[Music] h sh. [Music]. [Music] oh. [Music]. [Music]. [Music]. Darkness, welcome back, you filthy last Epoch players. So, I've sort of spent the last day getting the build into empowered monoliths at this stage, and I started cranking through harbingers, and quite frankly, it's super tanky. It's just obscenely tanky. It's not the biggest damage-dealing build in the world, so like if you want high octane damage, it's not that. It's basically a one-button build now because I managed to automate a couple of things, including my ring of Shields and my Healing Hands, and I'll talk about that very shortly, but yeah, overall build feels solid. Like you're not dying to anything erroneously or anything like that. It does good damage. I have two essentially two sh shields on me at the same time, which I've never done in an arpg before. So, we now have Monument of protection and and then a couple of

things like siphon of Anguish, but yeah overall feels good. Now to answer the question about Mana sustain. So, the easiest way is to get one of these Sentinels inscribed tablets, which has -3 attack Mana cost, and that basically gets you down to six Mana cost, pardon me. And then if you've got enough regeneration, you regenerate at 12. So, with everything else going off, you're basically just fully sustaining Mana, so it's no longer an issue once you level out further. So, that answers that question. And my tooltip sits at about 30,000. I use ring of shields to buff it. It goes nearly 40,000, and there's tons of room to move. You know, you can get masterworked horns of what it, oros, not sure how to pronounce that fully, but yeah, no, there's tons of avenues you can go to increase. Like my gear is pretty moderate. I only have like 69 strength at the moment, so you can definitely push that further.

I'm really only using one unique at this stage, which is Monument of Protection, so you don't really need any other major uniques at this point. I do have C Anguish, as I noted, but you don't need this ring. And then outside of this, I haven't even finished my idol, so there's a lot of room to grow with this build. There is a Max roll build that I did see that came out, that took a little bit of a different route to the way that I took, but it's very similar in that. So that one's like fully maxed out at this stage, so you could either look at this one or look at that one. It's relatively similar, but anyway, let's get into the breakdown on the video and breakdown of how the build's put together and how the mechanics work in the build. Okay, so starting with gearing, the obvious thing here is we need a Monument of Protection. The reason for this is this shield is basically the be all and end all of this build, gives you

40% increased block effectiveness, which is globally applied. It gives you increased melee damage for shield bash endurance, and it gives you 69 health gain on block, which is one of the things that makes this really powerful. Now, this isn't like a masterworked item or anything like that. It's just a basic, like, got it off the auction house level 52 variant. It's not very good. You can get significantly better ones. In my helm, I went for strength, and I managed to get a strength roll here, so that buffs my damage up. Not the best helm, but does the job. In my amulet, again, we're going for resistances, and we're fundamentally almost totally resistance capped on this build too. And I'll note, as we go up, I get to about 90% block chance. You can actually go over 100% block chance and then just keep increasing your eff block effectiveness, and that's just going to keep increasing your damage reduction over time. So we're at 69 there, and then

it sort of pops up and down, so yeah, you can go over 100% block chance. So I'll just add that. So to do that, you sort of need a really good shield. In this case, I'm using a Guardian's Dawn Shield of the Defender, which is what it's called. It's got a lot of block chance, and it's got rolled on block chance and blocked effectiveness, and damage reduction as well as armor, and crit damage reduction as well, which is really good. Alternatively, you can use this unique, which is I'm not going to say its name again, but yeah, if you get a really good version of this, this is going to do something similar, or just a very really good shield with a lot of block effectiveness. And I'll explain block effectiveness very shortly and why it's important if you didn't watch the first video. So on my chest plate, I've actually got plus three to Shield Rush, which I don't use, and I probably should, but it does give me increased melee damage if I could get.

that for shield bash this would be absolutely ridiculous. Then I'm running siphon anguish, which just gives me movement speed, leech, and all that. My Warriors GLE or my belt, it just basically has crit strike avoidance, which you need in last Epoch if you didn't know that, some Mana regeneration, and physical damage. And then my other ring is just like healing Effectiveness, increased block Effectiveness, which is basically what you want on any of your rings or any item, you want as much block Effectiveness and block chance as you can get. And then my braces again, we got strength resistances, health regen per second, and some crit chance. Boots, I've got a ton of strength, a lot of armor, and an absolute ton of movement speed. And then in my Relic, I've got hly AA, which doesn't really do anything but minus um three M attack Banner cost, and then resistances and flat physical damage. Ideally I'd want like strength or something significantly better for that so in my relics or in my

Idols, sorry. I've just got like Health armor Health, uh, physical damage, and anything that you can get. Block Effectiveness on you get as much block Effectiveness and crit as you possibly can into the build, uh, and then again some more physical resistance, physical resistance, and increased crit chance as well, but that's it for gearing. It's not like a really unique intensive build that requires crazy mechanics. A lot of the mechanics are actually baked into the skills, which is what makes this build work really well. As long as you have enough strength to satiate the increases to damage. But let's talk about the skills next, okay? So I'm a pretty lazy player, and I like to make builds one button. So what I did in this case, I've got a manifest armor configuration here. He doesn't die very rarely will die and only against like bigger bosses, but basically I Juiced him up and then gave him like Thorn Ma and whatnot so he could go and just take aggro and that takes the heat off my character a little.

