So I’ve just sped watched this 4 hour long youtube video:-
The player is speed running to empowered monoliths, but thats not my point. As he attempts each of the bosses in the normal monoliths, his damage output seems crazy high compared to my first semi serious character that was a warpath paladin.
He’s not being carried and the gear he’s using is so what he’s collected on the run.
So would you put umbral blades build in the same league as flame wraiths ?
It’s not Umbral Blades alone, it’s the subskill that UB is proccing.
Shadow Daggers is an ailment/skill with 90 Physical base damage, 450% added dmg effectiveness from both Throwing & Melee dmg + perma crit.
Flame Wraiths is better on single target dmg. Shadow Daggers builds are extremely fast monolith farmer.
Pity only 1 Bladestorm can affect any given target anymore…
I’m guessing thats the lethal darkness skill ?
I’m also assuming that umbral blades, despite being a throwing skill, is counted as melee ? (I see builds using umbral and melee health leech passive).
No, Umbral Blades is a throwing skill, but the Shadow Daggers ailment (or the damage element of it) has both melee & throwing tags so when the 4th stack is applied & Shadow Daggers does damage, it uses all applicable melee & throwing damage modifiers to calculate the damage.
But yes, it is the Lethal Darkness node.
Edit: Fun fact, Shadow Daggers used to also scale with spell damage as well.
To answer the thread title, yes. Everything we’re ever gonna optimize for speedruns will be the op thing, because we’re optimizing to go fast.
Theres other skills that will do more single target damage than this in a speedrun also, rogue is just really fast for other reasons as well.
Also worth taking into account somewhat, Terek is an exceptionally skilled player at LE, he’s been running it longer than anyone else, and more consistently than anyone else.
More funner fact, you could get Shadow Daggers effect to proc on every hit, instead of every 4th hit.
Still salty for how that was ‘fixed’, however. Not that it should have been able to proc every hit, with the same ‘double-dip’ power increase from Inc Shadow Dagger Effect mod(s), but could have done something with it that still made puncture-shadow daggers feel less bad to play.
As to this thread, I bet he could have gotten sub-2h to empowered if load times were fixed 
Yup, I was the one that “discovered” that funner fact even though @McFluffin didn’t believe me. Used to require 400% increased Shadow Dagger effect.
It doesn’t feel too bad while levelling with some attack speed and the node that gives a lot more attack speed every 4 seconds. When used with a 2h like a spear.