Talk:Ash/@comment-106.86.169.135-20151213094958/@comment-74.133.1.176-20151230073926

As others have said, no, as Bladestorm is a special armor ignoring move that does not crit.

Fury and Berserker can speed up how fast Cutscene Prime finishes the animation, but that's about it.

However, Shadowstep is still super useful for Ash (I don't think Deadly Intent is unless it's additive instead of multiplicative). Why? Because Ash can use it to stay invisible easily without using energy, for longer than his base smokescreen, while setting up long melee combo chains. These make Bladestorm much more powerful. So Ash can stay safefully invisible while gaining energy instead of using it, reviving allies if necessary, and increasing his melee combo counter to really high. The combo counter affects how powerful BS is, so this can make it do absurd damage.

This could work nicely with a Rising Storm build actually, I think I will test that. As Bladestorm itself also adds to combo counter, which with Rising Storm can chain back into melee attack chain again, etc. etc. You could theoretically do absurd damage over and over while mostly safe in invis or invuln, while doing utterly ridiculous amounts of damage from combo counter chain.

Throw in Arcane Ultimatum and Arcane Trickery, give him some tank mods + rage, and watch the good times roll. Ash Melee destroyer of worlds.

Jat Kittag or any Heavy melee rounds out the whole thing. Although I think Jat Kittag would be best, as it is a hammer, and I think they do the most finisher damage, which works nicely for 3 + finisher, in place of CL. Since, with melee so key, we can't really be relying on a dagger.