[3.8] ShakCentral's Tornado Shot For Dummies

How Does the Gem Work?



Here is a professionally made graphic for illustrative purposes:



When fired, an unlinked Tornado shot releases a single arrow with a 100% pierce chance. When the arrow impacts at its destination, 3 additional arrows shoot out from that point in random directions.

There are a few things to note about the mechanics of this skill:

        1. A single target can only be hit by 1 of the secondary projectiles from each arrow fired by the initial Tornado Shot.

        2. If an attack of Tornado Shot fires multiple projectiles, each projectile's secondary arrows can hit a single target one time.

        3. Tornado Shot's initial projectile has a 100% chance to pierce, but its secondary projectiles do not have an inherant chance to pierce.


How Do You Build Around Tornado Shot?

This isn't a shock to anyone who has played a ranged build, but the mechanics of Tornado Shot beg the user to add as many additional projectiles and as much flat added damage as possible. Tornado Shot is particularly positioned to take extreme advantage of both.

Every additional projectile that you add to Tornado Shot is effectively 4 total projectiles, and each projectile not only offers greater AoE, but also increased single target damage through the hits from the secondary projectiles. The same goes for flat added damage. Each arrow takes advantage of that added damage and multiplies your damage to a high degree.


How Many Tornado Shot Builds Are There?

There are a surprisingly large number of viable ways to build Tornado Shot. For the most part, they revolve around being a clear speed oriented build, and require a very large investment to become decent at boss-killing. As stated above in the foreword, the current most popular builds in temporary leagues are:

        1) Massive Movement Speed
        2) Magic Find Stacking
        3) Champion Impale

Nerding Out: Mods and PoE Build Theory

If you've played Path of Exile for any length of time, you know that rares can have up to 6 mods; 3 prefix mods and 3 suffix mods. Unique items do not share these restrictions, and may have more than 6 mods as well as more than 3 mods of a type that would be considered "prefix" or "suffix" mods, as confirmed by Mark_GGG back in 2012:



The majority of Tornado Shot builds utilize unique items in nearly every item slot. Typical TS builds only use 1-2 rare items (ignoring an endgame dex-stacking bow) and they are purely a function of needing capped resistances. Because of this, Tornado Shot builds are quite literally designed to squeeze every possible drop of power and function out of each mod that is offered by its unique items.

This is why Tornado Shot is in a somewhat unique place among most other skills. A spellcaster might desire The Devouring Diadem helm (especially in 3.8) for the Eldritch Battery mod, but may be unable to utilize the veiled mod on the item. A summoner might equip Alberon's Warpath for the strength mod, but never really attack and therefore waste the added chaos damage to attacks mod.

Tornado Shot is so focused on its "gimmick" that it is starved for the things that most builds naturally get on rare gear, namely life and resists. Queen of the Forest is perhaps the best example of this. While the allure of the item is rightfully due to its massive movement speed bonus, the resists and life are hugely beneficial as well. Even something as small as the reduced damage taken from animals mod can be useful when the build is at its best in open outdoor maps that frequently have animal monster types.

It is my opinion that Tornado Shot makes better use of the combined mods on its gear than any other skill or build in Path of Exile.


Tornado Shot vs Melee

Tornado Shot's advantage over melee skills is, predictably, its range. The advantage goes beyond simply comparing attack ranges. Tornado Shot not only clears at a much greater distance, but its secondary projectiles also weaken or completely destroy additional packs off screen, making each Tornado Shot effectively clear an area that can be 5-6 times the clearing AoE capability of even the most competitive melee builds.


Tornado Shot vs Spells

Tornado Shot's advantage over spell skills is its speed and efficiency. Some spells can clear the entire screen, and some spells are very efficient with the number of skill uses required for clearing. Tornado Shot simply surpasses them all. While a spellcaster and a Tornado Shot player may both clear the screen with a single skill use, the spellcaster is quickly left behind, Flame Dashing to its next position, while the Tornado Shot player is moving somewhere in the 200-450% movement speed range, rapidly pulling in front of the caster.


Tornado Shot vs Other Ranged Skills

Tornado Shot's advantage over other ranged skills is its total package of clear speed, efficiency, and currency potential. Elemental Hit builds clear entire screens, but Tornado Shot also shatters. Kinetic Blast shatters entire screens, but Tornado Shot has better single target damage, can get started at a lower level, and can either be much faster or have comparable speed but massively increased magic find. Scourge Arrow has laughably higher single target DPS, but Tornado Shot will clear the boss's map 4-5x faster. You get the point. None of these skills are bad; they are just unfortunately in the same game as Tornado Shot.

