Why does Shadow use life steal?

Obviously I'll wait until the weekend to give him a shot, but it does seem strange, even slightly useless. There is so much emphasis on using life steal with a claw build, but it just doesn't make sense.

Being a dex/int class, we can assume he will rely on evasion with energy shield to survive. So what is the point of life steal? It won't be useful until his main form of hitpoints (energy shield) is all gone, and at that point his (i'm assuming) low HP won't do jack.

He gonna get 1HKO without ES, so at what point will all that life steal become useful? There is one, ONE strength node nearby, and about 6 total 6% life bonus nodes, so I don't see the passive tree being much help...

I'm not trying to hate, I'm hoping someone with better knowledge of the game can come in and correct my wrongness.

It's pretty self explanatory, he lacks Strength and HP duh.

Did you even read my first post.... It's not even long man.

Shadow isn't suppose to go CI, he's suppose to hybrid between Energy Shield and Evasion.

And use high Life steal to mediate between those, to keep his low life pool topped up as the odd hit slips through his evasion.

Even if you have high evasion could be a reason to have much less HP potions on best and more mana and specialty flasks.

But you are mistaken if you think shadows majority of HP is ES, as it should be fairly even.

There's plenty in the INT/DEX corner of the skill tree that doesn't use lifesteal.

If you do want to use claws specifically (rather than daggers which also suit the INT/DEX area) then you can just ignore the ES passives, and go grab some of the STR area passives to make better use of your lifesteal.

What I'm rather perplexed by... why does Shadow get this awesome compressed side of the tree all to himself D=, is it to make claws viable?

None of the other classes have anything close to that many skills with same relations, dual weild, Claw, one handed bonus etc bonuses.

I've never reached the highest difficulty, but wouldn't a character without any STR or life passives be very susceptible to getting 1-hit once their ES is gone if they are only wearing ES/evasion armour?

That's my main point of concern, is that life steal doesn't become useful until energy shield is all gone, and at that point it is already too late?

Heading off into the STR side for more life is fine, except it means you're abandoning all the life steal passives with claws anyway (they are in completely opposite directions, lots of wasted points)

Well its a given that most of the passives for One Handed, Dual Wield, and claws are almost all Dex Side.

There is like 1 Dual Weild Strength talen, but everything else is Dex.

OP is correct in theory. Life steal makes no sense in this context.

This character will probably rely on ES as their primary hp pool multiplied by evasion factor, and then evasion once that runs out in order to RUN AWAY to recharge ES.

Perhaps there will be a great str/int/dex shadow hybrid that someone comes up with that relies on HP and leech, but that's certainly can't be the point of the class.. once the shadow runs out of ES and has low max HP, why in the world would they stand there whacking away gaining fractions of their HP back per second...

This exact same thing was brought up 3 days ago on the Alpha side.

Another solution would be to allow the Shadow to use a skill to sacrifice some HP for more ES, then use HP leech to restore the lost HP.

Yeah I posted a similar concern about this the other day in the beta feedback forum:

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/30799