Claws?

I was just wondering if anyone had found any use for these awesome looking things.

My first quip with these things is attack speed. I have seen 3 different claws-bases with 1.35 attack speed. For reference, my bow is 1.55, and a general sword I saw was 1.6 (Or 1.8, or some such). Is there any reason these fist-based weapons hit so slowly? Is it honestly slower to punch someone than it is to equip an arrow, or swing a sword (Second-swipe momentum aside)?

Secondly - Damage. Base DPS considered, these weapons have the third-lowest melee damage in the game (Aside from daggers, and wands).

So - With slow, low DPS weapons - Is there anything besides awesome looks that makes these things useful?

Suggestion

WAAAAAAAY higher attack speed! Sure, lower the DPS if you must, but bump the attack speed to around the 2.0 mark at least.

i agree with this.

i'm having a claw ranger at lvl 42 and the killing speed(aswell as the survivabilty and the overall hard road to 42) is pretty bad.

the only time my killspeed was okay was around lvl 27 or so, when i got a claw with 1.55 base and +20%ias (overall the range is from 1.20 to 1.55 afaik).. which i had to use till lvl 41 and even now with 1.35 base but a lvl 41 weapon it's not much better than before. (i could invest more passives in ias, but that would lead to a pure skilltriggering build and no "hard-punch-lady")

also i think the droprate of claws is like 1:10 compared to every other weapon..

You get an attack speed boost when dual-wielding, which these are obviously meant for. The dex/int area of the passive tree also has a lot of attack speed passives.

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whiteBoy88 wrote:

You get an attack speed boost when dual-wielding, which these are obviously meant for. The dex/int area of the passive tree also has a lot of attack speed passives.

I still think that, for nearly having bare hands, they attack a mite slow.


Edit: Let me put it this way, I think it'd add a truly unique weapon class if you can hit very, very fast and whittle away between skills.

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whiteBoy88 wrote:

You get an attack speed boost when dual-wielding, which these are obviously meant for. The dex/int area of the passive tree also has a lot of attack speed passives.

i'm actually slower with 2 claws (one 1.50 and one 1.35) than with my 1.50 and an 12%ias armguard(ofc +blockchance +evasion).. so this boost seems to have an incredible high penality or its just the average

I also agree. Claws feel pretty weak. And increasing there speed to around 2.0 would give them some identity (thus more build variety) as well as some better synergy with the "life on hit" mod.

No one wants slow claws, thematically it is very strange. You want to be like wolverine on crack that runs around and stabs like crazy.

Maybe also raises a few zombies and shoots lightning out his butt every once and a while.

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Nicseoul wrote:

Maybe also raises a few zombies and shoots lightning out his butt every once and a while.

so whats the point of using claw then anyways?

I am glad someone else brought this up, first let me post a little character build history for me.

Pre 9.3 I built a duelist dual-wielding swords. I did so because the claws just did not look effective enough on all levels. Once the 9.3 came and we had characters wiped, I went with a fire witch and a dual wielding marauder just for sake of testing something different.

I have been playing those two characters online with a friend, and recently he bought skyrim so has been otherwise occupied every other night with that. So in the meantime I started another Duelist, and decided this time i would build the Ninja/assassin/wolverine type character. I have built him to dual wield claws.

I will say first off, the character is level 20 and has survived just fine so far. However, the claws I have found (even the nice rare ones) are lacking. There is no way ANY weapon should be faster attack speed then claw class. As the OP stated, if this requires you to debuff the damage, then so be it.

I understand you get attack speed increases for dual weilding, but again, you can get this same bonus with dual weilding short swords which base attack speed is quicker than the claws. This is ridiculous.

I am very dissappointed, I was really hoping to build a character with insane attack speed, low damage output and quick movement speed. The mechanics in the skill tree is there to support this build as are the active skill gems (flicker, phase run, viperstike) but the claw class attack speed just does not support it. Its a shame.


Again, this is not an attack on the actual damage per second as it is on the speed of attacks. I have the idea in my head of bobbing and weaving through crowds slashin here and there, flicker strike, viper strike, phaserun, viper strike, etc. With the current set up i can own mobs as good as the next guy, but why not just dual weild axes, or maces with a marauder or swords with a duelist.

The problem with fast attack speeds is that mana consumption doesn't scale inversely with speed. So a slow 100 damage attack costs 5 mana, and two fast 50 damage attacks cost 10 mana.

They need some kind of scaling of mana costs for 1h weapons vs 2h weapons at the very least. Because for now it's just way more efficient to use a big slow 2h weapon.