[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)

Well first and foremost: drop the pierce gem and get an empower lvl 2 or 3. Since you skilled all the pierce nodes and the ascendancy the gem will only give you the proj dmg. Better to up your base dmg. Now my 2 cents: See if you can't drop clarity. You shouldn't need it anymore. Run Purity of Elements or any purity you need instead, if you can manage + grace. This will make it way easier to swap gear and the build isn't mana hungry anyway. I have never used clarity. Neither Arctic Armour. I may be wrong but i found it more comfortable to just increase my life pool and run around more. Get life on your ammy, since you won't be needing that much res now it should be easy to find one with life and iir. Get a Frenzy lvl 1 gem instead of 19 and you can run any reflect map while cursing all the time. If you have a couple ex, get a 6l +3 bow by one of the ways described in the op and in the last few pages. Get at least 1 decent ventors gamble with iiq. Use wither totem for soloing.

My Gear for comparison (5k hp, 22k something tooltip damage, 37/310 or so, can't log in now. Disregard Aoe Gem, I use Rarity for solo)

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Serleth escribió:

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SirTox escribió:

So, I've also been levelling an MF CA build, but as a Champion. What is OP's opinion of this?

My reasoning for rolling a champion is that Fortify is an incredibly strong mechanic, and you actually have two options on "increased damage" to choose from, one if you often run in parties and one which has a safety buffer when you reach low life. They are both strictly better than the Trickster node which just gives an increased amount of DoT damage, and it is even a lower amount.

Right now I'm just level 70, but later I expect to have about 6k life, and I can also add Fortify, Acro/Spell Acro, and a very high evasion rating to that.

Not worth it.

The TL;DR is that by starting from Duelist, you're wasting a minimum six passive points. Congrats, you get Fortify, but now you HAVE to take damage off Champion in order to compensate for the damage you're losing on the tree.

Alternately you could just roll Trickster, sacrifice nothing, and gain a boatload of dodge/evasion.

You can't just compare Ascendant classes straight up. You have to take into account what you're gaining or losing by making a particular decision. In this case, the six passive points you lose not only means you basically throw away six damage or life nodes, there's also the opportunity cost of what you could alternately have spent those nodes on instead of being pigeon-holed into recovering that sacrifice.

There's an argument to be made for going Champion for this build if you're playing in HC, but not as an SC character.

Played properly, even without any Ascendant benefits, you should VERY rarely die with this build unless you're rolling super-rippy T11+ maps. Even as an HC character, with some modifications, you can roll Scion and be confident in your ability to survive.

I don't really see where you mean that I will be missing a minimum of six skill point. To reach your tree from the duelist starting point it only takes five points, and two of those five points give increased life and evasion which is useful. So in my mind i'm only missing out on three skill points.

I just fell like you're misusing the Trickster tree. The hero stat in "Shade Form" is the 250 ES. But since you're going Acro you will not be building ES. And 500 base evasion is honestly not that much. Less than 1/5 than a level 20 grace gives you.

And I would rather not rely on dodge/evasion as a main part of my defense. I'd rather reduce the damage of a big hit, than have a chance to dodge.

You can basically say that fortify gives you 24% more life, recovery and regen. And since I feel that the evasion i get from Trickster isn't much at all, I'd rather sacrifice three skill points to roll a Champion, So I can use Fortify, Evasion and Acro efficiently.

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horstkaracho escribió:

Well first and foremost: drop the pierce gem and get an empower lvl 2 or 3. Since you skilled all the pierce nodes and the ascendancy the gem will only give you the proj dmg. Better to up your base dmg. Now my 2 cents: See if you can't drop clarity. You shouldn't need it anymore. Run Purity of Elements or any purity you need instead, if you can manage + grace. This will make it way easier to swap gear and the build isn't mana hungry anyway. I have never used clarity. Neither Arctic Armour. I may be wrong but i found it more comfortable to just increase my life pool and run around more. Get life on your ammy, since you won't be needing that much res now it should be easy to find one with life and iir. Get a Frenzy lvl 1 gem instead of 19 and you can run any reflect map while cursing all the time. If you have a couple ex, get a 6l +3 bow by one of the ways described in the op and in the last few pages. Get at least 1 decent ventors gamble with iiq. Use wither totem for soloing.

