Whirling Blades

So I recently started playing Torchlight 2 as a Berserker. The early Berserker skill "Shadow Burst" is essentially whirling blades done right. I highly suggest the GGG devs try that out. The TL2 devs didn't gimp their mobility spell by chaining it down with ridiculous animation delays, instead, they made it very fast to cast and once ended, you can immediately start performing other actions. It does have a short cooldown so it cannot be spammed back to back, yet it can still be be performed frequently.

Seriously, just try it out and see how fun and useful it is. That's how whirling blades should be.

I'm experimenting with whirling blade since a few days and I have to tell you that I have a blast with it! I have made an evasion/block centered ranger, but you could just as well make a duelist if you prefer male chars. As a duelist I would try resolute technique and venture a bit to the marauder' side of the tree. Although evade is very good at helping avoid stun-lock, which is essential for continuous WB casting.


WB evasion build

With this gear:


I'm at lvl 57, have ~ 1.6k life, 60% evasion, resists almost maxed, 50ish block. I use WB to mow down mobs, and double strike to finish off the remaining foes and lone monsters.
WB is definitelly viable, it takes me about 2-3 whirl to kill an average monster, but it is best to use against a large crowd. The trick is to cast it continuously, basically I'm invincible, noone can touch me during WB. I do experience desynch as well, but it is not so big of a deal. I found that in larger areas desynch is not a problem, and if I experience desynch, I get out from the middle, chop down 1-2 monsters by double strike, and during this my client will catch up.
So what I usually do is that I herd a large crowd together, select the boss (best to have it in the middle, or the opposite side of the crowd) and continuously pressing right click. Literally mowing down everybody :). With enough faster attack, actually the hardest thing is to get a hold with right click on a monster that has most life to last until the rest is killed. Otherwise I frequently find myself outside of the battle because WB is so quick.
I think that the ending animation is actually helping me to control the fast pace, and I also prefer think about it that the character needs to slow down and get some breath before continue with the next burst :).
In closer areas, aiming is more difficult, but I still utilize WB to lure mobs to wider areas or I just simple passing by quickly with it. Hunting down single monsters is easy too, I get there with 1 WB, that is already a hit for ~ half the HP of the monster, finish him with double strike, and repeat.

The only problem i get into is mana. In a big crowd, continuous casting of WB is essential. I only die if I ran out of mana (and realize it later due to desynch). But until I hit more then one monster per WB and leech I'm fine.

I recently got this skill on my claw witch. It is great for getting in and out of combat fast, though she doesn't do alot of damage with it yet as it hasn't leveled up much yet. This skill replaces her phase run gem once she got it. It also makes it easier to stay alive.

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Faerie_Storm wrote:

I recently got this skill on my claw witch. It is great for getting in and out of combat fast, though she doesn't do alot of damage with it yet as it hasn't leveled up much yet. This skill replaces her phase run gem once she got it. It also makes it easier to stay alive.

The only bad part is that the skill doesn't really scale damage that well when you level it up. If you look at the damage, it's actually AWFUL, compared to something like Dual Strike (mind you, it's single target, but if I can rip through every mob in 1 hit of DS, why use Whirling Blades when it takes like 5-6 casts?). Also, it's really slow without some sort of attack speed boost. I counter the slow part of Whirling Blades by using Blood Rage to get Frenzy Charges, since that's what my character is based on, but it's still extremely slow compared to other things.


I personally feel like it should have some sort of damage scaling, alongside what others are saying about the misses of the skill. With 93% accuracy, it shouldn't take 5-6 Whirling Blades to take out a mob of regular enemies, especially when you've got several uniques and pretty high damage.


Edit: Just to give some numbers, I'll show the massive difference between Dual Strike DPS and Whirling Blade dps with 5 Frenzy Charges.


Image 1: http://i.imgur.com/z4OUO.jpg

This image is the attack speed, mana cost, and damage of Whirling Blades on my level 31 Claw Shadow. As you can see, even with 5 Frenzy Charges, the cast time is still pretty long.

Image 2: http://i.imgur.com/uLjee.jpg

This image is the attack speed, mana cost, and damage of Dual Strike on my level 31 Claw Shadow. As you can see, with 5 Frenzy Charges, the damage output is significantly higher than Whirling Blades could ever hope to achieve. I realize it's modified by several supports, but even socketing them into Whirling Blades wouldn't increase the damage to the amount that Dual Strike does, due to the inconsistent hitrate of Whirling Blades.

awesome skill and would really like to use more on my shadow but right now it's just way too laggy.

