So hey, manifest weapon is pretty bad, any chance of it gets some love in 0.5?
In PoE1 some of my favorite builds were animate weapons/chains of command, so when I saw manifest weapon on the Smith of Kitava class in 0.2 I was SO excited, but man manifest weapon is terrible or at least I can't make it work and believe me I really tried.
I tried running 700str, 300dex, companion nodes with a max damage "Hammer of Faith"(yes the shrine effect does apply to it), and it still did next to no damage. It would very slowly move up to mobs and whack them for minuscule damage, that is of course if it would even reach a mob to hit it in time because man oh man this thing moves too slow. I even tried to anoint the 20% minion movespeed passive(Relentless Fallen), got a second companion with the haste aura and it seemed to make no difference.
If it's supposed to support you with on hit effects like bleed or ignite then it's too slow to do that and if it's supposed to fly around and kill things then it's scaling and damage are terrible.
I won't claim to know how to fix it, but I would love to be able to think of a build around this skill, be that extra copies of it, boosts too base damage, or even something like the dancing dervish treatment where your weapon is disabled as it flies around.
It's just been so bad ever since it came out in 0.2 and I would love to know if it's getting any changes this patch, or if anyone can actually make this poor skill function.