[3.13]🏹 Poison Barrage-VF / Scourge Arrow / TR PF | Bottled Fortify | The Tankiest Ranger + High DPS

The more attack speed the better, if it is reliable attack speed. We settle into a timing and it is just brilliant, it improves mobility/defense as well as offense.

But as you say, headhunter doesn't just give you massive attack speed, but highly variable attack speed. You're not going to be able to settle into a timing, and are doubtless clipping a ton of your DPS.

A lot of headhunter buffs are also wasted on poison/DoT builds in general, compared to direct damage builds. HH is so powerful it is probably still really good, but this build is not optimized to get maximal value from HH at all.

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WolfieNa wrote:

hmm.. I checked with CallMeUnique and saw his MiA+Blast Rain exploding everything with an explodey chest. I'm pretty sure MiA+BR can trigger Cinderswallow's green flame, too (enemies ignited by you..takes 10% increased damage).

MiA does not life-leech, gain charges, gain life, or any effect that affects you though.

Interesting, thanks for the confirmation!

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WolfieNa wrote:

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And if it's not working, what options do we have besides Withering Step to utilize the enchant?

Not sure if you really need it with above testing. But if you do, Eternal Suffering comes to mind.

That's a very good tip tho, thanks again.

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fleckens wrote:

Something I’ve been thinking about is whether attack speed is as good as we make it out to be for scourge arrow. Obviously you want a decent amount for it to feel good but since we have to hold then release the attack it comes down a lot to our timing rather than just being the predictable dps gain you find on skills you just hold down.

It’s mainly something that is relevant if you got changes in your attack speed, with headhunter buffs probably being the most extreme example, when I get some of the speed buffs it will reach 5 stacks very fast and so I’m bound to mess up the timings and lose a lot of damage. Of course my damage is still going to be more than fine as I will be getting more shots off than usual but it would be far off the potential dps that I would have shown in pob if that was set up with the headhunter buffs.

I think, the bare minimum required is around 8 ar (Attack rate in PoB), below that just feels sluggish for me.
The optimal is somewhere around 9.7-10ar, it feels the best for mapping. Again, for me and I think it really is a personal preference and how one likes to play.

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You're not going to be able to settle into a timing, and are doubtless clipping a ton of your DPS.

Can you explain this? I'm not following. What does it mean and why would you clip DPS?

Also, what would THE best mods on a bow for this build be? Of course attack speed and +2 additional arrows, but what about the rest? Im thinking it would be cool to make hunters/elder bow, with added chaos damage, 60% chance to 100% and 90% increased damage with poison?

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MichaelLaudrup wrote:

Can you explain this? I'm not following. What does it mean and why would you clip DPS?

The time between you reaching maximum charges and releasing your shot is a period of time where you don’t gain any damage as if you fired it instantly upon reaching 5 charges you could then already be working on charging a second attack. Now you will always have some of this as you’re not a machine, probably, so you will pretty much always miss a small bit. However this is minimized by having a steady attack speed so you get used to the rhythm. But when you get sudden changes to your attack speed you are more likely to mess up and waste time at max charges or even firing before it if you instead got slowed. Headhunter is just the most noticeable as you sometimes end up with ridiculous attack speed if you get some buffs like soul eater that give 5% attack per enemy you kill.

My point was basically just to discuss how there are factors that will limit the dps of scourge arrow and you are unlikely to do the same as shown in pob(unless pob has some delayed shot calculations I’m not aware of) when compared to for example barrage where you just hold down the button to continuously fire at whatever attack speed you currently have.

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fleckens wrote:

But when you get sudden changes to your attack speed you are more likely to mess up and waste time at max charges or even firing before it if you instead got slowed. Headhunter is just the most noticeable as you sometimes end up with ridiculous attack speed if you get some buffs like soul eater that give 5% attack per enemy you kill.

My point was basically just to discuss how there are factors that will limit the dps of scourge arrow and you are unlikely to do the same as shown in pob(unless pob has some delayed shot calculations I’m not aware of) when compared to for example barrage where you just hold down the button to continuously fire at whatever attack speed you currently have.

