Shield Charge

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Zoid wrote:

Shield Charge isn't a strictly physical attack, given it provides "% More Damage" which affects all damage types, not just physical. If built focusing on elemental damage it can proliferate quite powerful status effects. I personally combine it with Adder's Touch since Shield Charge is the strongest skill for daggers on a per-hit basis. I simply charge in, whirl out and keep picking targets while the proliferated burns kill the other targets. A physical based build could still combine Added Fire Damage with Chernobog's Pillar for 39% added and 25% converted fire damage.

thank you for adding shield charge to my planned puncture build.

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Zoid wrote:

Shield Charge isn't a strictly physical attack, given it provides "% More Damage" which affects all damage types, not just physical. If built focusing on elemental damage it can proliferate quite powerful status effects. I personally combine it with Adder's Touch since Shield Charge is the strongest skill for daggers on a per-hit basis. I simply charge in, whirl out and keep picking targets while the proliferated burns kill the other targets. A physical based build could still combine Added Fire Damage with Chernobog's Pillar for 39% added and 25% converted fire damage.

Unlike elemental hit, infernal blow, lightning strike, and glacial hammer, shield charge provides NO ELEMENTAL DAMAGE to it natively, like heavy strike, which ALSO has bonus damage effect to it. Does added fire gem and the unique shield you mention improve the elemental damage that this attack would do, yes? But it's only 25% more fire damage and nerfs your physical damage, is an exponential nerf as the effect of armor multiplies as physical damage is diminished. You could easily craft a non-unique shield starting with 30% block with 6% additional block put on it. Enfeeble on hit is quite useful though, if you didn't want to cast this yourself with one gem slot. Also, if you are going to go through ALL THAT TROUBLE to magnify the fire damage of an attack, why even bother using a pure physical attack in the first place?!?

I will say that Adder's Touch does synergize greatly with an attack that requires a stick and move concept. Adder's Touch is just the natural result of any decent dagger build though, so the fact that it stacks with shield charge is coincidental. I can see that that is why you want to put a burning effect DoT on the target. But consider that this is a physical based attack.

If you want to do AoE damage, and synergize with this attack, and put a powerful dot on the target, why not use Puncture with melee splash, and use shield charge to push and knockback targets forcing them to bleed harder? Then, rather than wasting gems like added fire damage and fire penetration and elemental proliferation on a PHYSICAL attack (thats 3 wasted gems), you can use melee physical damage, melee damage on full health (with your dagger CI) build which combine to multiply this damage even further, use crit strikes which vipermagi uses already, and use crit damage to really mess the target up. If you really want to mess up the target with fire damage too, use Elemental Equilibrium with tempest shield or wrath aura only to spread shock charges, and then when mobs try to hit you and you block it with a higher block percentage, your molten shell can explode all over them with the mob having a much lower fire resist. That way you do waste precious support gems trying to turn a physical based attack into an elemental one.

You could even use Phase Run running to magnify it more. I would say that you might need Warlord's Mark if you wanted to skip leech like Vipermagi, and you would definitely need Vaal pact for physical reflect if you want to run evasion (with blind) and block. And even still, you might need to pop Immortal Call just before you hit with the shield charge to survive the reflect.

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soul4hdwn wrote:

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Zoid wrote:

Shield Charge isn't a strictly physical attack, given it provides "% More Damage" which affects all damage types, not just physical. If built focusing on elemental damage it can proliferate quite powerful status effects. I personally combine it with Adder's Touch since Shield Charge is the strongest skill for daggers on a per-hit basis. I simply charge in, whirl out and keep picking targets while the proliferated burns kill the other targets. A physical based build could still combine Added Fire Damage with Chernobog's Pillar for 39% added and 25% converted fire damage.

thank you for adding shield charge to my planned puncture build.

Exactly. The dot you want with this attack is a bleed, followed by a way to force its magnified effect against ranged mobs (shield charge). That way, damage continues to occur when you move away to set-up the next shield charge. Adder's touch is just gravy on top of that. If shield charge can't be the AoE attack, melee splash can be on puncture, and life leech can be on shield charge. I can't leech a bleed anyway, and with most of the damage coming from the bleed, and with the increased necessity of making this a strong aoe attack to compliment shield charge, I probably need to avoid leech. It's not like I won't be taking blood rage or mind drinker anyway.

The challenge is going to be figuring out how to blind or flee without crushing those two attacks. Perhaps linking those things to a trap would be a nice top off. Fire trap would be nice since you don't want to immobilize a target with a bleed. With fire trap on a punctured ranged target, they're dammed with fire if they stand still and will bleed to death if they run. Mwahahaha.

i am currently playing around with this skill an some questions are rising

MAIN Q: how does SC interact with faster attacks?


OTHER Q:

what are the best supports for SC anyway?

i am thinking:

- melee physical damage
- added fire damage



an odd idea:
added fire + increased burning + fire penetration + elemental proliferation could give a nice 5L-combo as well (or even better with added "weapon elemental damage as a very luxurios 6L)

Just wondering if there is any future plans to make this skill available not only for weapon users, but also for builds orantated on facebreakers? I mean, this skill requires melee weapon, but in some sense, facebreakers are melee, just weapon replaced with your hands...

I love the sound of the upcoming interaction with melee splash, but the change to get rid of the always-hit interactions means there's even less reason to use this as anything but a between-fights nuke.

Could the skill gain an increased phys per level like all other melee skills do?

Maybe someone has suggested this before, but I think it would be cool if shields that contained the "thorns" effect added to the damage of shield charge. If your shield has big spikes on it, it makes sense that it would do more damage. It would give some utility to an otherwise underutilized item trait.

With that being said, I'm looking forward to the addition of melee splash. I can't wait to try it out.

Oh thank you GGG for hearing me about Splash !


Success !