Claws?

I am just starting a duel claw now, looks interesting indeed.

The problem I have with claws is this. Claws are dex/int weapons. Dex int defenses are E-shield and evasions. The claw intrinsic ability is life on hit. Life on hit is the last thing you want with evasion and eshield. It does not to replenish eshield, diminishing the value of that. And with evasion you should either be at full health, or very low health, and if you're at full health it also does nothing.

The best way to make use of life on hit would be with a blood magic char with a lot of armor, the exact opposite of a dex / int char.

Goodness, quite the necromantic feat, this.

Anyway, there is a way to drain energy shield rather than life with claws in the works.

I really enjoyed playing a DW Claw Shadow. It's certainly been one of the more challenging classes to play. I particularly liked the flicker strike / venom strike / whirling blades combo. It definitely keeps you busy. Unfortunately, i guess i more or less have them shelved @ 50 to see what happens with the archer projectiles that eat me up and make playing any map with archers especially tedious. I'd have to say that up 'till now tho, I think the Claw Shadow has probably been the funnest class ive played yet.

I was really excited to make a claw shadow, but after a while I started realizing that there were really no AOE skills available for claws. (Elemental Proliferation doesn't really count.) I picked up a good sword, and since I now had access, started using Cleave. It was like I was playing a totally different game - all of a sudden groups that would have been five minutes of whittling down went down without a problem, and cleave + life on hit was giving me more life than the drain from my claws.

It would be interesting if claws could replenish energy shield - I agree with an earlier poster that a claw build currently requires armor/life, which is the opposite of what a Shadow has easy access to. However, without access to some kind of AOE ability, claws are always going to be unable to compete.

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simnel wrote:

I was really excited to make a claw shadow, but after a while I started realizing that there were really no AOE skills available for claws. (Elemental Proliferation doesn't really count.) I picked up a good sword, and since I now had access, started using Cleave. It was like I was playing a totally different game - all of a sudden groups that would have been five minutes of whittling down went down without a problem, and cleave + life on hit was giving me more life than the drain from my claws.

It would be interesting if claws could replenish energy shield - I agree with an earlier poster that a claw build currently requires armor/life, which is the opposite of what a Shadow has easy access to. However, without access to some kind of AOE ability, claws are always going to be unable to compete.

Claw users have Whirling Blades, which is an awesome skill in combination with a claw's lifeleech and the general attackspeed you will have when going for a dualwielding char.

While I agree that you can't really combine claws with the shadow's ES/EVA position in the skilltree (at least until the new leech conversion talent is implemented) I must say that you can make them work pretty good if you go in the direction of the duelist-part of the tree to grab the defensive nodes (and even in case you don't want to you have a good chunk of life-passives in the shadow area). And since leech scales with physical damage you may want to go there anyway! If you want to be negative you could say that you don't play a shadow but a bad looking duelist with the current design.

One problem I see with claws is that currently you don't really have many alternative paths you can go in either the skilltree or abilty-wise because you only have one weapon dependant aoe, Dualstrike outclasses other singletargeted skills easily and when you want to use elemental damage you gimp the selling point of claws: the leech.