From last Epoch, we got the Harbingers Of Ruin Notes for patch 1.1 coming out, it’s a very long and thick patch notes, today this post will focus on the Manifest Armor update in the patch notes.
Manifest Armor is similar to Animate Guardian in Path of Exile. It’s like you put on equipment and weapons, then this soldier uses your equipment to walk around and attack automatically. And it has a Whirlwind Strike Ability, but it’s usually hard to get it to work. At this time, you can change it to forge weapons, then it works well.
Whirlwind Strike Ability Update
With this update, Manifest Armor will become crazy. The damage effectiveness of Whirlwind Strike Ability has increased from 60% to 300% now, which is five times the damage effectiveness multipliers of Whirlwind Strike. So Manifest Armor Whirlwind Strike now has five times the damage it had before, and Cooldown is less than half of what it had before, which is definitely going to be viable in Last Epoch, and it hasn’t even really been built again to do damage so far.
Now let’s look at what builds you can do with this type of character in the game. He has a sword, and the tags say it’s Minion Strength and Attunement, and the minion tags are Melee Physical. The best expansion is Attunement, because you get health and damage from Attunement.
Walk up to a pack and you can see him there using Whirlwind, and he basically goes off and does things automatically, and he has decent damage. Even without the buff, it’s not enough to get into high-tier monoliths. But he can definitely do enough damage to fight some random monsters.
So what’s changed is this Whirlwind. As it was said above, its cooldown has been reduced, and it now has five times the damage effectiveness, which is hit damage, so now you’re going to be playing Manifest Armor almost entirely based on hits. So what are some ways you can expand the hit damage of Manifest Armor?
Way To Expand
The first one is definitely your main hand sword. Basically, Manifest Armor gets your weapons and equipment, but you have to upgrade them to get them, and here you can get swords, body armor, boots, etc. If you don’t want to spend time upgrading them and just want to get this equipment, of course you can use Last Epoch Gold to speed up the upgrade.
For example, you have a miraa, so Manifest Armor gets the flat melee damage of the miraa and all the other properties. There is actually a property there, which is hybrid Physical Penetration and Minion Physical Penetration, which actually double dips because it’s a Minion. so it’s also holding a weapon.
If you can get a nice weapon, maybe you can do this. Like critical, fast attack speed and some hybrid penetration, this can be a pretty good way to expand damage.
So how else can you expand damage? There is also this note here, force of impact, which says that your Manifest Armor gets melee physical damage equal to a certain percentage of the Armor on your body, and it will give you 1 point of damage for every 10.
Let’s say you have Sentinel body armor with 700 damage on it, at level 84 or 86, you’re getting this basic damage. And then maybe another 200 points of damage on it, you can get about 900 to 1,000 points, which is you also get 90 to 100 points of flat physical damage from force of impact, so that’s another way you can scale it.
You’re not actually using Manifest Armor to do most of your damage. Right now you’re using Forged Weapons, so you’re not scaling the damage it does. Just using Titan heart, you’re not getting much value from that node. But if you’re going to scale it, you’re going to want to go all out with armor on your chest piece.
Manifest Armor Build
There is also this node here, thick padding which gives stun immunity to Manifest Armor, but it seems unnecessary since it is basically a meat shield, but if you want to use this thing for damage, you can choose this because when he does Whirlwind Strike, it is like sweeping through things and blowing things up, and he is unstoppable when doing this, which is very powerful.
Now let’s jump to some monsters here, you can see how monsters work in combat, you use forge strike to summon forge weapons, your Manifest Armor will do a little damage, but mainly acts as a meat shield, and sprinting is just to close the gap.
Although it is not necessary. Once you get the dodge roll, then you have Vengeance, which casts Healing Hands, Vengeance will also apply some debuffs to enemies.
So whenever your mana starts to get low, you just use Vengeance a lot, and then you can launch more Forge Strike, so you always have more weapons, and this build will gradually increase, it will be a little slow at first, and then once you get a bunch of weapons, it will start to be like Armor shred. Now you don’t need too much, because the weapons will do most of the damage.
In summary, Manifest Armor has received a huge buff. This change makes Manifest Armor a very powerful existence in the game, capable of causing huge damage to enemies. Players can further expand the damage output of Manifest Armor by upgrading weapons and equipment, and utilizing specific nodes, making it play a more important role in the game.
