Is Cadence still the best Soldier offense skill currently?

Haven’t been playing for months now.
Wondering if Forcewave or Blade Arc are actually on par with Cadence now.
Thanks. :smiley:

Blade Arc - hardly, the %Weapon damage is among the lowest for these kind of skills and flat damage on Laceration is much lower than deadly momentum. Also it’s energy usage has some bullshit scaling. Transmuted Blade Arc has a use though, Bleed Warder is based around that.

Forcewave - idk, honestly. Some ppl claim that it’s actually pretty good at the moment.

Cadence is still the way to go.

Ardor of Octavius set supports Forcewave with +800% Internal Trauma damage and +100% Increased duration. Downside is Internal Trauma seems to be one of the least supported damage types. It’s actually hard to judge skills since you can’t see the actual numbers in Grim tools.

Forcewave is OK. It doesnt deal as much damage as Cadence, but it has quite large AoE and can hit from range (so it’s much better against packs). And it has good support from gear.

The problem is, Octavius set includes Shield, so you cant use transmuter, that removes cooldown.
But 3 pieces of Octavius set is bonkers for physical Forcewave, and it also gives huge physical resist.

Looks like Octavius is a Soldier+Inquisitor Mastery, is it any good end-game?
Seriously considering using Forcewave cause I’m so tired of my Cadence Soldier.

Octavius gives bonuses to inquisitor skills, true, but my personal opinion is that Inquisitor doesnt offer much to physical build. He provides bonuses to pierce and elemental damage, primarily, and has a good ability to reduce elemental resistance (and another, not so good but still OK, to reduce pierce, aether and chaos resistances). Inquisitor is good for fire-based (can be converted to fire with some items) or elemental-based (using Mythical Arcanor, blade of Luminari). But unfortunate, Octavius set has “elemental damage converted to physical”, that make it impossible to use it for anything but physical build. Really, very wierd design.
As far as i see it now, it’s better to just ignore bonuses to Inquisitor skills, provides by Octavius set, and get another mastery. I’d rather got Occultist.
You can also make a good fire-based Forcewave, but it will use another set - Justicar Guard. As second mastery, you can use Demolisher or Inquisitor.

P.S. You also can try pierce-based DW Blademaster, using full Belgothian set (it provides bonkers Savagery-like ability).