[3.7] Cold Stacking Rain of Arrows Deadeye [Quick Clearspeed Starter]
 Welcome, fellow hipster, to my guide on a build for the worse Toxic Rai—err, I mean Rain of Arrows! Even though Rain of Arrows as a spell has been forgotten by the majority of a playerbase, mostly overshadowed by it’s poison oriented brother in recent leagues, it still offers a great deal of damage and compatibility if you’re willing to commit to it. And since there isn’t a Deadeye build anywhere on the forums even though it works great, I decided to share my variation I came up with combining several other sources in a current league. As a disclaimer, I’m by no means a heavily experienced player and if you have any ideas on improving the build, feel free to throw suggestions at me in the comments. Or flex with your gear, whatever floats your boat. Any feedback is welcome, really. So, with this out of the way let’s dive deep into the build itself. 3.7 Update
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So, a proper write-down for the 3.7 Legion league. We got hit, but only by a really small margin. With a nerf of Abyss Jewels and Immortal Call, it seemed like we would have to reconsider our jewel choice.
But fear not my friends, the nerf on Abyss Jewels is so small, that it's barely considerable unless you planned on running absolute GG ones. Immortal Call is a bit worse in this regard, but we're suplementing it with a new Steelskin spell. So all in all, we're supper safe and ready to slice through content. Also have I mentioned that screen clearing characters are great for this league? :^)  Pros • Works just fine on a budget
• Scales well with the currency invested • Great league starter unless you’re looking for a bosskiller • Fairly simple gameplay which still requires maintaining buffs and spells • Massive clearspeed • Smooth leveling • Engaging and fun gameplay • C O L D E X P L O S I O N S Cons • Can’t do elemental reflection maps, duh
• Relatively squishy • Can’t do an Uber Elder unless you’re a mechanical god • Might have issues with bosses on a lower budget • Requires a fair bit of currency to feel comfortable on red tier maps • There are straight up better bow builds out there-- Pros for some, cons for others • You’ll be a hipster, deal with it
• Heavily position dependant – takes a bit to get used to a long range gameplay • Since no one plays it you will most likely place on the PoE Ninja ladder, so you can show your mom what you’ve accomplished • --but they ain’t as much fun, am I right?  The idea behind this build is fairly simple. We’re looking at the basic bow oriented character which stacks cold damage. We do this by stacking a ton of flat cold damage on our gear. And by a ton I mean a fuck ton. Once you’re getting done with the build you’re basically swimming in flat cold damage. We’re achieving this by having a lot of Abyss Jewels (as listed in the gear section below) and having the modifier on all the gear where it’s possible. We also support our flat cold damage with Frenzy Charges which we get through our Blood Rage to help us with some extra damage and attack speed. We actively curse enemies for extra penetration with Elemental and Projectile Weakness linked to Curse on Hit as well. The smoothness of gameplay is ensured by almost permanent chill effect or freeze on enemies and your long distance positioning. So yeah, you can’t facecheck your enemies. Well, you can certainly try, but I would not recommend it.  Our tree is rather straightforward. I like to first go into the the cluster on left, then make my way slowly into the right upper part of the tree. Prioritize taking Increased Cold/Elemental Damage and Acrobatics/Phase Acrobatics, together with some evasion for survability. I usually don't go for small life nodes until late into the character, but if you want that extra bit of survability, go for it. Link for Path of Building
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Link for PoE Planner
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Before you get Lioneye's Fall
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 Take this Mana/Life Leech for extra survivability, before you can make use of the Claw cluster in the upper part of the skill tree thanks to Lioneye's Fall.  For bandit kill all. For our endgame character we want to kill all bandits for 2 extra points to spend on out tree. It's just too huge to pass on.
Before you get into absolute endgame though, and if you're rolling with this build as a league starter, I highly recommend you helping Alira as a first choice, since it provides us with extra Critical Strike Chance, Mana Regeneration and Elemental Resistances, which really comes in handy before getting your whole setup sorted. We’re rolling with a Deadeye ascendancy. Order would be: Fast and Deadly -> Far Shot -> Gathering Winds -> Rupture
For Pantheon take whatever floats your boat. It’s not really essential. But my personal choices would be:
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Major gods:
• Lunaris - for extra map clear speed and survability with more tough map enemies • Solaris - for when you need extra suvability on bosses - personal favourite • Arakaali - for extra survability and resistance against chaos damage effect Minor gods: • Shakari - for being immune to poison effect • Garukhan - for extra movement speed • Abberath - for extra movement speed and quality of life with being immune to burning ground  My Gear in Synthesis Bow Bow is the most tricky and expensive part of the build. It’s also one of the most important parts, since this is where our damage comes from. Even though our desired bows might look intimidating with options starting out at around 5ex, there are several way cheaper options out there which we can still pretty comfortably use.
