[2.1] Poison/Chaos Siege Ballista HC

Hey guys, this is a build I'm currently playing and its a lot more viable than I thought it would be. At first I just wanted to play with siege ballistas, and didnt expect too much of it. However, it turned out to be quite fun and viable enough, not needing a lot of gear (but scaling well if you can afford some). I lvld up with split arrow in a black maw tali, and stormcloud, did most of normal that way, when I got a 4l and ancestral bonds, I swapped to siege ballista.

You want to stack as much attack speed as possible, to get those poison stacks going. Lioneye's glare is a great unique bow for this, or a thicket bow with phys damage.

So without further ado:
Skill build & lvling:

Ranger version:

Skill gems:

Bandits:

I'm currently lvl 83 with this build, running t8-9 maps (my map pool is pathetic) but I can do most map mods, only problematic one is no regen, but I think it can be done if you dont run hatred and swap in a mana flask. I normally run 3hp flasks, thawing, staunching and warding, a granite and a quicksilver.

Short video, running through underground river map (highest tier map I have atm :<) here
Enjoy!

On the face of it - and I hope you can convince me otherwise - this looks like a rather inefficient build compared to the other Chaos/Physical Ballista builds around, including in this very forum.

No Iron Grip, no Point Blank, no RT/Chin Sol, no crit, mediocre attack speed of +69%, few jewel slots, and low damage modifiers to the initial hit.

You appear to go out of your way to scale the damage over time portion of your damage, rather than on making the initial hit larger, which also increases the size of the poison damage. That's not necessarily a bad idea, since at some point gaining an extra X% on the initial hit will matter less than gaining x% on the poison, but it can certainly be taken to excess - it it appears to me that you do.

As an example, you spend 6 skill points on picking up +125% poison damage that only scales the damage over time part (i.e. scales 21% of the initial hits chaos and physical damage taken the 5% increased skill duration into account(10%/s*(2s*(1+5%))), when you could have been picking up projectile damage, which would scale both the physical and chaos damage of your initial hit as well as the poison damage, and you are right next to several projectile damage nodes. (See this GGG post).

(It would also scale your Hatred damage, of course.)

Thanks for your input, something to consider. Not having Iron Grip is bad I agree, but point blank is a bit redundant for this build, as it primarily scales dot, and throwing your ballistas down next to mobs will kill them very fast, as there aren't many totem life nodes in the tree. The fatal toxins cluster is in fact only 4 points away because you need the thiefs craft node to make up the lack of int in the tree, which you need to run vulnerability and added chaos. It really boosts the dps from the ballistas a lot. I think 4 jewel nodes is a fair amount, and there is a possilbility of speccing into 2 more (there are points left in the build) or speccing into the projectile damage nodes, as you suggested. I would like to see how you would suggest stacking more attack speed in the tree (which nodes did I miss?).

I really appreciate your input, and I shouldve been clearer in my first post this build isn't really about efficiency primarily, I just wanted to see how far you can push scaling poison damage on siege ballistas, I will add a video later.

One thing I forgot to mention is the mings heart ring, if you can stay above 5k hp, and run one of these your damage will be insane, and even better if you can afford a drillneck.

The one obligatory item is a jewel, rain of splinters, which allows you to not have to run gmp/lmp in your ballistas.

Okay, a few things:

1) If your ballistas die quickly next to mobs, they aren't doing enough damage. Perhaps 50% more damage would do the trick? :p

Sorry, I couldn't resist the joke.

Since I use a crit physical/chaos siege ballista build that knocks back on crit it is probably safer for me. In my case, normal wimpy mobs are frequently one-short on crits with Siege Ballista - Faster Attacks - Slower Projectiles - Poison - Added Chaos Damage, while magic/rare are worn down and pushed back on crits. (Charges are built and all three types of charges gained with Frenzy - GMP - PCoC - CoH - Assasin's Mark).

(For reference, my build - and it is most definitely NOT HC safe due to lacking life making it only mostly safe - is this, with a Lioneye's Fall in the west slot, a Rain of Splinters, 3 more jewels, and making up the missing INT via equipment. Running Grace/Arctic Armour because I don't feel I need more damage when my tooltip damage is 15k per ballista, which doesn't take the 60-70% poison damage into account that scales off that.)

ANYWAY, Point Blank is way out of the way for your build, so it would be silly to path to it - it was merely that my original analysis was based on "which of the nodes that are generally good for siege ballista have been skipped."


2) As for the Fatal Toxins, the reason I consider that to cost you 6 skill points and 30 INT to cost 1 is that spending 3 points to go to 30 INT is greatly inferior to just picking the INT up right next to you. Be that as it may, whichever way one looks at it 30 INT + Fatal Toxins costs you 7 skill points.

Consider, however, this slight rearrangement of your tree, that picks up 30 INT from Trickery (20 INT) and Retribution (10 INT) resulting in the same total intelligence from the tree (135) and costing exactly the same number of skill points, but having the following differences:

-30 dex
-125% poison damage
+9% attack speed
+56% projectile damage
and +20% elemental damage

(Also has +10 STR, +20% critical chance, but that's irrelevant with Lioneye's Glare, and some irrelevant spellcasting modifiers).

..as an alternative, pick 5 nodes going west from Coordination instead and get 56% increased damage to physical and chaos together with 12 life rather than 56% projectile damage with 4% attack speed.

3) If you want even more attack speed, apart from the suggestion above, and apart from the obvious option of going for jewel nodes and crafting/buying good attack speed jewels, you are right next to the string of 4% AS nodes in the Ranger start, you are also close to the 13% AS cluster Totemic Zeal, and finally - though that is much more of a stretch, if you decide to stick with Fatal Toxins, a 7 point investment will give you 52% physical damage and 21% attack speed via deadly draw.

As you can see in my own tree above, I'm not stacking huge amounts of attack speed either (69% including jewels at the present); when I said that yours was mediocre, I wasn't thinking "haha, so little attack speed!", but rather "he's got roughly the same attack speed as I have and as I've seen in the other Siege Ballista builds in the forum, because while we all agree that attack speed is great, tradeoffs have to be made, so the reason that the build appears to be lacking in other ways of increasing damage isn't because of stacking attack speed".

Well most mobs are melee but its true any white trash mobs will be dead, but they are dead regardless of point blank :P

I think you are right about the pathing, although, I really "felt" the fatal toxins node when I took it. But following your thinking, I would prefer to take the attack speed nodes west of coordination and the 12% phys and chaos node ending in the life chaos/phys node at shadow start. So it would look something like this.

I did consider going for a Duelist start, and taking the lioneye's fall gem, but it leaves you too far from the chaos dmg around shadow, to be able to get everything.
I doubt there is a significant difference though, I will experiment a bit I have quite a few regrets laying about and some unspent passive refund points.

Will update op accordingly.

So I've played around with the build a bit more, and the Chaos/phys damage nodes seem to be the ones to go for, west from coordination. I updated the tree in the op. I also added a video, although I was still using the fatal toxins node in there. Now, I'm wondering about swapping out hatred for haste, but I dont have a lvld haste for an accurate comparison, will update about that sometime soon.

I started running haste instead of hatred, I'm quite pleased with it. Especially after you pop vaal haste, your ballistas turn into machine guns, pretty awesome.

Added ranger version of the build. I ripped my 87 Scion running this to some random lag spike porting into a map. A bit unfortunate as I had just 6L'd my lioneye's, major bummerino. Was very enjoyable to play though and it felt very safe, but I guess most totem builds do.