2.0 HoA BURN - 3x curse INSANE dmg

Main Damage



My main damage dealer is burning arrow. This is to take advantage of the 130% base damage of the gem, which significantly raises our elemental dmg. You can keep the level of the gem low for low mana costs but if you want the slightly higher % physical dmg you can level it up.
Having high damage per cast allows me to maximize any overkill damage for herald of ash. This is amplified by being a crit build as well as of course all of my curses.
My main goal is to kill the weakest mob to get the highest overkill dmg.

The support gem choice here is actually pretty important. You want PURE damage. We also want massive elemental damage by way of conversion because we boost elemental damage via items and passives. This will boost the damage of BOTH the initial hit by Burning Arrow and the overkill burn % from Herald of Ash.
This is the biggest pure damage boost you can get, period. Since we are physical damage, all of these gems scale tremendously. PPAD, Added Fire and Phys to Lightning. WED is a must. It is actually the biggest DPS contributor out of all the gems, because of our 100% conversion.
You must use pierce and drillneck if anything. Absolutely no LMP/GMP/Fork/Chain because they all have negative effects to damage to counter their effectiveness. Pierce however, with drillneck, will BOOST your damage instead, as well as having as much effectiveness.


Curses/Secondary Damage



Next i'll touch on my bread and butter, CURSES. Obviously assassin's mark is an amazing curse, not just for the flat crit chance, but the additional critical damage and the sustain by way of mana and life on kill.
Elemental weakness is obvious, since i am fully elemental based. Elemental weakness is best because it lowers ALL elemental resistances the same amount as a focused curse like conductivity or flammability, and this will aid in not only the initial hit of dmg, but lower fire resistances for herald of ash burn.
Next is flammability to again lower resistances for initial hit dmg as well as herald of ash burn.
***I MUST STRESS AGAIN***
These curses have DOUBLE effectiveness since it will lower resistances for higher overkill damage, as well as lower resistances against the burn. With this build every bonus you get is essentially doubled (has two applications of its bonuses).

These three curses stacked on top of each other raise my damage insurmountably. it is insane.
As you can see my preference for applying all of these juicy curses is lightning arrow and GMP. Lightning arrow is kept at level 1 for the low mana cost.

LA also provides me with a good secondary damage source when im up against reflect. Linked with GMP it significantly lowers its damage, and without any crit dmg or WED socketed that means the only bonus to dmg i get are from the curses themselves. This boost is still significant, and you do still need to be quite careful when facing reflect but it can be done.


Auras/Buffs



Herald of ash and Elemental proliferation are the focus here. Inc burn dmg to scale its damage up magnificently. I also wear my aura/buffs combo in my +1 to socketed gems corrupted Atziri Steps, so the base overkill damage % on lvl 21 HoA is 140% as opposed to 137%



Hatred. It isn't ideal to have cold damage in this build because if you shatter enemies they will no longer leave the proliferation effect behind. However it is an enormous boost in damage, scaling off our physical, and it isn't too big of a negative so i prefer it over Anger.


Nothing too out of the ordinary here.

I don't use Glyph Mark nor will i ever. Even though my bow is pretty great any physical dmg bow here will do. 250+ dps and you'll clear everything nearly as fast as you see me do, trust me. Windripper doesn't hold a candle to any physical damage bow for this type of build. 6L is also not required, but will boost your damage immensely with another support gem

As you can see my gear is pretty specific, as it is with all of my builds. But this is not necessary and only occurs over time when optimizing builds. AKA get a ring with every single stat point i need in order to save even just ONE passive for something else etc.

Drillneck is not required at all. If you are stuck with a 5L bow you'd be better off ridding yourself of pierce/drillneck. You can use the quiver slot to make up for any missing resistances or anything you need.

Carcass Jack was chosen for its evasion and added aoe capabilities, for herald of ash/elemental proliferation. It also grats added area of effect damage, which does scale with HoA...so bonus gravy.
It is definitely not required, and either belly of the beast (for significantly more hp) or the new Hyrri's Ire would work just as great.

Atziri Step are the best boots in the game especially because they are so cheap since there is a massive flooding of them from people farming atziri, so no reason to not get them. Decent life roll, super high evasion, cheap, and spell dodge? Do yourself a favour and get these boots.

Leather belt is the best option for my setup because i lack HP more than anything. If you have a godly rustic sash or something then by all means you can use it. I do however like to run +str on my belt so i can save a couple of passives.

The gloves are just to fill whatever you need. Accuracy, life, resistances.