Not sure if this has been mentioned before.

I recently took Mind Drinker node to help with some low level mana issues. I can see it's effects when using any other attack skill except for whirling blades (watching mana regen at time of contact).

Now it could be that because of the crappy damage it does combined with my low level that the leech is so small it doesn't show up on regen.

Has anyone else noticed this or is it just a display error?

I have this skill at level 7, and flicker strike at level 6. Flicker strike does around 56 damage whereas whirling blades does around 5 damage. It's ok as a mobility skill, but the damage is just awful, it doesn't scale up at all much. Why does this skill use so little damage? at level 1 I think it does something like 3.5 damage.

It's good for getting in and out of combat fast, but that's about it.

I think this needs to hit with both weapons if dual wielding(with the usual dmg penalty), like Cleave. There's not enough choice for DW skills at the moment, it's pretty much Cleave or nothing for your AoE(dual strike or flicker for single target). You can use lightning strike but you might as well use a shield then, there's not enough skills that benefit from DW. On top of that, the whole "move around in a flurry of blades" seem fitting with the DW style so it'd a perfect candidate, and the damage would be decent enough if it would hit with the 2 weapons.

Desync issues fix would probably be good too but that's more of a general issue not really specific to this skill.

This is an excellent mobility skill, as I think was the intention behind the skill's design, and, unlike other people who are complaining about the skill's dmg or lack of dual-wielding bonus, I am 100% perfectly content with it being just a mobility skill and nothing else.

However, I do have 1 major gripe with this skill. There is absolutely no point in leveling up the gem. The skill, as used currently, is 100% for mobility, and the added damage from each level is so negligible that it's not even noticed. Essentially, leveling up the gem just causes the skill to consume more mana, so I recently shelved my level 11 gem in favor of a level 1.

This can easily be improved by either 1.) Instead of providing additional damage each level (which is useless because this isn't a damage skill anyway) provide additional attack speed instead. From what devs have said, this should shorten the casting/ending animation of the skill and let it feel more fluid, as a mobility skill should be. 2.) If the additional attack speed isn't enough of a perk, could also consider minimal increases to the distance the skill travels. Although, if the numbers were balanced enough, I think a simple attack speed increase should more than suffice.

I have recently been playing dual wield claw rangers. Two of them in fact. Both are now level 50+.

As a dual wield claw ranger, your only AE damage option which uses your weapons is Whirling Blades. As an AE damage skill, I feel whirling Blades is terrible. It has only 60% damage effectiveness (for comparison, Sweep has 75%, Cleave has 70% and Ground Slam has 70%) and it only uses one of your weapons (Cleave will use both at 40% reduced damage, which in the end is still a damage increase over using one weapon). Additionally, the area of affect (which is a narrow cone that travels in a straight line) is difficult to use effectively. With Sweep or Cleave or Ground Slam you can literally just stand in a particular place and repeatedly hit every mob in a large arc in front of or around you over and over again. It is very easy to arrange the mobs in such an arc to maximize the damage effectiveness of these skills. With Whirling Blades, you must attempt to line the mobs up in a single file line and then dive through them. Not only does it take a while to arrange the mobs in this way, but as soon as you Whirling Blades through the line of mobs they will bunch up when they turn around to follow you. So you have to run around again to line up the mobs for another "optimal strike." This is just a waste of time for the low damage of this skill.

All of these factors combine to make Whirling Blades very difficult to actually do damage with. All of the currently existing melee AE damage options are superior to Whirling Blades when it comes to killing the mobs. If I could use any ability besides Whirling Blades for AE damage I would do so without hesitation, but I cannot due to my use of claw weapons.

I am aware that Whirling Blades has a movement mechanic that no other melee AE ability has. I consider this merely an artifact of the design of the skill and not its primary motivation for existing. In other words, using Whirling Blades only as a movement ability to escape is doing it wrong. It is my opinion that this skill is clearly intended to be the dexterity based melee AE damage skill. Having movement attached to the skill is an interesting flavor for dex characters. But the movement of the skill cannot be the primary reason the skill exists simply due to the fact that dexterity characters have no other means of doing AE damage with melee weapons. The skill is currently failing in its role of melee AE damage however which renders it as nothing more than a glorified movement skill. I hope the skill can be adjusted so that it is actually useful in its primary role of the dexterity melee AE damage skill.

I also must mention that Whirling Blades will desync pretty much all the time making it even harder to use. I understand work will be done on this aspect for open beta so I will wait and see how it works once those changes are made.