Viper Strike Quill Rain Weaponswap: The best of both worlds

The title summarises the concept that I thought of recently, and to my surprise, I couldn't find anyone already playing this build. I don't plan on playing this, but the idea seems too powerful to let it go to waste, so I thought I'd share it here and hope someone picks it up.

I grabbed and slightly adapted (basically just connecting the starting point) Kiss_Me_Quick's Pathfinder build to an Assassin, because the Shadow build list is (again, to my huge surprise) devoid of any Viper Strike build:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2201450

Changing to Assassin in the first place already had an impact of around 50% more damage (though not accounting for mostly neglegible flask uptimes; there were 3 flask uptime nodes next to the tree that weren't used: 40% charge gain, 20% duration and 15% charge use).

Then I added a Quill Rain with Barrage + GMP + LMP + Faster Attacks + Lesser Poison (for when the poison flask isn't up) and Withering Touch in case the version that's already in the build doesn't cause full stacks.

Two points in the skill tree can substitute the Lesser Poison link and the Withering Touch is optional, so this doesn't strictly require a 6L. You could also add PcoC or whatever you need.

With no Quiver and no extras, this applies 319 poisons in 4 seconds on average, resulting in 1595% increased poison duration from Noxious Strike.
Viper Strike applies 41 poisons in the same time, resulting in only 205% increased poison duration.

For the really rich people, I did the numbers for a maxed accuracy and attack speed quiver with two extra arrows and an extra arrow corruption on Quill Rain, resulting in 420 average recent poisons and 2100% increased duration.

Based on this alone, one could prepare a few seconds of viper strike uptime with 4 seconds of barrage in every attack window. But it doesn't stop there. Because Viper Strike has a lovely threshold jewel called Growing Agony.

PoB tells me it's theoretically possible to reach 3438 poison stacks (with the cheap version, 4694 with the expensive one).

7500% increased Poison damage over 70 seconds duration, anyone (10000% / 90 seconds for the rich)? At this point, I think that optimised builds could ignore all the regular sources of increased poison damage, much like people ignore minion damage for the Herald of Agony.

Of course the numbers I used here were from spamming barrage, but nevertheless, real numbers will be high as well. One should consider that while the viper strike damage is based on the total number of poisons, the poison duration is based on the number of recently afflicted ones, and that will ramp up every time. While the Barrage poisons don't have the extreme duration of Viper strike, they still have around half, which means there will be hundreds of poisons sticking around for 30 seconds.

I don't know how much effort weapon swapping would take, but other than that, this method easily multiplies the damage of the build by 10 with close to no extra investments (unless you're rich and minmaxing the extra arrows).

Well, the issue isn't damage, the issue is the slowness of such a build. You say "3400 poison stacks for 30 seconds!", I ask "Who has time to wait around for 30 seconds?".

Clearing has to be fast. Killing bosses has to be fast. The longer you take killing an enemy, the less efficient it is and the more likely it will kill you. Also keep in mind that when endgame bosses change their phase, all poison stacks get dispelled so you will have to build up all over again.

So yeah, I'm sure it looks real good on paper, but in practice it will be worse than a build with like 1/10th of the dps. Frontloading damage vs backloading. Huge difference.

That and weapon swapping during combat is incredibly wonky.

can post a pastebin?

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Bardharr wrote:

Well, the issue isn't damage, the issue is the slowness of such a build. You say "3400 poison stacks for 30 seconds!", I ask "Who has time to wait around for 30 seconds?".

Clearing has to be fast. Killing bosses has to be fast. The longer you take killing an enemy, the less efficient it is and the more likely it will kill you. Also keep in mind that when endgame bosses change their phase, all poison stacks get dispelled so you will have to build up all over again.

So yeah, I'm sure it looks real good on paper, but in practice it will be worse than a build with like 1/10th of the dps. Frontloading damage vs backloading. Huge difference.

That and weapon swapping during combat is incredibly wonky.

If the original build could kill a boss in 5 seconds, I'd agree, but Viper Strike tends to have rather slow poisons in the first place. After all, the build I used to test this doesn't even use temporal chains (which considering the durations you reach with this anyway isn't that useful as you said).

Even if you just get 1 second of barrages in before switching to viper strike, it will be more dps than with only viper strike. The numbers were meant to demonstrate the scaling. Because not only the duration will increase but also the damage, stacking a couple of hundred poisons will not be detrimental.

Basically, if you don't want to switch constantly, you can even apply 500 poisons beforehand and then never switch back to barrage for 30-40 seconds while still getting 1000% increased Viper Strike damage, with the same poison duration as usual.

Lastly, I thought of movement, which I hadn't considered before, and it's fine to just put a blink arrow in the 5th or 6th link. With this kind of APS, that should be close enough to melee movement skills.

As for the PoB, I didn't save it because I was just playing around and testing things out to see just how well it would work, but I'll do it again when I get the time for it among making builds for myself and possibly playing them eventually.