[3.11] Bowcaster Fireball Deadeye - Now for staves!

3.11 Update: Quite a few changes, but the build is even stronger now than before. I am updating the thread with my progress as I work on the build, and will eventually (hopefully!) come back and update the build guide too. The build is fundamentally the same concept as before, but now staff based rather than bow.

3.8 Update: No changes to skill tree. Although the build was originally designed for clearing Legion monoliths, it also excels at clearing blighted maps. With good gear it can easily defend a T15 map even without any tower defenses. There are several options for anointing amulets. I opted for Divine Judgement which gives additional elemental damage and penetration, yielding a bit over 5% more damage.

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This is my first build I am sharing here, so please let me know if you want it fleshed out in any specific ways.

The build itself is motivated by the 3.7 Legions mechanics and is designed to full clear monoliths in any tier map. It can also easily kill bosses in the Legion arena if you take advantage of fireball's overlapping aoe from explosions and the close proximity of boss spawns to the arena walls.

As an idea of the damage this build delivers, I had over 600k tooltip in hideout and 1.7 million shaper dps according to PoB with just the gear I was able to acquire in first week of league. After a month of fine tuning, I now have 875k in hideout and 3.8 million shaper dps with my current setup. This is with GMP socketed. You can swap to slower projectiles if you want even higher damage for single target.

At its core, the build utilizes a metacrafted bow with +gem levels and an empower 4 to scale the damage from fireball up to level 28. It combines this with gear that provides additional chains for synergy with the deadeye ascendancy giving us more damage and fantastic offscreen clearing ability. You can get chain from Snakepit (mandatory for this build) and optionally Gloomfang and/or a corrupted quiver. I feel a good rare amulet is better than Gloomfang once you have a corrupted quiver. 3 chains is plenty, not much benefit from going to 4.

To further boost damage on bosses, we can use Orb of Storms + Combustion + Curse on Hit + (Projectile Weakness or Elemental Weakness). Orb of Storms only has lightning base damage, so you'll need to get an additional source of fire damage added to it for example with a crafted ring or on abyssal jewel in order to proc ignite. I currently have this socketed in my gloves, but you could potentially try moving it to a 5-link in your chest and support it with Power Charge on Crit for an additional boost.

Mind over Matter and Eldritch Battery (provided by Devouring Diadem) are used to sustain the high cast cost and also give enough EHP for endgame. Devouring Diadem also helps us run a large set of auras (Herald of Ash, Zealotry, Discipline, Purity of Ice) with its reductions to mana reservation, in addition to saving us passive nodes by not pathing to EB. So while it is not mandatory, I highly recommend this helm. If you can get a Watcher's Eye with Precision critical strike multiplier that is also a good aura to run since it reserves very little mana if you keep it at a low gem level.

Here is my current PoB, with my Elegant Hubris implemented as an additional set of mods on my Watcher's Eye. I have skipped the nodes affected by the Elegant Hubris (slotted to right of Shadow) in this PoB to get an accurate result. This is just provided as an example of how far you can push this build.



I have also created a PoB without the timeless jewel but otherwise similar gear as a more general guide and illustration of the passive tree. You should refer to this one as a starting point since it includes the passive nodes you'll want to pick up around Shadow.



And below you can see example gear. Note you can get very good performance out of this build even without putting in the amount of time and currency that I have at this point. This was my league starter and I gradually worked up to this point swapping out gear along the way. Another option would be a Carcass Jack instead of the rare chest. That would give more aoe to the explosions although at a loss of some dps.



NOTE!!! It is no longer possible to craft spell bows due to changes in fossil crafting. If you are playing in standard, you still have the option to buy a legacy bow. However, in Harvest league we can easily craft a +2/+3 staff (Eclipse base is best) by first fracturing +2 all spell levels, and then spamming until you hit +3 fire spells. Cost should be around 15 ex.

Video of full T14 Shaped Shore with Breach Esh encounter and Monolith
https://youtu.be/sUV1IulTv-U

Minotaur ~2 second kill (could be 1 second if I didn't try to dodge)
https://gfycat.com/chillyflickeringamericantoad

Hydra kill (single target damage without overlapping fireball explosions)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCzqHtpjPdM

Phoenix kill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uxHd0WytnE

Shaper with Slower Projectiles swap, could be faster with better flask use and having Tailwind ramped up in advance
https://gfycat.com/finishedmeatycurassow

If there is more interest in the build I can try to expand on other gear options, passive tree routing, etc...

I personally enjoy the play style of this build as it is very fast, active and feels a bit like playing an old arcade topdown shooter.

I would love to see videos

I've been wanting to make a vaal fireball build for the longest time similar to the one windz ran as trickster last league. I'd love to see a video of it in action so that I and others will have a better idea oh how the build performs. Hopefully you'd be able to upload a high tier mapping video

I've updated the the original post with a Shaped Shore video. First time doing a capture from PoE. Not sure why it cropped off the bottom few pixels but should give an idea for how the build plays.

Jezus this build surprised me! Looks sexy! You have some insane items in there, but a million damage with proper clear speed seems extremely within reach on a decent budget.

Great job!

Yes, I was already doing close to a million dps and clearing well with just basic uniques before I started seeking out specialty gear. For example, I was using Emberwake until I found a good rare ring to take its place. I wanted to see how far I could push the build before posting, and also keep it on the downlow so I wouldn't have too much competition trading for items.

Damn dude this is sick! How does it do on budget gear? Also think you could slot a mirage archer in there (maybe the chest)? Always wanted to try a bow build with it

How do you craft your bow ?

Nice start! May I recommend a leveling section (order of skills) and also an overview of the leveling process as a whole?

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kpham1991 wrote:

How do you craft your bow ?

If you are on a budget just alt-regal a level 50 porcupine six-link until you hit +1 socketed gems and craft from there. It doesn't take too many tries. You can craft fire damage as extra chaos and get similar performance as 20% more spell damage. To get the 20% more damage modifer you need to fossil spam with aetherics. Thankfully aetherics are cheap this league. Once you hit +1 socketed gems and more spell damage you either try to annul the bad mods or craft prefixes cannot be changed and scour, then proceed to multimodding.