The order of affixes by which we judge our bows: • 20% chance to deal Double Damage • Adds # to # Cold Damage to Attacks with this Weapon per 10 Dexterity • % increased (Global) Critical Strike Multiplier • % increased Attack Speed • % increased (Global) Critical Strike Chance • % increased Elemental Damage with Attack Skills Examples in budget order:
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7ex
20c 1c Quiver For our quiver we want to get something with life, critical strike chance, critical strike multiplier, cold damage and attack speed. But these quivers tend to get quite expensive. Luckily for us, there’s a great option to get for only like 40c. Yes, I’m talking about Hyrri’s Demise.
Up until the point you can get yourself Hyrri’s Demise, you can use a rare one with few modifiers missing. It’s not really that big of a deal. Hyrri’s Demise worse alternative Hyrri’s Bite is also possible, especially for leveling. The modifier priority for rare quivers would be: • % increased (Global) Critical Strike Multiplier • % increased (Global) Critical Strike Chance • % increased Elemental Damage with Attack Skills • +# to maximum Life • % increased Attack Speed Helmet For a helmet our choice is rather clear. Since this build offers only a fairly limited options of survability, we have to look for ones wherever we can. So I feel like getting a Starkonja's Head for our helmet might be the best option out there. They are fairly cheap, give us a lot of life, evasion rating and survivability on low life. On top of that we get some sweet extra dexterity to feed our bow and quiver with. All the good stuff.
It’s also really simple to get yourself a Starkonja with our desired enchant, which would be "Rain of Arrows has 15% chance to fire an additional sequence of arrows". Body Armour As for our body, we want to get ourselves a simple evasion based 6-linked life and evasion piece. Stats there would be:
• +# to maximum Life • % increased Elemental Resistances (Fire, Cold & Lightning) • +# to Evasion rating • % increased Evasion rating There are many unique options you can try out. The only downside tends to be our resistances, with which you might struggle. Hyrri's Ire • An insane damage boost. It provides a huge chunk of flat cold damage, which we're stacking, so the link might be a bit obvious here. It also gives us a great number of evasion and extra dodge chance against attacks and spells. All in all a very solid choice if you want to maximize your damage output. The Perfect Form • Another really strong contender. While being more on the defensive side, it serves us in many ways. First of all we don't have to go for the Phase Acrobatics cluster on our tree, which saves us 4 whole skill points to be put somewhere else. On top of it we can use Arctic Armour for the extra layer of defensive while not losing any mana. A great choice if you're looking for a defensive option. Loreweave • A perfect balance between a damage and defensive options. Even after the nerf increased resistances are still a huge boost, while elemental damage and critical strike chance ensure increased damage. Queen of the Forest • A rather typical choice for bow characters. I feel like it comes a bit short compared to a really well rolled rare piece. On the other hand if you want to maximize your movement speed, feel free to go with this one. You just might want to spec into some more evasion in your tree and stack it on your gear for utilizing the movement speed buff. Also you might want to consider using the Jade Flask. Gloves These are simple. Two socket Tombfists are still the best option for us even with attack speed removed. Before you can get yourself two socket ones a one socket version is still good enough.
