whirling blades vs rest of movement skills

Thanks for the writeup peetrscz.
Shield Charge:
"- no cap on minimal or maximal distance"
Far as I can tell, there is a radius just like Flame Dash etc? I always found it clunky cause I kept bobbing into things, and the way clicking at your feet makes you not move. But I definitely never took it to a high investment, so I havent tried it with its greatest speed.

So lightning warp is your go to for casters? How do you find it for bosses? You just manage it well and jump small distances?

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1453R wrote:

Phase Run is actually interesting on builds with a lot of duration in the tree as a general mobility option, and is the only movement skill where "hold For Great Clearspeed!" actually makes some sense. PR > Inc. Duration > Fast Cast is a set-up I used on an old max-duration Blade Vortex character (y'know, back when Blade Vortex was good), and it provided some intriguing options for positioning. Especially since you could often dive into a pack of critters and start Vortexing up before the critters at the edges of the pack even started attacking you.

Also makes Vorici "lockpick the box" missions an absolute breeze, and there's intriguing applications to the stealth for some totem builds if you have the duration anyways for other skills. It's surprisingly good at getting you out of a rapidly decaying situation.

It's very situational though, and does frog-all for instant boss dodgery. Not worth the links on a super-optimized set-up most of the time, but could be fun for something like an Earthquake Raider or the like looking for some lulzy Ninja Action. It is a pretty hefty 'More' bonus to single melee hits.

God Ive tried to get phase run ninjaing to work a few times. Never quite made it fun though, like most of my fancy poe shenanigans, like... switching weapons. :P But, somebody here should be able to do something with ninja phasing im sure.

the only negative with SC is that you need a shield

otherwise its a ridiculous movement skill that can deal quite a lot of aoe damage and stun

quite easy to one-shot yourself in a phys reflect map on a crit with just two link of sc+fortify if you're scaling phys damage and some crit multi.

Technically LW does seem to be the perfect movement skill, but I've never levelled a caster to end game so I'm not sure how much cast speed we need to perfect it.

WB and SC are both equally fast, but I will use SC if I already have a shield and geared for attack because it does a lot more damage that you can kill packs simply on arrival. However, I always pick an alternate skill in case I need to jump over cliffs and fences, hence why I don't think these two are as perfect as end game version of LW.

Other skills are a distance behind these three. Even with top attack speeds on my build, LS couldn't reliably dodge Gorge map boss and it gets fatal on many occasions. The remaining skills have cooldown.

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peetrscz wrote:

I won't list blink arrow as you can't really say it is meant for movement (6s cooldown), but rather as escape / gap closer and it is great for that (fast animation, distance not limited, etc).

It only has 3s cooldown. Which can be reduced with helmet enchantment. Dont know what it is "meant" for but IME it increases effective movespeed for archer build (that doesnt have supersonic movespeed) significantly.
On archer build if I would have to choose between Blink Arrow and Flame Dash: No serious competition - Blink Arrow is much better.

@Zrevnur - Right, my bad, it's 3s cooldown. Still, it has a cooldown so you can't spam it (sure, I too use it as much as possible on my bow builds). Without the CD it would be best of the best, basically LW with no downside. I don't count helmet enchantments, because I once tried to get one, failed miserably and since then I only focus on boots.

@Chow - Maybe I'm worng on max distance, but it's conslusion of my testing in hideout. You gotta use shift (pretty much same as with leap slam), then it charges to place where your cursor is.

