[1.2.0] Dual Claws Are Cool

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i personally just figured if you avoid damage so much then the life leech is put to waste, and if you get 1 hko then again life leech means nothing.

Melee build. In a large group, it's not uncommon to take over 10 attacks per second, and I guarantee you that some of them will hit through acrobatics/evasion/block.

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i did not bother picking up the spell dodge since you will be able to eat spell damage for lunch with the amount of insta life leech you'll have.

When multiple spell projectiles are involved, you will get shotgunned by everything you try to kill. Have you ever taken out a diamond totem surrounded by spark skeletons as melee? Yeah, REAL FUN. And that's before multiprojectile voidbearers. Don't get me started on multiprojectile voidbearers. (Single projectile ones are fine, I'll happily run riot through an entire pack of them, but I don't ever want to deal with more than two multiproj ones at once.)

The point being, essentially, that spell damage is a great deal more likely to kill you than attack damage.

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This build gives you %160 boost to hp. You should be rocking some pretty heavy health here.

At 156% increased HP from build, I'm sitting at about...2.9k total? No HP from rings, amulet or gloves, though I do have a Rain.

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15% chance to avoid status effects

Which don't actually happen to me often enough that I care, though for 1 point it's worth picking up. The spark skeles with diamond totem were an aberration, happened all of once in my entire mapping career, and I used a flask of dispel shock and survived the encounter.

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Do you think using discharge would be useful? You don't spec supporting passives but you're generating charges with blood rage and enduring cry already.

Tried it, for pathetic damage. It's a spell. I don't spec for spell damage, elemental damage, or crit. Now I have a level 16 0% discharge gem I'm not quite sure what to do with. Discharge as a "bonus" spell works nicely with spell builds, not nearly so much with attack builds.

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If you're trying to avoid 1 shots, wouldn't Iron Reflexes make more sense? And Acrobatics doesn't help the cause assuming you would otherwise use some hybrid armor and granite flasks. I'm thinking IR might synergize better with leech even with OP's build (though he does make a good argument in the guide for evasion), especially if you want to get away with less HP nodes.

See above regarding the sheer volume of attacks taken: it works out, eventually, to a damage-over-time issue, though claw leech beats the damage-over-time both ways. Granted, when I had 1.5k HP and no instant leech, IR was a really good choice...because I was a noob and didn't run enduring cry, immortal call or molten shell. Still don't, but now it's because I'm a lazy bugger. (Also, when I first took IR, it was before the change.)

So if you read between the lines - my other point is, there are a lot more ways to achieve damage mitigation than just armour from IR. That reminds me, I'm adding endurance charge as an option for the final bandit reward. There's also one more, oh, a couple points away from where the build ends up, at duelist. Totally worth it if you're going to use them regularly.

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With HP, I'm guessing you can just use flasks for the occasional freeze? I was killed in hardcore by ice spear though, so I can see the value :)

The great advantage of closing in on Merveil is that her ice spears don't crit at melee range, and therefore she does not freeze me. Nothing does anyway, short of a minus max map.

just wondering how much dps u got ?

and can you post the ranger's build?

Go through the HP/eva nodes at ranger, to the ias node. Build as normal. These nodes replace the ones at shadow start which led to the ias node there.

Sorry, no DPS numbers available, I'm currently running cyclone+iiq+iir with all the MF gear I can get and I have no idea where anything from my normal setup is. I know it broke 20k before I changed claws.

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Legoury wrote:

Yeah this build is very interesting, but i think that you need Vaal Pact no ?
It s very rare a build dual claws, without VP...

And i dont understand what are your defences ? armor ? eva ? both ? ES ? And why dont take the +12% all rez ?

I think full AS and HP is good to survive and make dmg as shadow, but have no skills on armor, ES or evasion, is it viable ?

Blood seeker gives the same as vaal packt with no cost(but with less dmg)

CI, GR + VP, US, IR, dual strike, dual rare claws >>>>

Awesome build, I didn't run into a single problem until a1 merci. If you aren't starting with some currency you should save your best cold/lightning resist gear, you'll need it for merci ledge runs and siren. fyi I found these - and they seem to work well with this build. Again, great guide, thank you!

