[2.5] The Infernal Queen - Burning Arrow Ascendant

WIP

• 12/9/16 - Dropped the pathing from Scion to Shadow; took Ranger start for proj damage scaling and life to Herbalist. Gained 20% additional curse effectiveness. Picked up Holy Fire and dropped Arsonist.
• 12/12/16 - 6-link obtained!.
• 12/16/16 - Changed pathing by dropping some Ranger nodes and Holy Fire cluster for Lava Lash and Iron Grip.

Bow

We use Xoph's Nurture as our weapon of choice. The high base damage makes our ignites powerful as we don't focus too much on attack speed since we don't use Emberwake. The 50% Phys to Fire conversion lets us convert our Burning Arrow to 100% Fire damage for even more damage. The ignite chance, ignite proliferation and life gained on ignite are also very nice for pack clearing and defense.

---

Quiver

Because we get 95% pierce chance, we will be using a Drillneck for 95% increased damage scaling both the hit and the burn. The bow also has a decent amount of Life, added Phys damage and Evasion. Attack speed is a nice QoL but a minimum roll is still fine.
Ideally, you want to get a +1 Arrow corruption, giving 3 arrows in total. However, 0.2% Fire leech will work just as well, if not better.

Helmet

You can use a variety of different helms, but I chose to use Devoto's Devotion. It grants great amount of movement speed, evasion and Chaos resistance. It's a commonly used base for enchantments so it may be easier to find one with a desirable enchant.

Otherwise, a rare helmet with good life, resists and accuracy will work as well. I recommend a ES/Eva or AR/EV helm for ease of colouring.

---

Body Armour

Kaom's Heart provides an immense boost to survivability with the large lifepool, and the Fire damage boost is a great boost. You may feel a bit socket-starved, however.

You may wish to explore alternative options such as Belly of the Beast for a respectable life pool and some resists or the new The Perfect Form for free Arctic Armour and 30% Spell Dodge. Note that the Perfect Form will make it harder to cap your Cold Resistance, however. A rare chestpiece with resists and life will also work. Don't forget to craft WED with Haku 6.

---

Gloves

Although rare gloves with life, resist and accuracy would be nice, we want to get the Curse enemies with Elemental Weakness on hit corruption. Because of this, we can opt for unique gloves which are relatively cheap to obtain and ideally have Life; theoretically, any glove with the corruption will do. The rarely used Shaper's Touch can be obtained en masse fairly cheaply once people begin to farm Shaper and is easy to colour.

If you can't afford to corrupt gloves, aim to get rare gloves with Life, attack speed, accuracy and resists. Gripped gloves are the preferred base.

---

Boots

You have two great options here. The Blood Dance is a great budget item that grants frenzy charge generation and grants extra life regen and damage, alongside the usual benefits of frenzy charges. Good for early maps but lacks survivability.

Rare 30% movement speed boots with life, strength and resists are recommended over Blood Dance ASAP. If you know someone with Haku 8, you can get WED crafted on as well.

Those who can afford it or find it in Uber Lab may choose to use Death's Door. You sacrifice some resists and life for +1 Endurance charge and bleed immunity. As many monsters in breaches inflict bleeding, this can be a huge QoL item for defence.

Belt

If you choose to use Vortex in your CwDT setup, Dyadian Dawn is a great choice. High life, fire and cold res are ideal. The 20% ignite speed effectively acts as a 1.2x multiplier to your ignite. Vortex, The Brine Crown and Arctic Armor are all able to chill enemies for the leech bonus.

Your other option is Doryani's Invitation, which grants extra Fire damage, resists, 0.2% leech and ignite chance when using a flask. This is better if you feel that you aren't chilling enemies often or are dealing with ranged enemies.

Until you can get one of these, use a rare leather belt with Life, resists, and possibly a flask mod or WED.

---

Amulet

You have many options here depending on your budget and playstyle.
Xoph's Blood is a great item with 10% Fire penetration and the Ash debuff. However, Avatar of Fire means you can't add Chaos damage, which prevents the full use of Atziri's Promise, and the The Red Dream for extra Chaos damage and leech.

