Dragon Talon, Dragon Claw or Tiger Strike for Physical Damage?:
Generally you'll either use just a normal attack to release elemental damage or just one of these skills for physical damage but for bosses and other stronger targets you could charge then release using one of these two skills to do both elemental and physical damage. One of the advantages of adding a physical attack to a Phoenix Strike build is that it will make Cobra Strike more than just a prerequisite but a very useful leeching skill and leeching items quite useful as builds using just elemental attacks may not be able to do the physical damage needed to make effective use of Cobra Strike and leeching items.
Dragon Talon:
Using Dragon Talon for physical damage is helpful as it has no skills which will passively increase its physical damage so pulls less points from other skills and then at higher skill levels will put out a number of very fast kicks per attack. With a good amount of strength and higher level boots you can do a good bit of damage per kick so each attack will throw out a good chunk of damage plus kicks can generally make use of properties from both claws so each kick could leech both life and mana for instance if you had those properties on your claws. The mass of kicks you could then throw out means many chances for properties like Crushing Blow, Open Wounds, % to cast on attack/strike and other to be applied. Then due to the high attack rating bonus on Dragon Talon even with a low base attack rating you should not have too much trouble getting your kicks to hit. Then as your physical damage is mainly coming from kicks you can use low damage fast claws so it is easier to hit the top speed and even if you are cursed with Iron Maiden as you are not doing too much physical damage with your claws while charging you could keep on charging and releasing without as much concern.
The down side of using Dragon Talon for physical damage is that it needs a good strength investment to get you using the better boots and so each kick does more damage. This means less points will be available to dexterity so for your claws to connect you would need attack rating bonus items and/or claws that use a lower percentage of a target's defence (the Ignore Target's Defence property does not work on anything stronger than regular critters and minions but just using a lower percentage of their defence may) which can be done by socketing in Eth runes. Lower dexterity also means using a shield will be of very limited use as your blocking with a shield will in time be lower than with Weapon Block even at lower skill levels.
Dragon Claw:
When using Dragon Claw for your physical damage this means you'll be getting more use out of Claw Mastery than just the attack rating bonus and you can continue boosting your dexterity once you have enough strength for your gear. This means charging up will be easier and if you wanted you could work around two weapon sets with the Phoenix Strike charge up set using one claw and a shield. Also unlike kicks claw attacks can make use of Critical Strike and Deadly strike so while you won't be hitting as many times per attack as with Dragon Talon some of those claw attacks will have their final damage (after skill, stat and item bonuses) doubled which can help bridge the damage potential gap.
The difficult part comes in the claw choices. With elemental charging you want fast claws with skill bonuses, for physical damage you can use slower claws as the damage potential will make up for the speed difference and skill bonuses while helpful will not be as needed. Now to get this from one weapon set you could use Natalya's Odium (Nat's set) with a Bartuc's Cut-Throat for the fast base claw speed, good damage, skill and stat bonuses plus other helpful properties or a Jade Talon for the modest skill bonuses, good resistance bonuses, modest damage and decent base claw speed. If you don't use Natalya's Odium you could either use two Bartuc's Cut-Throats or one plus a Jade Talon mostly for the resistance boost. Another approach would be to work around two weapon sets, one is aimed at elemental or just Phoenix Strike charging and the other for physical damage. This is helpful in one way but would make using Natalya's Odium problematic unless you had two of the claws.
Tiger Strike:
The builds using this skill would generally be those using a claw and shield since they can't use Dragon Claw but dual claw builds could use this skill rather than focusing on Dragon Claw. Mostly builds using Tiger Strike would be more aimed as boss bashers due to the high damage potential of Tiger Strike and as those would be longer fights but the rest of the time you can either just use Tiger Strike for the attack speed bonus you get over normal attacks on weak critters and then use less than three charges on all the others except the ones with lots of life which you would fully charge on. This would let you scale the damage you do to your needs but requires some charging before hand. Now both Dragon Claw and Tiger Strike have built in attack speed bonuses but I'm not sure if the bonus on one is higher than the other or if they are equal but if one is faster than the other it would be Dragon Claw which is the fastest of the two.
With these as with the ones using Dragon Claw your claw needs would be the main problem area and works out in about the same way so refer to the second paragraph of the above Dragon notes for that info. ~Phoenix-Hawk