Murderous Eye Jewel has a priority over Searching ones because of the Initimidation debuff it gives enemies! If you’re running on a really tight budget and you can’t afford proper Murderous Eye Abyss Jewel to put into one socket Tombfists, you can get yourself rare gloves with following modifiers: • +# to maximum Life • Adds # to # Cold Damage to Attacks • % increased Attack Speed • % increased Elemental Resistances (Fire, Cold & Lightning) Belt Belt is simple aswell. We want the most basic life, all resistances and increased elemental damage belt you can find, which means that you're looking for these stats:
• +# to maximum Life • % increased Elemental Resistances (Fire, Cold & Lightning) • % increased Elemental Damage with Attack Skills With a good amount of currency the best in slot would possibly be a really well rolled Stygian Wise for the extra Abyss Jewel, but ones with the same affixes we want to get can be really damn expensive. Boots Nothing all too interesting here. We want to have there:
• 30% increased Movement Speed • +# to maximum Life • % increased Elemental Resistances (Fire, Cold & Lightning) Additional dexterity to feed your weapons might not be a bad option here as well if you’re not hunting for resistances. Amulet Best in slot amulets for us are rare ones with a lot of Critical Strike Multiplier and Elemental Damage. Life is also important since we don't have much. We're looking for these modifiers:
• % increased Critical Strike Multiplier • % increased Elemental Damage / % increased Cold Damage • +# to maximum Life • % increased (Global) Critical Strike Chance In earlier version of this build I was toying with the idea of using Pandemonius, because of it’s massive damage boost it should give us. In the end I found out that while it indeed gives us a lot of damage, it also takes away a considerable amount of Life together with Critical Strike Multiplier, which makes the gameplay a little bit less smooth. In the end I found it not worth the price, but it's still a possibility if you want to try it yourself. Rings Rings are a tricky part. Possibly the best ones for our build would be Opal or Diamond ones, but at the same time we’re really hungry for resistances, since the rest of our gear doesn’t give us much. Because of this I opt’ed out for basic Two-Stone ones. On rings, we want to get:
• +# to # Cold Damage • % increased Elemental Damage with Attack Skills • % increased Elemental Resistances (Fire/Cold/Lightning) • +# to maximum Life • % increased (Global) Critical Strike Chance / % increased Critical Strike Multiplier / % increased Elemental Damage / % increased Cold Damage Possibly with time we might be able to acquire Opal or Diamond ones which would suit us, but they will cost a pretty penny, so I’m not considering them as a base for the build. Jewels First of all, we’re using two unique jewels here, but they are BY NO MEANS mandatory. I’m talking about Watcher’s Eye and Lioneye’s Fall.
On Watcher’s Eye we want to get flat cold damage added while effected by Hatred, since it’s a serious damage boost for us. If you’ve got more Exalted Orbs lying around in your stash, you might want to get one with two modifiers, especially the critical strike chance while affected by Hatred one seems nice. We use Lioneye’s Fall to switch the claw modifiers in this area. By doing this we get a lot of extra damage and leech at the same time. If you can't afford it, there's a special skill tree up in the Skill Tree section. Both of these jewels can be replaced by regular abyss ones until we get enough currency for them. For an option without Lioneye’s Fall there’s a skill tree listed above. Abyss Jewels that we’re aiming to hoard like madmen are really simple ones. We want to have there: • +# to # Cold Damage Added to Attacks • +# to # Cold Damage Added to Bow Attacks • +# to Maximum Life If you’re on the rich side, you can buy jewels with 4 modifiers. I’m leaving the choice here up to you, but more damage in general never hurts. Flasks • Divine Life Flask with with Increased Recovery Rate and Antibleed
• The Wise Oak with your uncapped Cold Resistence being the highest • Silver Flask with Increased Duration and Antifreeze/Anticurse • Diamond Flask with Increased Duration and Antifreeze/Anticurse • Quicksilver Flask with Increased Duration and Increased Movement Speed If you’re low on currency and can’t balance your resistances and/or get The Wise Oak without the highest roll, you should use Atziri’s Promise, which is by all means a possible budget option.  Rain of Arrows Vaal Rain of Arrows – 21/20
• Our main spell. We use the Vaal variation for boss killing at which it feels completely amazing. Added Cold Damage – 21/20 • Since it’s flat cold damage, it’s our main damage boost. You should aim at getting this one to 21/20 as the first one, it‘s impact is huge. Elemental Damage with Attacks – 21/20 • Great boost to our damage since we do almost only elemental damage. Mirage Archer – 21/20 • Additional cast of our main sklil. It’s amazing for mapping and a map speed. 5 link – Concentrated Effect – 21/20 • There’s no reason not to get this one. Rain of Arrows already has huge area of effect, so you won’t even notice the decrease. It’s basically pure damage boost. 6 link – Hypothermia – 21/0 • With Hypothermia you can apply Chilled effect on your enemies, which leaves more room for you. It also gives a pretty damn nice boost to damage. You can try to replace Hypothermia or Mirage Archer with Ice Bite if you feel like it, but I personally haven’t tested it and I’m unsure whether it’s worth it in the end. Buffs Hatred – 21/0
