So far I’ve tried a ton of different combinations and definitely agree that the 2H passives are in a poor spot currently, though I feel like 2H in general is quite a bit worse than 1h + shield for every class right now.
The biggest issue to me is how necessary the mana cost reduction nodes feel. Really with every skill, in my experience it seems working to make the skill sustainable is key to usability and viability. This coupled with the current power of VK’s future strikes passive really limits choice, I feel, as you don’t really need to scale the skill itself, you just maximize the number of hits it provides and then scale future strikes and damage over time applied through the massive number of hits. Though, the alternatives just feel bad to use, in my opinion and I would suggest mechanics changes to them as opposed to only nerfs to hammers/tempest/future strikes. Notably, using Vengeance and Erasing Strike feels bad. Erasing Strike due to mana sustainability issues leading to large downtime, and Vengeance just because its damage seems to scale very poorly into endgame.
Hammers and Tempest both feel really good to use and are the most powerful options for maximizing your number of hits for DoTs and future strikes, but require a ton of passsive investment to make their mana costs sustainable which is especially important as you push higher arena waves and need more casts and time to kill enemies.
Currently- I’ve had the best results with Temporal Cascade, Reckless Spin, Unbound Storm, and Endless Vortex. This provides a high number of hits/second that scales exponentially with number of enemies while also making it drain ~1 mana per second, and giving the pull-in effect a large range. This greatly increases the speed at which you can clear waves, especially those with ranged enemies.
This build sadly lacks a bit in single target, but even with almost no gear investment and no passive tree investment, Hammer Throw can fill that gap, providing very high base single target damage.