So, while there are a multitude of builds that have an arsenal of insta-killing abilities, almost none of them are melee: outside of bourgeois assassins and Quivering Palm-specced Monks (honorable mention to visage barbarians), there's almost nothing in the melee spectrum that specializes in a wide array of instakills that is even slightly reminiscent of the tumultuous arsenal of crowd/champion-wrecking spells at a well-specced DC caster's disposal. However, assuming a certain ability can be used in tandem with several others, there's possible potential for a melee instakiller to exceed the efficiency of that of their caster counterparts.

As Dance of Death relays melee damage to four enemies at once, the million-dollar question is, can Dance of Death cause Quivering Palm, Dismissing Strike, and Executioner's Strike to hit four mobs at once? If anyone can test this on any build to see if this is the case, this could open the door to a build that could potentially devastate entire crowds of mobs at once.

15 Monk 5 Ranger PDK TWF w/Shortswords

As I'm not entirely sure if this build would even work (the entire premise hinges on the fact that Dance of Death works with these attacks), I'm not going to list a breakdown of gear, feats, or stats. However, as PDK add 1/3 of their Charisma Modifier to DCs, 1/2 of their Int through KTA, and 1/2 of their Wisdom through it being the relative stat for monk abilities, you synergize 3 different stats simultaneously to empower your DCs; this means that a three-digit Quivering Palm DC is probable with optimized gear. Maximize the amount of accuracy on-hit so you don't graze on essential strikes.

In Shadowdancer, you would have all of these insta-kills at your disposal:

Quivering Palm
Executioner's Strike
Dismissing Strike
Consume (implosion)
Shadow Manipulation (charm, with an instakill at the end of its duration)

As Quivering Palm can be used every 6 seconds, you are consistently obliterating crowds of mobs; in certain quests such as Grim and Barrett, Dismissing Strike/Executioner's Strike literally erases an entire pack of champions before they even reach you. Outside of speccing for instakills, you still retain a generous amount of damage versus bosses and Death Ward champions. In terms of gear, maxing Dexterity/Intelligence/Charisma/Wisdom (primarily wisdom) are all essential, as each of these fuels the DCs of a different insta-kill ability.

Additional miscellaneous benefits:

As your DCs are specialized to be so impossibly high to land Quivering Palm, your tactical DCs will hover around 140-150; with an investment into Shintao, you are able to inflict Jade Strike (+25% vulnerability) to all mobs in front of you with Dance of Death active - and CC any 4 mobs simultaneously for 30 seconds each with Tomb of Jade.

Path of Inevitable Dominion (Dark Monk) finishers. Since you're centered and a Dark Monk, with DCs that would require mobs to literally hack infinite saves on their phantasmal character sheets to save, you can utilize additional means of CC through these combinations of attacks; Air - Dark - Air blinds all mobs you're attacking with Dance of Death, Water - Dark - Water Paralyzes everything in front of you, and Earth - Dark - Earth, most importantly, inflicts Pain Touch, which makes afflicted mobs move at half speed, cannot attack, and cannot cast.

This character quite literally becomes everything a DC caster can be, at once, but under the assumption that Dance of Death works with all of this.

If anyone has the resources or character split to answer the million-dollar question, I'll take this post several steps further.

Did they add gear bonuses to dark finishers?

a guildie of mine ran that build a couple years ago it works OK

this is a 4 stat monstrosity worthy of Tilo but I like where your head is at.

Looked into it for Bard ranged assassin thrower and you can't really get Executioner DC high enough to be relevant in content where trash is an issue. It's like 37+Int/Dex Mod I think (not sure if they ever fixed the shadow charges to stack up to 7). Also DC on Consume s garbagio too if I recall correctly though I would love to be wrong on this. 

Mokune wrote on Apr 13^th, 2018 at 3:47pm:

dragblood wrote on Apr 15^th, 2018 at 2:39am:

JK_Seren wrote on Apr 15^th, 2018 at 6:48pm:

This is all extremely good to know. Since it's 99% confirmed that this split works (need final concrete proof that Quivering Palm, in the game's current state, will work - which I'll test later), I'll eventually work on making a spreadsheet on it. However, I have to refarm everything for an extremely ancient character, so I'm not entirely sure when I'll be in a position to post it at 100% optimization. I genuinely can't place an accurate ETA, but I hope I'll make something out of it in 6 weeks.

harharharhar wrote on Apr 15^th, 2018 at 9:28pm:

I've been hearing an influx of things about this. From what I've gathered, the DCs on each of those abilities doesn't "work properly", if you can even put it in that context; either the save on each is somewhat different than a straight Fortitude, scales up quite a bit higher than specified, or is just straight garbage. If it ends up being mediocre, this split will probably end up running GMoF for much more DCs and Everything is Nothing. I hope this does work well enough to be reliably utilized, but I'll anticipate a worst-case scenario.

roach wrote on Apr 18^th, 2018 at 9:38pm:

Yep, you'd need to +1 LR to get the fighter level off. Costly, but a worthwhile investment for +10~ DCs.

Just confirmed that Quivering Palm does not work with Dance of Death. While every other attack - including monk finishers - are relayed to 4 mobs at once, Quivering Palm works only on the first mob struck, and deals only standard damage to the other 3 without the instakill. So much for creativity in context 

Depending on your TR goals, play-style, group style, etc etc the synergies with DoD are numerous.

I cannot recall exactly the build/split I used (some Ranger/Cleric/Monk monstrosity) but DoD+Ameliorating Strike can yield several procs of the Healing, and DoD +Fists of Light curse on packs of mobs with Cleave/GCleave produced an astonishing stream of +3-+6 procs. 

This was before Reaper though and over-kill for HE/EE but for Low to Mid reaper could be significant /shrug.