Quill Rain CoC - How Hard Does the Nerf Affect It?

I'm going to preface this by saying I'm pretty new to Path of Exile. If this ends up a stupid question, please bear with me. I'm considering a new build, and want more seasoned opinions before I start devoting hours of my life to another character.



I happened upon a Quill Rain, then found out about its synergy with CoC, and the builds based on it look like hysterical facerolling fun. That said, I also heard that CoC got nerfed in the recent patch (cooldown went from .01 to .05), and that seems to be what makes Quill Rain run. There doesn't seem to be much on how badly this would specifically affect a Quill Rain build out there yet, but to my untrained eyes, it looks like it could still theoretically work. But, well, would it?

I don't pretend to really know the math. The nerf sounds like an incredibly small change to me, but that's also only a fifth of the procs it could have provided before. Just how badly does a .04 cooldown difference hurt the build? Is it enough that any other not-quite-as-fast weapon can now accomplish the same thing as Quill Rain? Does it entirely break a build and I shouldn't bother? Does it just nerf it into "eh, it's alright" territory? Or is it still great?

Now, I can't be 100% sure without trying it, but if you used chain to get more hits with quillrain CoC the nerf was quite severe because of huge projectile speed bonus on it. If your targets are tightly packed, it would take less than 0,05 seconds for the arrow to travel from target to target, potentially mutilating your trigger count.

Without testing 'before' and 'after' this is the best I can do.

Generally I would recommend you to run wands or daggers for coc builds, bows aren't that good (I made a CoC ranger in beyond, and you can't get close to the performance of wands).

Quill rain is often said to be good, but 5% crit chance is crap for CoC builds. YOu are better off with a blue bow with ~9%crit and attack speed.

A well-rolled death's harp can also work for chump change, you got some crit chance, some attack speed and a ridiculously huge crit multi bonus... and extra arrow.

The nerf was needed because as of now with the change... you can still possibly proc 20 COC casts every second! before with skills like barrage you could get even more essentially spamming the screen!! which even with 20 casts per second would still spam it so unless you have some insane amount of crit AND IAS then in most cases your not even gonna notice the nerf! before the change the amount of possible procs per second was 100 per second! which was impossible to reach anyway!! the nerf just makes Barrage not as necessary to run a bow COC build now! you can run many other bow skills and still get very good results! which is better anyway IMO!
People who say thing like the nerf will cut my DPS in half and such simply have no conception of time and the decimal system!

Not a huge fan of Quill Rain for a CoC build. The fast attack speed doesn't quite make up for the lousy crit chance. You'll end up firing a ton of sporadic blanks and it'll feel clunky and inconsistent.

As someone else mentioned, dual-wand is a better setup and is still very cheap. The procs will feel more consistent and the damage will be better. (Find or roll a couple of rare wands with either crit chance or spell damage, and master-craft the missing stat onto them)

That said, I haven't used CoC since the 1.3 nerf -- not sure if it's even worth bothering with period.

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Demonoz wrote:

People who say thing like the nerf will cut my DPS in half and such simply have no conception of time and the decimal system!

Keep in mind hits usually aren't spread evenly over that one second, they come in bunches and if those bunches are very tight because of high projectile speed on quillrain the procs you get might even be less than half of previous number.

The amount of procs you get now will be even more dependent on your exact setup. For instance, I remember CoC working somewhat decent with ground slam before, because the wave has a certain travel time. I'm fairly sure it's utter junk now (besides, mine was a left side build and there's significantly less crit there now).

Before the patch, I ran quill rain CoC. Haven't logged into it since the nerfs.
Don't need any more than math to tell me it's rekt.
By my calculations, the number of spells cast is about halved from where I was, RIP quill rain CoC.