bit and it makes it work. It actually works really well in fight boss fights, in particular, and uh it just keeps me alive just a little bit longer. But I don't really take much damage as it is. It just makes me tankier, and I like being really tanky and not dying. So yeah, now as far as Shield bash, uh, I talked through this in the last video. We got it to level 20, so the most important note is flurry blows. Then we want high impact, and we also want Shield storm because this synergizes with your block chance to give you attack speed. Then we also want, uh, Shield Bash, or Steel Coating. We also want to have iron arms. Iron arms is the strength stack component of this build, so more physical damage per strength. And that's set to 1% per strength, so you only get one stack of that. And then also you get Cutting Edge, and we also go down into protective impact as well, which gives us more block effectiveness. And yeah, that's basically all there is to it. And also indomitable.

force is incredibly important so damage per 40 block. Effectiveness is Plus two damage, which is why we need so much block. Effectiveness, and that's why it juices up our damage so much, because it's basically just our defenses are feeding our offenses. So, the tankier you make this character, the harder and the stronger it's going to hit, which is really good. I really like the way that this mechanic works. So, after that, I've also got lunge. I just like it in my builds, and I basically run through Juggernaut, Dash, Unstoppable, through the endless will, and then I have lead the charge, which gives you haste. I'm pretty sure I just like is more than Shield charge or whatever it is. It just feels better when you're moving around Maps, but you know each to their own, and then we also have ring of shields. Now we basically buff ring of shields up to give Bastion, and I'm moving points to get a mass, which increases the number of shields. You also want reinforcement.

and then you also want to buff up things like uh pulsing Shields, which means the shields will push enemies back away from you every 4 seconds. And the other thing you want to have is to defensive Shields, and that means that you have additional chance to block and a higher block effectiveness if you have cast ringer Shields recently, which gives you a big boost to your character and to your damage because we rely on block chance and block effectiveness to synergize with Shield bash to be able to do more damage, obviously per every 40 block effectiveness we get two additional damage to our actual Shield bash skill, so that actually buffs it up. And also block chance gives us increased attack speed. I also have in during defense so it lasts longer as well, and this then synergizes with our skill node here Shield crafter, which means chance to cast uh shield on block is at 50% and block effectiveness per Shield, so it's synergizing between your skill tree and your actual skill itself, so block

effectiveness per shield, and that's why we want to throttle up the shields by using reinforcement and aass. Lastly, I've got Healing Hands. This is just really good in the background. We use this cleric Hammer node. This cleric Hammer node allows us to automatically, so Healing Hands chance on a mely hit is set to 50%. If I put two more points into this, which I probably could, it'll be 100%, I'm pretty sure. And then basically we then proc up and have like increased healing, healing Effectiveness. We take a blessed Parish, which reduces its Mana cost, and purity of thought again makes it basically free additional healing per second, and then increase chances with sacred gift to get heal Globes as well. Keeps your character in the fight for longer, and it just means that you can sit on bosses and whale on them and not worry too much about dying, though you still have to dodge the occasional dot or like big hit skill.

something like that. It's not an immortal build, it's just a really, really consistently tanky and affordable build at this stage. But yeah, that's basically it for the skill setups, really basic stuff. Okay, finally, so I'm level 83 currently, and basically where we go with the tree is Fearless through to Stwart. We want Juggernaut, we want to max that out. We also want Armor Cloud as well, and then we don't need to take any more nodes here. And then we come down to Forge Master, we cap out Weapon Master, cap out Unflinching Guardian, try and cap Thorn Ma. You want Steel Agis and Rallying Block if you can get it. I they got one point in that though, it's not a huge thing. I do have 1.9 Attunement, sort of works, sort of doesn't work. You don't need it, but you can take it if you're me and you took it and haven't changed it. I do have 100% armor shred from

hammer and Anvil, which is really useful. I get more strength from might and increased health. And then Flawless Defender as well in a walls of solarum and into Shield crafter. And then you want to cap out Avatar of War. Then we take six points in the Paladin. I've got some uh capped out points in honor, and that increases my block Effectiveness again. And then Valor. And then I've also got seven points into Abyssal endurance with the void Knight, and this is increasing my health, void resistance, and physical resistance as well. But that's it for the skill tree. It will be in the um the EPO builds link down below so you can grab it and have a look at it and do whatever do whatever you want with it. But uh yeah, that's all there is to it. All right, so this is like um this would be like your mid-tier end game sort of level now. So the first video was level 60, and we just got it to monolith. This one, we've we're in empowered monolith.

dropping harbingers. And if we push this build more, it could do pretty much anything in the end game. I'm pretty certain. So I've been doing like creation 104 cuz I only just got two uh Empower monoliths. And I'm pushing my corruption. But I'd say at this stage, it wouldn't have any major issues to get to 200 to 300 because the damage scale is so consistent. And because you're buffing up defenses to scale your damage, it's just a cycling sort of increasing sort of ladder at this stage. So the more you pump into it, the better it's going to be. My gear is nowhere near perfect. It's pretty meager gear, uh, in fact. And I'm not even finished my idol. So there's a lot of stuff that you can do with this build to enhance it further. But uh, anyway, if you like like this video, don't forget to like and sub to the channel. If you want to see more last more last epox stuff from me, uh, feel free to, uh, let me

know in the comments below as well um we're going to be switching into Path of Exile League start testing moving forwards as well because we got League start hopefully in like 2 weeks which means we're doing the uh the brother build to this which is the shield crush Juggernaut in uh last in Path of Exile and I'll be doing my League start video for that and then putting that out in the next few days as well anyway I'll see you guys later and Havey a good one

THIS BUILD SLAPS... LITERALLY! Shield Bash Forge Guard | Build Guide | Part 2 - Last Epoch 1.1

THIS BUILD SLAPS... LITERALLY! Shield Bash Forge Guard | Build Guide | Part 2 - Last Epoch 1.1