TL:DR – Allow Crescent Moon and Plague runewords to work in claw type weapons.
The Sin MA improvements will go a long way… until midgame.
Then like 99% of players under these builds will realize there is NO endgame claw weapon or options aside 1 and a million GG rare claws through extreme RNG.
The obvious fix is looking at the number of runewords we have available.
Aside, potentially a godly eth upped bartucs, there really is no good weapons. Even then with no IAS it still isn’t the best. Chaos while has decent damage, is for a WW sin, not even a build you would put any points into MA anyway. Fury is ok, but its Fury. Its only good because there are no other options.
Shadowkiller could be ok for frost damage, but still would be totally outclassed by any decently rolled Rare claw.
Jade Talon is only an option defensively as an offhand, which means you would need to take the choice of say a phoenix or stormshield, which both just give far more better choices for the build.
So where does that leave MA sins. Go as a kicker and not even use a claw, be a WW sin with a chaos and ignore every change made in the PTR so far, or hope and pray for a GG rare claw.
Its just awful. The MA changes will fall on their face until assassin has a respectable choice in melee weapons for claws. And the two most obvious choices are runewords.
Give claws the ability to roll Plague (the new runeword introduced) and Crescent Moon. Both of these with their relevant -resist mods would allow MA sins to at least go into some endgame content and be viable. Until then – every update to MA skill tree is moot.
I could also see assassin dual wielding daggers whit claws. That would open up some more options.
And all 3 sockets runewords should be available in claws and daggers (and all weapons that can have a maximum of 3os). And more class specific items are needed, mit just for assassins but druids too. You can realy see and feel, that LoD was a rushed developement.
I would love Crescent Moon, but could also see Lawbringer, Black and Edge as claws. Could also see some completely new claw around Ist-Gul range in cost.
Really, in full retro-spec there should not have been any restrictions to the two or three rune runewords for weapons. But can’t change the past.
Black and Edge would have been great options, but Lawbringer i can kinda understand it being more of a paladin weapon with its aura to be a sword based weapon, while Edge there could be potential for some shenanigans with Thorns Aura stacking (2x edge + Bramble giving level level 51 thorns aura).
Black honestly would be the best one to add to claws as it add a cheap early on source of CB for a claw to help deal with tough super uniques and bosses.
I seem to remember some early on LoD artwork of the assassin using daggers, but that could be just be the Mandela effect at play here. To make that work we would really need to have a dagger mastery skill in her tree, or tie it into claw mastery. I do miss the sexier version of the assassin before the recent character retcon in D2:Res. But that’s a personal issue and not really related to class balance.