Splitting steel received a very significant buff in the patch notes. It gained higher added flat physical damage, and the split projectiles no longer have 50% less area of effect.

Additionally, with the change to vengeant cascade, we now get every secondary projectile to overlap for just an annoint, which results in 975% more damage for splitting steel (with 15 projectiles) - an equivalent damage effectiveness of 2257%.

I played berserker voidforge splitting steel with nimis for most of Sanctum, and pushed 110m dps while doing so, and it was very comfortable for clearing and bossing. But the random projectiles made it somewhat clunky at times, and I had to invest very heavily into AOE to reliably get every secondary projectile to overlap.

This league, I intend to play an impale champion splitting steel.

Pros:

It benefits from hitting a crazy number of times (so the instant leech mastery is very efficient)

Deals phenomenal boss damage while up close

Reasonably easy to cap spell suppression with

Cheap to start, lots of room to scale upgrades later on. Fatal flourish jewels are crazy good

Cons:

Gotta be right on top of the enemy to have good single target

No longer have exploding secondary projectiles, so clear will suffer a bit from Vengeant Cascade

Necessitates an annoint that costs 2 gold oils to do even halfway decent boss dps, so if you aren't confident you can get those on day one or two, it'll be a bit of a slog.

Have to press call of steel every 12 attacks (or 24 if you have fatal flourish jewels)

With all that said, It feels like the melee equivalent of tornado shot when clearing, and it has lots of cheap unique weapon options available. It wouldn't be too hard to run kaom's spirit gloves for rage if you wanted to go that route.

Here's the PoB that's not fleshed out at all. Attribute and res requirements can just come from the items that I didn't put anything on

https://pobb.in/9oetUpapT5Fe

Important breakpoints: you need 20q mark on hit support and lvl 21 sniper's mark to benefit from the mark effect mastery wheel, since it gives you 6 additional projectiles instead of 4.

Cheers, and let's spam some projectiles all over the place.

EDIT: Here's a quick showcase of the playstyle with my berserker killing minotaur in 4 attacks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD86j1jYoPc