[2.3] Burning Arrow Elementalist || Insane Clear Speed, Solid Defenses and Budget (Atziri Viable)

@prospecial

Haha thank you!


@MinstrelShadrak

Hi, you listed some interesting observations. I really appreciate you taking the time to make your post. I will now provide my thoughts on the matter.

1. Regarding attack speed. Attack speed is not that essential for our build. As evident in the video, we pretty much one-shot most packs so additional attack speed is not that mandatory.

By scaling purely our projectile/elemental/fire damage, we can ensure a very large hit, that will then burn enemies for a large amount of burning damage. Although I do currently have 98% attack speed modifier from jewels, bandits, skill tree and gloves. I basically just use blink arrow for cliffs and stuff, but I'll test out faster attacks.

2. I generally find defenses are fine for my build, I have rarely ever died on my way to level 89. But it is highly important to get 7% maximum life on as many jewels as possible. This way, you can maximize the effectiveness of Kaom's Heart. This will allow you to hit 5.5k - 6k life at level 90, which is more than enough for reflect mobs.

3. Good point, I might include it in the guide later on. But we don't have much evasion anyways. This is why I recommend not running elemental reflect maps if possible.

4. If you have a 6L lioneye's glare, you can try using a life leech gem as your 6L. Dropping Drillneck is not really an option sadly, since it provides us with 100% increased projectile damage (and a lot of burning damage due to double-dipping).

5. Double curse is ok, but overall, I dislike using a separate skill to curse on hit, because as you said, it slows down your clear speed. If you do plan on using a separate skill, you can try frenzy instead of split arrow. This will allow you to drop the blood dance boots.




I'm not sure if CI is optimal for our build. Mainly because we can't get energy shield from our quiver, belt and boots. This means the majority of our ES can only come from our chest, helm, gloves and discipline, which is not enough ES sadly.

With a fairly large life pool, I have had no issue with reflect mobs so far. You can try running Sibyl's lament and a ruby flask for extra security if necessary. It is actually a pretty good item for our build, since it gives us a lot of WED and added fire damage, which increases our DPS by a lot. I found the pathing to elemental overload too inefficient, as 3 points could give us potentially 12-15% increased maximum life instead.

Anyways, thank you so much for writing your observations. I do highly recommend getting a Kaom's heart and switching to life if possible. Going Vaal pact is a bit too inefficient for our build, and it also removes the life regeneration from blood dance.

As long as you have 5.5k life and Acrobatics/Phase Acrobatics, you should be able to run all maps comfortably (except ele reflect), so try to aim for that amount if possible.
Last edited by MoarPizza on Apr 18, 2016, 11:47:21 PM
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MoarPizza wrote:

@MinstrelShadrak1. Regarding attack speed. Attack speed is not that essential for our build. As evident in the video, we pretty much one-shot most packs so additional attack speed is not that mandatory.


Just for Mirror arrow. try it out. replace your faster projectiles gem in your helm with faster attacks. It becomes alot faster.

About the CI, with crappy gear, 500 es chest, 200 es helm and lvl 19 discipline i got to 6500 es. It scales rather quickly. It was nice to try.


@Minstrelshadrak
Last edited by MinstrelShadrak on Apr 19, 2016, 1:13:13 AM
@MinstrelShadrak

Ah I see, glad it was fun for you.

Yeah tested around with faster attacks and faster projectiles. Both work pretty well. Faster attacks improves the initial animation and faster projectiles reduces the delay between travelling.
Ascended another old witch on standard. This time I went crit.

Most important observations:
- AoE comes mostly from GMP, missing increased AoE skill nodes didn't bother me much.

- The shock caused by elemental conflux is absolute murder.

- Avatar of fire is not mandatory. You do not need full fire damage for elemental conflux, since it takes all different damage types to cause an ignite.

Playing crit BA felt like playing a slightly worse version of LA voltax.
Things died instantly, but I didn't get the feeling that I was playing a burning Arrow build except for single Arrow boss killing.
That felt so good; melting bosses with a 40k+ BA tooltip.

some crit build details

Skill tree went straight into shadow , ending in the duelist.

So no avatar of fire-> elemental conflux does not distinquish from damage types anyway to make the ignite. It's nice to scale 50% phys with all the % fire damage nodes, don't get me wrong. But I got a feeling there are way too many damage nodes in the skill tree to make a ballanced build.

The burning damage nodes closeby: 15%/40% are good to lower your damage for reflect and increase the burn, but oterwise they can be seen as medicore fire dmg skill nodes: 7,5% / 7,5% / 20% as in 12% each.

