Why does Shadow use life steal?

Right now I am building my Shadow with claws and planning on taking acrobatics soon. All the while grabbing the couple of %hp nodes I can find. Later on I might venture towards the center for a couple of those +str nodes.

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lupasvasile wrote:

It's nice to have around...just in case.

A lot of things are nice to have "just in case", but the fact is that the Shadow is a lot less efficient with life steal than other classes are. Due to how balance works, the corollary is that the Shadow is a lot less efficient with life steal than with other stats, like flat HP or flat ES.

In the end, you're better off just using swords or daggers, since they have bonuses that aren't wasted on the shadow, plus they have higher attack speed. Not to mention that swords have a larger variety of usable skills.

Of course, it'd be interesting if claws got something like 5% instrinsic life steal, to compensate for the inefficiency of life steal on int/dex characters. We may even get some interesting triple-attribute hybrid builds that have a lot of strength, but grab int/dex in order to wear claws and abuse this instrinsic.

I took the claw life steal nodes on the early levels because I thought I would need it. Well, it did actually help because when you're starting out you won't have that much energy shield and enemies will break it very quickly. At one point I had about 24% lifesteal on both hands while using double strike.

My Shadow didn't focus on energy shield until he hit about 35+. Around that level I started taking energy shield passives while at the same time reedeming the points I put into Soul Raker because I don't need the lifesteal as much. At Ruthless difficulty, I find that it's not that good of an idea to hope that the lifesteal paired with evasion would be enough to save you from enemy attacks. In my opinion energy shield recharge delay reductions are also key if you're going to wear eva/es gear. ES doesn't need to be high enough, you just need to evade attacks consistently enough for the ES to regenerate. I use Grace and Discipline auras together to increase my survivability. Currently 700 ES with 50% evasion.

Lifesteal is still useful for shadows at the later levels, but i'm not so sure about the Shadow Raker passives. It works about the same way as it does for any class that utilizes high eva : it's a way to regain life quickly when the ocassional enemy attack slips through. My build also has a bit of HP on it so I don't just die immediately if my ES is depleted.