Pros

▲ One of the fastest clearspeed builds in the game; can reach 450%+ movement speed
▲ Incredibly efficient at generating currency
▲ Shatters the screen, preventing any DD shenanigans
▲ Great for farming white or yellow maps while you catch up on your favorite Netflix or Hulu shows

Cons

▼ Not a boss killer without LUDICROUS amounts of investment.
▼ Makes tons of currency, but most of it tends to be funneled right back into the build
▼ Extraordinarily squishy; don't get hit
▼ Few things are worse than leveling a bow character in a new league

I'm going to start with the obligatory, "Unless you really know what you're doing, please do not just yoink the PoB code and leave." Tornado Shot is a very fluid and finesse-y build, with a single item upgrade often requiring reworking of 4-5 gear pieces. In Section 3 we'll get into the full build theory, but I highly recommend at least reading over the following section before taking off.

The image below is the generally used (using other build guides and poe.ninja for reference) and accepted "skeleton" for a Tornado Shot build:



The alternate route is mostly used by players desiring the Point Blank keystone.

If you want to create your own version of Tornado Shot or hybridize different builds within or without this guide, this is where you should start. It's a 69/121 point tree that allows for flexibility. You can take jewel nodes, grab movement speed, get the claw nodes for Lioneye's Fall, etc. More experienced players will branch even more. I see many forgoing life nodes, relying on experience and positioning to prevent death. Building off of this skeleton are the PoB codes below. Each has a leveling tree and a final tree, gem setups, and both a basic set of "budget" gear and your end-game items.

NOTE 1: The gem setups in the guide do NOT include gem setups while leveling. Refer to the leveling guide in Part 2 for those. Additionally, only the absolutely necessary gem setups are listed. As will be discussed in the gem section in Part 3, there are quite a few options for many of your gem slots, including making money by leveling gems to sell.

NOTE 2: The end-game gear in each PoB is optimized and reflective of the build if you invested a huge amount of time and currency(All items are uncorrupted; that's a whole new ballgame). As stated before, TS is ridiculously upgradeable. I am not listing all of the progression that can be found within a single item. For instance, a Tombfist could have a PoB item for each of the following: 1 Abyssal Socket, 2 Abyssal Sockets, 2 sockets & max rolls, max rolls with Lab enchantment, max roll with a single corruption, & max roll with a double corruption. Instead, I'm listing what I would consider to be a finished piece of gear with no need for upgrading. To see a full list of item progression, see the Full Purchase Order in Part 3.

NOTE 2: For current temporary leagues, I recommend the Hyper Movement Speed build over the Magic Find build. Item quantity mods can no longer be rolled on items outside of Shaper amulets, so your stacking options are more limited.


Deadeye Budget-ish Hyper Movement Speed

https://pastebin.com/PFqK1zTd

With 320+% movement speed, this build is great for clearing maps as fast as you can control your character. I believe this to be the overall strongest Tornado Shot build for temporary leagues.


Deadeye Magic Find

https://pastebin.com/9YyT808r

This version of the build can reach the 100% quantity / 300% rarity mark against various types of enemies (frozen vs shocked, magic v white, etc), but reaching near-perfect quant rolls on the uniques is prohibitively more expensive than the Hyper Movement Speed build. This version can take white maps and spit out enough loot to make your loot filter go cross-eyed.


Deadeye Tanky Version

https://pastebin.com/MFqS1k1H

The Tanky TS Deadeye is an abomination. Focusing on huge life regen, 100% cold damage to keep enemies nice and frosty, and a nice Molten Shell + Endurance Charge setup, this build has quite a bit of life while still packing a pretty good punch. If super high tier mapping is your thing in a temporary league, I'd at least look over the build. Note that a massive portion of the DPS in this build comes straight from jewels, which will be quite expensive and make up for the somewhat lower cost of some other gear pieces.


NOTE: The last two PoBs are not my own. I do not currently use Standard for anything other than racing practice, and I have not yet played the Champion Impale version of Tornado Shot. I will link to the original guides in each section, and I encourage you to check them out and show some love to the build creators.


Raider Legacy Gear Version (Standard League Only)

https://pastebin.com/6rmNwmfx

This is lifted directly from DeMiGodking102's build guide to Legacy Magic Find Tornado Shot, which can be found here. Legacy gear can get so ridiculous that it's hard to even know where to begin constructing a PoB, and Demi has done an excellent job. To see where this build stacks up with the all time best gear that PoE has EVEr had to offer, check out his guide and build.


Champion Impale Version

https://pastebin.com/GNjPPABR

This build is from Imeperfection and can be found in his build guide here. This build has become increasingly popular since Legion league and is now a solid contender among Tornado Shot builds. Using a much higher focus on physical damage and the impale mechanic, I'm actually very excited to try out this build as soon as I can. Give it a shot!

Uniques That Help The Leveling Process

        There are a few uniques that will allow you to truly zoom zoom through the leveling process. If you want to twink your character, slap these bad boys on and crush everything.