Today I face-tanked easy maps for my EK buddy. Man, I love the survivability on this. I am the ultimate lifesteal tank.

He asked, why do I not use end charges? My response was, never needed them.

And then I found an end charge on melee stun gem, and swapped it into my Rain. Now I wonder how I could have gone 83 levels without this. I've got only 3 charges, will pick up the 4th at level 86 if I get that far, but wow. (And that was at gem level 1.)

I think mostly it works because the damage is always sufficient to stun white mobs, and sometimes blue.

Anyway, yeah, if you were already using enduring cry, no change. But for lazy buggers like me, this is awesome sauce and then some.

Do you by chance have a shadow dual claw reaver or cyclone build that I could check out? I noticed you commented on a shadow dual claw cyclone build and was really interested. Thanks!

Both Reave and Cyclone alternate weapons when dual wielding. Just a note.

Just a quick answer to your question, my Rain is currently RRGB and these are the gems I would use for this specific colour combination.
Cyclone: added fire, end charge on stun, AoE
Reave: multistrike, added fire, AoE

there's just something really awesome about hitting pretty much the entire screen at once with reave

I don't know that I'd make any skill-specific build changes for either, the level 70 skill tree in the OP works fine.

Didn't think a whole lot about what other gems to use for different colour combinations either. There are plenty of Reave builds around, check those out. As for cyclone, it's somewhat mana intensive if you choose not to use the BM gem. Nothing unsolvable, 7 linked cyclone can be run on mana with minimal fuss, but you'll get a bit annoyed in half-regen maps.

Yeah, this is basically a collection of random thoughts on the subject.

ahh pretty cool to see this thread pop up again.

so after leveling my guy up and use using soul taker/whatever best 1h weapon i had, basically running a "blender" build as ranger evade, i somewhat ran into a wall.
not really a wall, but i noticed i didn't do well vs reflect and elemental bosses like piety, when they do hit.

over much debate i decided to go back to dual claw. looking at OPs build again its very similar to mine (again im ranger starting point however) except i think im going to opt for vaal pact the node other than run bloodseeker.
i also will be running some critical chance, because well...its very easy to.


SUGGESTION: in order to save yourself a bunch of nodes, if you wanted, you could just pick up an astramentis and get basically +100 all stats. thats what i had to do to feed my int/str requirements and i do just fine with resistances.

im currently not fully respeced to what i want to be, but this is my plan spec for lvl 81, 98 points.

any other points after this will 1st complete the hp node cluster near that power charge point, and then branch into shadow starting area for the 2x atk spd nodes (plus more block)

also this is my current gear


ignore the flicker strike, i just use that for fun. i use a 18/20 dual strike (for the added crit chance) which is still significantly higher dps than flicker, as well as a lot more controllable, and no dsync issues.

currently i have 46% evade chance, 46% dodge chance (with 8 frenzy charges), 54% block chance, plus the blind and enfeeble when i cast it etc. Basically right now nothing hits me or harms me except reflect and elemental boss battles like piety.
when i fully transition to use dual claw all i'll need to do is survive 1 shots and im pretty sure nothing will be able to kill me. you can survive almost all 1 hits (depending on map mods) with around 3k hp if you use the appropriate flask previous to any dmg taken, as well as enfeeble.

i have a couple questions tho, if anybody is able to answer, and its regarding claw life leech. The implicit mods apply globally, that i know, but if you are dual wielding and you pick up the life leech nodes right of shadow, does it apply only once, or to each claw?
it states 4% of physical damage dealt by claws leeched as life. If you were wielding only one claw, that would be 4%, but since you have two does that turn into 8%?

also, since you're dual wielding...currently if i use 2x claws with 6% leech, i have 12% life leech on each weapon (its global) but if i use dual strike which attacks with both hands at the same time, do i now have 24% life leech per attack?