Cadence has higher weapon damage and less flat damage compared to firestrike. Hence Cadence scales way better with heavy hitting weapons (2hand or slow DW maces). Moreover I believe Zohlans only takes the mainhand weapon making it pretty useless for dual wield. Dual wiel guns have the slowest base speed of 87 hence you need a lot of attack speed to compensate it. Moreover it is impossible to get enough crit on top of the attack speed. Demo and occultist gives good attack speed but no crit. Shaman and arcancist give crit but no attack speed.
Demo is nice due to blackwater cocktail. You don’t really need flashbang as overskilled marcovian (you are using cadence hence flashbang will be around normal level) already has high DA reduction.
So you need high attack speed and resist reduction. Flat damage is nice too of course. OA and crit is not important!
Occultist gives you high attack speed, strong 50% physical resist reduction and bleed, ~130 OA and >100 health regen and ~+10% physical resistance
Demo gives you high attack speed, ok 25% physical resist reduction, strong armor reduction and strong 18 reduced resistances. (break morale has higher reduced phyiscal resistances but the cocktail includes pierce resistance!)
You get ~130 OA and ~30 health regen. And temper gives flat physical damage and physical, pierce %
But fully skilled blackwater cocktail requires a heavy skill point commitment!
Conclusion: I believe that Demo is best together with acid spray devotion and 2 point blackwater cocktail for the 25% physical reduction. In this case you don’t need warcry/break morale and have plenty of points left to invest heavily into the soldier tree and max temper and flame touched and get 15% attack speed from vindictive flame. Occultist could be better for survival due to maxed blood of dreeg and aspect of the guardian But Demo has Blast shield… tough call!
If you go occultist I believe: http://grimcalc.com/build/zgL2XrS is best considering that you have many +soldier skills and no +occultist.
Of you go Demo I believe: http://grimcalc.com/build/VRAgbtC is best best considering that you have many +soldier skills and no +demo.
With commando you can really boost your damage with temper and the heavier focus on pierce damage maybe!
But to be honest for commando you will gimp your dps with cadence as http://grimcalc.com/build/P2Iiebt is much better. Just keep deadly momentum up for the huge physical flat damage increase. And convert as much physical to fire as possible.
It sad but Cadence only works well for 2handers and slow maces imo.
The two attached pics illustrate the scaling of crit damage and attack speed. attack speed it always better and should be maxed all the time! With double havoc you need 150% extra attack speed to reach the 200% cap. some crit is nice but won’t increase your dps a lot. And if you don’t have much crit it OA is not important at all. Attack speed hardly scale with OA. Hence no need to go above 2400 OA if you could get attack speed instead! ~110% crit damage at 2600 OA results in the same DPS as 20% attack speed and 0% crit damage at 2600 OA.
For double havoc auto attacks 1% attack speed is worth 5,5% crit damage at 2600 OA Just max attack speed and resistance reduction and ignore OA and crit damage! OA will be high enough anyway with soldiers exclusive!
For a big 2hander the autro attack scaling is more like 1% attack speed is worth ~3,5% crit damage. Hence crit is better but attack speed still dominates and should be maxed while just taking the crit damage that you can get easily.
For Grim dawn DPS just follow this 3 step plan:
1. resist reduction: 1 x reduced source (i.e. acid spray, break morale, elemental storm…), + as many -% reduced as possible (i.e. for lightning stack thermite mine + arcane bomb + ulzuin’s headpiece proc) + one % reduced source (i.e. Viper devotion for elemental or open hand of mercy ring for everything).
2. attack speed: Full focus on this and just take the OA and crit damage that you get on the way.
3. Accumulate Flat damage