3.4 toxic rain build

Been running a Toxic Rain build as a league starter this time around, it's been fantastic thus far. It handles really well while leveling too.

I've been looking into just how to optimize my own build while not going too heavily into being a glass cannon.

Thus far, these are a few things I've found to be helpful or noteworthy for this build:

It's very playable without uniques.. but as mentioned by others, it's much more potent with 3 uniques specifically. Those being Dendrobate, Lioneye's Glare and Ming's Heart. Here's a little reason into why, or at least how it appears to me.



As for other Uniques that could be useful, Silverbranch, Silverbough and Darkscorn can all be decent bows to use until you get a Lioneye. For rares, a +2/3 Bow gems can be okay an okay alternative for not having 5/6L Lioneye or a 5/6L Dendrobate. Ideally, you want the Dendrobate to be 5/6L over the Lioneye, because it comes with the additional link in Lesser Poison.

Now the Skill's links actually change slightly based on what you have for gear as well, which is actually kind of interesting.


Main links aside, I've been using these as supporting skills:



Passive Trees and Ascendancy Choices

So, at lvl 62 I switched to Darkscorn. My dps tripled, but I was killing slower in act 9. I went back to the Quill Rain and started killing fast again. It must have a mechanic better suited for Toxic Rain, though I'm not sure what that is . . .

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Zab_Foh wrote:

So, at lvl 62 I switched to Darkscorn. My dps tripled, but I was killing slower in act 9. I went back to the Quill Rain and started killing fast again. It must have a mechanic better suited for Toxic Rain, though I'm not sure what that is . . .

When u will swap for Lioneyes Glare at 66 lvl (if u will do this) ur dps will be balanced between flat dps and poison dps + u will never miss ur hits.

About ur question above. When u use Quill Rain, u have a lot of flowers and stack poison very quick and compensate ur lack of flat damage. When u swapped to Darkscorn, u lost a bunch of attack speed and have not so much flat damage to compensate it. So u felt bad when u changed Quill Rain.

Try to use PoB to see what gear is better for ur build.

Quill Rain is really a wombo combo and probably BiS for Toxic Rain outside of some crazy crafted bows. Most of Toxic Rains damage comes from the pods exploding, the actual initial damage is really pitiful and hard to land such that an enemy is hit by more than one. More over, the pods exploding are flat effects, not unlike Caustic Arrows ground degen--which means our bow dps does not matter much and that the lowered damage of Quill Rain is not hurting its damage (its a secondary source).

Quill Rain is letting you unload tons of spores, and because of the extra projectile speed, the arrows also land much faster after being launched. Anotehr perk is according to the wiki, the exploding spores can apply on hit effects like poison and bleed, which means you can get some great damage with poison chance (with enough poison chance, your effectively doubling your Toxic Rain dps).

The downside here is Virulence. For some reason GGG made it so the poison effect from pods does not trigger virulence, only the initial hit, which is a big dampener.

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faytte wrote:

Quill Rain is really a wombo combo and probably BiS for Toxic Rain outside of some crazy crafted bows. Most of Toxic Rains damage comes from the pods exploding, the actual initial damage is really pitiful and hard to land such that an enemy is hit by more than one. More over, the pods exploding are flat effects, not unlike Caustic Arrows ground degen--which means our bow dps does not matter much and that the lowered damage of Quill Rain is not hurting its damage (its a secondary source).

Quill Rain is letting you unload tons of spores, and because of the extra projectile speed, the arrows also land much faster after being launched. Anotehr perk is according to the wiki, the exploding spores can apply on hit effects like poison and bleed, which means you can get some great damage with poison chance (with enough poison chance, your effectively doubling your Toxic Rain dps).

The downside here is Virulence. For some reason GGG made it so the poison effect from pods does not trigger virulence, only the initial hit, which is a big dampener.

How about + 3 short bow with atsp mod, would it better than QR ?

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An4LPunishment wrote:

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shuruga2 wrote:

since I'll use snakebite and have many dex, Lioneyes Glare 100% hit may be useless.

Any idea ?

What is your reason for using snakebite? I think it's useless for this build since we have no frenzy charges.

When someone said that with Dendrobate we don't need conversion here is what got to my mind :

Dendrobate + sanebite + herald of agony = 100% chance to poison without taking any in the tree.

snakebite needs frenzy charge, frenzy charge gives a good buff for the build, so may be.

