Assassin blade skills

[zaphodbrx]

Bladefury analysis is discussed in this thread.

What I'm asking for is blade sentinel and blade shield. Not finding any info about these..

Does the 3/8 and 1/4 penalty apply to both one and two handers? What about venom? Chance to cast effects? Do they need AR? What type of damage they do, physical? Affected by deadly strike? +dmg mod, +max damage?

Thanks.

Also, what is the speed of the crouching ( starting ) animation of bladefury? It's IAS dependent for sure, anyone got a frame table?

[Sass]

Weapon damage penalties don't apply to the skill damage of Blade Sentinel and Fury, but Blade Shield's 1/4 penalty is applied to its skill damage: however, the further 1/2 weapon damage penalty when equipping two-handed weapons only applies to Blade Sentinel and Fury, not Blade Shield.

Weapon damage penalties apply to physical, magic, fire, lightning, cold and poison weapon damage, and cold (but not poison) length for all three Blade skills.

The AR is required, and uses Normal Attack's AR. The damage is physical, and then dependent on items for boosted damage.

A Grief 'EthTirLoMalRal' Phase Blade's Damage +340-400 isn't applied by Blade Sentinel or Fury, but it is applied by Blade Shield.

Frames are a set 6 frames. If I recall, IAS isn't flagged for that attack.


EDIT: Supporting post.

[onderduiker]

The Amazon Basin Diablo II wiki's Blade Sentinel, Blade Fury and Blade Shield pages should cover what does and does not apply to each of those skills. Answering your specific questions:

• Blade Sentinel's 3/8 weapon damage penalty only applies to one-handed weapons; two-handed weapons have an additional 1/2 penalty, for a net penalty of 3/16 (which the character screen doesn't display). Blade Shield's 1/4 penalty applies to both one- and two-handed weapons.
  
  
• These penalties apply to Venom's added damage.
  
  
• Blade Sentinel applies no Chance to Cast modifiers; Blade Shield applies Chance to Cast on Attack, but only on a successful attack (effectively converting it to on Striking).
  
  
• Both apply weapon damage of all damage types, and their skill damage is physical.
  
  
• Both physical weapon and skill damage are affected by Deadly Strike.
  
  
• Damage +X applies to Blade Shield, but not Blade Sentinel.
  
  
• + Min/Maximum Damage applies to both.

Also, what is the speed of the crouching ( starting ) animation of bladefury? It's IAS dependent for sure, anyone got a frame table?

According to this German post, Blade Fury (Klingenwut) has a 19 frame sequence animation with the thirteenth frame being the action frame, so the wind-up animation before that is 12 frames. I haven't seen anything to suggest attack rate applies to this section of the animation: there's no visible difference based on weapon speed (Falchion vs Phase Blade), and it was not slower when both Decrepify and Holy Freeze applied (whereas a standard Attack was glacially slow). What have you observed to suggest otherwise?

The AR is required, and uses Normal Attack's AR.

This is true for Blade Shield, but Blade Sentinel also gets +(5*slvl) Attack Rating and a MonLvl bonus dependent on its level (which is min(slvl + (0.75*clvl) , clvl) ): for example, a level 80 Assassin with level 20 BS summons a level 80 (min(20 + (0.75*80) , 80) ) Sentinel, resulting in +3,218 AR in Hell.