a great job.
Level 15
We won’t be picking up any new skills at this point but we will be back filling some of the skills we already have. First of all we want to level up Rapid Strike to 10 as Fracking Strike now allows us to burn the extra Heat that we generate, then we want to take Blood Seekers to 3 so that the blood missiles it shoots will heal us.
Level 20
You can take Energizer here to build relic energy faster or you can continue back filling skills you already have but for the most part we got the 3 main skills we care about ages ago.
Once you have spare skill points you will want to place 3 points into Spinning Blade in order to make it act as a passive, up to 5 points into Bloodletter as this increases our DPS but also opens up access to Rupture which you will also want to further increase our DPS. Don’t worry about its low chance to proc as Rapid Strike hits 4(5) times really quickly and we can use this to our advantage to proc any on-hit effects which is something Forged is great at in general.
Rapid Strike is also used to build heat so we can spam Fracking Strike as well which is another skill that hits multiple times which is great for on-hit effects as well and this one-two combo becomes our bread and butter, then between Blood Seekers, Living Barrier and Potions you have some good staying power.
Closing Remarks
This is a really simple build and as a result is open to a lot of customization but the core of the build is solid.
I find it better to play with a controller because its more comfortable to map Fracking strike to Right Trigger and you will be holding down your Rapid Strike button throughout most of the game. When it comes to legendaries I like Facebreaker and Wideload’s Cavebreaker but being melee oriented you will also benefit from having high block so Firewall and The Holy Icon are fantastic choices as well.
Also when it comes to passives if you didn’t know already the bonuses are global, not local to that skill so if a skill says +20% Melee damage then that will affect your class as a whole, rather than the skill that grants the bonus. Because we have a lot of spare points in this build you can take skills you don’t intend to use in order to receive the passives. I resisted listing them because there are so many passives you could potentially take and Forged just scales with everything so well, truly a fun class to play.
On the subject of scaling, Forged can apply on hit effects like glue! Bosses tend to be immune to Blind, Freeze and Stun so don’t bother with those (except blind because it disables enemy AI!) but everything else will have basically 100% up-time so effects like Slow and Chill are outstanding and when you get the ability to craft in end-game, you should use Magic tier weapons because they can hold 3 enchantments.
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