It looks like you can hit around 1-7,000 lightning damage nova on claws of thunder and you can hit with it once every 7th frame with Dragon Tail or twice over 10 frames using Dragon Claw. This is inferior to a nova sorceress who can cast a 7500-9000 lightning damage nova every 8th frame without a target selected at all. So nova to nova DPS comparison at the high end is:

Assassin: 3500 average damage 5x/second = 17,500 nova DPS with dragon claw. Or 3500 average damage 3.57x/second = 12,500 nova DPS with dragon tail.

Sorceress: 8250 average damage 3.125x/second = 25,781 nova DPS with self cast nova on a 105 FCR sorc. It can feasibly go up to 3.57 casts per second on 200 FCR sorc with some damage loss.

Sorceress has more raw lightning damage. Sorceress also has more access to -enemy lightning resists because she can wield crescent moon or self wield infinity scythe while assassin cannot because assassin is locked in using Mosaic claw in both hands.

So why would you play claws of thunder assassin? We have alluded to it by mentioning dragon tail earlier. The assassin has a whole arsenal of damaging abilities which can be tailored to what you are doing and survivability and QOL tools that take some set up but are unrivaled.

That 12500 nova DPS with dragon tail as the finishing move on a claws of thunder assassin is only part of the story, damage wise. An end-game MA sin with just 1 point in Tiger Strike and 1 point in dragon tail will deal 54,000 fire DPS with the explosion and the kick itself will deal an additional 25,000 lightning damage from the first charge of claws of thunder. Dragon tail’s fire damage is checked against both an enemies physical and fire damage because it is phys to fire converted damage, so there are many scenarios in which this fire damage is stunted or prevented nearly entirely (such as fire immune or phys immune monsters) but against bosses it will be something like 80k DPS on top of the nova DPS.

Cobra strike with 3 charges and only 1 point invested will give you 350% life and mana stolen from physical finishing move damage which basically solves mana aside from spamming teleport. Dragon tail is all fire damage so i’m not sure how effective the leech will be there, but all the other finishing moves should provide huge sustain.

Blades of ice was a meme skill. Now you can freeze every enemy near you when you use a finishing move, all the time, if you choose. You don’t need to invest in it, just 1 point is all you need.

Dragon flight is now an INSANE telestomp. Imagine you have 3 charges of all your skills up. You telestomp the mob. You deal 2600 physical damage which can leech 350% life and mana. You freeze everything around you. You deal 3500 avg lightning damage from the claws of thunder nova to everything around you. You deal 13000 charged bolt damage to many monsters but not the tele stomped target due to next hit delay from the nova. You deal 18k chain lightning damage from phoenix strike (2 charge) or 4K cold damage (3 charge) to most targets depending on next hit delay scenarios. Your merc comes with you and goes to town safely because everything is already frozen or in hit recovery. AND you bring an absolutely cracked out shadow warrior. If something isn’t dead, you choose dragon tail or dragon claw to one tap it, and you move to the next pack with another dragon flight.

You are tankier than most sorceresses too. You get weapon block which works on all hit damage (basically). You have a high life pool from the sin HP per vita being so good. You have DR from fade or you are fast as fuck with BOS. You get cloak of shadows. And you can use lifetap ffs.

You can use dragon talon for Ubers and keep ALL those charges going.

Whatever you are doing, you have a tool for the job. The MA sin with dual mosaic will be S-tier PVE in D2R 2.6 because it has the girthiest tele stomp in the whole game.