If all Skills were equal?

In an effort of determining enjoyable skills to play without concern how far they will take me in progression; I would like to ask the community the following question:


If all skills were equal in progression opportunity; and you could only play one attack/spell skill per character, which attack/spell skills would you play?


Thank you for helping me determine skills I want to build around regardless of progression opportunity!

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HoustonNative wrote:

In an effort of determining enjoyable skills to play without concern how far they will take me in progression; I would like to ask the community the following question:


If all skills were equal in progression opportunity; and you could only play one attack/spell skill per character, which attack/spell skills would you play?


Thank you for helping me determine skills I want to build around regardless of progression opportunity!

I actually find myself quite fond of Cast While Channeling builds these days. There's a number of interesting combinations:

-Scorching Ray > Firestorm is a classic, deals very solid damage and comes online early in the game. Easy to scale, good mix of ST and mob-clearing damage, can be built for peanuts.
-Incinerate > Discharge looks awesome. Uses Romira's Banquet to allow Incinerate to generate Power Charges for Discharge to explode. Very intricate build with lots of moving parts, late-gamey and expensive since it requires every last dripping drop of cast speed you can get (186% ICS required to generate 5 power charges before a 0.35s CWC duration recasts Discharge. Thaaaat...takes doing), but it looks and feels kind of amazing. Especially with Blue Incinerate and Flare Discharge.
-Blade Flurry > Bladefall is one Mathil did, a mixed attack/spell Poison scaler that dropped all the blades on all the things. Crown of Eyes means you spend most of your time scaling spell damage instead of attack damage, but otherwise an interesting mash-up.
-Wither > STUFF is also out there. Some folks do heavy Chaos conversion on Firestorm, use Wither for mad debuff deeps using a 75% chaos Firestorm. Some folks do weird versions of the Essence Drain build using CWC Wither, but that one has a few issues.

The cool thing is that all of these builds let you run two different skills at once, which is visually interesting and also makes damage scaling easy since you only need to scale each skill half as high as usual to get the same overall damage. The right combination of skills lets you 'double dip' without double-dipping, since your stuff all scales two spells at once and you're hitting critters with both of those spells at the same time.

Wildstrike. I love that skill gem, but have not been able to put together a viable build past T12.

Dominating Blow!

Ideally with Facebreakers.

I just wanna punch people so hard they start to work for me ;_;

Explosive Arrow!

An interesting mechanic. One that I just can't seem to make a decent build for (Also, why does it cost like a billion mana?)

Glacial Cascade!

It's a cool spell (Ha, puns). But it's stuck being this weird Physical/Cold hybrid that makes it kind of meh compared to pure elemental or pure physical spells (I mean, I've thought about trying to go Physical to Lightning > Lightning to Cold > Cold to Fire but that's a lot of hassle when I could just go for Freezing Pulse and Cold > Fire and rock 125% damage effectiveness...)

Scorching Ray, probably, I like the concept and it looks badass, but you really need to go all out of it if you want passable results and I don't fancy the way it locks to targets.