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

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manehi wrote:

Been spamming a hunter amulet in SSF - is it worth keeping +1 Strength instead of rolling on for Dex? I assume the level to Empower means it's not too much worse.

It doesn't work, the mod says "+1 to all strength skill gems" and empower is not a skill, it's a support. This is different from a faceted fossil bow mod which says "+1 to socketed strength gems" and doesn't specify skills or supports so it works for both.

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Viktranka wrote:

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manehi wrote:

Been spamming a hunter amulet in SSF - is it worth keeping +1 Strength instead of rolling on for Dex? I assume the level to Empower means it's not too much worse.

It doesn't work, the mod says "+1 to all strength skill gems" and empower is not a skill, it's a support. This is different from a faceted fossil bow mod which says "+1 to socketed strength gems" and doesn't specify skills or supports so it works for both.

Makes sense, thank you.

I've had a lot of fun with the build this league. It wasn't my league starter as I wanted to be able to do the new boss content and I know how poorly Caustic arrow scales for bossing and how good gear you need for it to not take ages.

I wanted to be able to farm haewark hamlet maps quickly for harvest so I figured raider with permanent onslaught would be awesome.

Build worked out way better than I expected and mostly went off of this guide to start with. I did however make a few changes which does cost a lot but makes the build feel infinitely better even if it probably isn't hardcore friendly (it probably still is you just go for less damage nodes).

Caustic arrow without arrow nova is kind of annoying for clearing maps once you see how much coverage you get with arrow nova. Issue with arrow nova is that you dumpster your single target DPS so you can fix that with either gem swapping or having a weapon swap setup with single target.

You can't really make the swap to arrow nova for red maps until you get enough DoT multiplier mods on gear, but once you do oh boy does it speed up. Rituals are basically entirely perma covered in CA making them very low maintenance to clear. for open maps you basically kill the entire screen per cast and even very juiced tier 16 maps can be cleared in a minute or 2.

Scaling Toxic Rain in the weapon swap is a bit more difficult, but if you do it with wicked pall on cluster jewels you can still somewhat scale both CA and TR at the same time without losing too much. Mana issues are solved with -9 mana cost on both rings and then mana regen craft on neck/ring and then I also take 2x Eldritch Inspiration on medium cluster jewels.

I'm still not done min/maxing as the build is a ton of fun to play once you solve the single target issue. The last 3 Mavens I've done has been deathless and I haven't died to uber elder at all in 4+ kills, ironically the boss that gives me the most trouble is the Eradiator.

I'm amazed at how tanky the build feels with Kintsugi+wind dancer and capped evasion, didn't know an evasion based character could feel this good. Currently testing out a double avoid rare chest instead of the kintsugi but I'm not sure which one I prefer, it does feel pretty good to have 75% dodge and 71% spell dodge passively before any conditional effects though (also using Grace with a watcher's eye giving +10 attack dodge and 15% movement speed).

Anyways just wanted to share my experience with the build, it's been a blast and the guide was a very good reference and had a lot of good inspiration. The only thing I feel you might want to expand on or update a bit is the parts relating to the onslaught ascendancy changes for Raider, it seems like a lot of the things that are recommended are raider pre ascendancy changes.

Some highlights:

I got incredibly lucky with the amulet and hit T1 life + dexterity skill gems in 80 or so aberrant fossils. Slammed T1 chaos damage multi on the first chaos slam so I feel a bit dirty. The reduced requirement mod was a yolo influence slam for malevolence mana reservation, but ended up being kind of useful in meeting the stat requirements for Dread banner and Wither.



Edit: As a sidenote I'd be curious in knowing how to drop grace and retaining evasion cap without having jade flask up. because of the vulnerability to spell damage I'm probably going to swap out stibnite/jade for topaz/sapphire flasks to have the reduced lightning and cold damage taken and have the full ruby/sapphire/topaz setup. Dropping grace would open up using flesh and stone and skitterbots which I like the idea of.

I wanted to thank the author once again for thq smoothest character ever. I struggled quite a bit starting this league, every build I tried just didn't feel "right". Then I just decided to roll CA raider again. Oh, boy was it a right decision. I am nowhere near end-game set-up. My tooltip sits at ~600k rn (without charges) and my tree is a mess. Currently trying to finish an ok-ish amulet (+1 chaos/chaos multi/t1 life) but harvest doesn't want to give me non-chaos to chaos. :/

Things worth to mention:
1) Once I got to t14/16 I started dying like every map so I swapped from Cherubin to Kintsugi (damn, its expensive) and it helped a lot.
2) I just finished my first ever Deathless Sirus. I was worried I didn't have enough dps but oh, boy was it smooth. I always hated that fight and I guess this build cured my fears. Now I will try to do my 10 boss fights and push for maven while finishing the gear if I get what I need. Worth to mention I only ever killed sirus like 6 times so it is a big step for me in any league I play.
3) Immortal call sucks and I don't know how ppl use it. Kappa

And If I can ask a question, what do you guys think about that +1 support gems implicit bows? Is it worth to invest into one? As of now the base is 18 ex alone so monkaS but I just wanna ask if I ever drop some cash. xD

Thanks again. : )

The guide mentioned 2-4 free gem slots with the setup, yet when I do the math the gems occupy exactly 24 slots. Where do the free slots come from?

