Shadow Hybrid Assassin?

[Mortent]

Hullo thar. I've mostly worked around more or less regular builds for my chars, but for my assassin i decided on something a bit different.

I have a few questions though that i hope you can help me with. I hope they're not too silly.

1) Will Blade Fury/Dragon Talon benefit from Venom?

2) I was thinking about using either Dragon Talon or Blade Fury as my main attack, as the Shadow Discipline ones are quite weak. Which one would be best, in your opinion?

3) Taking into account question 2, would it be better to go with Shadow Warrior or Shadow Master?

As for the build itself, i was thinking something like..
20 Blade Fury/Dragon Talon
20 Venom
20 Shadow master/warrior
?? Death Sentry (I would want as many shots as possible rather than increasing the lightning damage - would it be better to max fire blast in this case? Does the corpse explosion damage increase with levels?)
20 in some backup damage skill i haven't decided.. Or something entirely different. Mind Blast perhaps? How does this work with increasing the points?

As you can tell i'm not really far with the planning yet. WHAT TO DO WHAT TO DO?!
20

[stephan]

1) Yes. However, all damage gets reduced to 3/4 by Blade Fury and this includes venom. In case you were thinking of using a 2 hander the damage will be reduced to 3/8.

2) Define best. For damage DTalon, for safety Blade Fury. It's not a or/or choice, though.

3) Blade fury doesn't need more than 1 point, therefor you could do 1 BF and 20 DTalon and get a taste of both. Additionally, BF and DTalon benefit very much from the same mods like CB, OW, CtCs and elemental damage. The only two exceptions are that DTalon needs IAS (whhile BF always attacks at the same speed of 6fpa), whereas Blade Fury does depend on the damage of the weapon (DTalon damage is mostly dependant on boots).

The CE from DS does not increase in damage with more points, but it does increase in explosion range.

Check out the warrior-monk guide in the stickies for some ideas.

[Mortent]

Ahh, neat! Thanks for answering. I was thinking of using Grief for her, but i'm not sure how the +dmg would add up. Any thoughts on that, or should i go with something else? Claws with some nice skills on perhaps?
Alternatively i could stack poison charms and watch them eat people up - i've been very lucky and i've found like half an inventorys worth of +100 poison sc's. And then not worry all that much about the weapon damage.

Edit: On the warrior monk, i'm surprised how well it lives up to my expectations, and i see that there's lots of room for variation - i like that!
Only reason i've been worried is, i've never had a high level assa, and i can't just pick synergies and max 'em unless i wanna be a trapper (boring). So i wasn't sure which skills would perform well in what situation.

[stephan]

The +damage from Grief doesn't work with kicks and BF, so it's a really crappy weapon for this build. (Eth) Stormlash would be perfect (Eth only if you don'tuse Blade Shield).

No need for Poison Charms with Venom around. The rate on them is too low to really contribute that much.

[Mortent]

Oh yeah that's true. They get eaten by the short duration. I keep forgetting that.