[1.2] Non-Crit very TANKY bow Ranger. Because crit bows will be really pricey!

I'll bet that non-crit bows will be half the price of comparable crit bows. Hence the non-crit build.

Stats:
163% hp
267% EV (next few points would probably go into the EV wheel)
38% to all resists
152% IAS
313% phys bow damage
26% Movement speed

Should be pretty great with the Queen of the Forest chest for Rampage!

Any suggestions for improvement?

I like this, pretty much what I came up with for a Non-Crit bow build except I am using chain and not Pierce.

If you decide you use chain you can drop Piercing shots and pick up Celerity and Master Fletcher instead.

You have a net change of:

-18% Projectile damage
-40% Chance to Pierce (Obviously)
-10 Dexterity

+42% Increased damage with Bows
+2% Attack speed
+44% Evasion
+9% Movement speed

I'd love to use chain, but I don't want to cut my damage in half.

"

I'd love to use chain, but I don't want to cut my damage in half.

I'm not sure you completely understand how chain works, if you think it "Cuts your damage in half"

Say you have two targets standing in a row in front of you.

With pierce you will hit each target once for 100.

With chain you will hit the front target for 50 you get a chain onto the second target for 50 and then another chain onto the first target again for 50.

With More targets the effectiveness of chain goes up because each missile hits 3 times. So if you hit 5 targets with split arrow you are really getting 15 hits. With pierce you can only get extra hits if the targets are perfectly in a row.

Chain auto targets its effect so you will be hitting targets that were not in the direct line of fire as well.

So Pierce will do more damage under perfect conditions PER SHOT but will leave some monsters undamaged so you will have to do some single target clean up. Pierce excels in a small tightly packed group.

Chain will do more consistent damage to a group (albeit sometimes a bit less) but will more evenly kill targets and clear packs easier. Chain excels in more spread out groups and smaller groups of 5-10.

Are you sure that the same target can get hit more than once?

Plus, I wanted to try and use a gem that I've never used before: Stun! I think it might provide some very handy CC, since I'm not using Hatred. What do you think of that?

"

Are you sure that the same target can get hit more than once?

Yeah, there it just has to hit something else first.

"

Stun! I think it might provide some very handy CC, since I'm not using Hatred. What do you think of that?

If you want to Stun you need big hits, so a slower bow works better than a faster one. Also Pierce would work better with stun since it does larger individual hits.

With heavy draw and level 20 Stun you will have -59% to enemy stun threshold. This means you will stun any mob that takes 1/5th of its health in one hit. So it will be good against white/blue packs and will not stun rares or bosses.

Actually, damage is irrelevant to stun chance, as long as you get over the minimum. Every enemy is stunned twice on average, no matter your damage (with no reduced threshold).

http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Stun

Let me clarify then. If you want to stun a mob 100% of the time with every hit You will need to hit them for 20% of their maximum health given a -59% stun threshold.

"

Quakespeare wrote:

Actually, damage is irrelevant to stun chance

you need high hit dmg to notice any stun effect, chance is irrelevant

chain is great, will do like 50%+ dmg indeed, can hit target several times if you hit 2 or more things (can even be objects). problem is, its costly and you need cheap skills to use high atk speed, so i think pierce>chain in your case

what bow will you use? if it's lioneye's glare (why not? its great bow for cheap), ondar's guile will do no effect, maybe iron reflex will be better. reflect will still be a great problem, but vaal pact could deal with it (only 2 nods away from your tree). its also next to berserking

consider frenzy and frenzy charges to be even faster