[1.3] Death's Harpist - Everything's Better Shocked and Frozen

The basic concept is to use Cast on Crit's ridiculous effective cast speed to get a lot of high-crit chance spells out at once to fully take advantage of Death's Harp's insane crit multi. And since this build didn't use the Crit Multiplier support, and generally doesn't get more than 18 shots or so per second, it was completely unaffected by the nerfs brought on by 1.3.

This is the current build gear. It's actually a bit pricier than it needs to be, especially with the 5L Queen of the Forest. In general, you can get by with a bit less than 1 ex of gear in the endgame, give or take. You don't even need high-quality gems; I actually got all the 20Qs that this build uses by just playing it and leveling spares in my offhand.

In general, you want to prioritize sockets & links, then resistance, then life, then crit chance and multiplier (on gear that can actually roll it), then evasion. The only exception to this is your boots - prioritize movespeed, then all the rest of that jazz. Use Atziri's Step if you don't need much more resistance.

The main setup is Barrage/CastOnCrit/GMP/IceSpear. If you get a 5 or 6L, you can tack on Arc, Fireball, Flame Surge, or Arctic Breath for extra damage; which one you use is generally up to personal preference. Getting a 5L is pretty important past level 70 maps; the damage boost it gives is insane. I've yet to test it out with a 6L, since I'm not THAT rich, but I'd imagine the damage grows by a similar amount, i.e. fucktons.

The support setup is SplitArrow/PCoC/CurseOnHit/AssassinsMark. This is what I usually use to keep Power Charges up, since I mostly play solo. If you play in parties, you may end up wanting to use a PCoC/Chain/FasterAttacks/SplitArrow setup instead; it makes maintaining power charges much easier than the other setup does when you aren't guaranteed to get kills, and doesn't piss off curse supports.

The aura setup is ReducedMana/HeraldOfIce/HeraldOfThunder/Grace. Grace does a good job of helping you stay alive, and the other two add a ton of damage to your attacks and the spells they trigger. I don't really think there's much you can change about this setup.

Other than those, the only other setups are just utility stuff. I haven't tested the new bow movement skills yet, but I'd imagine they're pretty swell. Smoke Mine is still great for clearing strongboxes.

If you're going to quality gems, the first thing you want quality on is your Cast on Crit, since the quality on that boosts both the critrate of your attack and the critrate of your spells. After that, you want to 20q the things in your support setup - every last one of those gems benefits massively from quality. After that.... you could 20q your attack spells, I guess? Most of them don't benefit massively from quality, but even for those that do, it's generally not necessary.

This sentence is a link to the tree because I don't want to have to scroll past a giant block of ugly text every time I proofread this.

In general, the tree shoots mostly for global crit chance (most important because it affects both our spells and our attack), bow crit chance, and life. I grab Acrobatics because with no ES, low armor, and no block, there's no reason not to. Same goes with Ondar's Guile. I take the Ranger's defensive path over the offensive path because 4% life per node isn't that awful, and when it's coupled with evasion there's really no reason not to take it. I took the Profane Chemistry cluster because this build gets a lot of crits, so I tend to spam the everloving shit out of Surgeon's flasks; you can take more of the Scion life wheel if you're worried about getting 1-shot.

Also, if you want to run Flame Surge instead of the other spells, you're going to want to leave out the King of the Hill notable, because Knockback and Flame Surge don't work so well together.

This is pretty much going to be a dump of character stats on request.

I screwed up the cropping, so level, life, mana and ES are missing from these screenshots. At the time these were taken, those stats were 88, 4395, 529, and 52 respectively.

Please note that most of these tooltips aren't indicative of the build's actual DPS; partially due to how they fail to take into account Ice Spear's bonus 2nd stage crit chance and partially because I can't take a screenshot with power charges up to save my life - as such, all of these are without them.

Like all builds, it has a few kinks.

The biggest one is Proximity Shield rares. Due to this build having King of the Hill, a decent crit chance, and a pretty high number of arrows flying everywhere, everything tends to get knocked around a lot. Usually, this isn't an issue, because things will generally die shortly after they get hit with a crit arrow, but Proximity Shield rares don't. The best way to take care of them with this build is to either push them into a corner where the knockback won't make them desync away, or just skip the fuckers.

One other problem this build really has is with phys spells due to being evasion-and-acro based. Atziri's Step helps, but I'd still advise skipping Ghetto maps with this build, because any amount of prolonged physical spell spam is going to hurt like a bitch.

Oh, and in terms of maps, this can run pretty much everything except Blood Magic and elemental reflect; both for pretty obvious reasons.