No extra AoE -> GMP brings 90% of the aoe anyway, scaling up a 9radius prolif is not much better. Most important is a nice spread of your arrows creating alot of prolif puddles. The prolif 9r AoE was good anough to melt spawning Beyond monsters.

Shock: That extra bit of damage to push the dps further comes from there. it's like a fellow party member is constantly chucking vaal lightning traps. If you ever deciding between a couple of Jewels, take the one with shock duration to be able to properly shock high tier map bosses.


Just took the gear from an old crit tornado shot char. So bloodrage ice golem / harbinger bow etc etc classic bow crit. I tried some aura's like herald of thunder-assasin's mark*swap herald of ash* / hatred*swap-anger* /

Life was abit low, 5k because I didnt reach the scion life wheel, but high evasion and acrobatics.

Noticed gems like added fire / increased physical projectile damage scale good. For boss killing you might wanna try these out before deciding to swap in slower projectiles.

The mana/life leech from duelist skill nodes was a relief to have.

Crit chance was not 100%, but with a crit potion is was pretty consistent.

gameplay: I was melting screens of monsters just like the Original build of this post. It had alot less burning damage, but it was more then anough.

Elemental reflect problems remained, although I was able to evade alot of them with a jade flask = 20k+ evasion




Going to explore more options for BA & elementalist

*The Writhing Jar (uniq Hallowed Hybrid Flask ):
"2 Enemy Writhing Worms escape the Flask when used"
I want to see if spawning worms in a boss fight is good to re activate elemental conflux and/or proliferate some insane ignites on the boss.

*Fatso build: Since you're wearing koam's anyway.... why not go full classic fatso mode. Not going to the right side of the tree, but to the marauder. Lotsa life and armor. Perhaps even try irongrip/iron reflexes/bloodmagic/endurance charges, and see if the build can hold its own against map tier 12+ physical damage.

* Trapper: going to see if traps would work
(for the occasional elemental reflect map & for a respecced trapper)
BA +Trap +clustertrap/multitrap/gmp/pointblankshot/WED/firepen with and without chin sol.


Question: When using a pyre uniq ring where "Ignited enemies you hit are destroyed on Kill"
does allow for proliferation from the beacon of ruin where there are no corpses. Didn't the pyre used to stop proliferation from the elemental proliferation gem because there where no corpses left on the ground?

@Minstrelshadrak
Last edited by MinstrelShadrak on Apr 19, 2016, 6:51:42 AM
@MinstrelShadrak

Haha, great testing. I'm quite interested in all the variations of this build.

I think I'll provide some of my reasoning towards my choices, since I spent quite a while on theory-crafting this build.

Spoiler
The shock is definitely pretty insane. The thing about shock is that since we proliferate shock and ignite, it is a 50% more multiplier on our burning damage as well (so enemies burn 1.5x faster which is pretty crazy).

For increased area, I just wanted to make sure that I can get a clean kill on packs, since damage was already more than enough at that point, so increased area was nice to ensure there were no stragglers left behind.

For avatar of fire, I found it necessary because we can take advantage of 'more' multipliers such as fire penetration and WED better. Also, it allows us to scale our damage through fire/elemental damage, since fire damage double-dips into burning damage. This allows us to use flat elemental damage like Anger (which actually makes up 35% of my overall DPS).

This is also the reason why I use slower projectiles for single-target. Since the 'more projectile damage' from slower projectiles also double-dips into our burning damage, this makes it twice as effective.

You do make a good point about the "holy fire" cluster though. I will think more about it, but it is quite nice for reflect as you mentioned.



I also like how you are theorycrafting so many variations of this build, so I will provide my thoughts on that as well.

Spoiler
My initial plan was to go somewhat of a fatso build where we path mainly on the left side of the tree. But to be honest Kaom's Heart doesn't provide us with much armour to work with for an armour build. Also, it's a lot harder to get damage from the marauder/duelist area and Acrobatics / Phase Acro does make us quite tanky for minimal investment.

Another concern was that if we path to the marauder, we won't have any dexterity on the tree, and since lioneye's glare requires 212 dex, it will make gearing very difficult.

But if you do stack enough life and armour, it might be possible to pull off and will be quite a unique variation of this build.


I'm also really interested in seeing a trap version of this build if you plan on doing one. It should work really well as an Elementalist, especially with cluster traps. If it does turn out well, I was wondering if you could post a video or something, since I'm quite curious as to what it would look like.

Finally regarding your question. If an enemy is destroyed by Pyre, it cannot proliferate. But that is only if you one-shot the monster. If you deal 99% of the damage through burning arrow and then 1% through ignite, then the ignite will proliferate before the body dies.

