[2.4] Wild Strike - Claw Edition (Non-HC Viable)

This character started off as a Viper Strike build. Oddly enough being a duelist, I chose the class for the bleed/dot passives, as well as being near life nodes. The Gladiator ascendancy also applies some significant buffs to this build.

As a Viper Strike build, I was constantly perplexed with whether or not I should have Melee Splash always socketed or, hot swap it all of the time. Without it, clearing packs was hard, even while utilizing Bino's Kitchen Knife. Whilst using it, the decreased damage made a significant impact on single target dps. Making bosses more time consuming to kill, as you have to kite them.

Enter the skill to solve all those problems; Wild Strike. There's a lot of debate over the interactions between Wild Strike and, the various other gems provided. However, one thing I've noticed while playing with it, is that each elemental blast it fires out can proliferate bleeds/poisons. Eliminating the entire Melee Splash ordeal. One thing to note before going further is that it's very hard to support Wild Strike as compared to other skills. At it's base, Wild Strike is a melee attack. So it benefits from most physical/melee damage buffs. That's essentially the route you want to go when trying to achieve higher dps. Ignore elemental damage buffs and, go for more physical damage per second. As Wild Strike takes 60% of your physical damage and, converts it to a random element. This is where things get tricky, essentially what's happening when you attack, is you're landing a melee hit, than casting one of the following: arc (Spell), flame surge (AoE) or, some form of ice blast (Projectile). The most important thing to note about these casts are the Skill Tags. If you choose to support Wild Strike for example with LMP/GMP, than only the ice blast will fire more projectiles. Increased Area of Effect will only affect the flame surge and, Controlled Destruction will affect the arc.

Regardless of these interesting interactions, I've managed to find great success in simply linking it to MultiStrike, Melee Physical Damage, Faster Attacks and, Increased Area of Effect. Your hits have quite a wide spread, as arc chains, flame surge deals aoe and, the ice blast freezes or chills most things. Immobilizing most packs, alotting bleed/dot nodes from the duelist passive area further stacks on top of status ailments, usually resulting in your entire screen blowing up. An perhaps some off screen as well.

At the time of writing this post, I had been running Merciless Labyrinth. So, as you see I've linked my Rat's Nest. However, You may opt to use an Abyssus as I do normally. Assuming you're okay with running Arctic Armour. Back to the Rat's Nest, I couldn't defeat Izaro without removing my Abyssus as I have bad physical mitigation and, Izaro was using a two handed maul.

My two claws deliver huge bonuses, granting a 10k increase to dps once they proc. I suppose it's important to note, that while standing in town, My tooltip dps is just over 10k. Another thing to note, is that the tooltip dps does not calculate the 60% physical conversion. If you're into math, you're welcome to figure it out. There's also a quite descriptive conversion post on reddit summarizing things.

Another notable, in my setup, is the Shaper's Touch gloves. As I'm converting all evasion to armour, I figured I might as well get life from it as well. I've also gone a bit further and, used a Fluid Motion jewel in the socket adjacent to the Golems Blood node. This converts about 60 strength I believe into dexterity. All of the other sockets contain dex/resist jewels. Just because.