• Nice flat cold damage boost which helps with conversion of those small bits of physical damage that we do. Herald of Ice – 21/20 • Our main aura for map clearing. You should get this one as soon as possible. More on this in the Curses section Blood Rage – 21/20 • Our main source of Frenzy charges. You should start using this one as soon as possible. Ice Golem – 21/0 • Extra critical strike chance always comes in handy. Vaal Haste – 21/0 • Extra attack speed and movement speed. Great for bosses or other tough encounters. Doesn't matter what you link it to since we only use the Vaal variation of the skill. Vaal Grace – 21/0 • Insane boost to defenses. Great for bosses or other tough encounters. Doesn't matter what you link it to since we only use the Vaal variation of the skill. Steelskin – 16/0 Cast when Damage Taken – 11/0 • You want to level this one up as far as you can while ensuring that your CwDT doesn't require too much of damage to trigger compared to you own life pool. With this one it should be 1485 damage, which is pretty alright. With this setup you get way more survability thanks to making random oneshots much harder to get. Curses Assassin's Mark – 21/20
Curse on Hit – 21/20 • You need this linked to Herald of Ice, otherwise it won't work for you, meaning you won't get any Power Charges and mana regen! Our two active curses on hit. With Assassin's Mark we get ton's of critical strike damage against cursed enemies together with extra mana, life gained on kill and well, Power Charges, which always comes in handy. Projectile Weakness ensures bigger damage against enemies through our main damage spell. You want to have Projectile Weakness linked to Frost bomb as seen below by default, since it's supposed to be applied only through it for bossing (you would be otherwise rewriting your curses on enemies). Frost Bomb – (as much as you can muster)/20 • We get bottlenecked by our Intelligence here. Don't sweat it all too much though. Projectile Weakness – 21/20 Curse on Hit – 21/20 Increased Duration – 21/20 - Optional We use Frost Bomb on bosses to give them weakness against cold damage, which improves our single target dps by a huge margin. It's not really worth it to use on anything beside tough encounters. Movement ability Dash – 20/20
Our main movement ability spell which you're going to use most of the time. Especially good for bossing. Blink Arrow – 20/0 Faster Attacks – 20/0 - optional Our secondary movement ability we use to overcome obstacles and getting out of dangerous situations. Linking Blink Arrow with Faster Attacks is a good thing, but feel free to drop it if you're lacking free gem socket for another more useful ability. Hipster stuff Vaal Breach
• On some tougher encounters you can use Vaal Breach to get yourself Frenzy Charges if you feel like it. Frenzy Charges improve our damage by a considerable number, so getting used to popping these before endgame bosses might be a good call to master the build. Portal - 1/20 • Who needs portal scrolls anyway, am I right? For how to link these together you can get inspired in the „Current gear“ section, but it’s in no way mandatory like that.  Help, I’m not doing damage! Well then you must have done something terribly wrong. This build shreds. Try to look properly into the build and figure out what you have done wrong. Often the issue is not a proper gem setup, wrong flasks or underleveled gems. If you still don’t know what’s wrong, give us a link for your character in the comments, so we can help you. We don’t bite. Sometimes.
I’m not getting any Frenzy Charges, what build is this?! You’re not using Blood Rage. You should. Come on, give it a try.
I’m running out of mana all the time, what should I do? Don’t worry, so do I from time to time. Before you get a hold of the mana cost of you skills I recommend you getting the mana cluster for mana increase or mana leach (or both if it isn’t enough). They help a lot with worse gear. Mana flask is also a possible solution, especially while leveling.
Why would you even play Rain of Arrows to begin with? So I had a fitting build for my hipster glasses and beard. What do you mean?
I’m getting one-shotted by a lot of things, what am I doing wrong? That’s kinda the deal with this build. You can always opt for the more defense oriented skill tree if you feel like it, but dodging stuff and living on the edge can be fun too, trust me! Especially beware of enemies doing chaos damage, it’s our cryptonite.
Why aren’t you using *insert random item or gem here* in this build? Because I didn’t like how it felt in the whole build or I forgot. One of those two. But you can certainly try it out and give me feedback here. Or just throw it out into the wild as an idea, discussion never hurt anyone. For what you know, it might improve the whole build.
 Leveling
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For leveling I recommend checking out this guide by Bashtart. He uses a bit diffent skill tree than we do, but it does the job. Go in similar directions just by a bit different paths.
Bashtart's video • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mAmAjaEaRM Gameplay videos
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Rare T16 map clear (+boss kill)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJSJTXGXG_U Delve Depth 248 • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbWJegq8XQU To-do list
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• Make videos showing the build in action. My computer is glad to run PoE smoothly on lowest settings, so I'll have to record footage on someone else's. Shouldn't be that much of an issue and will be updated soon.
