[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)

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Atori wrote:

Hi everyone.

First of all, thanks Serleth for the great build.
I never tried a MF build before, since the cheap ones would tend to go full support/culling, and that gameplay don't interest me much. So your build, which can handle solo play, caught my interest. Level 67 so far, and no problem progressing through the game by myself.

Sorry if this have already been asked, but it can be a bit hard to find something among 129 pages of talk. ^^

So my questions :

-when MFing, where would you start ? Boss runs (piety, dom or voll) ? Or go directly into maps ?

-when you explain your 0.5ex/hour, you say that you only ran blue maps. IS that beacause it is more efficient ? Or should I run rare maps if able ?

Thanks in advance for your answers.

Best regards, and have a nice game.

PS : goldwyrm price this season is insane. :(

Hey man im about to start this build and had a few questions. How do you level with this char? Do you just go silverbranch and pa from the get go? Or level as something else? ALso what league are you in? Im playing in tempest and im following the recommended tempest tree.

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asbo96 wrote:

Can i just level with pa from level 4? Or would that be bad. ALso how do you progress through the recommended hc tree? Im only level 5 so i was hoping to get some answers earlier on in the build so i dont have to make any changes.

Nope. You'll need minimum level 28-32 or so (method to the madness + entropy are pre-requisites before going to PA).

Progression isn't that different from the SC tree but you focus more on life earlier. After MttM/Entropy you basically beeline to duelist life, then up to scion life, alternating taking projectile nodes as you go. Then Corruption after.

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-when MFing, where would you start ? Boss runs (piety, dom or voll) ? Or go directly into maps ?

-when you explain your 0.5ex/hour, you say that you only ran blue maps. IS that beacause it is more efficient ? Or should I run rare maps if able ?

Maps.

That 0.5ex/hr is a figure I generated by running nothing but blue maps. It doesn't mean you shouldn't run only blue maps, but often times even off blue maps you'll still burn through most of your portals. Alcing doesn't serve that much purpose other than to increase your chances at unique drops and chaos recipe drops, but re: the latter, if you're spending 2 alcs for every chaos recipe you get.... you're just breaking even.

Which is why I don't alc until 74+ maps.

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I still dont see mathematically how you can run out of Mana, unless you just reserved everything with a 3rd Aura and only had enough for 2-3 shots. I can get off 14 PAs before I autofire. I just dont see any possible scenario when you would ever fire off that many PAs with no downtime to recoup at least some of your mana.

Try running a fleet map with the onslaught mod and a deadly boss like Collonade Kole with a 1.45 APS bow, on a % reduced mana regeneration map.

Trust me, it happens. With that high APS I get 6 shots off before I autofire.

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Hey man im about to start this build and had a few questions. How do you level with this char? Do you just go silverbranch and pa from the get go? Or level as something else? ALso what league are you in? Im playing in tempest and im following the recommended tempest tree.

Check the leveling guides. They're there for a reason =)

I play in WB so read the above reply regarding changes to how you would level. It's EK/FT up to early to mid 30s, then you can switch to PA if you want at that point or keep pushing with EK/FT until you get a +2 bow.

Just to throw it out there, I leveled with this build, from the ground up. I used poison arrow from the very beginning. I didn't really have any problems. I did go for all the damage nodes I could along the way while leveling, and grab most of the life later.

I honestly thought it was pretty smooth. This was one of my first characters on warbands, and totally the most successful so far. Just hit level 71. Should probably start running low maps, just did a desert one :D

Great build, way fun, can't wait to keep going with it!

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Serleth wrote:

There isn't much really. Drillneck and Carcass are the only two I can think of immediately that allow you to scale PA damage.

While browsing Havoc's gear, I noticed that he's using this:


Hidden Potential is amazing, though of course you won't be able to effectively use it while maintaining high IIR/IIQ.

Currently, I'm pushing for level 90 or maybe 91; right now, magic find isn't a priority. So I've respecced/re-equipped for defense and damage.


The blue gear is for use with Hidden Potential - I can probably equip a blue belt too for even more DPS with a little work on resists. With 6 Frenzy charges up my tooltip DPS is 14,267 (and I can hit 15,752 by subbing out Pierce with Slower Projectiles - but I prefer Pierce since it clears packs much faster).

Anyhow, I thought I'd pass this along in case anyone is pushing for higher levels and wants to up DPS/survivability at the cost of IIR.

