To those that Theory-craft or have a good knowledge of stat placements, as a DW pistol character would it be viable to go mainly cunning (for the crit stat) and look for gear that supports Physique (as there seems to be more gear with Physique on them than Cunning) or pure Physique for the Health pool. I was putting around 20 points into Cunning along with the Masteries to get Cunning up around the mark to be able to use all pistols, is that strategy an ok way to go or not, any help is always welcome.
Most builds that I’ve seen posted do just enough spirit and/or cunning to be able to equip their gear and dump everything else into physique for health. There is the occasional exception (like the 1.0.2.1 build with 100 cunning), but that’s what I tend to see.
I’m not at all well versed in making builds so I can’t really say whether or not heavy investment into cunning is a workable strategy, but I will say that many builds posted here have little to no point investment in cunning and manage over 3k offensive ability (the stat that determines your chance to hit/crit) and good crit damage bonus.
-edit-
For example, Superfluff’s Inquisitor Terminator rifle build invests only 2 points in cunning and, at level 100, boasts 3.3k OA fully buffed (just shy of 2.7k unbuffed).
Your question depends entirely on your base classes. If you have base skills that buff your health or your physique like soldier or shaman there are ways to do all cunning builds that are viable. If you want to be able to do all the content in the game I’m not sure how you could go purely cunning or mostly cunning and still be successful (depending on base classes.) It also depends on gear you have access to, components, relics etc. I would also say it depends on how experienced you are with understanding the mechanics of the game. There isn’t a large need to put points into cunning to use all the pistols if you get the right gear and such. Also it doesn’t matter as much now with where you put your points in attributes as they can be changed later in the game to suit your end game requirements.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a solid Cunning-heavy build that wasn’t Soldier/X. That being said, I would absolutely not bother with boosting Cunning beyond what is absolutely necessary to equip desired weaponry, barring maybe something like a Pierce tactician, and would put as much into Physique as I possibly could afford to keep up with the ever-increasing need for HP and DA.
I would go max health, cunning just gear requeriments and enough spirit not to get empty of it
DA is harder to get than OA
I’d think Nightblade is the key to making cunning desirable, with the 25%+ cunning buff, it can make it so you can focus on HP, rather than OA on your gear. I imagine Soldier would make you want to go physique more so, for the +20% physique. At which point, you can ignore defense a lot easier on the gear, allowing to put more points in OA.
Anyway, in any case, if you go for cunning to get more OA, that frees up gear slots that can now focus on HP instead. Physique gives 2 highly desirable boosts, where cunning’s 2ndary boost isn’t as useful, so physique is generally preferred unless you have Nightblade to make it 25% better.
I would think death knight might be the superior DW shooting option for full cunning though probably unnecessary to go full cunning to achieve the kind of OA for high percentage crits.
It should be noted that Cunning, last I knew, was one of the more paltry and undesirable sources of more OA. One should definitely look at as many other options for boosting OA as are available before going “alright, let’s pump Cunning”.