My Gear for comparison (5k hp, 22k something tooltip damage, 37/310 or so, can't log in now. Disregard Aoe Gem, I use Rarity for solo)

Yup, trying to level up an empower gem now, almost LVL2 soon. Thanks for the feedback =)
The OP build says to drop essence drain once we have deadeye, I see some builds still carry it for single target? Not too sure how I can utilize this skill, it tends to hit some minions rather that the targeted boss?

See some skill changes to think about here in recent posts...

I feel what others do on the trading market... feels like there is very little of value to sell this league... last decent sales were the 20% lvl 1 gems I made in my off-slots from finishing leveling my Essense Drain supports... Void Manipulation/etc...

I need to eventually recoup my IIR losses from switching in Ventor's Gamble for Andvarius in my neck/helm/glove mods, but still waiting to mastermod my Bow...

I tried Malformation Piety for the first time (Vaal Orb up-roll working on challenge)... I clearly didn't know what I was doing and died 2x... first deaths in several levels (lvl 88)... First death I figured was flustered killing trash and then trying to run around her during beam with bad red ball obstacle placement... 2nd try wasn't much better so I moved on... otherwise been smooth sailing t1-t9... haven't tried progressing t10+ yet... working on challenges has slowed me down...

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Razorwind escribió:

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horstkaracho escribió:

Well first and foremost: drop the pierce gem and get an empower lvl 2 or 3. Since you skilled all the pierce nodes and the ascendancy the gem will only give you the proj dmg. Better to up your base dmg. Now my 2 cents: See if you can't drop clarity. You shouldn't need it anymore. Run Purity of Elements or any purity you need instead, if you can manage + grace. This will make it way easier to swap gear and the build isn't mana hungry anyway. I have never used clarity. Neither Arctic Armour. I may be wrong but i found it more comfortable to just increase my life pool and run around more. Get life on your ammy, since you won't be needing that much res now it should be easy to find one with life and iir. Get a Frenzy lvl 1 gem instead of 19 and you can run any reflect map while cursing all the time. If you have a couple ex, get a 6l +3 bow by one of the ways described in the op and in the last few pages. Get at least 1 decent ventors gamble with iiq. Use wither totem for soloing.

My Gear for comparison (5k hp, 22k something tooltip damage, 37/310 or so, can't log in now. Disregard Aoe Gem, I use Rarity for solo)

Yup, trying to level up an empower gem now, almost LVL2 soon. Thanks for the feedback =)
The OP build says to drop essence drain once we have deadeye, I see some builds still carry it for single target? Not too sure how I can utilize this skill, it tends to hit some minions rather that the targeted boss?

Yeah you can easily drop essence drain. I don't really use it all that much anyway. Without projectile speed it'S a really clunky skill imo. Still, I've got the 5l and nothing much to fill it with, so why not. It comes in handy in group play situations where you don't really care about getting the last hit or simply can't get it anyway. If you lack the survivability then drop it and run something else.

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Piros escribió:

See some skill changes to think about here in recent posts...

I feel what others do on the trading market... feels like there is very little of value to sell this league... last decent sales were the 20% lvl 1 gems I made in my off-slots from finishing leveling my Essense Drain supports... Void Manipulation/etc...

I need to eventually recoup my IIR losses from switching in Ventor's Gamble for Andvarius in my neck/helm/glove mods, but still waiting to mastermod my Bow...

I tried Malformation Piety for the first time (Vaal Orb up-roll working on challenge)... I clearly didn't know what I was doing and died 2x... first deaths in several levels (lvl 88)... First death I figured was flustered killing trash and then trying to run around her during beam with bad red ball obstacle placement... 2nd try wasn't much better so I moved on... otherwise been smooth sailing t1-t9... haven't tried progressing t10+ yet... working on challenges has slowed me down...

Trading is mainly about volume and time imo. If you have 10+ p2w tabs and are online a lot, the orbs will keep rolling in. It definitely helps to have a rough idea how much smth is worth the moment you find it and just drop it in the right tab. If you haven't sold smth in a while you can also just reprice whole tabs from 5c to 4c for example. Don't hold yourself up trying to price every single item correctly. That's time better spend in maps. Throw in some master mods if you can, so people can findd your item easier. Most still are a little fuzzy about what affixes are open or simply don't search that detailed. So if you have a 2 res ring, throw in a third, 5c tab, back to mapping. Stuff like that.

