[Theorycraft] Welp, time to jump on the chaos archer bandwagon I guess

Got a level 80 Witch that I can respec into a Caustic Arrow trapper, something along the lines of this.

- CI, +240% ES, +50% (+gear) from INT
- 60% life (should be enough to prevent perma stun/freeze)
- 90% evasion
- between the various bonuses, over 430% damage on CA traps
- Profane Bloom and Void Beacon for damage, Wicked Ward for defense (not counting endgame lab bonus)
- +50% max mana, +75% mana regen


The questions:

1. Choice of weapon. It basically comes down to offense vs defense:



Chin Sol would be an obvious choice for the ludicrous damage multiplier, but Darkscorn effectively gives me 25% phys resist (including bleeding!). Said Witch is already CI with 0 phys mitigation, and devourers and dropbears are pretty scary.

BTW, I'm also planning on using one of these:



2. Would EV/ES gear work better than pure ES? I could drop some ES nodes and get the Revenge of the Hunted cluster, but without an ES shield I'm afraid my ES would go too low and I'd become one-shot fodder.

3. Would the mana bonuses allow me to run without a mana flask? Considering that I don't have to throw traps that often, since they're DoT.

4. In general, would it work? I never played neither an archer nor a trapper, so this is very new territory for me (which is kind of the whole point).


All input welcome. :)

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suszterpatt wrote:

Chin Sol would be an obvious choice for the ludicrous damage multiplier,

Neither Chin Sol nor Darkscorn are very good for traditional CA (also known as PA) builds. Traditional CA scales the caustic cloud, which is not Attack damage, and thus does not receive any Bow Damage bonuses. Darkscorn seems like a smart defensive option.

Traditional CA scales damage with +2 bow gem/+1 general gem levels (also known as a "+3 bow").

With no Empower, changing from a +0 bow to a +3 bow will grant you:
770.6/550.3 = 40.0% more caustic cloud damage.

With Empower level 3 slotted and a Level 20 CA, changing from a +0 bow to a +3 bow will grant you:
(+3 base, +2 empower normal, +1 empower's extra level = ) +6 Caustic Arrow level vs +2 CA level
1073.7/689.2 = 55.8%% More Caustic Cloud Damage.

With Empower level 4 slotted, it becomes +7 CA level vs +3 CA level, or
1198.0/770.6 = 55.5% more Caustic Cloud damage.

But if you're building Poison CA then I see your point.

However, Damage over Time cannot be converted, so you do not get the physical mitigation against bleeding.

"

suszterpatt wrote:

1. Choice of weapon. It basically comes down to offense vs defense:

Chin Sol would be an obvious choice for the ludicrous damage multiplier, but Darkscorn effectively gives me 25% phys resist (including bleeding!). Said Witch is already CI with 0 phys mitigation, and devourers and dropbears are pretty scary.

Chin Sol won't work with CA. It gives bow (ie: weapon/attack) damage, not general projectile damage.

Darkscorn is really nice for CI defensively, and Caustic arrow is about the only skill you can use with it since its base dps is so low.
Although it's a shame to miss out on a +2/+1 bow, you might find it works OK.

"

BTW, I'm also planning on using one of these:

"

That is a pretty good defensive quiver, but you should also consider Soul Strike since you are going CI.

Also note that it's very hard to get max block on bow unless you are Necromancer.

"

3. Would the mana bonuses allow me to run without a mana flask? Considering that I don't have to throw traps that often, since they're DoT.

I have never made a build that needed a mana flask late game. I didn't even know it was possible. I guess anything is possible though!

forget about both these bows.

when using caustic arrow your damage comes from the poison cloud which is a chaos d-gen and
point blank and the 100% more from sol don't affect it!

the 25% chaos conversion wil scale with the trap damage and chaos damage from tree and would result in more dps than sol would but stil out done by the chaos cloud

if you want max dps on caustic get a bow with +2 to bow gems and +1 to gems

"

dudiobugtron wrote:

Chin Sol won't work with CA. It gives bow (ie: weapon/attack) damage, not general projectile damage.