In my opinion LW is by far best movement skill there is. It's fastest and it has least restrictions. This is balanced by high mana cost and bit harder scaling (use Q LD and even if u don't level LW, make it Q20, that helps a lot for non casters, do it even with casters to make it crazy (nearly instant as there is inner CD of 0.1s) :)). It's also rather hard skill to use effectively, you need to think few steps ahead to make it fluid and fast, at least in maps with corridors. Open maps are no brainer as with any other skill.
Boss fights are easy as this is perfect escape and with right positioning you just stand close to boss and spank him (name locked), when you see he's charging up something you don't want to land in your face, you just click LW once and whooop, you're directly behind him (thanks to minimal distance) ready to spank him some more. I used this tactic on my breach build, with an additional bonus that it flipped EE as well :)
One might say this skill is easy to learn, but hard to master ... my only other advice is: practice, practice and at the end of the day practice some more (took me one offensive LW build to get this into my hands and eyes, build failed, but I improved my LW skill by a lot and it was fun when it worked as was intended).
One more thing comes to my mind about LW: cool part of the skill is, as long as you make it through casting animation, the teleport will happen no matter what happens to you, so only window of opportunity to stop you from warping away is when you cast it.

Shield charge is close behind (fast movement, much less cost, lot of utility, but no way how to make it over gaps), best choice for caster who want fortify and amazing for attack builds (fortify and endurance charges from one skill).

Anyway this is high level overview, most of time you'll be limited by weapon choice of build. I personally keep 3 link with LW (LW+LD+RD, faster casting is waste of link, better to get Q20 LW) in 2nd slot on every char I make (teleport over gaps and up/down to/from pesky ledges). Lvl 1 LW for attack builds, I level gem with casters, but then I use it in main setup.
My last build used 2 movement skills. She's EE caster so LW was best choice for movement and occasional EE flip, original plan was to use only LW and use molten shell (with cdwt+LL+ML) as 1st aid kit instead of fortify, unfortunately I was not able to obtain enough armor gear to regularly blast the MS. Thus I used those links for SC+F+FA+AA to get fortify (AA mainly for bosses, I hate when you charge boss to get fort up and miss him).

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peetrscz wrote:

One more thing comes to my mind about LW: cool part of the skill is, as long as you make it through casting animation, the teleport will happen no matter what happens to you, so only window of opportunity to stop you from warping away is when you cast it.

Doesnt it require line of sight for the teleport to happen?

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Zrevnur wrote:

Doesnt it require line of sight for the teleport to happen?

Yep, it does, but it isn't blocked by many rather large obstacles.

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jeerinho wrote:

Technically LW does seem to be the perfect movement skill, but I've never levelled a caster to end game so I'm not sure how much cast speed we need to perfect it.

If I count correctly, then if I drop all my cast speed gear, use Q20 gem and include 5% from bandit, I have 53% increase (tooltip says 1.73) and skill is very usable for both movement and dodging. My buffed and geared speed should be 100% increase (tooltip says 2.2) and the skill is crazy :) At his point it becomes question of how much movement speed you can stack as it will scale skill speed much better for long distance travel (to a certain point, there's still internal CD). Links being LW(Q20/L18)-LD(Q20/L20)-RD.

That reminds me of one thing (this can be eliminated by player skill) one need to consider while using LW. That is: If target location is not valid, skill will not trigger (unlike f.e. SC, which will charge all it can until blocked by obstacle).

whirling blades is still the best. shield charge sucks. it gets me stuck all the time when i wanna move.

I heartily agree with peetrscz's assessments.
LW does need 3 gems to shine, however, at least it seems so to me. If I am a caster with slots to spare and without serious mana issues, I go LW.
Unless I am a caster who will be "in the middle of things" quite a bit, such as when using BV or RF or such. Then I may want to have fortify.
If I am in need of fortify, I much prefer leap slam to anything else. I detest WB's lock animation, I just detest it. This is a matter of taste. Some people detest baroque fugues, others feel the need to regurgitate to death metal, yet others wish to hurt people when forced to listen to house. For me, it's just taste: I hate WB's lock. Shield charge seems superior to WB to me for that reason. That being said, I detest it when I need to escape somewhere quickly, and I am in a stressful situation (one that requires ... escaping), and I hit my movement button, and my detestful SC or WB gets me absolutely nowhere, because some monster dropped its contact lense on the floor or lost an eyelash and WB or SC will feel that this is an obstacle and cannot path over it. That makes me furious. In the calmest of situations under ideal lighting and floor conditions, SC and WB are usable to move, but not when I want them to. May they commit autofornication with a spiked mace.