In Occultist, Solael’s Witchfire and Possession offer flat Chaos damage to your attacks, and putting 3 points into Consecrated Blade gives you 15% Physical damage converted to Chaos. After that, equip your weapon with a Riftstone component and get 10% more Physical damage converted to Chaos, plus the excellent Chaos Strike ability for more melee Chaos damage.
I’ve got a level 85 Witchblade with the Obsidian Juggernaut weapon and Abominable Might devotion skill. With the ability active I get up to 99% Physical damage converted to Chaos. With a better roll on the weapon I could get all the way to 100%.
But beyond that, I can’t seem to get the numbers I’d like out of my Witchblade (Occultist / soldier) builds. I can survive nearly anything, I just get bored of tanking…
Nightblade is a solid tree for any melee build mainly because %weapon damage skills scale much better late game than spell based damage. And for this reason, the dual blades tree works with any element type.
If you want to go 2H, soldier. If you want to dual wield, nightblade.
Shaman is as good with 2-H as Soldier (if not better).
Nightblade is a no-brainer for dual-wield melee, obviously. But for 2-H or shield, he isnt good.
Soldier is a no-brainer for shield users.
Brimstone in fire strike chain has chaos damage as well. Can duel wield fire strike with solalels witchblade devotion for debuff, and abominable might , (converts 50% physical to chaos).
It works well for ranged dual-wielding, cause you can get occultist as 2-nd mastery, and boost you chaos damage. But for melee dual-wield, you have to get Nightblade, which has nobonuses to chaos damage. I dont think it will make a good DPS without any damage bonuses from your masteries.
You still have several increases from devotions and gear. A 100% bonus from a mastery skill is just a drop in the bucket. You can you are talking maybe a 10% total damage increase on just the chaos portion, or about a 3% increase or less in total damage. It’s not necessary, debuffing is the bigger damage increase, as it’s essentially a total damage increase exponentially.
Well, it may be OK if you can put enemies under Thermite Mine (i actually hate this skill for its inconsistency), and get items like Blood Sigil of Chton.
But maxing both Nightblade’s Dualwield line, Fire Strike line & other skills requires too many points. And it’s too bad defensively, no damage reduction, no resists, no HP bonuses - nothing to keep you alive except Pneumatic Burst.
Disagree, you have blast shield, if you go a vampire devotion route you have that as defense. Maxing duel wield line or fire strike is not necessary. You need to hit 5 on the duel wield procs, you need 1 point in fire strike and explosive, then 12 in each static and brimstone. Just look at the tri-element sabatour on this forum, hell if you wanted more defense could max temper and phantasmal armor for a few hundred extra defense and still decent evasion.
Thermite mine is nice for big bosses, but everything else dies so fast with just mark of dreeg, witchfire from devotion, and sacred strike on heroes, that’s negative what 78% ? Thermite mine (I keep it low) for an extra 5-10. So far since hitting 40 it’s been a cakewalk through normal and elite.
Blast shield lasts for 4 seconds, and have 10 seconds cooldown afterwards. Not a thing you want to rely upon.
BTW, mark of dreeg and sacred strike dont stack, as far as i know.
Blast shield is 4 seconds worth of uninterrupted vampire time, and with -25% total speed -130 attack aura, plus multiple retaliation attack slow procs, combined with a buffed defensive ability, and Melee and ranged avoidance percentage, add in Giants blood, a 5 second recharge pneumatic burst, and I think your claim of no/little defense looks silly.
What’s 20+ % of attack converted to health when you have 50,000 DPS…