3.23 EXPLOSIVE ARROW BALLISTA ELEMENTALIST - League-Start to End-Game. Easy mode.

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Krwwpn escribió:

Spoiler

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bizbiz77 escribió:

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Krwwpn escribió:

I was wondering if I could get some advice on where to go with the build next? Would it be worth it to give up chaos resistance for Curse enemies on my ring?

https://pastebin.com/JTxgxnbj

I think 75% chaos res is not needed you can drop some
But Flammability on arcanist brand setup works nicely you can leave it like that.

What you need is attack speed you go from 14M dps to 18M dps vs boss with 20 stack of explosive arrow

You can grab some by adding cast when damage taken + lightning golem in youre boots instead of CoD Portal
And maybe some more in ring + large cluster Jewel + quiver to reach 20 fuse

Don't forget the catalyst on the belt it's a huge dps boost also

I bought a new bow and quiver and got the attack speed up to 2.43, the belt was done, not sure why it wasn't showing. I also switched over to a bow cluster.

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limevan escribió:

Spoiler

I pulled your PoB, and this is what I'm working with: https://pastebin.com/xGapXEFV

Overall, you're sitting very comfortably with good life and resistances. With all your skills active, you'll be at ignite cap. However, there will be situations (juiced maps, simulacrums, etc) where we'll run into problems like losing convergence from longer boss fights, not being able to apply flammability or combustion reliably, facing evasive/moving targets, etc. To try to address that, here are some of my thoughts:

Skill Duration. You're at 20 fuses with 2.29 Attack Rate, but this is only possible because you have 21/20 EA with 10% Tempered Arrowheads and 23% Malevolence. This means that while you can get the maximum potential of the skill, it takes 1.551s for the explosion to happen after you attach the first fuse. If you're bossing (non-fidgety boss) then this is probably fine, but it would feel sluggish while mapping. Bosses like UE and shaper are constantly flitting around, so it's harder for all 20 fuses to be applied especially without Rain of Splinters. If you find this playstyle ok, that's great! Otherwise, I'd recommend getting more attack speed and going for 21/0 EA.

Ballista Totem. You're on 20/20. Moving to 21/20 isn't costly and improves DPS. Consider divergent version if you prefer extra totem range. Malevolence is at 20/20, but doesn't need 21 at this stage since the improvement is 1% increased Skill Effect Duration. Once you get a +2 amulet, you can upgrade to lvl 21 Malevolence to reach 21% more DoT.

Elemental Mastery. 40% increased Effect of Non-Damaging Ailments improves your shock, giving you 4% extra damage.

Hit Chance. 98% is fine, but you can boost it affordably with a better eater implicit on gloves. Having a slightly different large cluster with Martial Prowess (15% accuracy, plus 6% attack speed, 20% inc. damage) as the 3rd notable can be a solution. Another way is to bring Precision up to level 7, and commit fully to lifetap on all skills. It looks like you can comfortably adapt to this, since you have enough spare unreserved mana and skills that can be lifetapped. Removing reliance on mana also means we can run no-regen maps without a care. Also, spending a point in bow mastery for 200 accuracy (2 green sockets on bow) hurts.

Ignite DPS. At this stage of your gearing, you can adjust for a lot more damage to overcome the issues of non-ideal fight scenarios. Your ring is very helpful for capping your chaos resistance, but it is also the slot that you can get a bunch of damage and accuracy mods on. Lethal Pride is another source of a bunch of damage you can consider.

Life Gain on Hit. This is not very useful, especially since you're firing a single projectile on frenzy. Alternatives are GMP, GVolley, Culling (popular, but unnecessary unless juiced bossing). Since we stack a lot of attack speed, having Faster Attacks linked here doesn't benefit us much.

Totem Mastery wheel. If you're starving on passives points, we usually drop both of these wheels since they give low DPS economy, and is mainly for QoL on totem life and placement speed. Of course, only consider sacrificing these when you need passive points with better value. From what I'm seeing, this is the direction you should be heading towards. With the spare points, set up your Lethal Pride wheel, getting points that help with burning damage, faster ignites and inc. life.

Flasks. You've got the Warding mod on a Life Flask. If you're looking for curse management, use the Warding mod on utility flasks (or enduring mana flasks). In your case, the effect will last for only 1.50s, or once your HP is full; so the curse removal and immunity has a very short uptime. I notice that you've also got a curse reduction flask mod, so I'm not too sure what your direction is. The usual mods we look for in flask suffixes are movespeed, armor, and evasion. attack speed is fine, but it should not get in the way of bleed removal.

