How.... just how do you use daggers?!

Is there a way to use daggers that doesnt come out with stank ass damage, or survivability or as a complete train wreck!? ive been trying to make some kind of shadow dagger build and they all fail.

I feel like i cant ever get a good combo of surivability and damage, ill either be more of a glass cannon or more of a.... lead...pillow? I dont know the opposite of a glass cannon but you get the point.

How the hell do you balance your defensive stat (life,evasion,armor,ES wahtever you choose) with crit and damage/attack speed

I just cant seem to do it, and yet i have this unsatiable urge to build a crit daggerin shadow or maybe scion or something that uses daggers like a professional badass.

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T3hswagman wrote:

Is there a way to use daggers that doesnt come out with stank ass damage, or survivability or as a complete train wreck!? ive been trying to make some kind of shadow dagger build and they all fail.

I feel like i cant ever get a good combo of surivability and damage, ill either be more of a glass cannon or more of a.... lead...pillow? I dont know the opposite of a glass cannon but you get the point.

How the hell do you balance your defensive stat (life,evasion,armor,ES wahtever you choose) with crit and damage/attack speed

I just cant seem to do it, and yet i have this unsatiable urge to build a crit daggerin shadow or maybe scion or something that uses daggers like a professional badass.

Just to say this quickly: since crit is split between crit chance and crit multiplier, it takes a while to kick in. You need a *lot* of both chance & multiplier for it to make a difference, but once you have that ... critical mass (facepalm) ... crit damage can become very strong.

Early on, it's likely to be garbage compared to the flat damage options.

Daggers are a primarily critical weapon. So... lot's of Crit multipliers and increased damage with daggers. Maybe dipping down into the Duelist part of the tree for increased dual wielding block and IR? The problem is with higher levels you will need both tankiness and high ST and AOE DPS. Reave has a ramp-up time so It kinda sucks.... I'm sure someone somewhere has perfected a Dagger build for shadow.

Personally, I use daggers on my crit cold witch. I think it's probably easier to use daggers for spells than attacks, because
-spells are usually ranged
-spells do not have to make attack rolls, which raises their true critical strike chance more without having to spec into accuracy

However, with the right mods on those daggers and after speccing enough critical strike chance/multiplier on the tree, dagger attack builds can probably far exceed spell crit builds in terms of potential damage output, as has been noted above.

Then, all you need to do is either get a moderate amount of survivability (energy shield items are quite strong if expensive), and/or use your high offense as your defense by adding ranged/AoE aspects - this can be Spectral Throw, Reave, or if you're creative, even something like Dual Strike + Elemental Proliferation with enough cold damage.

EDIT: Here's a tip if you want to make a dagger attack build. Increased critical strike chance on daggers increases the base critical strike chance of the weapon, which means that it scales multiplicatively with the implicit global critical strike chance and any critical strike chance you spec from the tree. This means that increased critical strike chance explicit mods on your item are key to scaling your damage off the charts in the end-game.

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syrioforel wrote:

once you have that ... critical mass (facepalm) ... crit damage can become very strong.

:D

:D

:D

The only time i have seen a dagger build is in the godly teir of builds where the person says to have a 6l shavronnes with about a kajillion exalts worth of gear, Is it just not possible to have an everymans dagger build?

My dagger cold spell witch has less than 3 exalts combined invested (including 1 exalt for a unique I don't even use anymore - and that's the only pure exalt) and I pretty much melt face in Lunaris 3 merciless. I think I can also somewhat safely farm up to first form Dominus but I'm too glass-cannon for second form Dominus.

Honestly, though, 3 exalts was an exaggerated estimate. If I'm remembering all the fusings I used correctly, and all the trade costs I made correctly, I'm pretty sure I actually spent less than 1 exalt combined currency on her if you don't count the unique I no longer use.

That's some pretty awesome "Everyman" dagger building, right there.

However, if you're talking about dagger attack builds, yes, probably it's reserved for the richest players, unless perhaps you make good use of Reave and life leech? I don't know.

EDIT: I never used more than a 4L when I was melting faec in Lunaris 3 lv. 70+ (witch is 82 now)

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adghar wrote:

My dagger cold spell witch has less than 3 exalts combined invested (including 1 exalt for a unique I don't even use anymore - and that's the only pure exalt) and I pretty much melt face in Lunaris 3 merciless. I think I can also somewhat safely farm up to first form Dominus but I'm too glass-cannon for second form Dominus.

Honestly, though, 3 exalts was an exaggerated estimate. If I'm remembering all the fusings I used correctly, and all the trade costs I made correctly, I'm pretty sure I actually spent less than 1 exalt combined currency on her if you don't count the unique I no longer use.

That's some pretty awesome "Everyman" dagger building, right there.

However, if you're talking about dagger attack builds, yes, probably it's reserved for the richest players, unless perhaps you make good use of Reave and life leech? I don't know.

EDIT: I never used more than a 4L when I was melting faec in Lunaris 3 lv. 70+ (witch is 82 now)

To be clear im talking about melee build of some type, or using physical daggers in teh case of something like spectral throw, spell builds are in general a lot easier to do.

Get cast on crit and a dagger with good attack speed, link it with a slow casting spell, enjoy superdestroy.

I had a lot of fun with my crit reave shadow. can get some insane dmg with a lot of ES too.

Yeah sure. Natural options of extension is Arcane Focus, or Heartseeker, or Harrier and the infinite wheel of Energy Shield. Twin Terrors and Fencing's critical chance buddy node are unrealistically expensive. Pressure Points and Weapon Artistry are within the realm of reason, but are still expensive thanks to those damn mandatory frenzy nodes that get in everyone's way - by then you'd have your fill of offense anyway and would want survivability above all.

Enfeeble, Blind, Skeleton Decoys and Endurance Charges are your best friends of course.

A weakness of crit is you have to settle only taking options from one zone if you want to be able to survive damage.