Need some help evaluating claws

Hi!

I'm planning on building my very first Assassin (sc nl). I collected some

Claws during the last months (see spoiler below), but I found it to be quite hard to tell a good from a bad claw. I tried to google it and read guides but I was overwhelmed by all the possible builds and special skill setups an Assassin can go. I think I know what a Trapsin is looking for in the late game and I know that Mosaic will probably not be available in non-ladder soon. But that still leaves a lot of other builds and skill setups...
This is why I have not decided, what kind of build I'd like to play, because I don't know for which build I have the best bases. Apart from the ones I posted, I have decent versions of all the unique

Claws.


So I thought maybe you guys can help me with my

Claws. If there is a link to a good summary of

Claws worth keeping that I have not found yet, this would also be a lot appretiated!

Thanks in advance for any help!

Spoiler

Im not much of helps but just now realized how often ive tossed something useful away.
Good luck with this, I have no idea and sorry cant help.

Well, maybe the hole time I was collecting the rubbish you tossed away correctly, I really don't know. That's why I need some help

Having

Death Sentry as a bonus on a claw is a big advantage if you're not playing a trapper, as it lets you have access to it without having to purchase any of the requisite skills.

Also, being able to get

Shadow Master via a claw is another advantage for any build that doesn't want more points in it, as again it saves on the prerequisites.
(while having both SM and

Shadow Warrior on the same is generally a complete waste, because you nearly always want to use one of the two rather than switching between them)

I think that's about the only easy advice i can add...

The first thing you need to consider is the WSM of the weapons.

• Greater Talons and
  Runic Talons are the fastest claws with WSM -30.
• Greater Claws and
  Feral Claws are the second fastest with WSM -20.
• Blade Talons also have WSM -20 but can't have +skills (no normal tier claws can have +skills, nor the exceptional tier
  Quhab,
  Wrist Spike or
  Fascia).
• The rest are generally not worth nearly as much simply due to being that much slower.
  Examples -
  
  Suwayyah and
  Scissors Suwayyah have WSM 0.
  
  War Fist is even slower at WSM +10 (slowest claw type in fact).
  WSM is very important to hit your breakpoints.

Slower claws may still be ok on swap for prebuffs, but for primary claws you definitely want as fast ones as possible. This concerns all Martial Arts assassins (whether Mosaic or some other kicksins variant) and trapsins.

Second, which +skills are sought after.

• For the majority of Mosaic assassins, who use the left side of the claw tree (the elemental skills), that's
  • primarily
    Phoenix Strike
  • secondarily
    Blades of Ice and
    Claws of Thunder
  • tertiarily
    Fists of Fire
  • a combination of more than one skill is obviously better
• For classic kicksins it would primarily be
  Dragon Talon, though + to
  Dragon Talon is impossible to find naturally due to it being a tier 1 skill (only exceptional/elite claws can have +skills but their qlvl puts them beyond the range of rolling tier 1 skills), unless you use the cube recipe to turn a low-quality claw into normal quality, but that limits max sockets to 2, preventing most useful rune words, or use the rare item reroll cube recipe (with 6 perfect skulls) repeatedly to drop its ilvl.
• For
  Dragon Tail builds it's
  Dragon Tail (duh).
  Tiger Strike would be on here too but it's impossible to find naturally due to being a tier 1 skill (see above).
• For trapsins, it's
  • Lightning Sentry (lightning based)
  • Wake of Fire (fire based)
  • Death Sentry (any variant)
• Death Sentry can be useful for any assassin build.
• For any assassin build, there are some utility skills that are basically one point wonders, so having them on claws saves skill points.
  These are:
  • Death Sentry
  • Mind Blast
  • Cloak of Shadows
  • Dragon Flight (for martial artists, not trapsins)
  • Fade
  • Weapon Block
  • You could consider
    Shadow Warrior and
    Shadow Master here too
• For slower pre-buff claws, you're pretty much only looking at pre-buffable skills like
  Fade,
  Shadow Warrior and
  Shadow Master.
• Venom: Skill is useless online. I just had to put it here

Hope this helped a bit. Or maybe it just confused you more

Wow, thank you! That already helps a lot!

Thanks for the work you put in your post, I really appreciate it!