Melee dual strike steroid speed ranger - experimental build

General strategy is pretty simple:
-Stack attack speed, physical damage and more attack speed as main passives/weapon skills.
-Dual wield weapons (preferably fast rapiers or something).
-Primary attack is dual strike linked with multistrike, melee splash, life gain on hit, faster attacks (5L) and melee physical damage (6L).
-Main healing comes from the combination of insane attack speed, melee splash, and life gain on hit gems. Even at mid-high levels you can be hitting 10+ times per second, healing 40+ life per hit, as well as hitting multiple enemies at once.
-Use whirling blades and flicker strike (+ faster attacks) to minimise delay between killing one set of monsters and moving to the next. Unlike life leech builds you only heal while you are attacking so running between mobs can be painful, especially if they use projectiles.
-For most mobs, I find it effective to use flicker strike to get to any rangers quickly and take them out first. Meleers will follow you and make a nice group your multistrike to work on, but rangers like to spread out. Killing them first before you get melee bombed will reduce damage a bit.
-For especially damaging mobs, a granite flask + a few seething flasks are more than sufficient usually.
-Bear trap can be a useful addition for bosses, especially at lower levels or if you have rubbish life.
-Also for bosses, melee splash can be subbed out for life leech for extra healing (or melee physical damage if 5L)
-I use blood magic to avoid mana issues (life regen is hardly a problem), so standard three life auras are used (wrath, anger, grace).

Main attack:
Dual Strike + Multistrike + Melee Splash + Life Gain on Hit + Faster Attacks (+ Melee Physical Damage)

Supporting attacks:
Whirling Blades + Faster Attacks
Flicker Strike

Auras:
Anger
Wrath
Grace

For fun:
Portal

Well, these are what I've gone for so far...

Current passive tree

ATM I'm eating up the last of the marauder life nodes to make myself a bit tankier... maybe i should've left some damage nodes and got the life earlier but w/e.

Basic trend is working around from ranger to marauder gobbling up life, attack speed and significant physical damage nodes along the way. Once I finish with the marauder life nodes I'll probably grab some more phys damage/attack speed around the duelist starting point and then head up to the Templar life/elemental damage nodes.

I do have one annoyingly wasted node on 8% mana around the duelist tree used to access the acceleration notable (12% att speed/20 dex) and a 6% duel speed node... If starting as a duelist this could be avoided by taking the right hand starting nodes towards acceleration instead. I also feel that some of the ranger starting nodes are wasted on too much dex and low attack speed (3%)... Might be better to start as a duelist and avoid this part of the ranger tree entirely.

Keystones taken:
-Iron reflexes. Reduces damage taken while wearing evasion armour etc. Also makes unwavering stance viable.
-Unwavering stance. Getting stunned is a bit of a nono when your healing depends on you continually being able to hit your opponents.
-Blood magic. Mana is annoying. Regerating life isn't a problem. Therefore, blood magic is good. :)
-Resolute technique. Idk if life gain on hit gem actually works if you miss an attack, but I've never really liked critical hits anyway. With a heavy focus on attack speed and damage I don't think I use any passives on accuracy so RT improves DPS a heck of a lot. Might be interesting to see a crit build using a similar technique though...

Normal: Oak. 40 Life is good.
Cruel: Kraityn. 6% attack speed is very good.
Merciless: Kill them all. Charges are for badkids.

My gear isn't great at the moment but working on it.

Note: i have 3 different melee weapon combinations atm. My highest DPS swords are both relatively slow. In nearly all cases they're fine, but if I need more healing I switch out 1 or both of them for faster swords. Long term goal is to find very fast high physical DPS swords, but that's not too easy :P

Level 72.

