[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)

Need moar portals

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Adri38 wrote:

I am using this guide on a HC CA shadow,using a +2 5L with iir i manage 4k chaos dmg p/s ,how do i reach the 25k,at least 20k dmg ,im lvl 63 ,took all chaos,dmg over time and almost all proj.dmg nodes yet my dps is still low,the clear speed even in my lvl range is slow,what am i doing wrong

Comments/recommendations:

1) Your life seems really low. I'd be very concerned about this in hardcore. Grab more life nodes, get life on rings (until you have enough life to go with Andvarius), etc.
2) Your flask setup isn't optimal. Get 3 Seething Hallowed Life Flasks - I usually just go with Staunching on all three, but whatever you want is fine so long as they're Seething. Drop the mana flask, run clarity if needed. And speaking of Staunching, you don't seem to have any Staunching flasks. That's very dangerous; how are you removing bleed effects?.
3) Gem setup - drop IIR and replace with Pierce. You're effectively running a 4-link; your DPS will improve substantially with this swap. Also, you want to be at or near the pierce cap (100%) to take full advantage of Drillneck - you're likely at about 40% Pierce or so at present.
4) Once 1-3 above are fixed, then I'd worry about more DPS - frenzy charge nodes are helpful for clear speed, a Vaal Lightning Trap is nice, you'll want to run a Wither totem setup for bosses, grab Swift Killer once you're confident of Cruel Ascendancy, etc. With Swift Killer in place I'd probably use Ice Shot to apply curses, using Frenzy for boss fights. Ice Shot's slow is incredibly good on defense - if you manage to obtain a +1 curse amulet I'd dual curse temporal chains + enfeeble most likely, switching enfeeble out for vulnerability on easier content.

Edit:
Due to the state of your gear, you are pressed for gem slots so you won't immediately be able to add wither totem, vaal lightning trap, etc. At this point in the game, I would definitely not take up a gem slot in order to run Arctic Armor - you do benefit from AA' chilled ground and chill when hit, but since you're moving all the time the armor bonus is wasted (personally I might run AA once I had all of my other optional links in place and provided that I had excess mana, but only under these conditions).

Finally, since you're in hardcore I'd probably run chaos golem instead of flame golem.

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grimjack68 wrote:

I haven't verified this yet, but running the lab with buddies running energy shield, I suspect that our evasion dodges a lot of the damage. Traps that regularly get my guildies killed don't seem to do even a fraction of my health. The damage is so different I started just running through the traps and ignoring their damage.

Yeah, life regen as Serleth says is the key.

I kind of suck at traps - so I'm now running Stone Golem and equip a Shaper's Seed for 8.6% life regen. With this setup, traps are easy. I just take my time to find safe spots in trap gauntlets and the awesome life regen takes care of the rest. With all that regen I can save pots for when I do something really stupid :-)

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hankinsohl wrote:

3) Gem setup - drop IIR and replace with Pierce. You're effectively running a 4-link; your DPS will improve substantially with this swap. Also, you want to be at or near the pierce cap (100%) to take full advantage of Drillneck - you're likely at about 40% Pierce or so at present.

Don't forget to respec from pierce node after that, you'll get 3 essentially free skill point.
Edit: No, I'm wrong - it is correct only for Deadeye, i.e. Scion.

Hey guys,

Would like to improve my build a little bit since I don't care much for clearing speed. I'm able to keep the 7 frenzy charges on all the time but I like to take its time clearing a map and seeing what drops.

Passive tree:

Gear and Flasks:


My stats, defense:


Caustic Arrow with Fire Golem active:



With Caustic I have 77IIQ/213IIR, I used an IIQ gem since the C value is a lot higher than using a IIR gem.

Is there anything I can improve to accommodate a more layback map clearing speed speed and improve survivability a bit?

If you don't care much about damage, Duckling, you have a good portion of the Scion life wheel to still take.

You have a couple options: you can either drop damage on jewels to invest more in resistances, which would allow you to get more life on your helmet and amulet

and/or

You can pull the three projectile damage nodes from Ranger to head into the life.

But your stats seem fine, if all you're doing is clearing lower or mid level maps to farm and check everything out, I personally find 4.8k life is pretty good, especially given that you've completed up to Phase Acro.

Given that you won't care as much about speeding through things, which is usually where the three life flasks come in, you can also drop Soul Siphon and just replace a life flask for a mana flask if necessary for 60% reduced recovery maps. You should be comfortable in 40% reduced recovery maps if you push your Clarity level up to 16-18.

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Serleth wrote:

If you don't care much about damage, Duckling, you have a good portion of the Scion life wheel to still take.

You have a couple options: you can either drop damage on jewels to invest more in resistances, which would allow you to get more life on your helmet and amulet

and/or

You can pull the three projectile damage nodes from Ranger to head into the life.

But your stats seem fine, if all you're doing is clearing lower or mid level maps to farm and check everything out, I personally find 4.8k life is pretty good, especially given that you've completed up to Phase Acro.

Given that you won't care as much about speeding through things, which is usually where the three life flasks come in, you can also drop Soul Siphon and just replace a life flask for a mana flask if necessary for 60% reduced recovery maps. You should be comfortable in 40% reduced recovery maps if you push your Clarity level up to 16-18.

Thanks for the reply. Right now I'm clearing T14 maps, going to move to T15 though I do take my sweet time since a I can get one hit easily if I'm not careful. I don't have problems with Mana since I don't spam much and I try to keep distance and do the chaos damage do its work from afar. The quartz flask seemed an obvious choice for me since I went all in for acrobatics.

Since I'm moving to T15 and been struggling a bit with T14 I may go for the life nodes instead of the Ranger projectile damage nodes. All my jewels have already added life as well. I could also start from the Ranger tree but instead of choosing the projectile damage nodes I could go for the Life/Evasion nodes instead, what do you think?

Yeah once you've got those final Ascendancy points, that's actually exactly what I did. More evasion as well that way.

Heads up for T15s, this build CANNOT do Core. Flat out. Not unless you're willing to do some respec/gearing for that map.

It can do Abyss, but the boss is difficult to deathless in full MF gear. It's possible though.

Daresso's a nightmare. His spinning blade spells are murder.

I haven't done T15s since the changes to flasks so I'd be interested in your findings particularly for that fight with the Quartz flask and Phase Acro combined.

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Serleth wrote:

I haven't done T15s since the changes to flasks so I'd be interested in your findings particularly for that fight with the Quartz flask and Phase Acro combined.

I shall report on it once I get a fight with Daresso. As you've said though, I may have to do some changes to survive him, at least removing the IIQ jewel and one of the rings for something else.

A noobish question: why do we consider the Carcass Jack the best body armor? I see only two relevant bonuses on it: increased AoE radius and AoE damage. We don't seem to need them: two arrows give great AoE radius and another 12% of increased bonus is quite small. What am I missing?