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hankinsohl wrote:

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Serleth wrote:

There isn't much really. Drillneck and Carcass are the only two I can think of immediately that allow you to scale PA damage.

While browsing Havoc's gear, I noticed that he's using this:

Spoiler

The blue gear is for use with Hidden Potential - I can probably equip a blue belt too for even more DPS with a little work on resists. With 6 Frenzy charges up my tooltip DPS is 14,267 (and I can hit 15,752 by subbing out Pierce with Slower Projectiles - but I prefer Pierce since it clears packs much faster).

Yeah there's been some discussion regarding this in the thread and if we were going for a pure damage PA setup, it'd take more consideration for sure, but for res balance and MF purposes it just doesn't have a place.

I also think you're the victim of a psychological trick regarding pack clearing with pierce. Your toolip with slower projectiles might only be 1.5k higher, but in actuality (since area damage modifiers don't appear on tooltip), it's probably a lot closer to a +5k increase with SP.

Using Vmoddin's PA damage calculator and subbing in rough values off this guide's tree (doesn't include jewel damage) using your gem levels and links (assumes Drillneck as well, which you haven't shown):

24,272 dps with Slower Proj, 6 Frenzy charges

20,117 dps with Pierce, 6 frenzy charges.

4,115 net difference in dps.

With 65% pierce chance, I think the relative amount of times you have to re-fire when PA doesn't pierce with Slower Proj compared to the reduced amount of re-fires but -4k dmg with Pierce = Pierce actually has slower clear speeds, especially when you take into consideration the slowdowns due to smaller dps during fights with Exiles, Warbands, bosses, tanky rares, Tormented possessed rares, Beyond creatures, etc. etc.

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Serleth wrote:

I also think you're the victim of a psychological trick regarding pack clearing with pierce.

With 65% pierce...

Actually, I base my clear speed solely on what I see in front of me, not on tooltip.

I have only 15% pierce w/o the Pierce gem, having skipped the pierce nodes for now (will be added in once I level a bit) in favor of jewels.

With only 15% pierce, clear speed is noticeably slower.

With my exclusive focus on leveling at the moment, I've taken all the life nodes I can and as many jewel nodes as possible having first taken care of life. So I'm not able to take the Pierce nodes yet with this approach while leveling.

Of course, once I hit my leveling goals I'll drop a bunch of life, switch gear, and of course take the pierce nodes and sub out Pierce for Slower Projectiles.

1 thing I started to use lately is Decoy Totem and it is AMAZING! I have it linked with Minion Life and my Golem. It completely trivialize warbands and a lot of map bosses. You can just use PA once in a while and recast the decoy over and over again.

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hankinsohl wrote:

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Serleth wrote:

I also think you're the victim of a psychological trick regarding pack clearing with pierce.

With 65% pierce...

Actually, I base my clear speed solely on what I see in front of me, not on tooltip.

I have only 15% pierce w/o the Pierce gem, having skipped the pierce nodes for now (will be added in once I level a bit) in favor of jewels.

With only 15% pierce, clear speed is noticeably slower.

With my exclusive focus on leveling at the moment, I've taken all the life nodes I can and as many jewel nodes as possible having first taken care of life. So I'm not able to take the Pierce nodes yet with this approach while leveling.

Of course, once I hit my leveling goals I'll drop a bunch of life, switch gear, and of course take the pierce nodes and sub out Pierce for Slower Projectiles.

AAAHH, okay, that makes sense then, as you'll see a much greater benefit from the Pierce gem than normal if you only have Poacher's Aim running presently.

Yo, back with another update.

I might have some gems to trade again ;-)

New gear with a 21/0 PA gem raised me over 20k before area/conc effect modifiers. It's insane, stuff melts like nothing, Warbands bosses are a joke and now I will try to get to higher maps for Achievements.



Level 90 and not caring about deaths anymore since I won't level up again with this character, too many things I try and some Tempest too =)

So there's

and for 3c each, pls just write a PM and mention some "brodeal", include your ingamename and I'll get in touch.

I had a question regarding how you map, specifically. I'm finding that even in blue maps, I'm often using all 6 portals, and spending a TON of my time in my hideout IDing and checking for relatively decent pieces to pawn off for a chaos or two each. Do you pick up every single rare just for the alt shard/chance at something decent (unid Chaos Recipes are heavily gated by jewelery for me), or do you find yourself only picking up the small stuff, and the time spent IDing gets smaller as you get more used to quickly assessing items?