Ranger - [2.1] Poison *Barrage* - New Supports = New Strategies for Caustic Arrow Builds! - Forum

DISCLAIMER: This is less of a guide right now and more of an essay. I am writing this now because I have a bit of time away from the game, but want to share what I’ve put together so far. It’s probably my best bit of Theorycraft yet. I'll be back in PoE around the 20th of January and will put more effort into fleshing out this guide at that time. For now, I've just got a few more bits to add to my plans/goals with the build.

Patch 2.1.0 made a number of changes to an existing in-game mechanic called Poison. For the most part, this mechanic was never built around and was used pretty much incidentally by dagger builds, particularly those wielding a Bino’s Kitchen Knife. However, three key changes have enabled builds, particularly bow builds, to scale in a completely new way that wasn’t possible before. Firstly, the Poison support gem was added to the game, providing easy access to Poison that previously only came on one Dagger-specific passive and on a small number of unique items. Second, Poison was changed to be allowed to stack. This meant that poison was now, essentially, a straight multiplier to damage, even if that damage is a little delayed. Third, the skill tree itself was changed in order to make scaling the damage of Poison *much* easier. I would compare the damage potential of Poison to be very much comparable to the damage potential of Crit, with some advantages provided by each:

Poison Advantages:
* No gear suffixes required for scaling extra damage, and only few, if any, needed for accuracy.
* Appropriately selected damage nodes also scale extra damage (“double-dipping”). It's as if every Projectile or Chaos Damage node was also a Crit Multiplier node.
* Poison support gem gives 100% application chance, which is far more consistent than any but the most expensive crit builds.

Crit Advantages:
* All damage is scaled by crit, not just physical/chaos.
* Extra damage is immediate.
* Much more utility is applicable with things such as elemental status effects and surgeon's flasks.

This can be demonstrated by my current build, where the Tooltip damage of my Barrage only accounts for a bit over 25% of my real DPS when used against an enemy that’s going to live for those three seconds of poison damage -- with an extra second earned thanks to skill effect duration. That’s a “real” DPS of up to 26k at level 82 with a blue, 61 DPS bow.

My Gear

NOTE: I'm not actually using Rallying or Abyssal Cry currently. Abyssal Cry is amusing, but not practical, and using Rallying Cry properly takes some gameplay adjustments.

The reason this works as well as it does is because the selection of Projectile and Chaos damage nodes that make up the bulk of the scaling for Caustic Arrow also scale both the initial hit damage and the Poison damage of this Barrage setup. With enough scaling, this causes the poison damage to take on a huge, multiplicative effect that is great with cheap gear (like mine) and scales extremely well with higher-end rares and uniques.

My Tree (Level 82)

There are a variety of skills supporting the build setup, and this is why I made the choices I did with each of them:

* Arctic Armor and Grace are currently the backbone of my character's defenses. As you may be able to see, I have 13k evasion, which is quite solid for the content I'm currently running, and my Armor goes from 2k unflasked to 12k flasked. This combination of defenses makes me pretty well indestructible in low maps while my Granite is up. I intend to also incorporate Enfeeble into the build -- either as a 4-link CWDT + CoH setup or as a 3-link Enhanced Blasphemy. In the latter case, it would replace Arctic Armor, which I do find to be a valuable bit of defense and utility from time to time.

* I am currently using Clarity for mana sustain. I may go back to Rallying Cry later in the build if I manage to work more stats into my build, but right now it's a pain to remember to use it, forgetting means I run OOM pretty fast, and right now I just don't have the suffixes to prop up both Strength *and* Intelligence. It's almost certainly ideal to run Rallying Cry over Clarity -- the extra bit of micro is absolutely worth the effort if you remember it.

* Another big MVP for the build is the Wither Totem. Like the Chaos Damage nodes mentioned earlier, the chaos damage increase of Wither is also double-dipped to an extremely effective degree, amplifying my damage greatly when I drop it. The slowing effect is also very useful against fast enemies to keep them pinned in my clouds, and against blue packs to kill them just a little bit more effectively. All said, it's just an all-around useful tool for manipulating enemy AI and assuring kills.

