Forgefall Amon (Crucible Detonation build - theory)

The general gameplay loop is to spam forge-drones, trigger detonations for damage bonuses, and continue the loop for mass AoE damage with a sprinkling of crowd control.

Hola friendos, it's your friendly neighbourhood Moze Amon main with the first of many Amon builds. This time around, going to be running through a theory based Crucible focused build with a heavy focus on forge-drones and the detonation mechanic.

Build Concept and things to know:

Explosions and splash damage is the name of the game here. Amons Crucible skill tree brings a mechanic known as Priming and Detonating which you can see on the card. Priming is triggered by damaging an enemy with a forge-skill which enables you to then detonate which creates an explosion at the site of the primed enemy. With that in mind, this build revolves around maximising uptime for the forge-drones through resetting durations, and spawning as many as possible while the Crucible is active.

I'm also going to be using certain words like "trunk" and "branches". Trunk refers to the top part of the skill tree and the branches refer to the 3 diverting paths from the trunk

Skills

Trunk

There's a few key skills that enable this gameplay loop which I'll quickly explain - but once again, I just want to reiterate that this tree hasn't been tested in game and the interactions might not work in practice the same way it works on paper. With that said, we can start the skill tree breakdown.

Crucible is the crux of this build and the action skill that makes this entire build possible. Simply put, Crucible gives Amon forge-axes which can be thrown at enemies to deal elemental damage. Crucible also brings the priming and detonation mechanic into the game which I explained above.

Combining this Action Skill with Tempered Pyre gives Amon the ability to spawn forge-drones when he activates his forge-skill, and resets the cooldown for every forge-drone active on the field everytime Amon re-activates his skill. In theory, this means that forge-drones will stay on the battlefield dealing constant damage.

Now, while that seems good already, what takes this build to greater heights is the Endless War augment. This augment does 2 incredibly useful things, especially considering how early you can pick this augment up (relatively). The 1st thing it does is increase gun damage for every enemy thats been primed, and the best part about this augment is the 2nd effect, which spawns a seeking forge-axe after Amon detonates a primed enemy (and these forge-axes can then prime their own enemies which you can then detonate). So combining Crucible, Tempered Pyre and Endless War creates a loop of constantly activating forge-skills to spawn forge-drones for constant priming and detonation.

Outside of those 3 core skills, we also pick up Executioner, Bellows, Vital Organs and Destruction Engine for some additional stat bonuses to get extra crit damage, crit chance, gun damage, forgeskill damage and detonation damage

To round out the top part of the tree, we also pick up Twin Tempers which spawns an additional forge-drone which ties the bow nicely on the Endless War detonation loop.

Branches

For this build, we're going to be dipping into all 3 branches. For explanations sake, im going to start with Branch 3 and work backwards, as it will help rationalise the skill pick ups.

Branch 3:

We start with Raging Inferno and Reactive Armor to give us a few stat bonuses that synergise nicely. Raging Inferno gives the chance for AS damage to crit and burn enemies on every crit hit, and Reactive Armor gives us armour/shield regen and ordnance cooldown everytime we detonate... which yes.. you guessed it. Synergises incredibly well with the gameplay loop we've built in the skills we picked up in the trunk.

For the capstone, we pick up Conflangarang which fuels the gameplay loop further. While the capstone effect itself is quite nifty (basically throw a big axe in front of you that deals constant DoT damage), we also get additional utility from the additional effect. Which restores forgeskill cooldown when you deal damage with Conflangarang.

We then round out the branch with Reverse Explosion which creates a singularity after dealing forgeskill damage, which helps further with crowd control (assuming mass detonations isnt enough)

Branch 2:

For Branch 2, we start with Blast Furnace which increases Amons damage temporarily (and stacks) after Amon or the forge-drones crit an enemy OR cause a detonation. Considering the core loop of this build is to deal constant detonations, we can guarantee uptime for this skill as much as possible.

We also pick up Armor of Contempt which gives Amon overshield when dealing AS damage, to increase survivaibility. As Amon doesnt have much by the way of health regen in this build, we rely on skills like Armor of Contempt and Reactive Armor to give us some reliable level of sustain during combat.

Branch 1:

Finally, we dump 2 points in Cacophony for a slight bonus to ordnance damage and detonation radius. While I would like more points in here, we only have 2 points leftover from the rest of the spec. HOWEVER, if during actual gameplay, survivability doesn't become a huge issue, you can take points out of Armor of Contempt and dump the spare points in Cacophony to get it to 5/5 and max out the bonus.

Fin

With all that said and done, as much as I would love to talk about gear combos and what would be optimal, we've seen such little gear that it's going to be quite difficult to predict what would make this skill tree spec optimal. However, if i was to make a wager. Any gun that deals splash damage AND/OR has a high base crit chance would synergise well so we can make good use out of skills like Blast Furnace and Raging Inferno. No idea what sort of class mods Amon has for this tree so you're guess is as good as mine. In any case, hope this spec inspires some of you guys to test it out and iterate on it to make it your own, or at the very least, serves as a bit of a starting tree to work through as we all play through the game. Hope this was useful and I'll be back soon with more builds!

Ciao~