Whirling Assault "buff"

according to patch note there will be some change to whirling assault: Baseline movement of Whirling Assault has been reworked to be more fluid. Now has +1 second to Total Attack Time (previously 1.4). Now has +14 to Melee Strike Range at all Gem levels. Now has +1% more Area of Effect per Gem level.

So i was considering giving it a trye with staggering palm also getting some buff but i feel these change are far from enough to make the skill viable. It definitly needed to be more smooth so that's okay but more aoe (also considering less density) is kinda useless. The base damage is still weak and it still does not scale with attack speed ? And tbh i'm still confuse about how attack speed exactly interact with whirling assault.

i'll definitly try it but yeah i'm not very optimistic about it.

Having the same opinion as you so far, will still give it a try.

I once read that attack speed would make you do more hit during the spin but i'm not sure it's correct and couldnt really see a difference.

Critical hit also only roll on the first hit so either you crit all hits of the attack either none. Some people advice is to dodge to cancel the hit if you dont crit on first hit and retry...

When i tryed i was loosing DPS on my tooltip when specing on the tree. Kinda gave up but i'm gonna try again this league.

My mystake was probably to want to use it with hollow palm last league and that only change attack speed and crit chance.

I think i'm gonna try with as much phys damage possible on quarterstaff and try to get 100% crit chance and see if it's better.

Could go up to maps T7 or so last league with it, campaign was very powerfull but than it fell off completely.

I would love to have advices of someone who could scale it to highest map tiers.

Last time i tried it in 0.2 and it didn't even scale AoE with AoE nodes. Not sure, did they fix this?

Also, there's that little fact that critical strike chance is calculated PER ATTACK (i.e. the entire animation) instead of PER HIT which makes investing into crit too unreliable with this skill.

An attack that does alot of weak hits, to alot of enemies in one animation would make for some really cool synergies, in Poe1. In this game with no stacking ailments and a very limiting support system It can't really do much.

the crit part don't bother me that much it's not hard to have 100% crit in late game , actually i think it could be a great skill for some cast on crit shenanigans.

It's just sad that atk speed has virtually no effect on the skill. It's one of the rare quarterstaff skill (only ?) that does not have some kind of damage conversion so going hard on physical damage is probably the way. idk i just want to spin and win :D

I am going for it as well.
We will see how it goes.

I was wrong, more or less finished my whirling assault pathfinder and it's an absolute beast so the skill is totally viable now :)
The skill slow you down a bit tho while spinning sadly and i don't think there's a way to make it feel more snapy, also would love to be abble to sprint around spinning without having to recast but hey it is what is, probably have to wait for new weapons for real spin and win :D .