        

The full leveling guide for Tornado Shot can be viewed here. This allows me to host future leveling guides for other builds in one place and reduces the character count for this guide.

To Kitava Or Not To Kitava

        There is a legitimate argument to be made that Tornado Shot builds should cease all progress once they reach Blood Aqueducts in Act 9 and farm until they own a Tabula Rasa. Tornado Shot is so support starved that swapping to it on anything less than a 6-link is heavily discouraged. Thus, a percentage of people will farm into the 70s in BA while accumulating their Humility divination cards to trade for a Tabula.

        While this is a viable strategy, I would argue that Toxic Rain and Herald of Agony have changed this conversation. They allow you to cruise through Acts 9 and 10, kill Kitava, and then begin to farm BA. You'll face a resistance penalty, but resists are easy to find on jewelry and gear.

Swapping to Tornado Shot

        Once you have a Tabula Rasa, provided that you've been leveling the required gems for Tornado Shot as discussed in the leveling guide, you're ready to transition. Socket your 6-link T.Shot and get right back to farming. Blood Aqueducts is a great place to work on resists and the early purchases needed to transition into mapping. Check the Full Purchase Order in Part 3 for more info on when to transition from Blood Aqueducts to maps. Make sure your Herald of Ice and aura setups are in place as well before you begin farming. Finally, use the empties gear slots made available by Toxic Rain and Herald of Agony to level more Tornado Shot gems.

In this section, we'll see the first reason that Tornado Shot is a great build - it relies on VERY few gems relative to other builds. This leaves us with many options of situational Vaal skills, but more importantly lets us level gems for profit while we run maps.


Tornado Shot BEFORE Rigwalds

Tornado Shot - Greater Multiple Projectiles - Mirage Archer - Elemental Damage With Attacks - Added Cold Damage - Fork


Tornado Shot AFTER Rigwalds

Tornado Shot - Greater Multiple Projectiles - Mirage Archer - Elemental Damage With Attacks - Added Cold Damage - Chain


Movement Skills

Blink Arrow - Faster Attacks. Optionally, you can slot a Flame Dash for some extra mobility during the B.Arrow cooldown, but it's totally optional.


Buffs

Herald of Ice - Onslaught - Curse on Hit - Assassin's Mark.

Blood Rage - Grace - Vaal Haste. Do not turn on Haste - we only use it for the Vaal skill.


Utility

All utility skills are completely optional. Remember that any skill you use is another gem that could be leveling to sell later.

Portal - Cast on Death (or manual)

Cast When Damage Taken - Molten Shell - Lightning Golem


Making Money: Leveling Gems For Others

Green gems are the easiest to level for profit, as we have very high Dexterity. You can either level as many Tornado Shots as possible to Vaal at 20/20, use 1 for yoruself if you hit a 21/20, and sell the rest. Alternatively, use poe.ninja to assess the highest profit green gem and level those.

Main Flasks

A full Tornado Shot build has 3 flasks that are set in stone. These flasks are:

The Quicksilver flask is self-explanatory. Super high movement speed with increased effect. Ez pz.

The Experimenter's Jade Flask of Reflexes grants an absolute ass-load of Evasion Rating, which is crucial for both our movement speed and survivability. As many players already know and we will discuss below, our end-game chest piece grants movement speed based on our Evasion Rating, and we need to hit 45,000 to be at the movement speed cap.

The Dying Sun is also straight-forward. Extra projectiles is one of the best things we can add to a Tornado Shot build. Fire res and added AoE is icing on the cake for the game's best flask.


Optional Flasks

There are quite a few flasks you could use to fill out your remaining two flask slots. Until you have a Corrupting Blood jewel and another source of freeze prevention, I highly recommend using two non-unique flasks with the immunities discussed above. Here are some options for usable flasks in your final two slots:

Unique Jewels

        Lioneye's Fall

Lioneye's Fall converts all melee modifiers in its radius into bow modifiers. This allows us to convert some very powerful claw nodes, including life leech and mana leech, into bow modifiers by placing our Lioneye's Fall here:

        Inspired Learning

Inspired Learning is a mini-headhunter, granting you 1 modifier from slain rare monsters. Note that Inspired Learning is completely optional, and many builds will forego this jewel for additional flat damage abyss jewels. For Inspired Learning to work, you must allocate 4 notables within its radius. Here is where to do this:




        Watcher's Eye

Watcher's Eye is a jewel that has randomly assigned mods that grant bonus effects based on auras that the player has equipped. If you can get your hands on a Watcher's Eye, here are some good mods to look for:

        -Critical strike multiplier while affected by Precision
        -Critical strike chance while affected by Hatred
        -%Cold damage while affected by Hatred
        -Flat cold damage while affected by Hatred
        -Cold damage penetration while affected by Hatred
        -Movement skill cooldown recovery speed while affected by Haste
        -Unaffected by Temp Chains while affected by Haste
        -Increased movement speed while affected by Grace

If you find a Watcher's Eye with any of these mods, feel free to re-configure your auras to support some of these, as they are very powerful.


