Assassin Blade Flurry Crit Chance

I have recently leveled a blade flurry dagger assassin to lvl 70 of which i believe there are many out there and i'm wondering if others have found what i have found; that crit chance from gear is almost irrelevant?

I'm at 66,82% crit unbuffed and 95% with power charges (and the power charge passives from the ascendancy tree), with no crit chance from gear other than from my knife and maligaro's gloves, which i think i'm gonna drop in favor of something else (although giving up the crit multiplier is gonna be hard, especially since they're legacy). I'm at the point where i'm considering removing crit chance from my passive tree. I'm considering getting a new dagger and i'm thinking that pDPS is the only thing that is really important.

Many people may think this is a stupid question, but it's just that i'm so suprised. I though reaching the kind of crit chances i'm seeing was supposed to be really hard or impossible. I've played a few crit based characters in my life, but never gotten near the crit chances i'm seeing now.

Since i'm made this post i guess i could ask another question while i'm at it. Is there any point to using assassin's mark as an offensive curse anymore? only benefit it seems to provide is 20% extra dmg (i have skyforth so i'm up on full power charges in no time). Vulnerability maybe when i complete merciless lab to get the bleeding/poison notable and get voidheart from this prophecy i have?

Well it is not that surprising, thats what Assassin subclass does. easy max crit chance with crit weapons.

there can be a point in using assassin mark. when you have max crit Unstable infusion is obsolete. So the curse can generate power charges in case you dont have any other sources. And there is also crit damage bonus

if you are physical with bleed and poison then vuln is definitely a nice dps curse.

Im not surprised that you reach crit cap without crit on gear. I am crit capped on my dagger reaver and shes an occultist, Im virtually crit capped on my dagger ranger too and neither of them are using maligaros either. You could crit cap on dagger builds without maligaros on before they even added the new version of critical strikes gem that has the base 1.9 crit chance.

I dont know if you are using crit strikes gem, quite possibly not with an assassin I guess, but if you are then another possibility is keeping all the gear and passive crit, dropping that gem and using a different dps gem as another way to generate more damage.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

if you are physical with bleed and poison then vuln is definitely a nice dps curse.

Im not surprised that you reach crit cap without crit on gear. I am crit capped on my dagger reaver and shes an occultist, Im virtually crit capped on my dagger ranger too and neither of them are using maligaros either. You could crit cap on dagger builds without maligaros on before they even added the new version of critical strikes gem that has the base 1.9 crit chance.

I dont know if you are using crit strikes gem, quite possibly not with an assassin I guess, but if you are then another possibility is keeping all the gear and passive crit, dropping that gem and using a different dps gem as another way to generate more damage.

I indicated that my surprise may seem stupid to some. My excuse, i guess, is that this is my first crit dagger character, and while i expected high crit, i had no idea it would go this high.

I am using the crit gem and hadn't considered dropping it before you mentioned it, but i will definitely think about that now as there are a lot of other support gems i would like to get into my setup.

My character is still young and there are a lot of options open to me. I'm consider respeccing to trickster even tho i will have to spend a lot of regret orbs, for more defense and attacks speed. As i'm playing the CI - Ghost Reaver - Vaal Pact combo with no damage mitigation whatsoever, and being a ES novice as well, the way my ES keeps yoyoing up and down makes me nervous and uncomfortable.

At early mapping there seems to be no need for bleed/poison as everything dies before it has a chance to do any damage, tho i realize that may change at higher tiers. Thanks for confirming vulnerability as a good offensive curse tho.

A question for anyone who may know: I'm aiming for 10k ES, is there any particular percentage of physical attack damage leeched as life (ES) i should be aiming for?

it doesnt seem stupid at all, I didnt mean to imply that, its just one of those things with daggers.

With leech I tend to just get as much as I can basically.

the yoyoing life pool, I hear what youre saying, I never really play pure es, I always have something else going on top of it. The answer would be more defenses for sure, you can either get more es so that the yoyo is only happening in the top 1/3 of your pool and hence feels less scary, and if you are under 10k es that would be advisable regardless of stacking other defenses. Once you go over 10 to 11k es you can either keep stacking es or find a way to crowbar decent evasion in on top, both of those methods would require some fairly nice gear though.

