[3.22] Toxic Rain Girl - All hail to our pod Overlords

Toxic Rain:
We use toxic rain as our only Damage skill. To scale the Damage we have 5 different levers:

Skill duration: The longer a pod exists, the more pods you can stack, increasing not only damage instances on a single mob but also help with clear as your damage areas increase as well. This also increases Curse uptime (30 Seconds!) as well as the duration of vaal skills and Steelskin.

Damage over time Multiplier: The strongest scaling mechanic outside Gemlevel. Also very hard to obtain. Can Mostly be found as crafts or on jewels or jewelry.

Skill Gem Level: Gem level increases are done with Amulets with +gem level enchants, and Bow prefixes(+1 to socketed gems, +2 to bow gems) or the catharina enchant if you're packing Empower. While crucible can give one Extra level, its weaker than some alternatives.

Flat (Chaos/Projectile) Damage: Standard Damage increases, mostly done with Hunter slam on belt or essence craft on jewelry or jewels on the skill tree.

Attackspeed: This increases the number of pods we have active at the same time as well as adding defense layers as you are more free to move with better attack times.

Area of effect and Overlapping:
As we can read here The optimal area of effect is 39% This guarantees to maximum overlap of pots. This requires 20% qual on toxic rain, a bow mastery and the aura enchant.

Despair:
Our selfcast Curse. Thanks to hexpbloom it isn't as annoing as you would think. Just cast it on a pack and with the right chaining it follows you through teh whole map. On Bosses the curse stays up for 30 seconds thanks to increased duration mods.

Withering Step:
Stacks up to 11 Withered Debuffs on all mobs inside range. this is an instant 9*11% damage multiplier (99% increased damage taken) Currenty not used as I lack a gemslot

Ballista Totem:
This an Enhancement for Boss DPS. Put them down far away from the Boss and recast them in Fight regularly. Thanks to focused Ballista Support the DPS is not that bad.

As usual in POE we employ different layers of defense to survive:

Life/ES on Kill This is our Main Source of substain in large Packs and maps. We get 2% of life and ES with every Kill. We also leech a small amount, have recouple and life on hit.

Flasks: This build has some Points in Charge Gain, Enough to have Mana flasks permanently up if needed. Life flasks as well ;)

Evasion:
This Build uses Evasion as its Physical hit mitigation. WE try to get above 30k Evasion, but bigger is always better. We employ Grace as well as defiance banner to achieve his.

Spell Suppression:
We aim for 100% chance to spell suppression. Together with Suppression mastery and Scion skill nodes we can reduce the suppressed damage to 38% in the best case. You will need only one item with spell suppression chance to cap the chance.

Energy shield:
We use energy shield as a buffer to protect our low life(only 5k). Try to get enough ES to fully utilize Ghostshrouds(3% of your Evasion) Real As soon as ES+ Life reaches 6k the build begins to feel immortal.

Armour: With the new Mana Mastery and Essence Craft on Helmet with Mana efficiency we can now pack 3 Auras. Determination is the strongest option.

Chaos Resist: Unfortunately chaos masteries were nerfed hard. But we still can and should stack this. Thanks to scion starting area we get a lot if resistances on the passive tree, so we have enough item budget for chaos resist.

Molten Shell and Vaal Grace:
Molten Shell as well as its Vaal Version push our tankiness into absurd realms. 2k normal absorb and 4k additional armor during effect as well as a 30 seconds vaal molten shell helps tremendously with crucible. The Normal shell also packs 10 second duration.
Vaalgrace caps our evasion on 95%as well make spells unlucky and holds for 15 seconds. Enough time to kill all normal bosses ;)

Elemental Ailments:
Thanks to essence craft, Elder mod and the unique Jewel Ancrestal Vision we are now immune to elemental ailments yay.

Speed:
Last but not least, this build is quite fast with permanent onslaught and rage and about 0.25 secs attack time. You can shoot and dodge at mostly the same time. You can make a killing field of flowers and enjoy them offscreen.

How To Die:
1. Excessive stacking of dangerous Map modifiers like reduced aura effctiveness combined with more monster damage or reduced resistances in dangerous. But mostly crucilbe 100% is dangerous. Not much else
2. Simulacrum last 3 Waves, funnily enough korvis is the less dangerous boss most of the time.
3. Ubers - need special tactics to manage their damage(like purities etc)

Just kill all bandits.
Major god is either lunaris for eater of worlds and most mapping or solaris for true single boss encounters
Minor god is hands down abberath. Burning ground is insane in POE. Just skip that shit.

Mainlink in Bow: Toxic Rain - (Awakened) Void Manipulation - (Awakened) Vicious Projectiles - Efficacy - (Divergent or anomalous) Mirage Archer - (Empower) Damage on full Life
All costly Choices can be found in brackets. As first choice update to awakened void manipulation, the plus one to chaosgems is insane.