Helmet is whatever you want. Alpha's Howl for better mana management and cannot be frozen or Rats Nest for higher crit chance and some rarity or devoto's devotion for movement speed and chaos res or just a good rare helmet, it really does not matter.
Im currently using the new Doedre's Scorn because of its added damage (which i don't need). It will also allow me to save two passives from unspecing an Int node - used for more damage...because im a whore.

Doedre's Damning is required for my specific build, using 3 curses. You do not NEED to run 3 curses as i'll touch on shortly, but doing so is beneficial.
In order to run 3 you'll obviously need a corrupted amulet too, and any will do including stone of lazhwar or w/e.

As for links, 6L is not required either, but 5Ls are. You do not want to use koams because you want at least 2x 5L items, which are pretty easy to get.

For the curse 5L, you'll be restrained to either 2 curses with LA/GMP. Assassin's Mark may remain a required curse, depending how much you want Power Charges and mana sustain.
For the damage 5L, drop the pierce/drillneck and run PPAD, Added Fire, Phys to Lightning, WED. Your damage won't be much lower and you can use your quiver for whatever else you need. You will go without pierce which can be annoying against packs of invulnerable monsters, but otherwise HoA will create all the AoE damage you need.

This build can have a hard time capping resistances, so the additional resistances from the survivalist and weathered hunter clusters are extremely beneficial, if not downright required.

I have quite a bit of additional accuracy, primarily because my curse LA cannot have additional accuracy support, plus i don't want to have to run additional accuracy as a support and lower my dmg output. High hit chance is ideal in order to have as close to your actual listed crit chance as possible.

I have as much HP as my flexibility will allow with passives spent. I do not recommend the scion life wheel for this build. if you need more HP use belly of the beast.
If you're not using drillneck you have 3 more passives and you could probably squeeze a few more out to get the hp+es circle north of shadow for an additional 20% hp for 5 passives total.

This is my damage without power charges. Power charges will only add DPS and not base damage, so its not necessary to show.

Herald of ash is the biggest buff we have and our main course as far as this build is concerned. Obviously with elemental proliferation burns spread and continue for a good period after things have died.
Its base overkill dmg is 140%, however with the current tree and all applicable boosts that means i have a grand total overkill burn dmg of 620.2%.
That is essentially #*%&ing MASSIVE. Add in my curses lowering fire resistance a total 88% and also +shock damage boost and it gets REAL difficult to actually calculate a DPS number on HoA.

Even though its tough, lets try just for fun! For this experiment we're going to IGNORE resistances. It would only ADD to its total damage anyway, since i lower it so much, so by ignoring resistances in the calculations i'll actually be severely underestimating its damage. It would be too difficult to calculate precisely however, since i do all three elements of damage etc.

Burning arrow max damage is 28,993. with crit including assassin's mark curse that equals a total of 123,800 (28993x4.27). Lets assume a little white mob i kill has 8,800. My overkill damage is 115,000, resulting in an overkill burn damage of 713,000. Minus 20% from the proliferation nerf and i still get 563,270 damage per second.
Again, lowering resistances so much would actually add to my damage quite significantly for both the initial overkill damage, and the subsequent burn as well. In testing, when i curse something that is burning the burn quickness seems to double or more.

I'd say its a safe estimate to say i do over 1 million DPS on my herald of ash burn with my current setup. Anybody, however, could easily achieve hundreds of thousands dps without a problem.

Not much to speak of which is quite rare for my builds. However there isn't much threat other than one shots. My goal is to avoid all damage with movement speed, blink arrow, and just killing things before they kill me.

The biggest threat to this build is elemental reflect, for obvious reasons. I have died to elemental reflect a number of times while working on the build, finding out how to optimize it.
This is an ongoing process but i feel semi confident going up against reflect now. When i notice the elemental reflect i will only use lightning arrow spam to kill things. If i shoot a burning arrow into ele reflect, even with 25k hp i'd one shot myself.

Be careful on maps that have water. its difficult to tell what auras they are sporting. that was my most recent death, was ele reflect i didn't see because they were standing in water and kapow, 1 shot.

3 curses maximizes damage
Allows you to side-step bosses curse mitigation to a degree, by capitalizing on herald of ash proliferation. Curse mob, kill mob for full curse effect bonus damage, which is applied to boss in overkill dmg.
Can also do the same thing to bypass the Corrupting Blood mod on rares. You don't actually need to hit that CB mob even once to be able to kill it, all you need are mobs around it to kill.
Very high dps both aoe and single target

Elemental reflect
Cannot recommend for hardcore

Normal Gameplay
How I Deal With Devourers