I had a nice sword and decided to play around with scepter/sword to see if the combination was as horrible as it sounded.
To my surprise, it is sturdy and kills far faster than my sword/focus or sword/pistol build. The key here is generating lots of retribution and shatter spam. The blocks do not share a cooldown, so with good timing you can nail a mob for a huge kickback on block, retribution and confuse all at once. Then shatter if they are still standing around.
http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#MVm9wfp0xcVRzMq
I also have it traited for staff cd reduction for a few reasons. I love using staff in dungeons for my group. Also, you lose on DPS if you run with a group of people on scepter/sword. If things aren’t attacking you, you can’t block and lose 2 very damaging skills. They still do excellent crowd control, but I find if I am going to follow a group that running staff is generally more helpful to everyone.
The traits can be moved around so that while I don’t have the luxury of super damaging warlocks with two +phantasm damage traits, they still should be attacking faster (phantasmal haste makes them attack faster, not resummon faster right?) plus the extra bounce on staff for more booning goodness.
http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#MVmMc9cMxmrmMxmrm0fp0xMVacka trait swap
Note that traiting for scepter cd reduction only reduces the cd on confusing images, and traiting for 1hs cd reduction does nothing at all, since both summon clones and get the illusionist’s celerity boost. You lose 50 malice and 50 precision, but make up for it with condition spam and other goodness.
It’s weird. It has sacrifices, but it’s fun!
