[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)

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Thomasmgp wrote:

ok maybe im being a total n00b but how do you build frenzy charges?

nm figured it out. Bloodrage.

Also Im kinda tempted to buy a Drillneck. I just bought a Carcass Jack so Drillneck would bankrupt me. Also I just picked up this for only 1c

So is Drillneck game-breaking enough for me to drop that nice survival Quiver?

Can this build be done on a shadow character? Can you link a passive tree for it if so? Thank you very much in advance! Great guide!

So about Poacher's Aim: The guide says that you should use it but even with drillneck its only 25% inc dmg. You can get that from a blue jewel.

So I've been playing a (quite different) build, PA, experimenting with various options. I'll leave this here for your perusal, but I'll be rolling this and some other theory into a separate Hidden Potential PA thread later today/tomorrow.

This was my second character in the league, built from the ground up with zero gear. I ran PA in the beta (as well as a lot of other things) and decided that given the new higher-damage, higher-risk mapping, PA was a perfect fit since it basically allows you to focus on dodging everything dangerous while still getting 100% full DPS uptime due to the poison cloud mechanics.

When I got to maps I was still wearing low-level blue rings, a rare quiver with zero useful stats, etc. I had a total of 3 4-links with the rest of my gear unlinked and went as high as 75 maps in that garbage gear. Despite running a fairly safe setup (Temp Chains, Arctic Armour, etc.) I was still able to easily progress and map even when I did stupid things like corrupt my gear and brick it.

Bricking some of my gear made me realize that I could potentially just pick up Hidden Potential (15-25% Increased Damage for each piece of blue gear) since the rares I was using were pretty worthless anyway, so I went ahead and bought one for 15c and started to min/max.

So, budget for my character at this point has been essentially... 1c for my bow via Global brodeal (+ finding someone to Leo mod it), 2c for the gloves, blue gear is free though get ready to get incredibly frustrated when you use all your Alts looking for Life + the specific mod you want, a few chaos for the Blood Dance, and then lots of tears trying to chrome your bow for those blue sockets.

Current Tree:


Current Gear:


Last night I wasted 300+ jewellers and then the rest of my chromes and some fusings just to break even and go back to a 4Link bow. FML. (Currently out of chromes to get the bow back to BBGG, but I hope to remedy that tonight mapping.) So while I have personally wasted a lot of currency getting this going, the build is pretty much free if you plan ahead/get lucky/use vorici for sockets.

At gem level 19 in a +2 bow my Poison Cloud is at approximately 8600 DPS without Frenzy charges, of which I have 7 (6 via tree, 1 from Bandits). Blood Dance makes those Frenzy charges regen my life and I also have the Frenzy charge node on the tree that gives me an evasion bonus when I have them up, so once you clear the first pack on the map (usually, since Blood Dance grants charges on kill) you do significantly more damage, have higher evasion, and have about 10.6% total life regeneration. These charges also provide Move Speed and of course, the extra damage you do to enemies on low life affects the DOT cloud as well, granting you even more invisible/non-tooltip DPS. We achieve such high tooltip via Hidden Potential and the blue items. I'm wearing 5 magic/blue items for a total of 120% increased damage-- way cheaper than a Drillneck, both currency and skill point-wise AND more damage!

I don't have the currency to afford a Drillneck or a +3 bow, but if I did, damage would likely be similar if I dropped Hidden Potential and just focused on rare/unique items. In a setup like this I could get more MF and potentially run Grace over Purity for higher defense or switch to something like Daresso's Defiance for free Endurance charges.

With that said, the setup I'm using rocks. My life is a little low at 3.7k, but this could be pushed into the 4k range with better blue life rolls. To be honest though, the mechanics of Poison Arrow make such a setup very profitable and surprisingly low risk. I'm mapping into the 75-76 range right now and it's safe enough that I dropped Temp Chains and switched to Vulnerability because I kill so fast I don't even bother cursing half the time and can generally sleep through pretty much anything, including 75+ beyond bosses. Damage is sound. 8.5k tooltip sounds low, but consider that most enemies lack high chaos resist AND chaos damage penetrates energy shield (which helps against certain boss/rare mobs with high ES). With the increased DOT damage on the bow, as well as the MORE damage from Frenzy charges (28% more damage at 7 charges), coupled with the fact that you maintain full DPS while still having 100% mobility, you can basically just fire into doorways and forget. All but bosses and high-hp rare mobs will charge through the cloud towards you and just evaporate.

