So what ELSE can you do with a Reach of the Council?

Preface (feel free to skip if you're easily bored): I've always loved archers in ARPGs. Mobile, versatile, lethal, firing a nearly Green Arrow-esque variety of devastating payloads from their (cross)bows while dancing around enemies too dumbfounded, debilitated, and dead to do anything about it. However, in PoE especially, good archers are easily the most expensive build archetype. A decent endgame(ish) bow costs ten to "Oh My God" times more currency than any other endgame weapon option, which themselves always cost more than endgame spell builds. Which has, unfortunately, left me sort of up a crick. Weapon builds are expensive, spell builda re (usually) boring. Ergo my off-and-on issues with PoE.

Well, it's been 'on' more than 'off' the last few leagues, and I finally seem to've found my pace (and my luck) in Prophecy. My league-start Vortex Elementalist shot up levels faster than anything I've ever played, and it managed to pay for my new love - a Frost Blades Deadeye which feels a lot like my old, beloved ARPG archers in many respects. That Deadeye, in turn, has allowed me to finally obtain as close as I'm ever going to come to the Grail - a 5L Reach of the Council, with which to finally Achieve The Dream and make a true badass archer in Path of Exile.

So...how does one go about doing that?

Relevant Part Starts Here:

I'm very aware of the AssReacher build, and will be using it as the foundation of most any Badass Archer I build. By 'foundation', I mean the Assassin Ascendancy and much of the basic gearing advice - Kintsugi and Hinekora's Sight have both done excellently on my Frost Blades build. What is up for grabs is the "Tornado Shot" part, because let's face it - Tornado Shot is awful.

Yeah, I know, it's actually considered to be one of, if not the, strongest physical bow skills in the game. Tornado Shot is like having Barrage and Split Arrow in the same skill with the drawbacks of neither...except it's ugly as sin and doesn't even remotely feel like an 'archery' skill. It's a skill you use with a bow, that somehow generates a screen-wiping Arrow Nova for no discernible reason. I'd say it was the worst Actually Really Good skill in PoE, but that title belongs inarguably to Cyclone (get that walking Beyblade bullscheissen oudda'ere, please).

I did a bunch of Crappy Layman's Math that came to the general conclusion that Barrage (which is more like it) only just barely edges out Tornado Shot in raw physical damage-per-click with Reach, whilst losing badly in the DoT department and having effectively none of Tornado Shot's screen-nuking power.

My question, I suppose, after all of that, is as follows: what're your guys' thoughts on non-Turdnado Shot builds that'd pop with a Reach? Doesn't have to be Assassin, either - while the fundamentals of the AssReacher build are certainly fantastic, I'm open to ideas as the ideas become available. Anyone got any interesting takes on things you can do with a free GMP that haven't occurred to me yet? How does one build a truly badass archer in PoE that doesn't revolve around no-discernible-reason Arrow Novas?

Can do pretty much whatever skill you'd like.

For example my sig, this was my second char in Prophecy. Generic Inquisitor Tree means you can do Lightning Arrow, Ice Shot, Burning Arrow, even Shrapnel Shot and get a ton of value from the extra damage.

Tornado shot + trap + cluster traps. Arrows everywhere :)

Vaal burning arrow for ALL the explosions!
Or maybe multishot ranged attack totems with fork for the lulz? Or same as above, but with iceshot and chain for the entire screen being covered in ice?
Or poison arrow so you cover the entire screen in clouds of death with only 2 clicks?
Edit: Or ignore the added arrows COMPLETELY because you're a rain of arrows/blast rain fanboy?

Use it with Caustic Arrow+Poison (+all the other supports you'd use with a piercing CA minus conc effect and empower).

Building for the projectile damage/damage over time/chaos damage (with some physical from the chaos+phys shadow nodes) results in initial hits that are pretty mediocre, but the amplifier from poison is just ludicrous... iirc my build with it did something like 6-7k dps at level 70 with the initial hits, but the poison damage they caused was about 800% of that even without much buffing (just frenzy charges and temporal chains, accounting for boss' reduced curse effect). Grabbing a little more skill duration and curse effect in subsequent levels, in addition to placing 20 stacks of my Wither totem (which i had and could achieve, but i never wound up bothering with it), i believe my calculated poison damage was approaching 3000% of the initial hit damage.

And the CA clouds themselves were okay too... they weren't nearly as strong as a 'normal' CA build, since i didn't use empower or a +3 bow, but they did alright. I had a second, non-poison CA setup (which was only a 5L, and with GMP) that cleared just fine in part using the caustic clouds.


