Double Strike Assassin?

New to the game, and I’m thinking about building an dual-dagger Assassin with Double Strike and Ethereal Blades as active and using Precision + Defiance Banner aura. Is this doable? Or are melee Assassins only good for poison DOTs?

Try storm brand build

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Waveclaw wrote:

New to the game, and I’m thinking about building an dual-dagger Assassin with Double Strike and Ethereal Blades as active and using Precision + Defiance Banner aura. Is this doable? Or are melee Assassins only good for poison DOTs?

Okay, first of all: you should focus on eigher spells of attacks.

Etheral blade is a spell, Double Strike is an Attack. You cannot spec into both effectively and they scale differently. Spells require "critical strike chance with spells", "increased spell damage" etc. and Attacks need the equivalent modifiers for attacks, eigher elemental or physical. There is very little overlap so you should definately choose only one of those.

Secondly, Assassin has a good position on Daggers, but daggers itself have weaker wheels in general and as a weapon type compared to swords and axes disadvantages when it comes to physical damage.

More detriment to the idea: All the interesting notables for fortify, good life- and leechnodes as well as 2 Totem-Nodes (u would typically play a melee striker with ancestral totems to support boss-dps) are in the south, south-west and middle of the tree, kinda bad pathing for the position of shadow.

In general, there is a lot u can do in Path of Exile - And I am sure that a duo-strike assassin might be possible as well, but I am pretty sure it would require a lot of knowledge to get this to a reasonably working state. Not a fan of the idea for a new player. But if you wanna try it, go for it - no harm in trying.

Okay, thanks for the answers :)

Noob question here again: how do I know whether a skill is an attack or spell?

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Waveclaw wrote:

Okay, thanks for the answers :)

Noob question here again: how do I know whether a skill is an attack or spell?

Its actually written on the gem itself in a line above it, we call those tags.

Here I linked you a few different Main-Gems.

1. First of all we have Lightning Trap. With the tags Trap, Spell, Lightning and Projectile u get a very clear idea what you can scale to increase its damage, meaning all lightning damage, trap damage, projectile damage and spell damage will affect it.

2. Viper Strike as a Gem has the "attack"-tag, therefore it is considered an attack. Moreover, it is a strike skill - that distinction is important as some modifiers on gear and notables on the passive tree affects strike skills, so the gems needs to have this tag to be influenced by this. Duration and Chaos refer to its damage time, while duration increases the time an enemy is affected by one single stack of poison. Poison itself is always chaos damage and a pretty complicated mechanic on its own.

3. With Cremation you have a typical fire spell, but also a duration tag - that means everthing that shortens or increases gem-duration will affect it.

4. Last gem-tag that might be considered important is "Slam" which u´ll see in the last example - slams can use different support-gems as well as some passive notables on the tree that only affect attacks that are slams.

So you can always just check the tags to get a pretty solid idea what affects your gems.

Woah, I understand now. Thanks for the in-depth explaination :)