[Chin Sol Caustic Arrow] Looking for Feedback!

I've been working on my Chin Sol Caustic Arrow build the past few days and I feel that it has alot of potential. I initially designed it to farm Atziri while still maintaining a decent clear speed in maps. I died to Atziri's Split Phase a few times, but only to misplays and missing experience.

When I watched Darkee's Uber Atziri guide on youtube I figured that my build could probably do Uber Atziri aswell in due time since my damage numbers aren't too far off (at least my single target damage). My biggest problem would be to clear the trash I guess.

The character is a Trickster with the name "TerrorMakesYouRun". Feel free to inspect him. I'm aiming to get the relevant Trap and Mine notes next in the passive tree. This is how my tree would look like when the build is finished.

I'll now go into details about this build. Chin Sol is a pretty uncommon choice for a Caustic Arrow build. Most people nowadays only look at the Caustic Cloud damage and are completely unaware of the 49% of Physical Damage added as extra Chaos Damage. My idea was that, if I poison the enemy, I could easily double dip from the combined physical damage / chaos damage nodes and projectile damage nodes. If I would use Mines and Point Blank this damage would be multiplied by 150%. And I could also double dip from the Mine nodes.

My problem then was that Caustic Arrow Mines were pretty damn bad for clearing maps in general. It hit me then that the Chaos Damage and Projectile Damage would also benefit the Caustic Cloud. To top that off I read that the Caustic Cloud is not influenced by Point Blank. This opened up the possibility to use a second Caustic Arrow setup which I would cast myself. In this setup I would only focus on the Cloud's Damage.

As stated above, my goal to kill Atziri with a certain easy was reached (at least to a degree xD). I'm currently clearing mid tier maps. It has been reasonably safe and decently fast so far, although I feel that my damage on my Caustic Cloud won't carry me through high tier maps. Here a few numbers:

Caustic Cloud: 10500 Damage per second (without Frenzy Charges and not taking both Curses into account, also on a 5 Link).
Caustic Arrow Mine: 4000 - 10000 combined Physical / Chaos Damage (Also unbuffed, not taking Chin Sol's 100% and Point Blank's 50% into account)

I'm using a Added Chaos Damage gem on my Mine right now. I would however swap it out for Minefield in most situations. The Added Chaos Damage Gem is basically for the double Vaal fight only. My Mine damage will increase with the next few levels as I will get all the juicey Mine nodes.

The problem is my Caustic Cloud. I don't really see any options to buff it further. I could also use Mines, but that would make clearing awefully slow. I'm considering a +3 Bow on my Weapon switch now.




Some other random problems:


-My life pool is pretty low. I only get 146% from the tree, that brings me to roughly 4.200 Life right now.

-I'm trying hard to get Hex Master for the extra 20% Curse Radius.

-I'm considering to drop Snakebite since the need for 4 Frenzy Charges before your Attacks Posion is pretty annoying. That would mean that I have to use a Poison Gem on my single target, which would drastically reduce it's damage.

-Dropping Snakebite would allow me to also drop The Restless Ward and go for a proper HP/Evasion Armor

-I don't really want to use Frenzy CoH vs. Atziri, so I might drop AA and run the second Curse on Blasphemy aswell


Thanks to those of you who crawled through this wall of text. Your feedback is very much appreciated =)
Last edited by kahzin on May 1, 2016, 6:14:04 AM
Last bumped on May 3, 2016, 6:24:45 AM
To those of you who care, here's a little update.

After I put some more thought into this I decided to give my Weapon swap idea a go. I bought a 6 Link base and crafted it. Unfortunately I'm a moron and didn't think my crafting process through. So I ended up with a 6 Link +1/+1 Bow. I also bought a level 3 empower and a second Drillneck. My damage jumped from 10k to 20k. Once I reroll my Bow to +3 I'll even spec out of some chaos nodes in order to grab Hex Master.

I'm still considering to drop Snakebite and use a Poison Gem on my single target setup. I feel like not having maximum Frenzy Charges when Atziri's clones spawn is the number one reason I mess up.
Last edited by kahzin on May 1, 2016, 4:33:55 PM
Hi kahzin,

Chin Soll - Point Blank combo is better with traps not mines.
both are increasing the dmg on close distance, mine you place in your feed and detonating, so the dmg go down from you to the target. With traps is counting the distance from the trap to the target so you will benefit fully from the combo.
And some idea.
Use Trap + Cluster Trap for trowing 4 traps.
together with:

Traps will detonate instantly targeting 4 targets and will create quite nice and deadly cloud.
Without Cluster Trap will work also very good and powerful, no need to wait the trap to be triggered by enemy.

Cheers,
WD
Poor_Exile
Hi Kahzin,

I'm not sure how you are currently applying curses, but in my Caustic Arrow set up I like to use:

Frenzy - CoH - GMP - Vulnerability

And of course you can add your second curse to that as well in a 5L chest. This will let you maintain your frenzy charges against bosses when blood rage isn't helping.

For normal trash clearing, use blood rage with at least 4% life regen from the passive tree and this basically acts as free full frenzy charges as well as an attack speed buff (not that APS matters much for caustic arrow).



When it comes to Atziri, I wouldn't get too hung up on the Frenzy charges. Of course they are helpful, but the fight is 90% about movement and only 10% about DPS.

I regularly let my frenzys drop off in split phase and just focus on staying alive. The nice part about caustic arrow is that you can drop a cloud and forget it. You can move around while the damage is continuously being done - so seize this advantage and make use of it to stay alive!


In regards to your +3 vs Chin Sol, I can't really comment because I've never used a Chin Sol for Caustic Arrow (I used it for Punture trap before it was nerfed), but I can comment that a +3 bow is extremely beneficial to DPS and clear speed since each gem level contributes so much towards the base chaos damage. I believe with 7 frenzy charges up my tooltip chaos DPS is around 27,000, and this doesn't include my concentrated effect gem, area modifiers from jewels/carcass jack (if wearing), wither totem stacks, or curses. I have been clearing up to T13 maps very easily and quickly with this, and I'm sure it could go higher, I've just never tried.


Best of luck! Always neat to see a different variation of these popular skill builds.
Legacy SC IGN: Octora
Standard SC IGN: Octyte
Last edited by Nick42 on May 2, 2016, 11:49:06 AM
Thanks for the replys guys, really appreciate it =)

So the reason why I use mines is that I can control myself when to set them off. This is very crucial for me since I have to have maximum Frenzy charges in order to apply poison. I am aware that I need to place the mines right next to the target to get the Chin Sol and Point Blank bonus. Another reason is that Mines don't have a limited amount of uses.

I decided to run both, Temporal Chains and Vulnerabilty with Blasphemy now. The main reason for this is that Atziri would reflect curses that I apply with Curse on Hit. I also found that the 10% Chance to gain a Frenzy charge on kill from the Trickster keeps me at maximum Frenzy Charges while clearing. You're completely right, it's not that big of a deal for the Caustic Clouds damage, but since I'm a lazy player I don't need to use Frenzy at all now for general clearing.

Getting a second bow on my weapon swap was definetly the right decision. Even the +2 Bow doubled my damage (with a level 3 empower). I really think that clearing the Uber trash is doable with a few more improvements.

As I said, the Frenzy charges are vital to me at the moment because I use Snakebite's Gloves. What I'm doing right now when I encounter a unique boss is swap my weapons to Chin Sol, get maximum Frenzy Charges, drop 6 Mines next to the boss and finally pop Atziri's Promise and trigger them. Each Mine deals a shitload of combined physical and chaos damage and will poison the boss.


To be honest it's debatable if it's really worth it to get all the Mine nodes and Point Blank only to melt down bosses. More then once I was at a point where I thought dropping the Chin Sol idea and just focusing on the Caustic Cloud would be much more beneficial.



EDIT:

The story of my 2 Ex crafting adventure.
When I finally decided to get a +3 Bow for my weapon swap I knew that I'd also need to have it 6 Linked in order to use Empower. So I bough a sweet 6 Linked Bow and crafted it (shoutout to GrayScar's free crafting service - great guy! Stupid me rolled +1 to all Gems on the Bow and when I exalted it it struck me that I should have rolled +2 to bow gems. Here's the result of my thoroughly planned crafting process.

Last edited by kahzin on May 2, 2016, 12:40:25 PM
Expensive way to learn, but I find that those lessons stick with you forever so at least it wasn't a totally pointless use of exalts!

While I am biased to say that a pure +3 Caustic Arrow build would be superior to the Chin Sol swap idea, you seem to have a good thing going here and it's certainly different from mainstream; don't hop on the bandwagon too quickly and drop all the hard work you've done to progress your own unique build this far, especially if it seems to be more or less working!


I suppose you are smart to avoid reflecting temp chains on Atziri. Since I only run Vulnerability I don't particularly care if I reflect since if you are going to die to Atziri it won't be to a DOT or physical damage, it will probably be due to fire or lightning damage.


If you do decide to drop the blasphemy set up and include it in a Curse on Hit set up, it will free up some passive points since you won't need the increased radius any more, as well as free up all that reserved mana for something like grace or clarity if need be.

That's just my 2 cents.



edit: Looking at your bow you are using a 20/20 Caustic arrow. If at all possible, try to swap this out for a level 21; even 21/0 is better than 20/20. Of course 21/20 is a bonus. Since cloud base damage scales with level, you will see a significant boost in DPS from this one added level. Try to level a whole bunch of CA gems in your offset to try corrupt, or search for a level 21 gem on poe.trade.

You should also be using concentrated effect instead of slower projectiles: 59% more damage vs. 29%. This won't show up in the tooltip since it is an area modifier, but you will feel a significant boost in your kill speed as long as you can deal with the smaller cloud radius. Not sure how that would work with your Chin Sol set up, but at least for traditional caustic arrow this is superior.
Legacy SC IGN: Octora
Standard SC IGN: Octyte
Last edited by Nick42 on May 2, 2016, 12:58:39 PM
Yeah I'm not going to play a pure CC build for the reasons you listed. I'm currently running T9-T11 Maps and have no problems whatsoever. I thought about getting Conc Effect but I simply don't need the damage right now. My Caustic Cloud is stong enough to deal with the map bosses and that's a shame because the map bosses are the single reason I run Chin Sol =)

I'm in the process of leveling additional CA's to level 20 to corrupt them to 21. But again, I actually don't need the damage right now. I've done a few tests on the Malformation Boss (good for testing because it Resists Chaos). My 5 Link Chin Sol setup was already dealing more damage then my 6 Linked CA. So once I grab the Mine nodes and 6 Link my Chin Sol the damage should be far superior to single targets.

I did run my Curses on Frenzy for a while and used Grace and Artic Armour. There are good reasons why I changed it tho. Temporal Chains is basically 90% of my defence. I mostly rely on not getting hit by anything. Grace would add roughly 14% Evasion and let's be honest, if there's the one big hit coming through Arctic Armour would save me with my emberassing 4.3k HP. Having to apply Curses myself is also another thing to manage. This may sound noobish (and I probably am a noob) but having to manage my frenzy charges, endurance charges, swap weapons, place mines, pop flasks and trigger mines all at once is already stressing enough for me :D
So here's the math behind this build (well, I didn't count in several factors like resistances, physical damage mitigation, curses, frenzy charges. The numbers don't resemble my actual damage output, but they help to get a picture of the proportions. I don not guarantee that my calculation is correct, please let me know if I messed up somehow).

Spoiler
6 Link + Added Chaos Damage Gem - BEST CASE
5300 Physical Damage + 6000 Chaos Damage = 11300.
11300 * 2.0 (Chin Sol's multiplier) * 1.5 (Point Blank) = 339000 (initial hit).
33900 * 0.1 = 3390 (initial poison damage)
3390 * (1 + 5.27 (%increased damage multipliers)) * 1.48 * 1.38 . 1.28 = 55.567 Chaos DoT


WORST CASE
4900 * 2.0 * 1.5 = 14700
1470 * 6.27 * 1.48 * 1.38 * 1.28 = 24.000 Chaos DoT


Spoiler

6 Link + Minefield - BEST CASE
6800 * 2.0 * 1.5 = 20.400
2040 * 6.27 * 1.48 * 1.38 * 1.28 = 33.500
33500 * 0.78 (22% Less Damage from Minefield) = 26.130 Chaos DoT per Mine
=> 78.390 Chaos DoT per Minefield

WORST CASE

2450 * 2.0 * 1.5 = 7350
735 * 6.27 * 1.48 * 1.38 * 1.28 = 12.000
12.000 * 0.78 = 9360 Chaos DoT per Mine
=> 28.000 Chaos DoT per Minefield
Last edited by kahzin on May 3, 2016, 6:32:56 AM

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