* Blood Rage is my source of Frenzy charges and a nice attack speed boost for Barrage single-target. I have a little more than 4% regen on the skill tree to negate the damage from life, and the tiny bit of extra damage I take from having non-zero ES. I'm strongly considering adding a Hungry Abyss jewel to the setup so that I can make use of the life leech here and from jewelery prefixes, as well. It's at least something worth playing with.

End Game Plans

From this point on, I'm going based purely on Theorycraft. My drop RNG has been absolute shit this league, so getting all this together may not happen for quite some time. My current tree is basically everything I intend to get -- I'll also grab Herbalism and the Frenzy charge next to it, but beyond that it's all about small optimizations and picking up sockets.

In terms of gear, this is how I plan to proceed:

Bow

Having a "wonderful" time trying to 6-socket and 6-link this piece of garbage and then get it crafted into a +3 bow. Current prices on such items are quite out of reach, so I'm using what I have to try and make it happen on my own. It's not looking like I'm going to save any currency doing it.

Once I get access to higher-tier maps, I'll look for an ilvl 83 variant to craft, instead. Once I have a 6l base of that ilvl to work with, this will be my crafting process:

* Alter/Aug either +2 bow gems or flat Chaos Damage onto the bow -- T1 Attack Speed or Accuracy Rating suffixes are fine to keep, and I will augment them if I get either of these two alone.
* Regal the other one of +2 bow gems or flat Chaos Damage. This will probably take some exalts worth of alts and regals to finally pull off.
* Craft Multi-mod and Cannot Roll Attack Mods onto the bow along with a dummy suffix, if necessary. Exalt for +1 all gems. Pretty well-known strategy, here.
* Remove master mods.
* If I have T1 Attack Speed on the bow, I will YOLO Exalt and master craft Leo's "Reduced Damage Taken from Damage Over Time" modifier.
* If I have T1 Accuracy on the bow, I will YOLO Exalt and master craft Tora's Attack Speed if I can, or Leo's Reduced DoT mod if I cannot.
* If I have neither on the bow, I will Multimod and use both mastercrafts.

In any case, I can later remove master mods from this bow and go back to "finish" it's suffixes if I want simply by crafting "Prefixes cannot be changed" and scouring. This will take many, many exalts to do properly, so a perfect bow will be some time coming.

Something you might be wondering is why I would go with flat Chaos Damage over the Increased Damage Over Time modifier from Leo. The answer is simple: the flat Chaos Damage affix will increase my Barrage's DPS by 50%. That's hundreds of times better than just another small, additive modifier on top of the 500% of additive modifiers I'll already have with this build. The Decreased DoT modifier will also make it marginally easier to run Blood Rage and prove to be quite the valuable defense against stronger degens late-game.

Quiver

There are a lot of good quiver options in the game these days for different reasons.

1) Rearguard -- I, personally, don't put too much stock into it for this particular build. I feel like you need more than just this and Rumi's Concoction to do well with Block, but that's all I have the chance to grab with my current build, but getting more takes you into parts of the tree that don't have great scaling for Caustic Arrow.

2) Rigwald's Quills -- A great quiver that really does for Chain builds what Drillneck does for Pierce builds. Unfortunately, this build would never use Chain, and may not use Pierce.

3) Drillneck -- The traditional standby for this build. I don't just like the damage boost with this and Caustic Arrow, but I also like the utility of Pierce with Caustic Arrow. High pierce chance means you get to put the arrows right where you want them instead of having them hit the front enemy and only cover half a pack. It's not as mandatory for CA builds as it used to be thanks to the new support gems, but it deserves a mention still.

4) Rare Quiver -- Ideal mods would be Life, Life Leech, Accuracy, and whatever Resistance you can get. You don't want Attack Speed because Tora crafts better attack speed than anything you can roll. These quivers are cheap as dirt to buy, and corrupting them for +1 projectile will give you the opportunity to greatly augment your damage output. Partially because my drops have been so crap this league, I'm leaning towards using this. You can swap out Pierce for Slower Projectiles on your CA and maintain similar damage output, and the unique behavior of adding a Projectile to Barrage will increase your damage with that skill by, IIRC, about 16%.

Last edited by XCodesLIVE#7013 on Dec 27, 2015, 6:11:22 AM