Scourge Arrow

I started a Ranger/Pathfinder Caustic Arrow/Toxic Rain build this league. I'm not very good at PoE so I used Mathilification's stater build guide. I've tried out Scourge Arrow as my main skill every few levels, because that's actually the skill I wanted to play with this league.

But I hate it.

On paper, I feel like I love this skill. Aesthetically, I really enjoy it. But in game, it feels so weak and cumbersome to use.

The idea of channeling the skill did not bother me at first, but the actual arrow fired is incredibly weak regardless of how long you channel. And the skill has no minimum spore count -- which means you can channel and release really quickly to fire an arrow, but not even a single spore will be produced in the arrow's path. Add in that you have to be stationary to channel and Scourge Arrow becomes very high risk low reward to use. The channel makes the skill far too inconsistent and dangerous to use in its current state.

In regards to the spores; if I can get a full line of spores to shoot thorns, and a majority of those thorns hit an enemy, the spore damage doesn't feel too terrible. But because the thorns are shot in a nova-like/nova-lite spread, it's difficult to get multiple hits on anything even with a good channel. Supporting skill gems help alleviate this to varying degrees, but the inconsistency of the spores makes for a frustrating time trying to continuously produce as many spores/thorns as possible.

I feel like Scourge Arrow just needs improvements all around; There doesn't seem to be anything Scourge Arrow does that Toxic Rain doesn't do better. Toxic Rain hits multiple times, slows, and it's explosions are area affects and not reliant on small projectiles, you don't have to channel it, and the entirety of the skill benefits from support gems.

Some ideas I had for improving the skill:

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- Regardless of time channeled, Scourge Arrow will always produce at least 1 spore pod
- Every stage channeled allows the arrow to hit enemies 1-5 additional times
- The arrow can now be affected by support gems
- Thorns released by spores now ricochet off of walls
- Every stage channeled increases your Evasion/Chance to Dodge while channeling
- Enemies killed by thorns produce another spore pod on death
- Spores are spawned around you while Scourge Arrow is channeled
- Spores slow enemies (like Toxic Rain does)
- Scourge Arrow also increases the duration of ailments by x% per stage channeled
- Scourge Arrow has a chance to inflict Poison
- Scourge Arrow has a chance to inflict Wither
- Increased Arrow/Thorns damage

I'm not suggesting all these changes be made, they're just examples. Some I'm sure are more insanely overpowered than others, and I'm sure better PoE players can find ways to really exploit some/any of these changes. Maybe the skill is already stupidly good and my inexperience is rearing it's head with this feedback.

But I just felt let down with the skill and would love to see it improved.

My character is Ranger Pathfinder and I am level 86 going to level 87. I am running Herald of Agony and Purity. I have to run Toxic Rain for the slow sometimes, but specifically for maps with rooms/tight corners. Without Toxic Rain, Scourage Arrow becomes very risky to play with indoors. The character name is FantasyScourage.

I have built my character to focus on attack speed, physical damage and chaos damage, with poison support due to the ascendancy that spreads poison to nearby enemies.

Summary

The skill can be built in several different ways and it has potential of being very strong. The biggest problem of this skill comes in several fold:

1- The skill not auto releasing at 5 charges.
2- The size of the arrow making internal maps or maps with obstacles a very huge problem coupled with 3-
3- The spores are placed at a set distance, meaning that if the arrow hits a wall or door, or does not have enough space, the spores simply won't spawn or won't spawn fully.
4- It feels that single target damage is underwhelming even on a 5 charge. This might be intended as toxic rain mostly takes care of the single target issues nicely.

In my experience, 2 and 3 are the biggest problems that plague this skill. I don't think the lack of damage is an issue while charging.


The Good

So far, the skill is overall pleasing to play, and very strong with the level of investment put in. The maximum I have run so far is t9 maps, and the clear is pretty strong on a 5l Dendrobate. Due to my attack speed, coupled with frenzy and onslaught, I have a channel time of 0.14-0.16, so I am able to have a fully 5 charged shot in under a second. I have not had time to fully explore the skill, but it seems to me there are multiple ways to make this skill work.


I will update this post as I go. This is my first feedback for a skill, so let me know if some details need to be better explained.

My Main Character for this league is a Scourge Arrow Pathfinder.

I play with both herald of purity and herald of agony.

I obviously play with a lot of attack speed as well as physical,chaos and damage over time for a poison build.

The only problem i had with caustic arrow is the fact that it's really weak in areas where you have a lot of doors or small gaps.You either have to blink arrow behind or play really risky.

