Bored at work - dragon tail kicksin?

Simply put:
There's various kicksin options that work but any kicksin not going for dual Mosaic nowadays is just wasting its own potential (while typically having to spend far more on acceptable gear on top of that).

The AoE part is merely fire damage that is based on the initial physical dmg of your kick.

Well, it depends on what you want.

Mosaic didn't make the others any worse. It just made the decision of "weird fun thing" vs. "true top performance" even more obvious.

As for the poison bit, that's really no concern. At all.

A Dragon Tail sin - when even half-way built correctly - has probably the single most insane damage per hit in the game. Not in the "aye, 10k more dps than xyz" sense but rather in the "you're literally talking hundreds of thousands per kick, millions of theoretical dps" sense. You won't notice a difference with or without poison damage because you can literally 1shot everything that isn't Baal, DC or an uber.

At least on P1..higher counts, other bosses start taking more than 1 hit as well.
Note, the above is just a quickly cobbled together version. I played around with this one quite a bit in the pre-Mosaic days and I distinctly recall there was a way to push damage even higher (significantly so..to around 3.4M dps I believe it was), I just can't remember what that was right now..had to switch out 1 Key piece for something weird and unexpected, that much I remember..

Also built an actual in-game version, more tailored for real play (since the dmg per kick is just pure overkill no matter what you do) which ended up with
(so a bit lower) but had brilliant survivability on top of it, unlike a pure raw dmg push. Still 1shot anything pre- Baal.

The problem though - and the reason it is so inferior to Mosaic despite that - is that you
a) have to re- Charge because without Mosaic, charges drop
and b) have to actually use Dragon Tail

So you lose time on re-charging (at least for bosses, non-bosses you can actually 1shot without charges still) and when moving from one pack to the next, you have to Dragon Flight -> Dragon Tail and then Dragon Flight to the next one.

Mosaic by contrast when built right can Dragon Flight in and then immediately Dragon Flight to the next one because everything got blown up from the DF alone (and at least partially in a larger radius), meaning you save the entire Dragon Tail action on every pack and hence massively speed up the process for reasoning as dumb as "yeah, you 1shot everything..but you don't 1shot it with the more convenient/efficient skill!".

Despite Mosaic leaving it in the dust though, you are still talking about a build with fairly insane actual top-tier performance here. So if you enjoy the playstyle, by all means, go for it.

The gear to truly optimize that one though is nearly impossible to get, let alone for cheap.

(You could run a Mosaic tail build actually..saves you from charges dropping at least..but the max dmg will be lower than a claw-optimized tail build)

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

...
Note, the above is just a quickly cobbled together version. I played around with this one quite a bit in the pre-Mosaic days and I distinctly recall there was a way to push damage even higher (significantly so..to around 3.4M dps I believe it was), I just can't remember what that was right now..had to switch out 1 Key piece for something weird and unexpected, that much I remember..
...

Alright, remembered what had to be switched...3.8 it was.
You could still push that past 3.9 but then you're looking at pre-buffing and gear switching and all that annoying stuff. F that.