To get frenzy charge I can: cold spell (meh!), frenzy skill (totem work so may be), blood rage (good buff, but need physical dammage to keep up with degen)

I only have 60% convertion and I can put viscious projectile in my setup, I have room for herald of purity, go for bloodrage.

With the passive skill points I gain I can take frenzy charges and may be life leech. So I made a tree (quick and dirty), it look like this :

www.poeurl.com/b4mo


It looks good, all chaos/poison dammage available, near 170% to max life, AS, acrobatics, life leech, mana leech (2 points for no mana potion?), dex + accuracy (with this and snakebite I should be fine).


With all of this combined, what bow should I take :

- lioneye's glare still looks very good 1.7 AS, 330 pDPS. This goes very well with frenzy charges and blood rage

- rare bow with over 1.6 AS and 300 pDPS are already buyable, if I can get one with poison dammage It'll be great

- Reach of the concil, not sure about this one, 1.5 AS, 280 pDPS is big downgrade, but :
2 more arrows
=== 2 more hits & 2 more pods
=== 4 more hits & 2 more slow stacks
=== ~30% more damage & 4 more poisons stacks & 2 more slow stacks

each time I use my skill.

I'm not sure for now, but I like the last one.

toxic rain is a frickin fantastic skill. you can build it in so many different ways.

the DoT is good if you wanna base your dmg purely off that, with a quill rain and such.
the hit rate is great because it hits when you attack, and hits when the pods burst. this is essentially a mini chaos explosive arrow. its also good for poison because the hits will rack up so quickly.

im personally starting out with a quill rain DoT focused version. but i'd like to also try a dmg version with lioneye's and focusing on hit dmg, probably without poison. only thing there is the base damage is fairly low but the amount of times it hits and the overlapping aoe from the flowers may make it still pretty good

Really great stuff here. I'm learning a lot, thank you.

But, at the risk of sounding like a complete dweeb, is it safe to say that there are multiple build approaches to a Toxic Rain build?
1. DoT
2. initial damage
3. combo of 1 & 2

Quill Rain seems clearly the winner among uniques for #1. And it sounds like Darkscorn is good, but superseded by Lioneye's Glare, for #2.

I feel like a combo could be good, but harder for noobs like me to find an efficient balance.

In my humble ignorance DoT seems best for speed clearing, while intial damage seems best for bosses. Or, is barrage still superior?

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Zab_Foh wrote:

Really great stuff here. I'm learning a lot, thank you.

But, at the risk of sounding like a complete dweeb, is it safe to say that there are multiple build approaches to a Toxic Rain build?
1. DoT
2. initial damage
3. combo of 1 & 2

Quill Rain seems clearly the winner among uniques for #1. And it sounds like Darkscorn is good, but superseded by Lioneye's Glare, for #2.

I feel like a combo could be good, but harder for noobs like me to find an efficient balance.

In my humble ignorance DoT seems best for speed clearing, while intial damage seems best for bosses. Or, is barrage still superior?

i'd say you're mostly right.
i would disagree that the third way to build toxic rain is a combination of DoT and initial hit damage. i don't think that would play out well. but i'd say the third way to build toxic rain is poison based.

its hard to say what would be best. DoT i think is probably the best for clear, and maybe the easiest to gear for, but it has a hard cap to its damage, as the DoT only goes so high, and you'll only be able to attack so fast. so its DPS will be (potentially) greatly outscaled by #2 and #3.
its hard to determine at what point it'll be surpassed though.

the reason why i feel a combo wouldn't work out too well, is because of the duration of the pods. they're duration based and have a duration tag. as a DoT based build, i use increased duration because that vastly scales how many pods i can have sitting on a given single target, which drastically increases my damage.
but as an initial hit char i think you'd benefit most from less duration, allowing the pods to explode faster, generating more hits is less time.

its hard to say if barrage is superior for single target. probably would be for poison, but not for actual hit damage.

Thank you, xMustard, that definitely helps clear things up. My build is a little broken, I think. I need to get some orbs of regret.

Now, for quivers, I've been using Maloney's, but am also trying to decide between Drillneck and Hyrri's Demise. Any thoughts, anyone?