Ethereal Knives/Whirling Blades/Claws LoH build.

This is my idea for a shadow that mainly uses Ethereal Knives and Whirling blades to progress. I mainly wanted to make a build that revolved around these two attacks because they feel fun and shadow-like. *LoH= Life on Hit for those that might not know.



This is only an outline of the build. As far as I think I need to stretch within the tree and allows for many different defense or attack specific nodes.

The premise for fighting is:
AOE - Ethereal for damage obviously. If I start taking a lot of damage I use Whirling blade to run through and heal because of LoH and hopefully get some mana back.
Single Target - Viper strike + Dual Strike. Self explanatory.

Since I am relying on LoH, I wanted to get armor so I had a less static health pool. Also figured I could lose my energy shield since LoH is worthless while my energy is up.

Now a couple questions since I do not have a character to Merc yet.
What would be most beneficial in Merc? more Block, or health/resis, or more damage?
Another thing I could do is ignore Eldritch Battery and Iron Reflexes and rely on Ghost Reaver and more energy shield. This obviously saves up on some passive points to invest into more dmg/ES.

What do you guys think? Any and all criticism is helpful.

Bump. No responses? Has this just old news?

Ive decided on an End game build for this. Please critique



The reason behind the +spell dmg nodes, and correct me if I am wrong, is that Ethereal knives says projectile/spell on the tooltip so I am assuming both +proj dmg and +spell dmg benefit ethereal knives.

The order of operations, which nodes to go for first, of achieving this build is still sketchy.

My gems will be: (hopefully)
Ethereal knives + fork + faster projectiles + Mana Leech + fire dmg
Strictly dmg dealer. Hopefully mana leech helps the huge mana consumption
Whirling Blades + cold dmg + lightning dmg + others as i see fit
used to quickly gain HP/ES since it counts as melee and benefits from
LoH/Leech when fighting large packs and hopefully CC.
Dual Strike + faster attack + melee phys dmg + .....
Strictly single target boss dmg.

I have to say if you're going with ghost reaver then you shouldn't really grab all those +hp spots. And if you are going ES then you need to grab ES nodes. I guess I'm most confused about what your defense plan is. I know you're going EK ranged mostly so you aren't as worried about melee mobs, but you need to identify your primary defensive plan.

Are you leeching HP or ES? If HP, then you need HP nodes and no ghost reaver. I know that you can regain some HP and if full you'll gain ES, but you're ES will be so small that it's not even a drop in the bucket.

You'll also want some form of resists if you're converting evasion to armor as armor won't stop elemental. Are you planning on wearing heavy armors here or are you going to wear evasion armor and let it convert it? If you're going to wear evasion armor, then you should grab a few evasion nodes to pump it up.

Basically you're converting evasion into armor while leeching life and energy shield, yet you have no ES nodes, no Evasion nodes, few HP nodes. And 14% chance to block while DW weapons. Gotta pick something and go with it.

Other thoughts, you look like you will be mana hungry, but I'm not personally familiar with EK and mana leech gem.

You're so close to Vaal Pact and Iron Grip keystones - why not grab those? Even if you don't stack strength, you can eek out some extra damage for one skill point on your way to Vaal Pact (which happens to be awesome for leeching builds).

Anyway, those are my observations with my limited knowledge.

I appreciate your questions.

Well first off, I did not want to be evasion based nor did I want to be ES based. I have a full evasion ranger and a CI witch. I wanted to try something different. My main dislike with evasion is it's scary jump in health pool. Since I wanted to base my shadow around EK and melee I wanted to get away from evasion.

Note: My actual in-game build I DO have that Nullification hub of nodes that includes the +evasion/+ES which works out better anyways.

This brought me to Iron Reflexes(also helped that I wanted Point Blank) so that I could have a more steady fluctuation of health. I figured block would have good synergy with the armor and add a little more defenses. Since I will be going daggers, my LoH will always be helping my health pool.

My thought behind Ghost Reaver. I like how ES plays mechanically. It is an extra health pool and while it is up you have a 50% less chance to be stunned, and with this build if I do not have constant uptime it could be troublesome. Since I will be stacking LoH and leech, especially with those +leech claw nodes, I will be constantly having SOME[/u] ES. I plan on wearing evasion/ES gear so I hope to have a sufficient amount of armor/ES by the end game.

For example: Lets say I get hit a bunch for all my ES and half my health. I am hoping that having LoH for my HP and leech for my ES that they will both be going up at the same time(obviously not the same rate) and I will always have that 50% less chance of being stunned.

I am still questioning whether the block chance nodes are worth picking up or should I be trying to reach more +resis nodes. It just seemed like most of the +block nodes were bundled with +speed and dmg nodes so it seemed to have good synergy. I think I will be severely hurting for mana. Still trying to figure that one out. Maybe I could head towards the witch tree for mana regen/+spell dmg instead of the middle section.

Bump

LoH works only with attacks, not spells. EK will not trigger it.
(The life leech support gem works with all damage, and would work with EK)

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redrach wrote:

LoH works only with attacks, not spells. EK will not trigger it.
(The life leech support gem works with all damage, and would work with EK)

I understand that. I said whirling blades would be a way to gain fast health without having to use a health pot (if you really need to). Since whirling blades counts as a melee attack and not a spell. EK is strictly for AOE massive dmg.