A Brief history of Claws (Their prime, their death, and why they are still bad atm)

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zSavage wrote:

Ever since my second character (my first REAL character), I've been a lover of claws. They offered a cool way of surviving, by gaining flat life (at early base levels) or by life leech (at higher level bases). This was back in 0.something, when I first started playing the game.

Shortly after I started, while I was still leveling said character, the melee splash gem was added to the game. This revolutionized my own and many others' playstyles, as it made single skill melee a possibility, esp if dualwielding. (You could use the same attack for both single target and AoE). My choice at the time was Dual Strike.

Back in those days, getting instant life leech was typically done through the Vaal Pact Keystone, which had the penalty of 40% leech effectiveness. Atziri's Acuity at the time gave you 100% instant leech for crits (in 1.1). Also, the attack damage leech values on claws were not local, so they could stack (with each other, or allow the weapon in your other hand to also leech). A clever player figured out that if you placed the Bloodseeker unique claw in your main hand, all your leech would be instant if using Dual Strike with no penalty.

Around this time I had gone CI with my claw character and used this while dual wielding claws, allowing me to get 33% of physical attack damage leeched as life at instant speed. This was in patch 1.3, which I would consider the prime of not only claw builds but also builds known then as 'leech tanks'. These builds relied on fast, powerful life leech to tank damage. My own build, for instance, had over 16K ES/s recovery while attacking.

Then came the nerf hammer. Big time. With patch 2.0, all leech values across the tree were hit hard. Claws suffered in multiple ways. First, all leech became local, meaning using claws with other weapons no longer offered you leech, and using two claws offered no advantage over using one. Second, many of the high level claw base types were changed to LGoH instead of leech. This change made them essentially useless bases for physical claw builds (the only kind which the claw nodes on the tree really support). Third, the leech values on the claws themselves were reduced to the point that other weapons could leech exactly like a claw build and have a lot more damage due to claws' low base damage and better tree scaling for those other weapons. Ever since patch 2.0, there has never really been a successful or popular claw build on the forums (the ones from 1.3 and such, including mine, were discontinued).

Here's the basics of why claws are still pretty much useless or an inferior choice right now:
1) Claws lost their niche (leeching). Other weapons can pretty much leech exactly like a build with a claw could (or their leech is a tad lower, and since claws don't leech as much the difference is not significant).
2) Claws do less damage than other one hand weapon types (both from the base item, and scaling available from the tree).
3) Good phys claws are hard to find. This is because about half of the base types are useless for a phys build (since LGoH doesn't scale anywhere near as well into endgame DPS as leech does), and you're not going to any decent damage with a claw build without going crit (for the reasons described in 2). Also, pretty much all of the unique claws aside from Bloodseeker are pretty much useless for most claw builds.
4) The state of melee (Let's not discuss this here, please).

Anyway, to give claws a better place in the game, I would suggest:
1) Increasing the implicit leech of claws to give them a niche again. Make all or almost all of the high level claw bases have life leech instead of LGoH. This would make more bases usable for phys claw builds and allow them to fit their intended purpose in the game.
2) An extra notable wheel or two (or improved nodes in the tree) that support claw users. Right now there aren't really that many that are practical or located in good places.
3) Consider allowing claw leech/LGoH to be global again (rewards using a claw in a DW build for leech, and allows better leeching for a pure claw DW build). This would give them another use other than for claw builds.

Thoughts?

-Savage