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And If I can ask a question, what do you guys think about that +1 support gems implicit bows? Is it worth to invest into one? As of now the base is 18 ex alone so monkaS but I just wanna ask if I ever drop some cash. xD

As a general rule of thumb +1 gem level is usually considered a 10% improvement to base damage on skill/spell for abilities that have flat damage.

In this case you'd have to look at what level you're aiming for to see what difference it would make. For example upgrading CA from 29 to 30 is a roughly 12.5% improvement, where as upgrading from 30 to 31 is like a 6% improvement.

The scaling on skills past level 30 was nerfed a few leagues ago so usually there are better ways of scaling skills past level 30. That said when +1 skills are available and don't conflict with any other more multipliers then usually it's still good to pick them up.

In the case of picking up a +1 as an implicit then you don't actually lose anything because CA generally doesn't benefit from any bow implicits anyway (I haven't actually looked through the synthesis implicits for other potential good ones though). That said you have to ask yourself if the price tag is worth it for a 5-6% more modifier.

In some cases picking up +gem levels allow you to replace that mod on other pieces of gear, however you don't conflict with that many great mods on the amulet so +2 on the amulet is still a good pickup and is also fairly consistent to craft without too much investment.

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The guide mentioned 2-4 free gem slots with the setup, yet when I do the math the gems occupy exactly 24 slots. Where do the free slots come from?

Not OP but:
You don't use all the gems listed 1:1, for example he describes not using grace and malevolence at the same time, but that malevolence will replace grace at a later point.

* 4 link wither totem
* 4 sockets for either malevolence or Grace, banner + generosity, and clarity
* 4 link for your curse on hit setup
* At that point you put your 2 link cwdt in your chest and you have 3-4 gem slots left for whatever utility you want whether that be flamedash/faster casting, blink arrow/faster projectiles/second wind or whichever.

personally I'm using a 4-5link for blink arrow which feels very good.

I am wondering if it's worth using dread banner with generosity (afaik it is used for reducing enemy accuracy, right?).

I have about 98% chance to avoid any physical and ranged attacks (combined evade and dodge, not counting avatar of the veil) from monsters lvl 84 without jade flask so I replaced it with bottled faith.

So I wonder if dread banner will push my 98% avoidance further through reducing enemy accuracy.

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Posid wrote:

In the case of picking up a +1 as an implicit then you don't actually lose anything because CA generally doesn't benefit from any bow implicits anyway (I haven't actually looked through the synthesis implicits for other potential good ones though).

There's another synthesis implicit that is increased chaos damage, according to poedb it can go up to 40% but I don't know if that would beat +1 support.

Well it beats it in price last time I checked.

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I am wondering if it's worth using dread banner with generosity (afaik it is used for reducing enemy accuracy, right?).

I have about 98% chance to avoid any physical and ranged attacks (combined evade and dodge, not counting avatar of the veil) from monsters lvl 84 without jade flask so I replaced it with bottled faith.

So I wonder if dread banner will push my 98% avoidance further through reducing enemy accuracy.

You can't combine your evasion and dodge, it's 2 different mechanics and is rolled for separately. Taking that into account, it's good to make sure that you are evasion capped regardless of how much dodge you have. It's also worth noting how entropy for evasion works so that you don't think 95% evasion and 75% dodge means monsters only have 1.25% chance to hit you (it's a bit more deterministic than that, but the math is complicated but it means that for every x attack, 1 of them will definitely go through to your dodge check. Dodge is however not entropy based and is pure chance).

Evasion is rolled for before dodge. So the more attacks you evade, the less attacks go through to roll against your dodge.

Evasion cap is 95% and is pretty hard to reach without a large investment without dread banner/generosity combo when you have wind dancer (Try disabling dread banner in PoE and you can see what difference it does to your evasion percentage). a lvl 84 mob has 536 and the dreadbanner/generosity effectively lowers this to 369 according to wiki numbers. So for example I'm at 16k evasion if I have not taken damage recently (winddancer), if I disable dreadbanner I drop down to 82% evade chance instead of 95, which is of course a massive change, if I'm in a 50% increased monster accuracy map, my evade chance drops to 68%.

The point at which you can remove dreadbanner/generosity looks to be at around 25400 evasion mark assuming level 84 mobs and around 42k evasion if you want to have 95% evasion in maps with 50% increased mob accuracy. This is based on my character that has the +3% evade node survivalist.

Anyways all of that is just to say that the 10% mana reservation is extremely well spent and is about 75% as effective as blinding the enemies at less than half the reservation cost, but still gives you the option of applying blind. The range of dreadbanner is also almost twice that of flesh and stone which helps apply the accuracy debuff to ranged mobs as well.

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There's another synthesis implicit that is increased chaos damage, according to poedb it can go up to 40% but I don't know if that would beat +1 support.

On my character 40% increased chaos damage is about 4% more damage where as +1 to level of socketed support gems is about 6% more damage (CA from 30 to 31), so they're pretty comparable and could be a good budget option if there is a large price difference. There's actually an ilvl 82 thicket bow up right now with 31% increased chaos damage and +1 to maximum frenzy charges for 5 chaos which would easily be better than +1 to level of socketed support gems assuming CA is already level 30.