Assassin - Claw Mastery

PTR Feedback
#1

It’s a shame that 'sins don’t really have claw attacks for dealing physical melee damage. The wind up skills are just normal attacks and the spender’s are mostly kicks.

So - perhaps Claw Mastery needs a significant buff so it can enhance her charge up attacks to be solid single-target damage dealer

Adding stun duration with greater buffs to %crit and %dam so people spend points in it.

Also it could enhance Blades or provide a synergy

If Paladin’s can get +420% from concentration for themselves and their parties, then I think assassin’s Claw Mastery can be significantly buffed for the paltry few attacks she does with claws.

6 Likes
#2

there is a claw spender, I think the main thing is that end game claws themselves are not that great.

1 Like
#3

Dual Claw is nice but assassins are too squishy by spending points into Str and Dex for Ar and not using a shield for a melee needing to pump some Dex points instead of Vit makes it bad. Claw Mastery should have a higher crit chance and more Ed and also to make dual Claw setups better they could improve the Weapon Block to works while walking/running like the shields and scales with Dex since assassins like Dex.

6 Likes
#4

Someone has clearly never played a MAsin…
Max Dragon Claw and Claw Mastery equals over 600% claw damage. Granted, most of that is from Dragon Claw and mastery should give a bit more.

The issue is that claws themselves give very mediocre base damage at best. It doesn’t really matter how much +%dmg you have if the base is low.
The highest base damage of a claw is the War Fist, at 53. Most other end-game weapons have base damage that is quite a bit higher.

Then combine that with the fact that most of the best runewords can’t be used in Claws. They either specify swords/axes/maces or they require more than 3 sockets.

Another issue is, as Kessig said, that MAsins are significantly more squishy than other meleers. They need both high str AND dex - a rare combination. They also only get 3 life per vit and have no way to boost life. MAsins have to sacrifice offense (Burst of speed) to increase survivability to comparable to others (Fade). Allowing both for Assassins would help substantially and would not make this underpowered build OP.

7 Likes
#5

Crazy thought but what if they changed claw mastery or dragon claw effected the base damage of claws rather then simply being a % increase. Then Tiger claw could become a beast of ability with dragon claw. I’m leaning towards claw mastery effecting the base damage of claws. It be hard to balance, and would have to start off low.

#6

With the new plague runeword to claws, and chaos still being really high damge for WW sins with a phoenix and fort, I don’t think that change is neccesary.

Claw mastery is pretty solid as is, especially in tandem with the above or dragon claw’s huge AR and damage boost on top.

DW Plague RW Claws with +3 Tiger Strike, +2 all skills gives +10 to it.

A dragon claw now with 3/2 charges of Tiger strike and plague with maxed out claw mastery would hit for well over 50k phys, since its possible to get level 50 MA skills.

#7

Claw Mastery AR needs to work with Blade Fury.

3 Likes
#8

Does it not?

That’s pretty unintuitive considering it uses your weapon’s base damage…

1 Like
#9

I’m not an MA sin expert, but I did play her for a good 4-5 hours on PTR and had a lot of fun…

I did find she was squishy, and could die easily… I tried lots of equipment combos to make her more survivable…

What I found made her into a real tank was to put 1-pt into cobra strike. If I see her health or mana getting low, I’ll charge up cobra strike a couple times… Cobra strike made her really tanky I found and fixed most of her health/mana problems…

#10

Unfortunately it does not. One of the many reasons Blade Fury needs more AR scaling on the skill.

4 Likes
#11

Claw Mastery needs “+X damage” mod like grief

level 1 CM:
+2 damage
+30% AR
+35% dmg
3% ds

2 Likes
#12

+flat damage would make claw mastery insanely good.

I somewhat disagree about that it needs flat damage, as with chaos and plague or even an eth upped bartuc (aside god tier GG rare claws) sin’s have decent options for weapons, which scale with skills more than say just a grief.

using max roll’s character planner shows how strong 3/20/20’s are or +min/max damage jewels in armor slots are for fast 1h weapons – and getting all that basically for free with a 30-40 level claw mastery would be insane.

Even adding 1 to min/max damage per level on claw mastery would add a stupid amount of phys damage to sins using claws. If they added a flat damage component I would be of course ecstatic, but I feel it would be unnecessary.

#13

This would be an excellent addition. Even just 1 or 2 points per level would be huge since it should be modified by the 600% ED from skills. This change would really help buff the MAsin’s damage without making it anywhere near OP.

2 Likes
#14

Blizzard, Claw Mastery AR needs to work with Blade Fury. Thanks.

2 Likes
#15

Claw Mastery, Tiger Strike, and Dragon Claw give you a potential 108k dps attack right now in the current 2.4 iteration.

#16

ONE 108k dmg single target attack after THREE 1k dmg attacks (or more if you miss) is still like 25k per Single target attack.

In the meantime, paladin is spamming 20k AoE hammers that can’t be resisted.

2 Likes
#17

you hammer has to be badly built to reach that much dmg

#18

Ya they really do 15k damage each, but I cast 2 every second.

#19

This.

And Blade Fury needs more than 10% AR on the skill. I am hoping it was bugged and suppose to be 10% per level with no cap.

#20

10% AR on the skill is a joke honestly.

You legitmately need a fool’s claw and % bonus to AR (cahracter level) on a circlet to even have a chance to hit bosses, and ignore monster defense is mandatory with all those blade skills.

Honestly, been thinking more about it – claw master legit needs like 2 min-3 max to claws per level.

Even with a very geared shadow based sin that’s like 120 flat phys, which only affects ww sins, thunder dragon claw sins, bear sins, and blade sins.

Most other MA or attack based sins either don’t use a claw or use kicks.