Curse-on-Hit rings. I think these are useful if we have DPS problems when doing normal content. However, once we start tackling harder content, we need a big boost to reduce monster resistances (esp. ubers). This ring could hurt us instead, because it would constantly override any stronger curses that we're applying (either selfcast or arcanist brand). Based on the curse manifesto for 3.20, curses have been made weaker against regular monsters, but stronger against uniques and bosses. also, the "with #%increased effect" part of curse-on-hit rings has been removed. to me, this is ggg's way of encouraging us to apply a strong curse on tanky monsters, while relying less on these rings.

Good luck!

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Krwwpn escribió:

Spoiler

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limevan escribió:

I pulled your PoB, and this is what I'm working with: https://pastebin.com/xGapXEFV

Overall, you're sitting very comfortably with good life and resistances. With all your skills active, you'll be at ignite cap. However, there will be situations (juiced maps, simulacrums, etc) where we'll run into problems like losing convergence from longer boss fights, not being able to apply flammability or combustion reliably, facing evasive/moving targets, etc. To try to address that, here are some of my thoughts:

Skill Duration. You're at 20 fuses with 2.29 Attack Rate, but this is only possible because you have 21/20 EA with 10% Tempered Arrowheads and 23% Malevolence. This means that while you can get the maximum potential of the skill, it takes 1.551s for the explosion to happen after you attach the first fuse. If you're bossing (non-fidgety boss) then this is probably fine, but it would feel sluggish while mapping. Bosses like UE and shaper are constantly flitting around, so it's harder for all 20 fuses to be applied especially without Rain of Splinters. If you find this playstyle ok, that's great! Otherwise, I'd recommend getting more attack speed and going for 21/0 EA.

Ballista Totem. You're on 20/20. Moving to 21/20 isn't costly and improves DPS. Consider divergent version if you prefer extra totem range. Malevolence is at 20/20, but doesn't need 21 at this stage since the improvement is 1% increased Skill Effect Duration. Once you get a +2 amulet, you can upgrade to lvl 21 Malevolence to reach 21% more DoT.

Elemental Mastery. 40% increased Effect of Non-Damaging Ailments improves your shock, giving you 4% extra damage.

Hit Chance. 98% is fine, but you can boost it affordably with a better eater implicit on gloves. Having a slightly different large cluster with Martial Prowess (15% accuracy, plus 6% attack speed, 20% inc. damage) as the 3rd notable can be a solution. Another way is to bring Precision up to level 7, and commit fully to lifetap on all skills. It looks like you can comfortably adapt to this, since you have enough spare unreserved mana and skills that can be lifetapped. Removing reliance on mana also means we can run no-regen maps without a care. Also, spending a point in bow mastery for 200 accuracy (2 green sockets on bow) hurts.

Ignite DPS. At this stage of your gearing, you can adjust for a lot more damage to overcome the issues of non-ideal fight scenarios. Your ring is very helpful for capping your chaos resistance, but it is also the slot that you can get a bunch of damage and accuracy mods on. Lethal Pride is another source of a bunch of damage you can consider.

Life Gain on Hit. This is not very useful, especially since you're firing a single projectile on frenzy. Alternatives are GMP, GVolley, Culling (popular, but unnecessary unless juiced bossing). Since we stack a lot of attack speed, having Faster Attacks linked here doesn't benefit us much.

Totem Mastery wheel. If you're starving on passives points, we usually drop both of these wheels since they give low DPS economy, and is mainly for QoL on totem life and placement speed. Of course, only consider sacrificing these when you need passive points with better value. From what I'm seeing, this is the direction you should be heading towards. With the spare points, set up your Lethal Pride wheel, getting points that help with burning damage, faster ignites and inc. life.

Flasks. You've got the Warding mod on a Life Flask. If you're looking for curse management, use the Warding mod on utility flasks (or enduring mana flasks). In your case, the effect will last for only 1.50s, or once your HP is full; so the curse removal and immunity has a very short uptime. I notice that you've also got a curse reduction flask mod, so I'm not too sure what your direction is. The usual mods we look for in flask suffixes are movespeed, armor, and evasion. attack speed is fine, but it should not get in the way of bleed removal.

Curse-on-Hit rings. I think these are useful if we have DPS problems when doing normal content. However, once we start tackling harder content, we need a big boost to reduce monster resistances (esp. ubers). This ring could hurt us instead, because it would constantly override any stronger curses that we're applying (either selfcast or arcanist brand). Based on the curse manifesto for 3.20, curses have been made weaker against regular monsters, but stronger against uniques and bosses. also, the "with #%increased effect" part of curse-on-hit rings has been removed. to me, this is ggg's way of encouraging us to apply a strong curse on tanky monsters, while relying less on these rings.