Auralink: Determination - Vaal Grace - Malediction - Enlighten lvl3(lvl4 only gives a little quality of life)
Main aura link, but it in the armor slot you have +1 to auragems/area increse crafted.

Support Link: (Vaal)Molten Shell(23 Qual) - (anomalous) Withering step(23 Qual) - Enhance(lvl4) lvl4 - (anomalous)Despair - Hexbloom
primary Support Link. We try to scale up cooldown reduce of steelskin as well as number of withered stacks inflicted by withering step with quality.

Ballista Link: Ballista support - Toxic Rain - withering touch - focused Ballista

Other things: Frenzy - Vaal Haste - (divergent)Defiance Banner - Flame Dash

Shoot away in front of you, mobs will die behind you - loot.
At bosses pop your Cds (vaal haste and vaal Grace) and shoot away. Thanks to a lot of movement speed, dodging most shit is as easy as pie.
Most mapmods don't pose a problem,but be aware that increased accuracy will be dangerous and reduced aura efffect will be annoying.
Try to dodge Charge steal and hexproof too. On a positive note, All reflect modes, all leech and regen modes etc don't pose any problem.

This is the section concerning Level 85 Content, normal pinnacle Bosses can be killed easily by this build.
Annoint: Crystal Skin seems to be a requirement to offset oneshots through clipping skills, nobody dodges everything.
Maven: get a Sapphire Flask and use it to safely stack the debuffzone in the middle. As long as you're able to do that the fight is doable. You still need to dodge most shit. Maybe even use purity of ice instead of discipline.
Good thing through, the maven regen debuffs doesn't really matter to us in p3 as long as you dodge shit.

Searing Exarch: Only two dangerous things in the fight: Annihilation is a lot faster, maybe use a fire flask for it or use purity of fire instead of discipline.
The ballgame is insane... dodge or die.

Chase (and not realistic) Builds:

"Ultimate Edition" Armour Based and some other goodies, unending flasks and insane dps and good Defences: https://pastebin.com/f61Qpamb

"Ultimate Edition" ES based Version, focused more on tankiness while still providing good dps: https://pastebin.com/5e6jGY18



Current(3.21 Crucible): https://poe.ninja/pob/W4Z

Current with a lot more Gear (~30 Div) https://pastebin.com/6r8L3As6
Berserker/Trickster/Raider Version: https://pastebin.com/eZqH4DDB
Triple Curser Version(not actually build, just thought about) https://pastebin.com/f36ACWQQ
Isane gear bullshit: https://pastebin.com/uwP1axyC

T1:
Damage over Time and reduced Life recovery > all
T2:
Aspect of teh eagle, flat attackspeed or some passive skill with dmg over time.
T3 and T4:
Chaos Damage over time Multiplier/-chaosress, or increased Duration/-cd reduce > all
T4:
Chaos Damage over time Multiplier/-chaosress, or increased Duration/-cd reduce > all
maybe Lifetap i you have some mode of generating frenzy charges.

T5:
All are bad.
but maybe ensare explode if you can squeeze in Manaforged+Ensnare+culling

3 Core Items for DPS:

A Bow with 3 To bowlevel(or 1 to socketed gem and catarina craft when you have empower). You could just buy a bow with those gem prefixes and one open prefix and hunterslam it (it did) Alternatively with a little more money and the Catrina craft a good hunterbase with dual craft mod becomes stronger if you pack empower:



Broadhead is the way to go, with huntermod of course. increased Damage with bowskills and life are a bonus

Amulet with +1 chaos gems. ashes of the stars would be best. As for anoint potency of will is not the highest dps option but it also pushes steelskin and our vaal skills.

On the other Slots try to max your resistances, get - mana cost of skills on rings and try to get minimum frenzy charge and % chance to gain frenzy charge on kill.
My exarch/eater mods are mostly shit, there are better options. I will make a optimal PoB "soon"

First off, i would not recommend to leaguestart with this. Damage is low throughout the story if you don't luck into a quillrain early. With a quill rain the build gets a lot stronger but you will need a lot of mana at bosses, so plan with two slots for mana flasks in the worst scenarios.


List of the best Level Uniques:
Bow: https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Quill_Rain
This Baby carries you to endgame. The Insane Attackspeed guarantees high stacks of Pods. You will only switch it with a +3 skillgem Bow with attackspeed. Its worth the chaos you need to invest in the first days!

Ring: https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Praxis This bad boy has helped many an exile to reach maps. And it clear why. Cost reduction paired with regen. You will likely use the ring until you have eleron ring crafts.


Here is a PoB for leveling(work in progress):
https://pastebin.com/LkQ7DnBi