• Incorporate Leveling guide • Add example gear in each section including budget option. • Improve style of the middle "gear" section. • Add lab enchants. Changelog
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06/16/19 - Thoroughly updated the guide for patch 3.7, reworked the skilltree section, added unique options for chest armour and applied small changes to the gem setup. Also a changed the bandit choice
06/05/19 - Updated guide for patch 3.7, added gameplay videos and updated gem section a bit 04/01/19 - Fixed the curse setup, reworked amulet option and improved gear examples 03/27/19 - Added example gear 03/23/19 - Added missing Helmet option, fixed few typos and slightly improved looks 03/22/19 - Guide created Last edited by JeDDyCZ#0926 on Jul 15, 2019, 9:50:32 AM Last bumped on Sep 28, 2019, 4:45:15 PM
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Very good build, keep it up!
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Im trying this build right now and I was wondering where do you get +1 additional curse to apply peojectile weakness and assasins mark?
edit: nevermind Im dumb.I jsut saw you use one for trash and the other for bosses Last edited by sparealcon#0408 on Apr 1, 2019, 10:45:01 AM
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" Thanks a lot for sticking with my build, it means a lot to me! Yeah, I should have made that more clear in the guide itself, my bad. I'll try to fix it asap. I mean, gear needs to be updated anyway, so I might just aswell rephrase it in the gem section while I'm at it. |
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You can also try a more budget but a very good version for rings if u get a mark of the elder and a shaper ring. i play with yoke of the suffering amulet, also pretty good. the shock gives good damage increase, and since it has an increased dmg per ailment mod i got cinderswallow urn flask for ignite 10% dmg, thus getting that juicy 25% for increased dmg on enemies in total. i also play with ice bite, gives a lot of flat cold dmg plus enemies freeze much more often. ty for the idea to implement a rain of arrows in this setup =)
I also suggest trying out pathfinder, almost the same dmg wise, but has more survivability. And add a vaal haste and grace for the gem section also) And for the upgrades you have to aim for a better 6l body armor with %increased dexterity and crit chance. also a good idea to get an elder belt with increased attributes on it. Upd: Just got my first Guardian set and Shaper down, not deathless tho =) but im just bad. the build is solid even for end-game content. Ill try to take Uber Elder this league either. Last edited by TredOnMe#7797 on Apr 4, 2019, 11:29:28 AM
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And what to take in the pantheon? |
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" Thanks for suggestions, here is my opinion: Mark of the Elder and a shaper ring sound really good as a budget option, it will be added into the build for sure. Yoke of Suffering mechanic seems interesting, but I don't really know about how well would it apply in the end, since we're striving for pure cold damage. Certainly could be considered a fine budget option before you can get yourself a juicy amulet. I've toyed with Ice Bite instead of Hypothermia, but I decided to go with the bigger damage increase which Hypothermia provides. On the other hand as you've pointed out, Ice Bite gives more quality of life and survability for mapping. Will be added as an option in the gem section for the convenience it provides with freeze chance. I really wanted this build to be built around Deadeye, hence the ascendancy I decided to go with, but Pathfinder should certainly be a viable option. Not everyone is keen on it's playstyle though. Regarding the chest piece- we treat it as a purely defensive option, since we don't really do it with the rest of our gear. Critical Strike chance and Dexterity would be nice to have there, but we need to get resistances and life from something. Could you enable your character/post pob/post your gear in the comments so I could stick it in the main post for people interested on your take? Congratulations on the fist Shaper kill, it's certainly a nice challenge to beat! :) Last edited by JeDDyCZ#0926 on Apr 9, 2019, 1:37:16 PM
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" Thanks for checking my build! :) As mentioned in the guide itself, it's really up to you, but viable options would be: Major gods: Lunaris - for extra map clear speed and survability with more tough map enemies Solaris - for when you need extra suvability on bosses - personal favourite Arakaali - for extra survability and resistance against chaos damage effect Minor gods: Shakari - for being immune to poison effect Garukhan - for extra movement speed Abberath - for extra movement speed and quality of life with being immune to burning ground I will add it into the build itself for future reference. |
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I have a question (because i'm new - started about 1 month ago tops) about the passive build. In my PoB, i see there's points in using claw weapons (Soul Raker). I was wondering why. Is that for weapon swapping? (I just use my bow, i haven't done much weapon swapping, maybe i should?)
EDIT: I suppose i had to ask the question to understand something that went over my head ealier. Now i understand what was meant with : " And thus my question is answered. Last edited by Bad_Luck_Charm#4450 on Apr 17, 2019, 3:48:43 PM
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