Did anyone ever try to go for commando with range weapons?

I just finished my single player ultimate clear (everything except skeleton key areas). Only a few bosses are entirely immune to life steal (many spawn adds, which works well enough). Same with crowd control, I died four times to the last boss on ultimate while killing him. Three of those were because I had switched out my rings with more resistance, and did not augment them for freeze thinking it was a boss fight and was not a big deal (I finally went and did it in the middle of the fight, which ended the problem). The close quarters meant I really needed to be able to cc the adds when they spawned. The other death was chaos lightning, it either one shot me or close to it at 5500 hp (not really enough even at max resist, but my gear is far from ideal as it is self found).

ZT does use both hands. The tooltip says what it does, so we do not need to guess.

For my char standing in town in mostly resist gear with a piddly 23k dps listed on the char sheet at the moment (which can of course go much higher with different gear, and I do not think counts most procs):

ZT (rank 13)
mh: 3372-4030
oh: 3348-3929
1216 internal trauma over 2 seconds.
33% slower enemy attack for 10 seconds.

MA (rank 16):
mh: 2164-2598
oh: 2152-2531
1447 physical damage
196 reduced defense for 5 seconds

So ZA does a little bit more total damage immediately, plus the dot (max damage is about 9000 instead of 6500). Looking at it the bonus for ZA is based on weapon damage, and MA is based on all damage (so ZA needs physical damage and internal trauma, but scales better even at three levels less).

I think they both get the damage from olerons rage when they go off as well.

I am looking at -resist, but talent points are already limited and multiple skills would make this less lazy (single pointing it looks not worth it). I wonder if there is an item which can proc it… blackwater cocktail is more tempting, but still way too many points.

I have not been lucky with talismans, I am using basic gunslinger. The “of insight” suffix does look really nice, I will look out for it.

Tooltips are kinda tricky. Did you make tests with Dummy in town?

I just shot it for a while, is there a way to determine which skill is going off when you hit it short of respeccing?

It looks like they take the form of a quick shot from both pistols, testing it with autoattack after stripping enough gear to be able to have an idea what was proccing.

I will lose some physical damage when I change devotions, I wonder how much it will go down.

Ok, i made tests for you today.

Zolhan’s Technique has ~33% chance to hit with both pistols, and ~66% chance to hit with just one pistol (cant say 100% sure, but i feel chances are the same as for normal attack).

It was pretty easy to test because ZT places Internal Trauma debuff, while normal attacks dont.
So, it’s better for DW than i expected.
However, there is another major problem with it. Since additional damage from Fire Strike skills line is NOT a weapon damage, it wont be increased by ZT %weapon damage. And since lion’s share of your damage will come from Fire Strike, ZT will still be pretty useless for DW pistols.

I just redid my devotions and some talent points, and specced into a lot of static damage of various sorts, which helped quite a bit.

I also went with viper for the -20% elemental resist, and put a mark of dreeg on my mainhand (since those two should stack after looking it up).

It makes a huge difference, thanks for the tip about -resist!

This is what I ended up with for talents and devotions if you are curious http://grimcalc.com/build/hQ4LeK

How can you skip Flame Touched? It’s one of the best skills you have. Much better than Vindictive Flame.
Also, i’d maxed Military Conditioning instead of Squas Tactics, cause HP pool is better, imo, than tiny damage boost.

That it is…

The dps readout is higher if I take it from olerons rage instead of squad tactics, +all damage and speed are both pretty good.

I ended up with http://grimcalc.com/build/wZmNrj for now.

Temper is pretty good too, I wonder if I can fit that in somehow.

Changed to http://grimcalc.com/build/Hm2TCa That seems about as good as I can make it… maybe it would be worth stripping MA a bit for squad tactics, but scaling is top heavy on that and ZT.