I guess I misspoke. Additional shields will proc 1 additional round of attacks per shield adjacent to weapon, but will no restart the series of attacks.
Put all shields and all cleaver on ducktape and replace hats slowly with more ducktape and cleaver. Every single extra cleaver and shield in the mix multiplies the amount of attacks per energy and the amount of belt of knife activations. -7 damage is on all your weapons can be ignored if you get 150 belt of knife activations.
And this is just turn one, every extra turn the damage stacks further up. My 2nd hit does triple the damage of my first just for comparisson and my first one is already 150k+.
Replacing a shield with a cleaver increased the damage for my by around 30k damage, replacing the hat for a cleaver around 20k. But I settled for 3 shields for 7 activations to stack my haste, but for maximum damage the best setup I think would be all cleaver, all ducktape, one shield. (Tho attacking once can take minutes on max animation speed that way.. :P)
I believe the current state has this hitting for 109k first swing. I've been playing in the beta since it came out and haven't returned to this to test further. The expanded bag there has me itching to get a real big build going!
With your 3 shields for 7 activations, you're lining up the shields to be adjacent to each other and to duct tape, correct? I wonder if this could be done in excel to get the min/maxes down.....
Yea, every shield in the mix of the cleaver duct tape will also trigger the cleaver chain once, so 3 shields are 3 extra activates. The issue is, that despite no attack triggering, you will still recieve the - damage from shield spirit in the mix. This usually means nothing tho,s ince a single activation already triggers many belt of knifes for all cleavers. But it can work against you, if you have more pavis than cleaver.
There is definitely some min maxing, also in the way duct tape priority works. For example a cleaver with rage and a cleaver with golden whetstone. I saw a change in damage by swapping around my cleaver, so I would assume that the position in the duct tape line matters and buffs will be used in realtime instead of calculated beforehand. In a big cleaver chain my logic would be to have it trigger rage as early as possible to have as much cleaver beneifit after it. The whetstone cleaver could be in a positon where it would mostly hit at the highest damage of belt of knifes.
If you use duct tape, the position of shields won't matter. In a chain of duct tape, a common blue cleaver is better for it's 1 extra damage than any other cleaver, as long as the sideways activation is not necessary to trigger a cleaver that isn't part of the same duct tape.
With belt of knifes tho, the only real thing that matters is how many cleaver activate in one turn on the same duct tape. If you can get energy, every single energy will increase your damage by a huuuuge amount. I can't even test the damage of my third hit, because my 2nd hit already does triple the damage of my first hit. Every extra energy would mean insane damage, but it is very hard to come by.... and .. you are really glad if the cleavers finally stop attacking :D