Whoops, my mistake. Still, against single targets, consider Puncture + Trap + Point Blank + Poison, while cursed with Vulnerability. Chin Sol would be a frickin' beast with that setup, I can't even count all the dips.

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dudiobugtron wrote:

I have never made a build that needed a mana flask late game. I didn't even know it was possible. I guess anything is possible though!

A 5-link trap can cost 200 mana to throw, and can't leech itself back. Though I guess with a lazy DoT setup like this, I could afford to have a dedicated leech skill to use inbetween throws. Hmmm....

Chin Sol would be nice with that setup if you can work out the logistics of standing next to the enemy when your trap goes off. Your normal CA damage would be low, though, without a +3 bow.

I don't think a 5L caustic arrow or Puncture trap will cost 200 mana.

I've been fooling around with Chin Sol alot this league. I've built three characters, one of them utilizing CA.

Here's my Chin Sol CA experience: Alot of people do not realize how much damage CA does even without the Caustic Cloud (if you build for it). The idea behind this build was to scale lot's of projectile damage. Projectile Damage would increase the damage of the initial hit, the poison applied by the initial hit and also the poison cloud. My second priority was Chaos Damage, since it scaled the chaos damage part from the initial hit and again the poison and caustic cloud.

My first intention was to have two CA setups, one for trash clearing and one for single target. The single target setup was CA - Pierce - Trap - Trap Damage - Slower Proj - PPAD. The damage was simply impressive. There wasn't a single rare that I wouldn't one hit. However, I wanted more. And since you can stack poison I chose to use Mines and Minefield instead of traps. Having only three traps with a kinda high cooldown was pretty annoying aswell.

Now the trash clearing. My initial second setup was CA - GMP - Slower Proj - Pierce - Void Manip or something. The problem was the way CA works - it always explodes at the point you were aiming. This meant that I'd always have to have my mouse cursor at the edge of my screen and this was just not bareable. At this point I decided to utilize the Caustic Cloud. This solved alot of problems but created new ones. I didn't pick up any AoE nodes in the tree, so using traps was not an option (again, traps have quite high cooldown and I had mine nodes now). I could have used mines again but I don't really enjoy the gameplay. I mean it's okay for finishing off rares and bosses but that's it for me.
So I ended up with this setup: CA - Pierce - Void Manip - Empower - Slower Proj. IIRC I ended up with roughly 15k DoT on my poison cloud (there was potential to still increase it tho).

Sadly I then got bored with CA and went on to Chin Sol puncture. This would be another wall of text tho so let me know if you're intersted in it :P

"

kahzin wrote:

My first intention was to have two CA setups, one for trash clearing and one for single target. The single target setup was CA - Pierce - Trap - Trap Damage - Slower Proj - PPAD.

Just curious - where did you get Poison?

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kahzin wrote:

The problem was the way CA works - it always explodes at the point you were aiming. This meant that I'd always have to have my mouse cursor at the edge of my screen and this was just not bareable.

I've always wanted to do a CA* attack build, but this always got in my way. I never thought of using trap - that's a pretty clever way to get around the aiming issue!

*Actually, PA, but CA would be fine too. ;)

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dudiobugtron wrote:

Chin Sol would be nice with that setup if you can work out the logistics of standing next to the enemy when your trap goes off.

I don't need to. The distance is calculated from the trap, not me. It's practically impossible for a trap not to get the 100% more bow damage from Chin Sol. :D

Although I just realized that since I have +100% chaos damage from the tree, the 25% phys->chaos conversion on Darkscorn translates to an effective +25% more damage as well, giving a 60% physical / 40% chaos split on my main hit. Considering mob chaos resist is generally much lower than physical (hello Void Beacon), we're looking at at least +50% more damage compared to a full physical bow.

...yeah, I think I'll stick with Darkscorn. :)