Mapping is a breeze on this character. Take your highest level map, chisel it if appropriate (I generally chisel 72-73+ to some degree), then alc and go. Chaos if the mods are too easy. Vaal if you get double boss/the map has multiple bosses. Even without a specific focus on elemental resistance nodes it's easy to cap your resists AND get all-important life rolls on high-level blue gear.

No regen maps are fine, you can run any kind of reflect map, negative resists/higher enemy crit chance/elemental status immunity map mods don't really matter, because you're moving out of the way of most elemental damage and spell dodge/arrow dancing generally handles the rest. My chance to evade melee/ranged is only about 30-35% meaning the downside of arrow dancing is only -5-10% chance to evade melee (ie. almost nothing, because we're never in melee range) while still providing substantial defense against dangerous ranged projectiles. Dodge is incredibly effective at mitigating attacks and there's really no downside to taking it since I'm not stacking energy shield, running EB, or worrying about armor.

With that said, if you get really lazy and try to facetank Giant Skeletons, boss telegraphed attacks, or other things on damage-modded maps it is possible to be "one-shot" or close to it, especially if you're moving and AA doesn't help to mitigate the damage. This happened to me once in the low-80s when I was playing drunk and was wondering if I could tank a bloodlines giant skele in a increased-phys aura. (I couldn't. But to be fair I assumed I would dodge the attack anyway!)

I'm pretty sure I could easily do Atziri at this point and the only reason I haven't tried is that I'm waiting till I level up to prevent annoying experience loss. (I'm not saying death is inevitable, I'm just fairly lazy and usually die to Trio etc. at least once.)

Future plans: 6L +3 bow, obviously. Power spike if I can buy/obtain a level 2/3/4 empower, but otherwise just more item rarity/damage. And a 5-6L armor, blue if possible (I think it is, but I need better jewels, the additional jewel slots I'm about to go over). In the 5/6L chest I'd put the Curse on Hit setup and either go for a Doedre's or +1 curse corrupted blue ring/amulet and go with one of the following set ups:



As far as further passive tree adjustments... Well I could potentially drop the piece cluster (3p) since I'm not using drillneck and pierce is more of a convenience than anything else at this point and remove two life nodes (11% life) for 2p. When I level up to 85 today or tomorrow I'll gain one more point and have a total of 6p points to play around with. Ideas right now are to spec into Graceful Assault + a life node for perma-onslaught (probably not worth for this build specifically, but 10% chance of 20% movespeed on kill is tempting from a faster-mapping perspective) or the crystal skin cluster for 50% shock/freeze/chill avoidance as these are, I think, under-rated defensive nodes or simply spec into 2 more jewel nodes (the proj damage jewel cluster and the jewel cluster north of the Duelist traversal area) while still keeping 1 life node but gaining 2 more jewel slots-- this is probably the best option, all things considered.

With the right resists/damage/life rolls on perfect jewels and/or on the additional jewel slots I mention above, I could probably drop my helm or chest-piece and gain ANOTHER piece of blue gear for a further +24% increased damage and/or change auras for more evasion.

One last hat trick = grabbing a self-flagellation jewel to slot in for maps where you're cursed/dual-cursed (Up to 40% increased free damage during those maps where you're stuck cursed anyway).

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ben_hure wrote:

Hey Serleth,

just hit 25 on my TS ranger following neversinks guide, but I see the probs of maybe having troubles acquiring good gear, as I'm just starting this league.

Would you recommend switching to your PA build to accumulate wealth? I would have to respec about 10 points so far, or roll a new ranger.

On the long run, I really want to play the TS ranger, as I like screen shaking ;)

Do you think the 200 IIR are worth the extra time investment (respec investment), given that on my TS ranger I will prolly have almost 0 IIR.

I just wanna accumulate wealth to buy the stuff I need for a decently working crit build.

Cheers

Honestly, level 25 doesn't take that long. It's a couple hours playtime. Keep your TS ranger, reroll PA MF, then when you can afford the gear, work on your TS guy. Level 25 isn't worth the respec points.

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luvahiz wrote:

Cheers, for answering so many questions when 80% of the answers are in your guide or somewhere in your thread

Just glad to help out. =) I don't mind for the stuff that's buried elsewhere in the thread at all, I mean we're 123 pages in :P I don't expect people to scrub that many pages.

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Thomasmgp wrote:

So is Drillneck game-breaking enough for me to drop that nice survival Quiver?

Adds 1.8k or so dps before charges. It's more like 4-5k with all Frenzy charges up.

So, yeah.

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dubplate89 wrote:

Can this build be done on a shadow character?

Nope. Scion or Ranger. Anything else is 5+ points inefficient.