Other than that i've been enjoying a lot Scourge arrow and i play it in 2 different ways but with the same gem support setup, i won't into detail i will talk about it in a build if i ever want to make one.

Keep in mind that i have A LOT of attack speed (playing with a Lioneye's Glare so far)

- To clear packs :
I usually try to charge at stage 5 from a distance when i can and if i can't i spam the spell to get a Stage 1 attack (stage 1 means 1 pod) and the spread of poison thx to pathfinder just kills everything yellow included.

- To kill a boss with a lot of adds :
Same as clearing packs.

- To kill a boss with no adds (or a phase that doesn't have adds):
If i have the time to charge the attack or i can face tank i try to go for stage 5 attacks as much as i can.
If i have to be mobile i do stage 1 attacks which relies way more on poison damage rather than spike damage like with stage 5 attacks. It takes a bit more time for damage to kick in but it's safer and the damage is still very good (i'm not further than T11 maps yet but it does the job really well). When i have all flasks up i have enough attack speed where i can spam attack and still get a stage 1 caustic arrow. If i want to go faster (agains't a boss) i use my vaal haste.

I think an auto trigger(and restart charging right away) at stage 5 of charge would be a huge improvement to the skill and that's the only thing it really needs i think. It's still possible to deal with small gaps but it takes a bit of time to adapt.

First of all - I love the skill.

The points that make it a little frustrating are, as Fantasykiller4 has put:

2- The size of the arrow making internal maps or maps with obstacles a very huge problem coupled with 3-
3- The spores are placed at a set distance, meaning that if the arrow hits a wall or door, or does not have enough space, the spores simply won't spawn or won't spawn fully.

I personally don't find his points 1 or 4 really detrimental - the skill not auto releasing adds a certain level of versatility - you choose between firing efficiently at 5 stacks (which hasn't been a problem (for me in any case)) or aiming and firing when you want to (boss fight starts for example; fully charging before activating to get an initial volley off). In terms of killing bosses, it also doesn't seem too bad.

The only thing that really bugs me, is that there isn't a great deal of clarity about what affects the skill. For example, Reddit seems to suggest that all arrows - not just the initial arrow, but the thorn arrows too - pierce.

However if you add a Gloomfang amulet to your build, your tooltip reflects the +1 chain, even though if every projectile is a piercing projectile, this logically can't function.

Personally I was looking forward to a Rigwald's Quills + Gloomfang bonanza to see if it worked.

I'm level 84 - Pathfinder but my main bit of feedback shouldn't be too reliant on character information.

Tried it with a Trickster for my league starting and the skill is really not good the state it is . He can't be end game viable .

I mainly agree with all other comment and like to share my guess too :

-The skil need to do something while chanelling !
Like a a barrage of projectile targetting a single enemy .

-Casting poison nova around the char that blind them.

-Make 2 spore clone that taunt and protect you .

Or any mixte from my suggestion.

Keep up the good work, cheer !

When I first saw this skill being released I was thinking. So this is just a much worse tornado shot. Granted tornado shot is pretty good but this? You have to charge the attack which is always dreadful not matter how you put it because many bosses just don't give you the luxery of staying in the same spot quiet for enough time to charge the attack. Then after the shot goes it creates the pods which will then take extra time until they explode. It would have been a good skill if multiple shots created additional arrows that would in turn create additional pods but it just added to the number of arrows from the pod, lol.

So of course I ignored it, it was very obvious right from the very begining that the skill was absolute garbage.

Then you came with the idea that multiple shots no longer applied to the pods but something on the way you worded things made me unsure on whether this was going to be good so I decided. I'll make a new character and try it out to see what happens.

Indeed I was supremely disapointed to see that the extra projectiles don't create extra pods, they remain at 5.

Perhaps GGG didn't understood the fundamental problem of the issue here so I thought, let's go to the forum and give them the feedback that they will probably ignore about this skill.

First off, comparing to a skill that does a similar thing, tornado shot, we see that tornado shot is plain better. Why is it? Because it's an instant fire skill, not a charged one and because the more projectiles the more damage you will do. After all each pod cannot shotgun, much like each individual tornado shot projectile can't. But each extra projectictile can hit at least once so if I can fire 9 shots, I can potentially hit an enemy 10 times with tornado shot (one for the original arrow strike), with the pod I can potentially hit the same target 6 times (one for the original projectiles). So we see that we land less hits and have a HUGE drawback (I cannot stress enough of how big of a drawback this is!!!!!!!) which is the charging up.

