Shadowdancer Trickster/SP (Patch 1.2)

[Boeroer]

The Palm shield is awesome with anything that multiclasses with monk. It scales with Transcendent Suffering, it gives you deflection and relflex with Weapon & Shield Style, it gives you dual wielding speed and more speed via Two Weapon Style and gives you additional wounds once you get damaged. Lantern go home!

It also helps to trigger Riposte more often since the deflection with a shield is so much higher than without (or a dagger). And since it scales with Transcendent's Suffering the damage becomes respectable (for a shield bash). It's hard to hit you when you stack its deflection with Wizard's Double and deflection rings + cape for example and have some serious RES.

 

Using it on a Minor Blights-based Wizard/Monk with Stunning Surge. It's awesome. 

Edited July 1, 2018 by Boeroer

[WHW]

Would using Whispers of the Endless Paths drop Deflection to the point where you wouldn't be able to Riposte Tank reliably? I was eyeballing Trickster before for it, and after the buff, I'm really interested in checking if it works. 

[Boeroer]

WotEP has an enchantment "Offensive Parry" that lets you Riposte on 100% of misses (stacks with Riposte - meaning that you can witness two Ripostes being executed on a miss) - is also adds +5 deflection. As a Trickster you can blind enemies (which results in less ACC). Of course you cannot achieve the deflection of a shieldbearer but it's still possible to get missed a lot in melee.

 

However, the Offensive Parry has its own damage and effects - it does not do a cone-AoE-riposte or something but is only single target. But it causes Dazed which is not bad.

Edited July 1, 2018 by Boeroer

[Purudaya]

I don't know if this is the intended behavior, but I've been testing this build and Swift flurry currently affects trickster spell casting times... which is awesome.

[grasida]

Unless a speed boost says something like “+ x% action speed with weapons”, it typically works for everything. Also, one thing that’s easy to overlook about swift strikes and its upgrades is the dex inspiration, which is actually another 15% action speed on top of what the description says.

 

Unless you mean that swift flurry is duplicating trickster spells on crit, which seems wild.

Edited July 3, 2018 by grasida

[Purudaya]

Unless you mean that swift flurry is duplicating trickster spells on crit, which seems wild.

 

Definitely not, but the casting speed/recovery bonus is cool enough

 

I've played it vs. other trickster multis and it makes a surprising difference considering that that we're only talking about roughly half a second. Worth it for avoiding interrupts alone.