This can be worked around using the non-upgraded Xoph's Heart, which has slightly weaker stats comparatively but still has the Ash debuff and more affordable to corrupt for +1 Curse.

Eye of Innocence has an interesting interaction with Xoph's Inception. Because Xoph's Heals about 50 Life on ignite, it can effectively cancel out the damage taken from the amulet while still triggering self-ignite. This is great with the Hotfooted jewel for extra movement speed and activating a low level CwDT setup for triggering Firestorm and Vortex and/or Fireball, granting a near-infinite self-heal. The chance to ignite and damage bonus are nice as well, but lack of Fire resist may cause some strain on your rings and jewels. This setup needs some consideration.

Finally, you can use Ngamahu Tiki for a lot of Fire damage, but in the end the Ash debuff from Xoph's Heart is considerably better even with about 40% less increased damage.

A Marble amulet with the Essence of Anger Fire Damage % craft is a good substitute.
If you can afford the amount of currency required, you can corrupt any of the above amulets to try to get the elusive +1 Curse corruption, which can be used with the Witchfire Brew's Vulnerability aura.

---

Rings

Ideally you want to get Opal Rings. Breach Rings and Resist Rings are also viable options if you are on a budget. Prioritize getting resists and life. You want these rolls in order of importance:

Prefixes:

• Life (craftable)
• WED

Suffixes:

• Lighting res (will likely need to be 40+)
• Cold res (craftable)
• Fire res (craftable)
• % Fire Damage (only via t6/t7 Essence of Anger, natural roll is too low)
• Accuracy (craftable)
• Dexterity (craftable)
• Strength (craftable)
• Chaos res(breach rings only)

Uniques

• Poacher's Aim, obtainable in A2 Cruel (Crypt quest) to reach 95% Pierce. Required.
• The Green Dream. Place in the
  socket near the Sentinel cluster (Scion). Grants 28% chance to get a Frenzy charge on kill. Upgrading to The Green Nightmare grants 9% dodge chance (absolutely not required, just QoL). Recommended as an end-game ugprade.
• The Red Dream, which gives 5% of Fire damage as Chaos (great with Atziri's Promise). Placed in the socket near Elementalist (Templar). Grants 12-18% chance to get an endurance charge on kill. Upgrading to The Red Nightmare grants 4-6% block chance (absolutely not required, just QoL). Synergy with Death's Door boots, lessens need to use Enduring Cry constantly. Optional.

---

Rares

You are looking for the following affixes on Crimson Jewels (max rolls listed):
Prefixes

• Life - 7%
• Fire Damage 16%

Suffixes

• 3 Resists - 10%
• 2 Resists - 12%
• 1 Resist - 15%
• Projectile Damage - 12%
• (Generic) Damage - 10%

Death's Door grants immunity to bleed immunity. Roll accordingly.
You will want these flasks:

• 1/2x Bubbling/Seething Divine Life Flask of Staunching (Heal+Bleed)
• 1x Chemist's Quicksilver/Silver Flask of Adrenaline(Move speed or Onslaught (damage, atk spd, move spd))
• 1x Chemist's Basalt Flask of Warding(Phys mitigation+Curse)
  [li]1x Experimenter's Quartz Flask of Heat(Phasing/Dodge+Freeze) for Breaches and Strongboxes

And any of the following according to preference/mods:

• Dying Sun for Fire resistance and extra projectiles/prolif radius
• Any Ruby Flask for Fire resistance for elemental reflect and Xoph's burning degens
• Witchfire Brew for smoke cloud, DoT and Vulnerability (if 3 curses or without Ele Weak gloves)
• Atziri's Promise for Chaos resistance and Chaos Damage/leech. Cannot be used with Xoph's Blood.
• Rumi's Conconcotion for armour and a bit of block and spell block

