Are poison Shurikens back?

Rogue
1

Once upon a time, before poison was nerfed hard and before Shadow Daggers Umbral Blades came onto the scene, there was a fast and smooth starter build for Rogue based on poison Shurikens. The idea was to use Shift off cooldown both to trigger Shurikens in Blade Shield form and drop Acid Flask pools at the beginning and end of the Shift. It pretty much disappeared by the time version 1.0 of the game came around.

I think changes in season 4 will potentially make this build very strong again and it looks like it will perform pretty well without hard-to-get gear. The key season 4 changes are:

  • Blade Shield Shurikens can hit the same enemy multiple times
  • Blade Shield Shurikens can stack

My understanding is that the above changes mean you can have 10s of Shurikens spinning around you, each one hitting each enemy multiple times until the enemy dies or the Shuriken duration runs out. That’s a lot of hits.

I’ve created a proof of concept on Last Epoch Tools if you’re interested. One thing you’ll probably notice is that Dancing Strikes is on the skill bar. This is partly because I want to see how it feels with the season 4 changes to it, but it does bring a lot of strengths to the build:

  • Triggers Shurikens on 2nd and 4th strikes of the combo
  • It shreds poison resistance, so we don’t need the blessing or Shurikens node for it
  • Trickling Cuts: 6% more global damage over time per recent skill use
  • Rhythm: 8% (I think) more global damage per stack
  • Extra Dodge and less damage over time taken for 1s after using it (important for dancing through dense packs of dangerous enemies)
  • Generates Dusk Shroud stacks
  • Better control over Flow stacks

That last one is important because if Flow works as I think it does, manually casting Shurikens to consume the Flow stacks will grant those Shurikens triplequadruple damage for DoTs until those Shurikens expire. I’m assuming the damage bonus from consuming Flow is locked in for that particular cast of the skill.

One thing to bear in mind is that this is very much a melee-range build, despite using a throwing skill. Plus it’s dual-wielding. Both of those factors make it pretty vulnerable, so I don’t know how survivable it will be. That’s why I think you need to invest quite a bit into Glancing Blow, armor, health and any “less damage taken” you can get your hands on.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

1 Like
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With the nodes you’ve chosen, consuming flow would give you 2 lots of 100% more (one from base flow effect & another from the Pulse node though this only affects DoT damage) and one lot of 30% increased from the Rhythm node) which would give you quadruple damage for dots & double damage for hits.

I’m curious how Dancing Strikes feels with lots of attack speed now, but that & lots of dusk shrouds should make it feel safe? :person_shrugging:

I was thinking of going with DS (proccing Shadow Daggers as well as Shadow Cascade & Shurikens), Shadow Cascade (proc’d by DS), Shurikens with the Chakram node (proc’d by DS & Blade Storm) & Blade Storm. :person_shrugging: But I do like the idea of lots of Shuriken applying DoTs, I’d not read the patch notes so I wasn’t aware that they’d reverted the original change to Blade Shield only hitting mobs once.

I was working on a build planner but fat fingered the back arrow & my phone ate it…

3

Doh! :man_facepalming: You’re right, my mistake. Nice to be wrong understating the case, though :slight_smile: