[2.2] Chin Sol, Herald of Ash Railgun

This build is a variation of the Point Blank Chin Sol Ice Shot build created by r4wb1rd. It was created with the help of xMustard, who originally intended it as a Burning Arrow build. So all credit for the build goes to these guys. I am sure someone has played this build before, as xMustard mentioned this, but I was too lazy to search for old threads. If you happen to know any feel free to link them.

For technical details, I suggest you read the thread from r4wb1rd. I don’t think it’s necessary to write this down here as well. There are some changes, but I am going to explain these in the skill section.

Pros/Cons:

+ Not a standard LA/TS/SA bow ranger (but can be easily be changed into one)
+ Decent clear speed
+ Works well with low budget
+ No golem

- Evasion-based, so terrible defence
- Melee range
- For best results you actually want to aim (nobody wants that, I know…)


Skills:
The main difference between r4wb1rds build and this one is, that we are going to use Herald of Ash to deal burning damage and proliferate it to all enemies nearby.

GGRBG: Ice Shot – Increased physical Projectile Damage – Weapon Elemental Damage – Elemental Focus – Pierce – (Slower Projectiles)


This is the main attack skill. Elemental Focus is important, as crits could freeze/shatter enemies which does prevent elemental prolif. You can play with Burning Arrow, the single target damage will be higher, but the map clear speed is 20% slower. In low lvl maps, Lightning Arrow and LMP (instead of pierce) works great as well.

RBBBR: Herald of Ash – Elemental Equilibrium – Concentrated Effect – Increased Area of Effect – Increased Burning Damage – (Empower/Enhance)


This is the only Aura we use. Because of the support gems, it does reserve 82% of our mana. Elemental Prolif was nerfed (probably too hard compared to “balanced” chaos dmg) so the radius is quite small. It’s still good enough to burn everything to death that did not get oneshot from Ice Shot. Good luck getting the socket colours on evasion armour.

RRRG: Cast when Damage taken (1) – Immortal Call (1) – Increased Duration (4) - Blink Arrow


Some sort of defence. Maybe it will save your life one day…mostly it doesn’t. You could use Flame Dash instead of Blink Arrow, if you manage to roll the right colours.

BBGG: Assassins Mark – Increased Area of Effect – Faster Attacks – Frenzy


Assassins Mark is our power charge source. It also increases the crit chance and recovers life, which is great. Use Frenzy during longer Boss fights to generate frenzy charges when there are no other mobs around. Otherwise you don't need it at all. (Maybe Vaal Haste would be an interesting option here as well.)

GRGB: Blood Rage – Increased Duration – Vaal Grace – Vaal Lightning Trap


Blood Rage creates frenzy charges. We get some minor life degeneration from it, but normally that doesn’t matter. Vaal Grace is our emergency skill, contrary to Immortal Call this can definitely save your life. Throw Vaal Lightning Trap in Boss fights if there are no mobs around.

How to play:

Pretty straightforward. The moment you start the map you activate Herald of Ash. Activate Blood Rage after that. Find a (large) group and apply Assassins Mark. Run towards the first/nearest enemy. Activate the Stibnite Flask. Shoot him and watch everything behind him explode and burn to death. Beautiful. You should have max power and frenzy charges now. Use your Quicksilver flask to get to the next group. Repeat. (You might want to pull together a few groups for even larger mass destruction)

Map Bosses:
Depends on one factor. Does he have some normal mobs around him, or can you spawn some (white chests)?
If the answer is yes, everything is fine. Pull him into the middle of the mobs and kill the nearest trash mob. The boss will burn to death. If he did survive you can either pull him into the next group or finish him off in melee range (use your evasion flasks, Vaal Grace and Vaal Lightning Trap now).
If the boss has no trash mobs try to get close/survive using your flasks. Use Vaal Lightning Trap as Damage boost. Swap HoA for Frenzy in your Skillbar and use it to generate charges. You can swap out Ice Shot for Burning Arrow for higher single target dps.

Reflect Rares:
Physical reflect Rares are not much of a problem. You shouldn't hit them from close range with the Ice Arrow directly as you will take major damage. Elemental reflect is an issue. Do not hit them directly with the Ice Arrow blast, as that will kill you instantly. You can kill a group next to them and lure them into the burning area. Or you can kill them directly with Ice Arrow, keep some distance to test the actual reflect damage you'll take.


Skill Tree/Ascendancy/Bandits/Levelling

The standard tree without pierce
https://www.pathofexile.com/fullscreen-passive-skill-tree/AAAABAYBAQQHBS0FtQj0DY0N0Q5IEJIUdRvIIG4i9CM2I_YmlS5TMHEwfDIBMjIylDY9N9Q6Qj1fPs9DMUV8R35KfUt4TLNM_02STipQMFBCUUdSU1MQUzVUR1VLVYVVxlb6Whpbr13yYeJirGNDZU1qQ2wLbIxtGW1scFJ07XXLd9d_An8rg9uHdonTjDaNfY1-jb-PYJMnlQWXlZeXl_SbJp2qnsSkwqXLpr6m4LIZtDi1SLxvvTa95r6nwFTDM82Yz3rP3dAf02_UI9ZY2YbZxtrB3ajjhOOf5RnndOjW6mLtP-_r8Yr79Q==

My current tree, with pierce (level 84)
https://www.pathofexile.com/fullscreen-passive-skill-tree/AAAABAYBAQQHBS0FtQj0DY0N0Q5IEJIUdRvIIG4i9CP2JpUqWy5TMHEwfDIBMjIylDY9OkI9Xz7PQzFFfEd-Sn1LeEyzTP9Nkk4qUDBQQlFHUlNS7FM1VEdVS1WFVcZW-loaW69d8mHiYqxjQ2VNakNsC2yMbRltbHTtdct3138CfyuCXoPbh3aMNo19jX6Nv49gkyeVBZeVl5eX9JsmnaqexKTCpcumvqbgshm0OLxvvTa95r6nwFTC7MMzzZjPetNv1CPWWNmG2cbawd2o44Tjn-UZ53To1upi-_U=

Pierce vs. Non-Pierce:
Quite simple, if you have a Drillneck and don’t care about less life (from the jewels) get the pierce nodes. Otherwise get some life and damage (increased area damage, projectile damage, physical damage, critical hit multiplier) from jewels. You'll take more damage in Physical Reflect maps, as the Ice Shot arrow will hit more enemies.

Ascendancy:
We pick Assassin, because it grants almost 100% critical hit chance on an enemy with full life. Deadly Infusion should be the target for cruel lab. If you manage to kill Izaro in merciless, pick Ambush as last ascendancy skill. It doubles the critchance from 45+ to 90+. This is also the reason why we don’t use a golem. Golems do damage which would prevent us from getting a crit with basically every shot.

Bandits:
Life, skill point, power charge -> Oak, kill all, Alira

Levelling:
You can play this build as any other elemental bow “ranger”. A Storm Cloud bow will carry you from lvl 9 until cruel A2. After that switch to any other rare or unique bow. I played with Tabula Rasa and Rearguard until lvl 70. Then I switched to Point Blank and Chin Sol, got some gear from poe.trade and did the normal/cruel Lab with Burning Arrow. I used Lightning Arrow and LMP the moment I could buy it until lvl 70. For act bosses I switched to Burning Arrow with pierce. You could probably play with Ice Shot, or any other bow skill. Just give it a try.

As for the skill tree progression, I just went down to the Duelist area. Didn’t pick any jewel slots or Acrobatics or charges. The moment you pick the mana leech and life leech nodes you can throw away our mana flasks. Never had any issues with my mana again. If you start using Blood Rage, you can take the frenzy passives. Power charges are not that great until you have 4 Ascendancy points. Take Acrobatics if you have full evasion gear (70+).


Required Gear:
Chin Sol

This bow is really cheap because most people run around with Windripper or Voltaxic. Which is great! Get one with 180% increased Physical Damage. Dexterity and increased Attack Speed do not matter (still nice to have). All other stats are fixed.

Other gear:
Rares are fine. Make sure you have maximum elemental resistance if you start mapping. Chaos resistance should be 0 or higher. Other than that you want Life and Evasion on pretty much every piece of equipment. You also need 300+ Accuracy to get a decent hit chance on higher maps. 80% should be fine, as we only need to shoot one mob, everything else is explosion and burning. All other stats, like additional weapon damage, is nice to have but not required.
For Ascendancy enchantments, make sure you do not have any auto trigger damage stuff. If the mob we are shooting does not have full HP, we won’t get 100% more crit chance (Ambush).

Awesome, but not required Gear:

Carcass Jack

If you happen to have some exalted orbs, this is the item you want to buy. It increases the AoE of Ice Shot and Herald of Ash, which is simply awesome. It also helps with the socket colours because it has int and low dex.

Maligaros Virtuosity

In case you want to go full YOLO, these are probably the gloves you want to get. I don’t use them because I was unable to get max resistances and didn’t want to search poe.trade all day to get new equipment.

