kMaCh1NE's Hardcore Lightning Arrow Templar with Ice Shot Variant

Since everyone and their mothers are making Lightning Arrow builds, I decided to make my own that, so far, has been pretty effective. I also added a variant to accommodate Ice Shot as the AOE skill. It may not do as much DPS as LA but it can help quite a bit in group play as well as soloing. Both builds are pretty strong in my opinion. I made a little spreadsheet with some calculations, skill choices, gear choices and even the flasks I use.

Links to the builds are in the spreadsheet below.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AswgHTjM8HN3dEhtMEZSRlh0NVlJTHpYaW1BVE1UWnc#gid=0

It's typically a good idea to start out melee and switch to bow around level 24 or 28 once you can either use the bone bow or royal bow. You are likely to have mana problems early on, depending on your gear, so it would be wise to go into a few mana nodes while you're leveling (pre-blood magic).

Life regen is 4.4% from the tree alone so with 4k-5k life, that's around 200 life regen. Gear wise, get high life, high resists (chaos where possible), life regen, + and % armour and elemental damage where possible. Thicket bows with attack speed, 2+ elemental damage mods, a percent physical roll of over 150% and a high flat roll are usually the best option for a build like this.

Crit is not important on these builds because the chance to crit is pretty low on bows. You would have to stack a lot of crit chance and multiplier to make it worthwhile but it's simply not worth the sacrificing of life nodes to do it.

I'll be updating the builds and spreadsheet as I go so keep your eye out for changes. Let me know how you guys like it.

Update: Optimized the builds a bit and changed life leech to life on hit for the AOE attack.