It was a novel and fun concept to try, I enjoyed it for a while, but I have trouble staying interested in most bow builds... almost all of em just wind up feeling like the same 'cone of arrows' clone (and while this felt a bit different in many build regards, that aspect felt the same). And using the same skill in two different setups didn't help keep me interested either; I tend to use builds that have 3-4 different active skills, so only having 2 that are nearly identical setups just got old for me in a hurry. But other people are different, so it might be something you'd like to try.




I've also got another use for it I'm working up, but I wanna keep that one a secret for now... I feel like it's gonna have some disgusting potential, but I wanna test it out for myself first.

you can 100% convert physical damage to elemental damage so you can do literally anything that doesn’t rely on a single powerful projectile to do its damage such as puncture traps etc. but even then it is atleast competent in that role on account of it being a decently high dps bow.


I was planning a raider that went la with physical to lightning for 100% zap.
you could also go a straight up poison raider that really really scales the frenzy, you wont have the high damage over time but your upfront damage will be better than the assassin.

even builds that require +1 bow skills could work with reach and a +1 tabby. its not optimal. but you could easily pull it off if you are transitioning to say a pa build but lack a linked +2 or +3 bow to use

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1453R wrote:

Preface (feel free to skip if you're easily bored): I've always loved archers in ARPGs. Mobile, versatile, lethal, firing a nearly Green Arrow-esque variety of devastating payloads from their (cross)bows while dancing around enemies too dumbfounded, debilitated, and dead to do anything about it. However, in PoE especially, good archers are easily the most expensive build archetype. A decent endgame(ish) bow costs ten to "Oh My God" times more currency than any other endgame weapon option.

You w00t m8? o___o

As on topic: Anything, really? Anything but Split Arrow, as it already has many projectiles. LA, Ice shot... If you really want to go crazy (and inefficient) you can even try, I dunno, Ball Lightning, since it has Reduced Proj Speed (note: Ball Lightning is terrible).

Honestly, you could even go for CA or EA. Attack speed might be an issue, and also lack of +3... but I dunno, try? D:

Bow is good enough to use even non-crit, and the no-GMP part makes it really good for DoT builds, so you can do basically anything: prolif Elementalist, Ice Shot Slayer, poison Berserker, movespeed Raider/Pathfinder, almost any synergistic bow skill-ascendancy combo.

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1453R wrote:

Tornado Shot is awful.

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it's ugly as sin and doesn't even remotely feel like an 'archery' skill.

Wow, so vain.

Thanks for the feedback, folks. Much appreciated. Investigating a few possible options here. Still probably leaning on Ranger/Shadow options, mostly because I'm one of those nonsensical goobers who goes for the Avatar of the Hunt cluster on as absolutely many prototype/theorycrafted builds as I can manage. Totez legit a base movespeed ho here. Have had (bad) LA character in the past with 50+ standing movespeed sans Quicksilver flask, loved every second of it even if the character had less than 2k life at 65. Nevertheless, will definitely take a peek at Inquisitor options, though I will admit to curiosity - how do you scale bow crits on the left side of the tree? Or is RotC Critquisitor a case of "start here, then spend your first twenty points beelining to the other half of the tree to actually run your build?" Tried to search for the LA Inquisitor in Sarang's sig, did not find bunk.

Perq: Yeah, my bad. Heh, generally meant broad archetypes rather than base weapons - you can do Axe Guy for fifteen or twenty chaos on a solid rare axe. 'Solid rare bow' starts at 5e and goes north from there @_@. There's a few unique options I'd been investigating, still tooling around with a Point Blank Blast Rain Berserker (if RotC generated four additional Blast Rain bombs this thread would not have been a thing), but on the Reach build I wanted to try an archer that actually shot things from range. Those are surprisingly difficult to do economically, it seems.

Hikaru: clearly my opinion of Tornado Shot is my own, eh? If other people love it and want to run the hell out of it, more power to 'em. Have never liked the concept of Tornado Shot, but will likely still slam it in muh Tabby at some point during the leveling process just to see if it can convince me it's not as awkward as it looks.

The only skill in PoE I just flat-out categorically refuse to ever so much as consider for any build of any sort at any point in time is Cyclone. I never used Whirlwind back in the day for the same reason, and the fact that Cyclone has single-handedly ruined Cast on Crit for every other build in the game via stupidly overpowered CyCloc Discharge tomscrewery does not endear me to a skill which reads "Turn into a war dreidel and assault your enemies with the POWER OF GYROSCOPIC MOTION."

Sometimes a skill's aesthetic just doesn't work for a guy, eh?