I like the idea of making blades usable. Blades really well suits assa style. But some issues have to be addressed. I think we have some mess and inconsequence with this skills.
AR - let all blade skills benefit from Claw Mastery. Its crucial to make this things work.
Blade sentinel - make it spell or melee. Right now it uses AR like melee but doesn’t proc any effect - only venom. Bit boring and it close the gates to some funny builds.
Blade fury - casting delay still makes it clunky but at least it proc effects. I think some chance to pierce would be sweet. Like +1% per skill lvl.
Ad 1. I agree - blade skills lack AR heavily to hit even normal monsters, but each of them should receive high AR bonus per level, similiar to that kick skills have. Doing it via Claw Mastery would just not be enough and would force every bladesin to use claws. This build needs more weapon variety, as for example daggers fit its fantasy just perfect. But of course if you decide to use Claws - the benefits from Claw Mastery should also be taken into account.
Ad 2. Blade sentinel is using your weapon damage and some attack modifiers (like deadly strike, +%ED, etc.). Since it’s ‘weapon based’ like other blade skills it makes sense for it to also use AR. So the problem is the same here - it just needs high AR bonus on the skill itself.
Also since it’s a trap it would not make sense for it to proc anything, just like the other traps do not.
Ad 3. It’s more like animation delay/wind up (not casting delay which is equivalent of cooldown in D2) and I agree it has some negative impact on gameplay variety, because you lose about 0.5sec every time you use other skill in between Blade Fury casts/spam. If you don’t want to lose DPS due to these wind up times it also makes you completely static. So yeah, this delay could be removed but it’s only 0.5 sec and you can always play around this and adjust your gameplay.
Regarding pierce - this skill have really high DPS so I would suggest to leave it as a single target skill. For AoE you can still use Blade Sentinel and also Death Sentry, so I don’t see any need for it to pierce.
I can give vote on first point, let Claw Mastery effect Blade traps AR. On the 2. No, keep all AR dependent or make all work like spells, don’t take them apart. You either stack AR, or FCR, you don’t want to be dependant on both. On 3. The animation should be faster, it has a long wind up animation, that could be shortened.
I really like bladesin after some testing. The biggest problems are attack rating and no pierce. Dmg is more than enough by using weapoms like edeath ettin axe or eth stone crusher.
Bladesin would need, Angelic Halo+Wing, Passion whit perfectly rolled AR bonus and 176 dex in total to have 4236AR or also put on a Stormchaser on to have 4406AR.
I’ve been thinking and theory crafting, and realistically I think we might have to suck it up and use Blessed Aim. But the fact that we sort of HAVE to use Blessed Aim is testament to the fact that Blade Fury gets NO additional attack. Blade Sentinel actually gets SOME. It really, really needs more. But I would caution that it doesn’t need THAT much more, and I would much prefer to trade some synergy damage for +AR or +AR% on Blade Fury and Blade Sentinel than to simply fix Claw Mastery.
Dragon Talon gets a TON of Attack Rating, often putting it 20-30% hit chance above Blade Fury, with minimal AR investment.
Claw Mastery working for them would buff Claws quite a bit but you still have basically one choice if you’re using Blade Fury, and that’s the Fury Runeword. For true variable usage we’re going to need more AR from the skills you’re using, and that opens up the ability to use other weapons that aren’t claws. Not that you couldn’t already, but it’d be pretty hard to justify it if you just make Claw Mastery better. That math changes if Plague is added as a Claw runeword too, though.
Lastly, Blade Fury is fine with a casting delay. Yeah, it can make it annoying or even impossible to kite, but it does chew through mobs like nobody’s business.
I will echo that I’d like some Piercing; but I don’t know if we can add Piercing without also having the ability to stack pierce up to 100% or so.