Hello everyone, I have a couple of questions if that's ok.
I recently started a hardcore melee dual wield hunter dryad. It's a rather unorthodox build (not staves/Int/Acute Mind) and if it works out I'll share it in a lengthy build post, as I'm not finding anything similar anywhere. However, I want to get it to niob first. The problem is that I haven't played many dryads beforehand, just a bit of totem dryad. So, I have a couple of questions for the hunter skills that I can't find conclusive answers for.
1) Ravaged impact mods. I picked Perforate, Breach and Double shot in order to maximize single-target damage. I’m fine with the Bronze and Silver mods, but I’m not sure about Double shot. I don’t really need Blast, but before picking Double shot I was noticing that sometimes RI happened to register 2 hits anyway even without Double shot. And since the DW RI animation shows the dryad hitting with both weapons anyway, I started wondering whether double shot is unnecessary for melee DW. I’m thinking of trying it out on a new dryad, but I thought I’d ask here first, as I'm not sure that it always registered 2 hits or just sometimes (with double shot it hits twice 100% of the time ofc).
2) Darting assault mods. I picked Reload, Wounding and Rotate to maximize Area of Effect damage. It works fine so far - a limited range, but alright damage. However, I started noticing that the Area of Effect hits and kills more than 4 enemies at once. At first, it used to hit just 3 enemies, after Reload it started hitting 4, as expected. However, it now kills 5 or 6 enemies with just one spin. And it’s not just that a couple of enemies die from the Wounding of previous DA – it’s always a fresh group of enemies.
I’m not really sure why that’s so. The wiki doesn’t seem to indicate that Reload gives more hits the higher level DA gets, it just says “+1 projectile”. Does the Reload mod scale with level? Does the skill itself scale with level and I just wasted my bronze mod? The damage from the Edged bronze mod is just 22%, but it’s still something. My DA is at level 3 or 4 atm, due to item bonuses.
So those are my two main concerns – whether melee DW dryads hit twice with RI even without Double shot (and I wasted that gold mod), and whether DA hits more than 3-4 enemies even without Reload (and I wasted that bronze mod).
Other than that the build is going really nice and I have high hopes for hardcore niob – I’ll share it if it gets there.
P.S. Another quick question while I’m here – do you prefer Spell resistance or Combat reflexes for a melee dryad? I’ll mod Dust Devil for Spell Shield and Goldenglade Touch for Persevere (I.e. a ton of Willpower), so I should be sturdy against spells. However, with Ancient bark, Armor lore, Constitution, and Goldenglade Touch I should be all right against regular attacks as well.
Thanks!
Edit: I don't know if it matters, but I'm using the Community patch on a Steam Sacred 2 Gold edition (should be the latest version, I guess).