Jeweling : Bandaid or Cannon?

In a perfect world, Tornado Shot players would use a trade website to locate a Searching Eye abyss jewel with 4 damage mods, purchase it, and be off to the races. Sadly, this isn't a perfect world, and jewels are often used to assist players in shoring up weak areas, specifically resists and attributes.

Use your jewel mods for resists and attributes sparingly and with reluctance. A huge percentage of the damage in a Tornado Shot build comes from Searching Eye abyss jewels. Save as much space for damage as possible, or you may be better off taking other notables.

NOTE for The Tempest users: Don't forget that The Tempest deals no physical damage. As long as you're using The Tempest, any "Added Physical damage" mods are complete blanks.

To use this section in a new league, do the following:

        1. Click on the link of the gear you want to live search.
        2. To the right of the search bar, change the league to the current temporary league.
        3. Click the live search button on the left side.

This process is illustrated in the following (professionally commissioned) image:



Leveling Gear

Wanderlust

Goldrim

Quill Rain

Lochtonial Caress


Uniques

Death's Opus

Storm Cloud

The Servant's Heart (The Tempest Prophecy)

Tabula Rasa

Cheap Humility Div Cards (1.5c or less)


Rares

30% MS Boots with 50+ Resists

5c or less ring with 120+ resists

5c or less leather belt with 75+ life, 75+ resists, and % ele damage with attacks

5c or less ring with 2 ele damage mods and 50+ life

1. Lioneye's Glare

Lioneye's Glare is a consistently 1 Chaos weapon with respectable damage, high attack speed, and it always hits. Great starter weapon while The Tempest is above 20c on day 1 of new leagues.


2. Prismweave

Prismweave is a great cheap belt that functions as a very respectable abyss jewel. With a lot of added damage to attacks and increased elemental damage, this belt is a great way to up your damage at very little cost. It even has some resists!


3. 1-socket Bubonic Trail

Bubonic Trail is a great unique boot, giving a lot of movement speed and life, granting the very nice Death Walk ability, and allowing for more jewels, which Tornado Shot desperately desires. However, Trails with 1 Abyssal socket go for 1 Chaos or lower after a few days of a new league, while 2 Abyssal socket pairs go for upwards of an exalt. Snag a pair early on and you'll be very happy with the benefits.


4. Maloney's Nightfall
Maloney's Nightfall is a cheap quiver that provides a nice blend of defense and offense. While its implicit doesn't do very much, the extra life and smoke clouds are very nice to have early on while the build is uber squishy, and the extra damage and attack speed can definitely be put to use.


5. Rat's Nest

Despite being outshined by its bigger brothers Starkonja and Devoto's, Rat's Nest has always been a very cheap and fine helmet, providing quite a lot of stats for its small size.


6. Daresso's Defiance

Daresso's is an interesting piece. It has very solid Evasion and Armour, a nice chunk of life, and some cool survivability mechanics that have you swapping between Endurance charges for smaller incoming damage and then Onslaught to get out of the way once you do get hit.


7. Shadows and Dust

Shadows and Dust is a very solid glove with crit and crit multi and is one of the cheapest ways that our build can gain access to the Rampage effect. I've used these gloves into the mid/high 80's multiple times.


8. Le Heup of All

Le Heup adds a nice amount of damage and resists to an early build, and the rarity definitely doesn't hurt.


9. The Warden's Brand

The Warden's Brand is an ultra-cheap way of boosting your damage near the time you start farming Blood Aqueducts. No resists and reduced attack speed hurts, but it adds a good amount of damage and the Frenzy charge generation helps to offset the downside.


10. Sacrificial Heart

In Sacrificial Heart we have an ultra-cheap jewelry piece that adds a large amount of flat damage. It basically acts like a souped up abyssal jewel, with the Vaal skill mods being a nice bonus.

⚫ 10/2/19 - Added 25+ terms to the index and updated the note at the beginning of the guide.
⚫ 9/26/19 - Updated PoBs to reflect a more realistic lvl 90 Tree by default. Continued work on index.
⚫ 9/24/19 - Nearly done with Part 3. Updated Post Title. HUGE CHANGE: Added numbering system for sections within each part. Will make indexing and referencing much easier.
⚫ 9/23/19 - Totally forgot to update this as I've continued work on the guide. 3.5 of the 5 sections are complete. The Index will need to be created, and I still have to finish jewels, end-game gearing, purchase order, and a few other items. Getting close!
⚫ 9/10/19 - Table of Contents structure placed into body of guide. Spoilers and colors modified and put in place.
⚫ 9/9/19 - Forum post created. Marked as Work In Progress. For Dummies intro, dedication, and Table of Contents sections put in place.