4~6L Main Attack: Burning Arrow-Pierce-WED-Slower Proj-5LFire Pen-6LAdded Fire
3L CwDT Setup: Cast when Damage Taken (Lv3)-Firestorm-20q Vortex
2L Scorch Totem: Spell Totem-Scorching Ray
*Note that the totem should only be on an adjacent 2L; a 3 or 4L will mess with the other skills.
2L Blasphemy: Blasphemy-Flammability or Enfeeble
Buffs: Arctic Armor/Herald of Ash/low levelClarity
Misc Skills: Enduring Cry/Blink Arrow or Frenzy or Portal or Vaal Breach
Note: you could drop either Arctic Armor or Herald of Ash and add Elemental Weakness to your Blasphemy if you prefer that instead of vaaling gloves, although it might hurt your mana pool.
[/list]

• Normal: Oak (+40 Life)
• Cruel: None (Skill Point)
• Merciless: Kraityn (Frenzy Charge if using Green Dream/Frenzy) or None (Skill Point)

POE Planner or POE Website

For this build we go with Scion for the Ascendant ascendancy, taking the Deadeye and Chieftain nodes. This grants us:

• Easy access to both the left and right sides of the passive tree with minimal travelling
• +40 Strength and Dexterity
• +3 additional Skill Points
• Access to Ranger start (45% Life pathing to Heart of Oak and Herbalism)
• +1 extra projectile (removes need to use LMP/GMP which lowers ignite damage)
• 30% Pierce chance
• 15% Ignite chance
• 15% Added Fire damage when you or your totems have killed recently
• 30% increased damage and 2% Life regen when you have a totem
Do both the Normal and Cruel Lab before taking Deadeye. Then, take Chieftain in Merciless. In Uber Lab, take Ranger start for more Life nodes.

• 10/15% of Burning Arrow Physical Damage gained as Fire Damage
• 20/30% increased Flammability Curse Effect
• 30/40% increased Burning Arrow Damage

Burning Arrow's Added Fire is very powerful as it adds to the base damage, increasing the ignite damage.
Flammability effectiveness is very nice as it both decreases Fire resistance by a further 9 or 13% and makes it more likely to ignite the enemy.
Burning Arrow damage is the last desirable enchantment but still fairly strong.

• 6/8% chance to Dodge Spell Damage if you've taken Spell Damage Recently
• 0.5/0.6% of Damage Leeched as Life and Mana if you've Killed Recently
• Regenerate 1.5/2% of Life and Mana per second if you were Hit Recently

None, you should have the Elemental Weakness on hit corruption instead.
Otherwise, the Projectile Damage on Gripped Gloves double dips.
If you insist on using a Glove Enchantment, use any of the following:

• Attack with "X" of Fury on Hit (projectile nova)
• Attack with "x" of Spite when Hit (chilled ground nova)
• Cast "x" of War on Kill (animates bow)

Pierce chance: 95%

• 50% - Pierce Support
• 30% - Ascendant Deadeye Notable
• 15% - Poacher's Aim Viridian Jewel

Ignite chance: BA: 88-100% / FS: 68-92% / Fireball: 88-100%

• 10% - Xoph's Nurture
• 25% - Passive Tree nodes (chance to ignite)
• 15% - Ascendant Chieftain Notable
• 14% - Flammability
• 4% - Passive Tree nodes (curse effect)
• 10% - Doryani's Invitation (optional)
• 10% - Eye of Innocence (optional)
• 2-4% - Flammability effect enchant (optional)
• 20% - Burning Arrow (local)
• 20%-30+% - Fireball (local)
• 
  

Fire Resistance Reduction: 119~134%

• 24% - Scorching Ray
• 44% - Flammability
• 29-31% - Elemental Weakness (Lv10~12)
• 21.9% - Passive Tree nodes (curse effect)
• 8.8-13.2% - Flammability effect enchant (optional)

Fire Penetration: 42~52%

• 5% - Passive Tree nodes
• 37% - Fire Penetration Support
• 10% - Xoph's Blood (optional)