Will ranged Saboteur with 2h rifle/crossbow work on every difficulty? or the best choice is Commando for dps ranged build? Will Saboteur have a lot less dps than Commando, if it can work so what will be the best skills in nightblade mastery?
I’d like to know this too. Nightblade is just more interesting than Soldier when you get into melee. Does anyone play this type of build?
I played a ranged saboteur up to lvl 58 while building a melee saboteur. It was decent but after switching from ranged to melee the character felt a lot more powerful. Killing speed increased like 5 times (I don’t fully understand why, to be honest), and survivability didn’t go down.
Well, Nightblade is just too “melee-focused”. It offers very few bonuses for ranged build. Demolisher is self-sufficient ranged class, it will work no matter what 2-nd mastery you got. But for ranged build, i think, Occultist is the BEST 2-nd mastery. Both for Demolisher and Shaman ranged builds.
For Shaman I would prefer Arcanist. Grants a lot more raw spirit, amping Primal Strike a lot, IEE helps you convert your physical into more magical damage, and the energy leech makes Primal Strike go from energy whore into energy regen due to all the AoE weapon damage going about.
Spirit is barely relevant - you get most of your damage increase directly.
IEE is great only to sustain energy cost. DPS increase from it is minimal - lion’s share of Primal Strike’s damage is lightning already.
But occultist has a curse for -36% resistance, and that’s a huge damage increase. You can get energy regen/leech in many other ways, but getting more resistance reduction is impossible. Sure, Arcanist will work too, but in the end, whoever has more resistance reductions, deals more DPS in Ultimate.