But yeah, I would not recommend using Pyre for normal mapping. But if you do encounter a map with porcupines, I can suggest using it, since it prevents their quills on death, which is somewhat of a threat to this build if you don't have CWDT - Immortal Call.
Last edited by MoarPizza on Apr 19, 2016, 9:08:41 AM
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MoarPizza wrote:
My initial plan was to go somewhat of a fatso build


I tried this: 7,5k + life and 16k+ armour and then some with granite/basalt/endurance charges.
DPS is on the edge. but defenses are solid. Using 75% pierce (15% jewel) and grace / iron reflexes. Alot of dex is taken at the duelist.

Feels really safe, 30k+ armor with a granite up.


"
MoarPizza wrote:
I'm also really interested in seeing a trap version of this build if you plan on doing one.


For the occasional reflect map, trap works fine, just by swapping in Trap for something. The major problem where the trap charges. Without some sort of trap specialisation, you run out of ammo real fast. So the fatso build can't really do that like people did 2 years ago with the ele prolif gem.

"
MoarPizza wrote:
Finally regarding your question. If an enemy is destroyed by Pyre, it cannot proliferate. But that is only if you one-shot the monster. If you deal 99% of the damage through burning arrow and then 1% through ignite, then the ignite will proliferate before the body dies. But yeah, I would not recommend using Pyre for normal mapping. But if you do encounter a map with porcupines, I can suggest using it, since it prevents their quills on death, which is somewhat of a threat to this build if you don't have CWDT - Immortal Call.


Aah right, thx for that.
Elemental quills are still a big problem though. So a pyre is nice to have for backup. the xx % extra damage as elemental map mod can be brutal.


When i got time I'll look at the trap thing, but I'm also still interested in a tripple/quad curser.

p.s. Talked about elemental overload as crit reflect protection, noticed you're back at square one if your second hit comes in with 40% more elemental damage. So just helps on the first crit reflect if the buff isn't on alrdy....... probably counts as another buff for your mantra though.
@Minstrelshadrak
Last edited by MinstrelShadrak on Apr 19, 2016, 10:55:52 AM
I went for elemental overload and it always proc with Orb of Storms which is pretty consistent.

Also I tested with TC on hit and vul on hit, dual-curse, works pretty good. But was wondering how it compares to Ele-weak/flamm combo. Really torn deciding which 2 curses to go for.....since burn is based on TC and vulnerability and Ele-weak/flamm will influence the initial hit, right? Couldn't figure out the math here.

How's this build in T13+ map doing and how about Uber?
Sorry for the newbness but the skill tree in PoE is still a bit overwhelming. Could you tell me which direction to head towards for first or if it's not too much trouble, lay it out every 20 levels? Thank you.
@MinstrelShadrak

Ah I see. Nice to see some different variations of my build (such as trap version, ES version and Armour version). Thanks for taking the time to work on these variations, pretty cool to see as well. Hope you enjoy the builds.

Yep carrying around a Pyre with you for Elemental Quills will be very helpful for certain maps with a lot of porcupines and added elemental damage.

Hm, I guess the trap builds don't really work without some investment into trap nodes. Ah well, thanks for testing it out though and good luck with your future experiments.

@minimalistjason

Ah interesting note with orb of storms. I'm generally a lazy player so I wouldn't use orb every 8 seconds, but that's pretty cool so thanks for letting me know.

If you plan on using a curse on hit setup, Ele weakness and Flammability would provide the highest damage boost. This is because Elemental Weakness and Flammability double-dip for burning damage. So first they increase the damage of the initial hit, and then they increase the burning damage.

So far the furthest I've taken the build is T11 maps which are quite easy. I can one-shot most bosses such as the Crematorium boss with one burning arrow. T13 maps generally should not be a problem.

I can't guarantee for Core and Uber Atziri though, that kind of depends on your mechanical skill. Uber Atziri can't be ignited, so it will take a bit longer to kill her, but our damage is fairly high so it might work.

@Ferocite69

Ah this build might be a bit hard for newbies since items like Kaom's Heart can cost 50 chaos and a 5L Lioneye's glare can cost 30 chaos. Also getting life on jewels might cost a little.

But if you can do all that, you should be fine. I have included a bunch of leveling trees in my guide, so have fun!
Last edited by MoarPizza on Apr 19, 2016, 11:27:15 PM
7min Video of Fatso Build:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0cp_git_0U

*Will try again with 30-50% more dmg.
Main reason is for faster clear speed to keep the elemental
conflux buff going.

DPS tooltip will end somewhere around half the 35k tooltip of the original build.

*Will also try a couple worm flasks for really big bosses.
@Minstrelshadrak
Last edited by MinstrelShadrak on Apr 20, 2016, 5:23:23 AM

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