CoC and this dagger

will I be able to use the added lightning on this for CoC in some way or is it a useless stat for a CoC dagger?

and adding spell damage will be the most useful mod I can roll on this, yes?

I've never done CoC but thinking of trying it in new leagues but I just want to make sure I know how to gear for this. will be starting as a shadow.

what stats should I really be looking for in the shadow tree to make this work (THIS WILL BE MY FIRST SHADOW IN 2.5 YEARS OF PLAYING SO IM A TOTAL NOOB HERE); going to be using mostly projectile skills; life based and elemental based.

thanks guys.

Added lightning is a mostly useless mod for CoC. I mean, you'll proc it a bunch because you hit so quickly, but that's still pretty piddly damage. You do indeed want spell damage. The order of mods you want on your weapon is something like local crit > attack speed > spell damage > crit multi > spell crit.

On the tree, stack as much dagger-applicable crit as you can, get a reasonable amount of life (150%+), and use your leftover points on attack speed, acrobatics/phase/ondar's (ondar's not necessary if it's out of your way), power charges if you can be bothered and making sure you have a large amount of increased accuracy (although that tends to come with the other stuff). Nothing else really matters.

Side note: I would actually recommend Ranger over Shadow, unless you're set on making a Shadow. Better start nodes (take the attack speed node and the accuracy node if you really need it, then join up to the main tree with the ev/life nodes), and you go to all the same places.

yea; ranger is where I thought I could find most crit but ive already done many ranger builds- albeit Bow builds- but haven't ever done a shadow. i do want optimization so I may just roll another ranger and go CoC that way. thanks, man!

I think the added lightning is useful because of shock. The actual damage is not that important, but with a CoC build you will crit often. So if your trigger attack did lightning damage and crits this will shock enemies and they will take an extra 50% damage from the spell that gets triggered by CoC. The spell gets triggered immediately, so you don't really care how long the shock status lasts. The important bit is that you do enough shock damage to get above the trigger value, which is 1.09% of total target life without further mods according to wiki.

If you use cold/fire spells in the CoC setup, you could also take elemental equilibrium for a massive boost in DPS (hit with dagger, mob gets -50 cold/fire, spells cast).

viperesque sort of summed it up really.


I dont have any coc dagger characters in use atm with a solid tree to show you. I have a wander coc shadow though, a few actually, but Ill post the tree and gear of the most basic of them if you want to get an idea of generally what kind of nodes, gem links, blah blah a coc shadow might go for.




with daggers, lower base crit on the weapon than a wand, ud probably drop the 2x 20% crit nodes below assassination along with a few other points here and there to grab "nightstalker" above shadow, thats a fairly essential dagger crit node.