[3.16][HC][ON BREAK] Caustic Arrow Raider, DoT Focused | Tanky | 6k+ Health | All Content | In-depth

One of the smoother league starters I have played. The lack of required uniques and genera gearing philosophy of piling up rares with life and resists is ideal for league starting. Still need to craft my +1/+2 bow but the build already feels smooth and is solid for the league mechanic. Thanks for a great build and guide OP.

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DankawSL wrote:

Conclusion - with how the league mechanic plays out, you need stupid amounts of damage and range or simply play totems.

There's probably a reason why Necromancers are the most popular ascendancy at the moment, having an army of minions is even better than a handful of totems.

I thought i would clear up some stuff from my previous post, about Blight league:


Anyway, i'm back at mapping. Currently skipping blight until i get some damage and uber lab. Setting up atlas in order to farm Imperial Legacy once again, Desert is my only T3 currently. Didn't get many cards yet tho. Well, there's not much else to say.

However i did notice quite big density increase everywhere. Maps, incursions, delve. Feels like everything got ~50% monsters pack size to it. Anyone else feels the same?

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Viktranka wrote:

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DankawSL wrote:

Conclusion - with how the league mechanic plays out, you need stupid amounts of damage and range or simply play totems.

There's probably a reason why Necromancers are the most popular ascendancy at the moment, having an army of minions is even better than a handful of totems.

The reason is simpler. Necromancer is the newest archetype and received ridiculous buffs, plus it was quite obvious it's going to mesh well with blight encounters. Based on previous experiences with how powerful archetypes are and you can't really fail with them... yeah.

Totems should be fine too, having to place it few times every ~8 seconds is nothing compared to actively damaging. There's so much stuff you can do during that time period.

What realy helps are the minion towers - one upgraded easily protects almost 2 lanes and gives you time. imo the key for non minion builds.

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rade0n wrote:

What realy helps are the minion towers - one upgraded easily protects almost 2 lanes and gives you time. imo the key for non minion builds.

I've finally started running blight again and done some experiments in lower tier maps to try some towers out:

Shock tower itself quite decent and i liked a lot since the beginning. They become real powerhouse with the last upgrade tho. Arc tower is capable of clearing one whole lane in a single cast and has big range. Lightning storm one is great at chokepoints and for AoE in general. Both are my go-to towers atm.

Fire towers except Meteor (it's good) are just awful.

Chilling towers... i used them a lot and they're good, but i'm not sure if they're worth investing into. Icicle upgrade felt like a massive downgrade. Glacial cage seems useful in general but it wasn't that useful to me yet. Whole branch simply feels worse than...

Seismic towers (physical). The stunning effect with empowering tower shoots quickly enough to cripple enemies in large AoE. I didn't experiment much with their last abilities yet since at T3 they're great.

Minion towers. Used a lot in the past but honestly their huge leash range just reduces their usefulness. You could use them to capture certain type of enemies (like bosses!) but instead they'll just charge at mobs from huge range. Didn't experiment with final upgrades yet.

I always try to have at least one empowering tower at key locations. They seem to make towers cast more frequently. As for T4 upgrades, the empowering one (buffs you) increases speed so... only the weakening one looks decent.


I've tried to do two blighted maps and mostly did fine but didn't finish twice. Once portal spawning right near pump and zombies are stupid to block the mobs. Second time i didn't notice the boss and let him attack pump, deals 15 health out of 20. Overall it went fine but not extremely well. Bosses are mostly the problem with their high health. Blocking them with Wither totem seems to do the trick, but might not be enough at higher tier maps. Keep looking at minimap, they have special golden "suns" rather than small red dots like other monsters.

Overall with enough damage the mechanic seems really fun. I'm still heavily against throwing one shot mechanics into the mess that are blighted maps. That's all from me.

Any thoughts on anointment for amulets past leveling.

Hi, first of all thanks for the guides and I currently running Caustic Arrow build with Pathfinder. I refer to few guides regarding this build to compare the differences, and i am struggled on which passive tree i should follow, so i would like to ask which damage nodes are better in term of scaling the damage of Caustic Arrow.

For example, instead of choose Master Fetcher and King of the Hill nodes for increase Damage Over Time with Bow Skills , why you choose nodes up to Atrophy node for increase Chaos Damage, increase Non-Ailment Chaos Damage over Time Multiplier and increase Damage over Time?