It's possible to think that firing 9 projectiles assuming a reach of the concil + extra proj on the quiver + 1 from deadeye +4 from GMP each creating 5 pods would be overpowered. Quite frankly I think it would bear testing and comparison to other builds that also deal a lot of damage though.

However here is the bottom line. You got skills that literaly hit millions of DPS, one such example would be elemental hit. You have skills that get insane multipliers from charging the attack like flame blast (we're talking about 1100% MORE damage, this is no joke) because you have to stay stationary and because such skills massively slow your clear speed.

So why can't scourge arrow actually be treated like a first class skill and must be put into the garbage bin right from the very moment it was created?

GGG, if you value any feedback, make each arrow create it's own pods up to 5 (6 with the lab enchatment). Yes let players have 54 pods exploding for a possible 54 hits. They are slowing their clear speed, they have to be vunerable to the attacks of enemies and as it was proven, there are plenty of skills that already do more and will always do more damage than scourge arrow will do. There are skill that gain massive buffs from charging which is the opposite of scourge arrow.

With the fieedback given, the scourge arrow character will be shelved until the skill is given the buff it needs (as it's worthless to even play it) and I'll go back to my main which farms everything easily and eforthlessly while having good clear speed. Gotta love the meta builds.

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1- The skill not auto releasing at 5 charges.
2- The size of the arrow making internal maps or maps with obstacles a very huge problem coupled with 3-
3- The spores are placed at a set distance, meaning that if the arrow hits a wall or door, or does not have enough space, the spores simply won't spawn or won't spawn fully.
4- It feels that single target damage is underwhelming even on a 5 charge. This might be intended as toxic rain mostly takes care of the single target issues nicely.

Those points are most valid for me.

The obstacles are worst case thing, especialy doors. Maybe add some function that auto-aim the arrow thru the doors when aiming behind them.
The second solution is to give smaller hitboxes to doors/obstacles when projectiles fly near them.

I am playing Deadeye with load of on-hit damage, additionaly my attack speed is 0,09sec per charge (around 0,07sec with tailwind stacked). With such charging speed I dont feel the problem of "standing still and waiting for charge". My bigger problem with such speed is the auto-realsing feature that is needed for such skills.
I feel like I loose a lot of DPS only because in heat of battle there is no time of thinking about holding the button for 0,1 sec longer to have optimal DPS. Auto-release on holding mouse button would be perfect. It could be implemented in game settings as a optional choice for players.

The skill damage on the other hand feels good.

The new change to additional projectiles didn't add anything to the skill at all in my case.
Since neither the thorns or the main arrow can shotgun, additional projectiles on the skill sems like a waste of space. The skill alone on 5 charges got enough AOE. Adding GMP to it give you small boost of AOE where you loose support gem slot for potential 40% MORE DMG, plus you get your dmg debuffed by additional 25% more dmg.
The only thing that would make GMP work well with the skill is adding more spore pods.

The Quality Bonus sems weak to for such limited skill. Faster charging speed or just attack speed would be much more welcome.

If you are not willing to create auto-release feature, I would recommend on creating "optimal charge" for such skills.

By optimal I mean, dividing charges to two groups - strong and weak ones.
The basic MAX 5 charges are optimal-strong ones. After that if player hold the charge for longer, he will get weak ones (also up to 5). The weak ones will give more spore pods(or not) and increase damage with lesser values than the strong ones. This should give back some of the lost DPS when you cannot optimaly control the skill.

I think the damage is ok, at least on path of building, it shows huge numbers (assuming all pods hit the target, which i think they do because each pod fires 8 arrows).

The pods spawn too close to you, therefore, if the enemy is far, he won't get hit by many, imo, the pods should always spawn closer to the enemies instead of a fixed distance, if that could be done automatically and if enemies are nearby, it could prioritize the enemies closest to where the mouse was pointing... again, if that's doable

Also, the arrow disappearing when hitting walls or obstacles is too broken, it simply vanishes, 0 damage after channeling, doesnt seem fair... plus, the arrow hitbox is so big when detecting walls, it's nearly impossible to shot it through a door.
Imo it should only vanish when hitting special obstacles (like the barricades in sarn arena or rampart maps, for instance) or at the very least, have a very "small/forgiving" hitbox when passing close by obstacles.

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The_Risen wrote:

Also, the arrow disappearing when hitting walls or obstacles is too broken, it simply vanishes, 0 damage after channeling, doesnt seem fair... plus, the arrow hitbox is so big when detecting walls, it's nearly impossible to shot it through a door.

agreed
but i think the convert to chaos damage part is only to lessen the true power of this skill