Hi, I want to try out a different mosaic buid this season, so I am playing:
Tiger Strike + Dragon claw with Claw mastery and Fade maxed, as well as some points in Weapon block. I am using Dragon claw, because I think it is more thematic with the dual claws that assassins use.
So i have a lot of left over points and I was thinking of putting them in the elemental charged skills.
I am between “Claws of Thunder” or “Blades of Ice”.
From testing I found that it was easier to deal with physical immunities with Claws of Thunder. And the AOE was better. And all that with only 1 point so far.
But with “Blades of Ice”, I hear that you can freeze your targets.
What about maxed out venom and 1 point death sentry. This would allow you to knock out one monster fairly quick and bring in death sentries fire dmg for corpse explosion
Or maybe just double down on physical only; use a phys sunder and then use a reapers toll act 2 might merc, or maybe swap your highlords for atma’s scarab (least desirable imo). Of even an act 1 fire arrow merc with Brand runeword if it’s in the budget. The amp dmg proc happens a lot when you teleport into a pack.
Well I did some testing and with the best gear I could find, the combination of skills (Tiger Strike + Dragon Claw) didn’t perform well.
I knew that it wouldn’t be “P8 Chaos” strong, but I believed that I could do on my own chaos runs.
It is viable, but I was struggling a lot. I thought that dual Mosaic would be enough, no matter the skills I used for charges or finishing moves.
When I respeced to Tiger Strike + Dragon Talon, I noticed a small improvement.
I also have only 1 point in each of the other elemental charged skills. When I tried to use them (Claws of Thunder or Blades of Ice), with my maxed Tiger Strike, I saw significant difference. With only 1 point it made a huge difference.
Now I am thinking of using my last respec for going with the standard Phoenix Strike build, even though I wanted for the physical build to work.
The solution to my problem would be a new runeword like Mosaic, that boosts only physical damage. The +elemental damage I have on my Mosaics don’t really help with my current build.
I also need to farm for new gear If I am going with PS.
Guillaume’ Face, socketed with a 33%ED jewel, won’t be much help.
I think that’s because your current setup had no form of aoe, unless I’m mistaken and you were using Death Sentry, but even then, death sentry falls off a bit in higher player counts. You need to add some form of AoE to Tiger Strike+Dragon Claw, but even maxed out, this skill combo will always be way worse than the element skills. They all deal massive aoe dmg and will easily outpace TS+DC+DS.
If you want to you try something different, that avoids a ton of screen clutter caused by the elemental skills, you could try Tiger Strike + Dragon Tail; Tiger Tail. You can get some pretty crazy fire aoe damage kicks. This is how the combo works;
tiger strike boosts the physical dmg of your kick, and dragon tail takes the phys kick dmg your kick just dealt to a monster and then cause a massive amplified fire aoe explosion. You’ll want both the fire and physical sunder charms active, as well as either reapers toll a2 merc or brand a1 merc, I prefer brand a1. In game my sheet dmg is 64,000 → 100,000 per kick, but this would be vs a monster with 0 physical and fire resists. So it does vary up and down a lot, depending on a monsters physical and fire resists, but it has no troubles clearing p8. Maxed out fade, and 1 point into cobra strike make the spec super durable.
The kick does cause knock back, which can be both good and bad; it helps keep you alive and not get surrounded, but it also stops monsters from clumping up; you can slightly negate this by putting 1 point into blades of ice and using it primarily for lvl 3s freeze, not damage the dmg, same could be down with lvl 3 Phoenix strike. With that said, if you don’t max fade, you could technically max PS and 1 elemental skill as well and use something like;
Tiger Tail + Claws of Thunder + PS2 Chaos Lightning
Or
Tiger Tail + Blades of Ice + PS3 Chaos Orb
But now you’re starting to introduce a lot of screen clutter again, and it’s kinda overkill dps wise, your Tiger Tail kicks are already 1 shotting most monsters. On a side note; you can’t use Fist of Fire with Dragon Tail because FoF converts all your physical dmg into fire dmg. The issue is that dragon tail takes your physical dmg to make an explosion, but since FoF made all your phys dmg fire dmg, your dragon tails explosion no longer deals any dmg since it has no phys dmg to work off of anymore
But I think I will use my last respec for the usual elemental build, but have active only 1-2 charged moves.
I did some chaos runs with only 1 point in the elemental charges (Blades of Ice + Thunder Claw only) and it was much better than the maxed Tiger Strike with all the other skills.
I will not max FoF, because I want to use cobra as well.