Blade Furry: Gladiator vs Assassin

I leveled a Gladiator just to see how Blade Furry would perform, and for the most part leveling was really a breeze. It's only since I reached level ~80 that I see it slowing down a bit.. so I told myself, lets try and level a shadow.

I asked on chat, and was told to go Assassin. Okie. I'm about to fetch my second ascendency, but I must say the dps feels really low atm. I don't know if the second ascendancy is gonna redeem everything, but at the moment it takes TWICE the clear speed, hands down (compared to Gladiator).

Since Blade Fury is loving attack speed (and physical damage), using medium-speed daggers (high crit or not) I almost have to 2-shots trash, instead of 1-shot. Is Assassin really a good ascendancy? Is my gear that bad?

No one? A hour later, no one cares to comment on this? Am I the only Blade Furry Assasin on the planet? :D

Thanks alot sir, for you detailed information. That's what happens when you barely ever create/play Shadow and go with the flow. You are right about me going all the way south and skipping crit/dagger nodes, I'll try to remedy this!

:)

I'm playing with Gladiator now, I think duelist have more defence than assassin in term of blocking spells/attacks, and the allocated tree is kinda balance between defence and damage, although you have to travel further to grab the dagger nodes, you can find a good sword instead of a dagger and get the critical nodes of sword.

Currently I'm level 69 with avg damage around ~3k (without Conc. gem), 3k6 HP (will be more when I can reach the life nodes near Scion), 30% blocks (42% if I use Ungil's Gauche) excluding the blocks when you have been hit. And you can even have around 100% chance to bleed with non-legacy voidheart (120% more damage at max stage seems to be equal to Earthquake so yeah sometimes I just need to stack the max stage and blow it away while running around lol). Overall, there are still plenty of critical nodes around duelist to help you reach the prominent chance and IMO, I even found that 50-60% with me is enough.

Anyway, I'm feeling good to play Bladefurry with Gladiator now, spell block will save you some ways :D.

Assassin Megapoison can't really be beaten in terms of raw killaging power for Blade Furry (I find it amusing how common that particular typo is). Gladiator is better for a more defensively oriented build given the shield passives therein, but a properly kitted-out Assassin will outdamage just about every possible other physical-attacker option. You really can't match its sheer killing strength, though other Ascendancies do have their perks.

It is honestly why I'm so sick unto death of Assassin everything. All Assassin builds are basically the same build, and they do the same thing - take Skill [X], crit-cap it, then deal more deeps than a pre-nerf Rainbownuke Berserker with a Diamond shrine up. UGH.

I don't see any reason, ever, why you'd want to play Gladiator instead of Assassin.

honestly? assassin. here are the main two reasons.

1) offense. you cannot beat assassin in offense. you can easily crit cap, and the bonus poison damage you can get as assassin is unmatched. basically you run binos, death's hand for stat stick, and now you have insane DPS. you will get a total of 50% of physical damage as extra chaos, run added chaos jewelry/gem and now you have full physical/chaos damage for maximum poison potential, and with high crit/crit dmg and double poison dmg on crit....well you see where this is going.

2) defense. the past 2 years of poe has been defense in a bottle. with little investment you can get max block/spell block just from dual wielding and running rumi's flask. that is literally all you need when you'll be killing things as fast as you will be.

i know exactly what im going to be doing. i just don't know if i'll use cospri's will chest or use carcass jack and socket poison. you could get adder's touch and depend on that + toxic delivery for your poison but i don't like the thought of it being that to chance since most of your damage will be from the actual poison.


right now i've taken my raider based on mathil's dreamfeather spectral throw build and just socketed blade flurry with appropriate supports. it does just as much dmg if not more and im not even optimized for it in gear, passives or ascendancy. not to mention the gem is only lvl 13.

soon as i get a respec from 2.5 i'll be taking one of my assassins and turning it into my planned outcome, which should get a minimum of 5x the amount of dmg im throwing around right now on my raider. absolutely insane.

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toyotatundra wrote:

I don't see any reason, ever, why you'd want to play Gladiator instead of Assassin.

Because you already have seventy-three Assassins because nobody can ever see any reason, ever, why they'd want to play [X] instead of Assassin?

Also because Blade Flurry necessitates a one-handed weapon as it is but also deals stupid-high damage, allowing a player to devote less overall opportunity cost in their build to damage and still get acceptable clearspeeds, which opens the way for things like max-block Gladiator that are otherwise difficult to play but could be a nice change of pace from the "ASSASSIN EVERYTHING(!!!)" current existing meta?

'Course, I'm also wondering if Champion doesn't have something to offer, and not just perma-Fortify shenanigans. In fact, a few of my prototype trees have actually skipped Fortitude altogether in order to get both First to Strike, Last to Fall and Worthy Foe. Lots of extra damage reduction there, and if I want perma-Fortify I can just throw Fortify on my Blade Flurry. Plus, thirty percent increased enemy damage taken - better than half of Shock, on everything, without any crits, and you can still Shock them, too! Might be worth a spin sometime, be the only Champion in all of PoE that doesn't have passive Fortify.

And also the only Blade Flurry character in all of PoE that is neither an Assassin or below level 40.