I still sometimes die on mal piety. the main thing is to run a big circle when she casts her balls and a small one when she does the beam. This way the balls won't be in your way.

I've probly spent 200 regals now trying to craft a dual resist bow =/
Hope I am doing it right..
I am using bowstation to add Dex to make it blue
Then Regaling to try and get +2bow skills
then scouring and repeat.

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permallama escribió:

I've probly spent 200 regals now trying to craft a dual resist bow =/
Hope I am doing it right..
I am using bowstation to add Dex to make it blue
Then Regaling to try and get +2bow skills
then scouring and repeat.

Don't say that... I'm getting ready to start mastercrafting my own bow tomorrow... got all the exalts... 50/50 scour/regal, few hundred alts... hope its enough or I'll need to convert more currency around...

@horst... I have the p2w tabs... been pretty aggressively price dropping... trying to 1ex/40c/30c/20c/10c/7c/5c/2c/1c/vendor method (shift prices all down a layer every day or so until sold/vendored)... maybe I need more low number tabs... and been using poeprices.info to price items i dont know well once a day or so as well...

...and despite my comments before, both my big ticket items sold today... spell dagger with 75% spell dmg and spell crit on crit base dagger with open mastercraft crit mod... and heavy resist/ES shield... made nearly 2ex there which financed starting my +3 bow

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SirTox escribió:

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Serleth escribió:

I don't really see where you mean that I will be missing a minimum of six skill point. To reach your tree from the duelist starting point it only takes five points, and two of those five points give increased life and evasion which is useful. So in my mind i'm only missing out on three skill points.

I just fell like you're misusing the Trickster tree. The hero stat in "Shade Form" is the 250 ES. But since you're going Acro you will not be building ES. And 500 base evasion is honestly not that much. Less than 1/5 than a level 20 grace gives you.

And I would rather not rely on dodge/evasion as a main part of my defense. I'd rather reduce the damage of a big hit, than have a chance to dodge.

You can basically say that fortify gives you 24% more life, recovery and regen. And since I feel that the evasion i get from Trickster isn't much at all, I'd rather sacrifice three skill points to roll a Champion, So I can use Fortify, Evasion and Acro efficiently.

I'll concede the three points, but that's still three points.

Shade Form is about the 20% MORE evasion chance when not on full ES. The amount of ES you get is irrelevant, it's the multiplicative evasion chance that scales with Grace and your other gear. Given how fast you're SUPPOSED to play the build, you should basically never be on full ES.

I don't get where you're seeing that Fortify gives you 24% more life. It's reduced damage taken, not less.

I don't know how else to phrase it but it's seriously not worth sacrificing three points given the dodge/spell dodge and multiplicative evasion boost from Trickster. If you're playing evasion correctly, it decimates Fortify.

20% reduced damage taken (before buffs) isn't enough to make a difference when you're dealing with things that are going to one-shot you unless you're really investing in life off the tree and gear, and sacrificing MF to do it, and scaling armour rather than evasion. The Orchard boss on a rippy rolled map is still going to one-shot, Fortify or not.

Besides, the whole point of the SC variants of the build isn't about making sure you get to level 100. It's about steamrolling content and farming like mad, mostly in T8 maps or less, with the option of running T14s if you want. So if all you're doing is speed farming =<T8, you're not even going to feel the difference with Fortify anyway because you're not playing difficult enough content where it's going to actually save you in any given situation.

Like I said, if you're playing HC and changing the build accordingly, there's an argument to be made for it. But not for SC. SC's about murdering the hell out of things as fast as possible, and being willing to sacrifice the odd death here and there. Hence, Scion for SC.

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permallama escribió:

I've probly spent 200 regals now trying to craft a dual resist bow =/
Hope I am doing it right..
I am using bowstation to add Dex to make it blue
Then Regaling to try and get +2bow skills
then scouring and repeat.

Cripes, with that kind of success rate, you could have just converted your regals to exalts and paid a bit more for the crafting.