Its possible to do both with strong enough gear, Im on an ek witch atm who has 15,700 es and 12,000 evasion, but youd need at least a lvl3 enlighten gem to make a setup like that work as it takes running both grace and discipline auras, + you would want to keep hatred aura for the damage.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

Its possible to do both with strong enough gear, Im on an ek witch atm who has 15,700 es and 12,000 evasion, but youd need at least a lvl3 enlighten gem to make a setup like that work as it takes running both grace and discipline auras, + you would want to keep hatred aura for the damage.

Really nice tip about the evasion, i have enlighten 3 and 4 too actually and i'm running skyforth, haven't done the math, but seems that wouldn't be enough to get hatred, grace and discipline (could be wrong here), aura nodes are withing easy reach either way tho. I guess you have the Void barrier cluster? Are there any other evasion nodes you have? I've considered using alpha's howl as i have no protection against freeze other than a flask and that would help evasion, but it would really put a dent in my ES.

I would say i have really strong gear. I have quite a few hours of poe behind me and i've aquired a lot of nice gear and quite a bit of currency in that time, but nearly always played life with heavy damage mitigation, so i'm not very experienced with crit, and completely new to end-game ES. Seems very hard to reach the kinds of ES you have tho, but of course, i've just reached lvl 71 with 7 unspent passive points, and there is still some potential in my gear. And of course, you're cheating, playing an occultist *joke* :p

Hope i'm not bothering you too much with questions, but i'm really new to this ES thing :)

yeah I have void barrier, skyforth and I have charisma cluster and 1 node into influence just for the extra 4%. Part of the key to running them all on that setup is using The Vertex for the auras in order to get +1 level of gems on the lvl4 enlighten, but with a lvl3 you can also grab leadership aura cluster for the extra bit of reduced reserve, or you have leadership + lvl4 and drop the skyforths... any way you shake it you need some fairly expensive components.

This is the tree I have...




obviously its an ek tree so its a different thing but just for an idea of the defense and aura nodes involved. I have evasion on gear, vertex has strong evasion and I also have hybrid gloves and shield..




the character is lvl89 atm but thats defense complete I think, all the rest of the nodes I take will probably be dps, at least up to say lvl93 or there abouts. Might go back for the last couple of es/ev in void barrier after that.

All my flasks are physical and I roll them with chemists to get 2 uses from a full flask.

with the gloves, a key to getting a good ev rating is to use the bench flat evasion prefix which is considerably higher than u can otherwise roll on a rare. I have a few more pairs in breach coming back...

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

obviously its an ek tree so its a different thing but just for an idea of the defense and aura nodes involved. I have evasion on gear, vertex has strong evasion and I also have hybrid gloves and shield..

Yeah, it's different, but still very interesting to see and compare. And i would say defense and defensive options are largely the same for us both.

I was so exited by this new thought of throwing in evasion when you suggested it first that i immediately specced into void barrier (untypical of me to do something that rash without analyzing everything first), but after further thought i decided i wasn't quite there yet where i could support dmg, ES and evasion at the same time, so i specced out of that again, (fastest i've ever specced into to something and then out of it, i think, unless a mistake was made)

I still find it very interesting however, and it seems very likely that i'll go for something like that when i'm higher lvl and have the passive points i need to pull it off. I've always been a player who likes defense over offense.

I slightly concerned about a couple of things when it comes to going in that direction tho. I'm considering things like dropping voidheart (and thus, not picking any damage over time nodes or chaos dmg ones), changing to trickster and/or, like you; getting evasion. But if you look at blade flurry builds in the build page for shadow, and there are like 10-12 of them, no one (haven't read every single one in detail) seems to go for any defense other than highest possible dmg for the most leech, apart from the life based ones who are built differently, and they're all assassin.

Maybe the combination of the most dmg with the most ES pool is an integral part and building it differently with more defense and less dmg would in fact make my survivability lower and not higher. I guess only way to find out are at the higher map tiers.