Some general stats:

Standard 5L DPS: 4704.8
Standard 6L DPS: 6597.7 (Though I don't have a 6L yet)
5L single target DPS: 7387.4 (melee splash swapped for melee phys dmg)
Attacks per second: 7.38 (9.22 when using 1 DPS sword and one speed sword, 10.31 when using 2 speed swords)
Life gained on hit: 43
Life: 2656
Life recovery per second: 111.0
Armour: 4486

DPS Weapons:

Speed Weapons:

Other junk I sometimes wield:

Flasks:

Pros:
-Fun innit. Gotta love slashing about 5 times faster than everyone else.
-See very few similar builds atm. It's nice to be unique. :)
-Can tank nearly all mobs without worrying too much about dying, so long as you keep attacking.
-No need for quicksilver flasks. Whirling blades + faster attacks gem + loads of faster attacks passives makes you faster than any char with flasks (over flat ground at least - obstacles are harder). And it's unlimited. Good for escaping bad mobs if they overwhelm you as well.
-Pretty good DPS for both single and multi targets.
-Virtually all bosses and rares (that can't 1bang you) are easy.
-Doesn't need a ton of 4L boots/gloves/helmets to work. One 5L chest is enough to get most potential out of the build.

Cons:
-Dual wielding means you have to rely on your chest for 5/6L. So no Kaoms whoring.
-No standard projectile attack means you have to be next to, and get hit by, everything.
-Lightning thorns hurt. Barracks is a deathtrap if you're not prepared.
-Slow at taking down dense mobs compared to say, LA chainers. High mobility through FS/WB makes smaller/more dispersed mobs fairly quick though.
-You can have all the regen in the world, but if you can get 1 banged that's not gonna help you. Even though you, on average, heal faster than most mobs damage you, some can land 2-3 heavy hits at once and kill you anyway. Prime offenders are zombies and those hairy bonecrusher things. Especially the magic ones. Same with massive hitting boss attacks like Brutus' ground smash, Vaal's melee smash attack and Piety's ice arrows (might not 1bang but they're very fast). Life is arguably lower than a lot of more tanky builds. Maybe I should take some armour & evasion nodes.
-Swarms of projectile mobs can be annoying.
-May not scale that well. Healing 30 life 6 times per second in cruel will keep you alive way more easily than healing 45 life 10 times per second in maps.
-Lag makes you die. Not for HC.

-Add in frenzy charges for extra attack speed woop. Frenzy charges could either be gathered through the basic frenzy attack or through the blood rage gem. I experimented early on with both but didn't really like either. Frenzy attack means you need to waste several attacks building up charges while you're not able to heal, and you need to use the attack again to keep the charges up, which can be inconvenient in the middle of mobs. I liked blood rage better but the life drain irritates me... I would think a blood rage based build would be perfectly viable but I haven't made one. Main difference would be taking 1-2 maximum frenzy charge nodes, siding with Kraityn in Merciless and maybe tank up a bit more to avoid annoying blood rage deaths when you charge into a fat mob on half health and get 1banged.

-Use the Bringer of Rain unique. This could be done by itself with the same build as above, with the helmet acting as a 6-link (melee phys damage and faster attacks are inbuilt supports). More radically, it might be interesting to test a slightly more tanky build without Iron Reflexes/Unwavering stance using the helmet. This would allow the helmet's other inbuilt support, blind, to take effect. Fast attack speed means that on average it would only take about a second to blind an enemy, so coupled with decent evasion this might mean you hardly get hit at all. The Bringer's block endurance charge ability may also make block passives more worthwhile to get. Main disadvantages would be the loss of some armour and that you'd get able to get stunned. I don't have a Bringer of Rain myself so I'm not sure if this would actually work well or not, however.

-Use more elemental damage stuff instead of/as well as physical. Take ele damage nodes and have ele damage weapons etc nothing too unexpected. Could be pretty effective I guess, the main reason I focused on physical was that there are far more physical melee damage nodes than elemental damage, and the blood drinker notable passive is nice for that extra 2% physical life leech bonus. Would be pretty easy to modify to get more ele damage if I found a particularly good weapon though.