Is those skill mentioned have different in scaling and calculating the damage of Caustic Arrow?

In case you're wondering what happened to my character yet again, my life was claimed by short lag in a very inappropriate moment during the mastermind fight. Noticing the lag spike i immediately logged out, but it seems it wasn't quick enough to prevent death. Also imagine my disappointment when i found out i didn't activate the replay function in OBS...

I'll recover yet again, however farming Imperial Legacy is gonna be harder now due to me completing all T3s already.

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bctheredninja wrote:

Any thoughts on anointment for amulets past leveling.

Already posted earlier, but it's not inside the actual guide so here you go:

List of all noteworthy notables:

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jackchoong wrote:

Hi, first of all thanks for the guides and I currently running Caustic Arrow build with Pathfinder. I refer to few guides regarding this build to compare the differences, and i am struggled on which passive tree i should follow, so i would like to ask which damage nodes are better in term of scaling the damage of Caustic Arrow.

For example, instead of choose Master Fetcher and King of the Hill nodes for increase Damage Over Time with Bow Skills , why you choose nodes up to Atrophy node for increase Chaos Damage, increase Non-Ailment Chaos Damage over Time Multiplier and increase Damage over Time?

Is those skill mentioned have different in scaling and calculating the damage of Caustic Arrow?

They're designed for different type of build. Most of their stats don't apply to the skill's damage output. Compared to chaos/dot related nodes, their power is much smaller.

You also have to travel across the passive tree to pick up life, so instead of picking the closest ones you pick up the strongest.

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jackchoong wrote:

i am struggled on which passive tree i should follow, so i would like to ask which damage nodes are better in term of scaling the damage of Caustic Arrow.

Increased damage is additive. Multiplier is multiplicative, and should win long term.

Let's say your skill does 100 damage and you take 3 nodes "10% increased damage". Now your skill does 130 damage.

Now if you take instead 3 nodes that give "10% multiplier" you get 100 * 1.1^3 = 133.1 damage. So in the long run, these nodes stack more.

They're also harder to find, there's a ton of "increased" damage (with bows, with chaos skills, with projectile skills etc. etc.) and they will get "diminishing returns" (i.e. the more you have of them, the less you gain of each next added to the pile). While multiplier you always get the same value each time you add another. The only sources of multiplier I know are:
- talent tree
- malevolence watcher's eye
- elder base gloves and neck
- bow mod IF you don't go for vicious projectile
- yellow jewels but only up to 4%
Maybe I forgot something but there aren't endless amounts of it.

Best idea is to import your char into POB and experiment there, remember to compare the "DOT dps" part.

I tested it briefly with my old character and my results were:
King of the Hill worth 11.6k dot dps
Master Fletcher worth 8.7k
Deadly Draw 21.8k
Avatar of the Hunt 17.4k
Fury Bolts 14.5k
Dirty Techniques 23.7k
Toxic Strikes 21.8k
Atrophy 37.8k
Growth and Decay 37.4k
Method to the Madness 34.2k
Hunter's Gambit 40.2k
Corruption 46.6k (good annoint option for dps!)

I also dislike the fact they made Master Fletcher / King of the Hill wheel cost 9 points investment since Legion. :( And even then, the 5-point "semi wheel" of Master Fletcher is 37.8k for me which is 1 chaos multi node without adding the preceding pathing nodes to it, while the whole Atrophy semi-wheel clocks at 84.2k.

Test with your own character because it's very gear dependent what's best for you, but from the example above you can see the multiplier nodes should be clear winners by a large margin.

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DankawSL wrote:

They're designed for different type of build. Most of their stats don't apply to the skill's damage output. Compared to chaos/dot related nodes, their power is much smaller.

You also have to travel across the passive tree to pick up life, so instead of picking the closest ones you pick up the strongest.

I see, that's true that we can get some useful defensive nodes along the way while getting chaos/dot related nodes.

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Viktranka wrote:

Test with your own character because it's very gear dependent what's best for you, but from the example above you can see the multiplier nodes should be clear winners by a large margin.

Thank you for detail explanations and data, now I am understand more on the damage calculation. I will try use the POB to experiment more.