I think you made a good point in which you wanted to discuss the upper limit of Scourge Arrow's damage output and how to scale it even further. It's just the way which you framed the problem confused people. :)

Here are my thoughts. We seem to push the poison part of SA pretty much with lots of flat chaos, super high APS, multiple effective scalers (DoT multi, chaos DoT multi, etc.). Harvest grants the possibilities to incorporate so many high-DPS mod on literally every piece of equipment. Our gears are stacked and shiny, and it reasonably makes us think there is no room to improve.

However, one thing people recently overlook about Scourge Arrow is the hit damage. In fact, SA scales hit as well (remember the time when we abused cold-stacking SA that dealt like 20mil damage per 5-stage hit?). According to PoB (of my profile), one hit from the initial arrow deals 2.6mil and 4.5mil DPS at stage 0 and stage 5 respectively. Even better, the init arrow pierces thru all targets. Furthermore, there are thorn arrows that hit as well with 50% less damage. Therefore, if you looking forward to scaling SA's overall damage output further, it may be worth looking into how to incorporate the hit damage into the equation.

With the advent of Harvest crafting, maybe we could find some way to include some elemental damage into our offense, like a hybrid cold + poison bow (instead of +1 arrow), etc.? Or just stack up more flat phys/chaos damage?

I didn’t play when cold scourge arrow was a thing(started about a week into metamorph) but that build did not scale the poison at all I’m guessing? As you would need to convert the cold to chaos for it to be able to poison.

I’m also looking into other options for skills to use, I tried CA/Barrage a bit and it’s definitely not bad on single target but the clear definitely needs pierce for caustic arrow to feel good. I did try awakened arrow nova as that’s what I used for pretty amazing clear with TR but CA is a lot weaker with this build and it doesn’t have mirage archer TR as backup to finish off mobs.

I am thinking of giving TR poison version another try to see if I can get it better than just regular toxic rain as when I tried it earlier it felt about the same/slightly weaker than regular TR but I got a lot better gear now so maybe I can get it to work now. TR single target scaling is still quite confusing to figure out though with exactly when you get extra overlap and when/if extra arrows improve the single target damage.

I suppose it’s a bit off topic as this thread is about scourge arrow but figured most who are interested in one chaos dot skill probably also have some interest in the other ones.

Well, I just played around with PoB and added an additional stack of cluster jewels. With the new setup, I have 26.3mil sirus DPS (30mil with a Bottled Faith, but would be overkill already) at the expense of ~1,400 raw life. Apart from that, the defense system is left intact, i.e. still quite tanky. Guess that it is the most obvious way to scale Scourge Arrow poison DPS further.

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PoB: https://pastebin.com/XZd4cHgp
+ 5,579 HP
+ 26.3mil SA DPS (ideal conditions with 15/15 withered stacks)
+ Poison deals damage 52% faster

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This is probably something more suitable for T19 100% delirium maps or deep delving.

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MichaelLaudrup wrote:

Also, what would THE best mods on a bow for this build be? Of course attack speed and +2 additional arrows, but what about the rest? Im thinking it would be cool to make hunters/elder bow, with added chaos damage, 60% chance to 100% and 90% increased damage with poison?

The best bow mods for the build:

Prefix:
+ T1 flat chaos damage
+ Poison chance to deal double damage (Elder)
+ +40% chaos dot multi (bench)

Suffix:
+ T1 attack speed
+ +2 arrows
+ +35% dot multi
+ T1 poisons deal damage 25% faster (Hunter)
+ Culling strike (Elder)
+ T1 hybrid attack speed (Elder)
+ +1 arrow (Elder)
+ T1 hybrid poison damage/chance


The current best bow ever made for this build was crafted by Neabsera.

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Neabsera wrote:

I think this might be the best poison bow in the game, at least I can't think of a better combination to get

He also explained the crafting process here.

This is just for reference. The Hunter's mod (T1 poisons deal 25% damage faster) costs a lot of currency as the chance to roll is low with add/remove influence mod.

For folks with a much smaller bank (like me), a bow like below can clear all contents:

Don know how to delete other post lul