Good luck!

Thank you for the help!

I updated to divergent Ballista totem (21/20) Downgraded EA to (21/0) and switch over to lifetap (Rip Cod-Portal)

I was able to raise Precision to lvl 12 (this allowed me to get 100% hit) and changed my ring craft to 16% increased fire damage.

I added lethal Pride 11199, Martial Prowess, and Elemental Mastery. I needed to keep 1 point in the lower totem mastery to keep my AS at 2.29, I'll Adjust that when I get enough currency to pick up a watchers.

I also fixed my flasks, that was just an oversite.

At some point should I switch away from lightning spire trap to something like you're running with Searing Brand?

Updated PoB: https://pastebin.com/EhYWD7SL

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MacGyver85EL escribió:

1. what are our primary sources of skill effect duration? when I added polaric devastation, my number did not change from 1.221. Perhaps I have an incorrect setting in POB somewhere when I calculate? My understanding of my fuse count currently is 2.37 APS, 99% hit, 1.221x skill duration, 6 totems = 17.19, +1 (count starts from the first hit) = 18 fuses. Am I calculating this correctly?

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MacGyver85EL escribió:

2. Is the only benefit of the Blizzard crown the cold damage implicit?

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MacGyver85EL escribió:

3. I'm considering swapping out the chest in favor of Hyrri's Ire, which would help with maybe freeing up some passive points (or allow me to go with a completely alternative helm instead of looking for suppression on Blizzard.). It does look like a lot of the top builds on POENinja use Hyrri's.

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MacGyver85EL escribió:

4. It's *really* hard to get a good +2 amulet on PS. Fractured 20+% DOT multiplier bases sell for 12d, and that's before you begin crafting on them. I know my amulet sucks, am I better off abandoning the +skill gem dream and just getting an amulet with good stats?

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Zuuule escribió:

@limevan

You seem to know quite a bit about how this build functions. Maybe you can explain what the ignite cap it? My PoB has warnings that my DoT DPS and Full DOT DPS has exceeded game limit. What does this mean? Can I not do more than a certain amount of damage with this build?

EDIT: I looked back a few pages and see it mentioned but never really explained. Does this mean that at some point I'll hit a ceiling?

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limevan escribió:

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Zuuule escribió:

@limevan

You seem to know quite a bit about how this build functions. Maybe you can explain what the ignite cap it? My PoB has warnings that my DoT DPS and Full DOT DPS has exceeded game limit. What does this mean? Can I not do more than a certain amount of damage with this build?

EDIT: I looked back a few pages and see it mentioned but never really explained. Does this mean that at some point I'll hit a ceiling?

I don't know enough about this build, but we're all here to learn.

I googled a bit about this after trying to look for answers here. Apparently, this game calculates a few things in a "convenient" way. Damage over Time is one of them, and it is set up as 2 to the 31st power (the max. positive value in a 32-bit signed integer = 2,147,483,648), divided by 60 (over a minute). We arrive at 35,791,394, which is the familiar number we encounter in POB when it comes to DOTs like ignite. [source]

To us, this means that monsters we ignite can take a maximum DOT damage of 35,791,394. Practically, we should strive to hit this and then divert our other resources to QoL. It makes no sense to devote more gear or passives into getting more damage UNLESS we're aiming to farm Uber Pinnacle Bosses. (If you switch the target to UPBs in POB, it's very likely that your ignite will not remain at the cap.)

Since this build is made to hit the cap very easily, we can move forward by aiming for Ignite cap while:

1. Spending the least time to hit the necessary fuses: instead of relying on a very long fuse duration and slower attack speed, go with shorter Skill Effect Duration while stacking more attack speed. In this way, we get the same damage done without the clumsy playstyle of waiting for nearly 1.5s per explosion. Mapping becomes a lot smoother this way.

2. Reduce reliance on supplementary skills. Combustion is great when it applies -10% fire resistance. However, it takes too long to weave a Lightning Spire trap, and wait for it to trigger and hit monsters to apply this effect. By using "Nearby Enermies have -#% to Fire Resistance" on helmet or by increasing DPS through quicker burns (boots implicits, lethal pride buffs, etc), we can do the same damage with fewer skills. The same logic follows for Flammability. We want to be able to kill most monsters without having to lean on other skills. This is actually a huge boost to our survivability since monsters have much less time to get dangerous, and also why it's a great asset during sanctum runs when you can snipe the guards before they crowd the screen with skills.