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Flouyd wrote:

So about Poacher's Aim: The guide says that you should use it but even with drillneck its only 25% inc dmg. You can get that from a blue jewel.

Right, but in our current setup, we have 65% chance to pierce (P.Aim, Drillneck, tree). Without P.Aim, we drop down to 50% chance to pierce.

It might not seem like a lot, but in high level maps when you're dealing with a "other allies cannot die" totem or rare mob, it's the difference between taking 1-2 shots to get that PA cloud working on the totem/rare, or 3-4 shots. And it provides increased chance for better AoE coverage whenever it does pierce on any other pack.

It's kind of a QoL thing more than anything, but if you're struggling (or your preference is) for resistances or life, feel free to use a rare with dual damage rolls and life/res.

That, and trying to get a 3-affix jewel with life right now (double damage, life) is being overcharged at 3ex+

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Serleth wrote:

Adds 1.8k or so dps before charges. It's more like 4-5k with all Frenzy charges up.

So, yeah.

OK Im just trying to figure out how I want to spend my final 4 exalts. Currently I have 215 IIR with gem but only have 8 quantity. Would I be better off getting Goldwyrm, Sadimas, and a Divination Distillate? Is having ~60 quantity better or worse than increasing my clear speed via Drillneck?

In other words if you only had 4 exalts and were sitting on 8/215 would you rather

A) buy Goldwyrm, Sadimas, and Divination Distillate to reach ~60 Quantity

or

B) screw quantity! maps have enough go Drillneck!

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Thomasmgp wrote:

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Serleth wrote:

Adds 1.8k or so dps before charges. It's more like 4-5k with all Frenzy charges up.

So, yeah.

OK Im just trying to figure out how I want to spend my final 4 exalts. Currently I have 215 IIR with gem but only have 8 quantity. Would I be better off getting Goldwyrm, Sadimas, and a Divination Distillate? Is having ~60 quantity better or worse than increasing my clear speed via Drillneck?

In other words if you only had 4 exalts and were sitting on 8/215 would you rather

A) buy Goldwyrm, Sadimas, and Divination Distillate to reach ~60 Quantity

or

B) screw quantity! maps have enough go Drillneck!

I wouldn't even be using Perandus Blazon. I'd drop that for a rare belt with dual/tri res and use Sadimas, then get Drillneck.

Then:

Goldwyrm (drop Sadimas, switch to rare gloves), dual andvarius. Distillate last.

This of course assumes you have a +3 bow already. If you don't:

* Sadima's (rare belt)
* +3 bow
* Goldwyrm (swap to rare gloves)
* Dual Andy
* Drillneck

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Serleth wrote:

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Thomasmgp wrote:

"

Serleth wrote:

Adds 1.8k or so dps before charges. It's more like 4-5k with all Frenzy charges up.

So, yeah.

OK Im just trying to figure out how I want to spend my final 4 exalts. Currently I have 215 IIR with gem but only have 8 quantity. Would I be better off getting Goldwyrm, Sadimas, and a Divination Distillate? Is having ~60 quantity better or worse than increasing my clear speed via Drillneck?

In other words if you only had 4 exalts and were sitting on 8/215 would you rather

A) buy Goldwyrm, Sadimas, and Divination Distillate to reach ~60 Quantity

or

B) screw quantity! maps have enough go Drillneck!

I wouldn't even be using Perandus Blazon. I'd drop that for a rare belt with dual/tri res and use Sadimas, then get Drillneck.

Then:

Goldwyrm (drop Sadimas, switch to rare gloves), dual andvarius. Distillate last.

k thanks. i was just using Perandus mainly for the +all stats.

Serleth said

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Right, but in our current setup, we have 65% chance to pierce (P.Aim, Drillneck, tree). Without P.Aim, we drop down to 50% chance to pierce.

I think you have 85 % chance to pierce (piercing shots 60% drill 10% poachers aim 15%) looking at your tree im thinking of dropping pierce on my 6l and using faster proj its a very clever use of pierce.

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Fhark wrote:

Serleth said

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Right, but in our current setup, we have 65% chance to pierce (P.Aim, Drillneck, tree). Without P.Aim, we drop down to 50% chance to pierce.

I think you have 85 % chance to pierce (piercing shots 60% drill 10% poachers aim 15%) looking at your tree im thinking of dropping pierce on my 6l and using faster proj its a very clever use of pierce.

Tree: 5% pierce / 5% proj damage nodes, *2 = 10% + Piercing Shots notable (30%) = 40%

Drillneck 10%

Poacher's Aim 15%

40 + 10 + 15 = 65%.