Drillneck

Only use this if you have the piercing nodes from the passive tree. If you didn’t skill them, rare quivers with weapon elemental damage and critical hit multiplier are better.

Lightning Coil
Probably a must have in case you want to do t10+ maps regularly, because Evasion sucks. That being said, I would never buy one for this build. Carcass Jack is simply too awesome. Didn’t want to reach level 100 anyway.

My Gear:

I played with the rare items until lvl 82 and payed less than 20c for the whole equip (self-found quiver and belt), so it’s pretty cheap to get started. Got unlucky when I tried to 6s my bow, but managed to get a 5l with 3 fusings (typical PoE randomness…). After a few hundred of chromatics I was able to get the right colours on my Carcass Jack, so I switched to that. I also reskilled into pierce and started using Drillneck at that point, mostly because I wanted to give Burning Arrow another chance. (Ice Shot is still better when it comes to map clear speed.) Ignore the gems.





Flasks:


The Stibnite flask is probably the best addition for evasion builds this patch. It’s simply awesome. It blinds everyone near us, which makes it harder for them to hit us. It also increases our evasion (which makes it even harder to hit us), and it also has quite a long duration and a lot of charges. I am sure they’ll going to nerf it.

Everything else is pretty much standard. Surgeon is maybe the best prefix on the flasks, but other prefixes work as well. One insta-heal flask might be good. You could change the Jade flask for a Basalt flask, to mitigate some of the melee oneshot stuff that happens in higher maps (and Izaro), but the flask charge/use ratio is terrible.


Map Mods:
Monsters from Beyond: This build can kill large groups with one shot. So you will meet these guys definitely. They are not too hard, one of them uses destroy undead so make sure you’re not standing in the group you killed moments ago.

Elemental Reflect: You will die.

Physical Reflect: Annoying, but manageable. Make sure you don't you dont pull "the biggest group ever" and hit 10 enemies with the Ice Shot arrow.

Immune to curses: Not much of an issue. You will do less crits and won’t get life from Assassins Mark. You still have max power charges almost all the time from the Ascendancy passive.

Elemental Equilibrium: You will do less damage if you can’t oneshot the enemy. Just takes longer to clear the map.

Blood Magic: Can’t use Herald of Ash, so I wouldn’t play it. Even in random groups I have never seen anyone playing this map mod.

Cursed with Vulnerability: You will take considerably more damage from Blood Rage. If enemies are curse immune as well, this can become a serious issue! You might want to remove Increased Duration from Blood Rage, because you could easily kill yourself when you have no flask charges left.

Avoid Elemental Status Ailments: Seriously, why is this in the game. It's rather common and can completely shut down some elemental builds. Chaos/Poison builds on the other hand don't give a f*ck at all. That being said, you will do (far) less damage. 60% avoid chance probably takes 25% more time to clear. I did not play an immune map yet, but I don't think it's worth the time to run these maps. Maybe if you remove the support gems from HoA and use Hatred as well, to get at least some sort of damage boost.

FAQ:

Can I kill Core Malachai with this build?
- No.
Can I kill Atziri with this build?
- Probably. Shouldn’t be too different from other LA/TS/Frenzy bow builds.
Can I reach level 100 with this build?
- I would not recommend it. The build is probably too fragile for high end maps, because you are still a bow user in melee range. That being said, lvl 90 is possible and everything after that is that is rather pointless (imo).
Is this build viable for Hardcore?
- Even your fancy auto-logout script won’t save you if you hit a reflect mob. So I would say no. Also, sometimes the game just decides “your 20k Evasion does not work!” and you die from a white trash mob… Seriously, I would not recommend it.

Last edited by jomtoy on Apr 7, 2016, 8:56:08 AM
Last bumped on Apr 16, 2016, 11:33:33 AM
No video = Didnt happen :)
looks pretty good.

i like how you do a few things here, like not using a pet because it'll damage enemies and such like that. once i get enough of my CoC ground slam build im going to transform my other shadow into this build.
it was me who did the build previously, back in 1.0 up to 1.3 or 1.4 or whatever it was that nerfed elemental proliferation. this build will play quite a bit different now because of that massive radius nerf.

and yes its basically relegated to a glass cannon build. in all honesty if you put all passive and gear towards damage you should be able to break 8 million DPS on herald of ash burn. this isn't at all ideal, its just to show the absolute power HoA has with its scaling...its insane.

the usage of ice shot looks great. i'd probably try to throw in phys to lightning as a 6th link...and if you don't go full pierce i'd replace pierce with it. just because you have elemental focus and WED so gaining 50% of your phys damage as added elemental damage will boost its damage incredibly well.

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