Help with Assassin Caustic Arrow Build

Before I make any major decisions on shifting builds, can those running caustic arrow tricksters give me a range of your caustic arrow DOT dps and how you got there (e.g. +2/3 bow, 2 or 3 empower, projectile vs. chaos nodes, etc.)? I see the builds with ~30-40k DOT dps, but wanted to check with current players not capped to see how you are doing with it and whether it is within budget reach.

It will take me 10 regrets and another visit to the lab (which I really dislike) to change to trickster to continue with caustic arrow. With 10 regrets (and my 10 free respec points), I can do a lot of change on my non-ascendancy passive tree to fit with a barrage or other poisoner/bleeder. Not sure which way to go yet, so wanted to check with you all on pros and cons in your play-style/etc. I did want to try to keep this guy a DOTer of sorts if the caustic equip does not seem within reach.

Thought I would update now that I have a +2 5-link bow and a drillneck quiver. The bow sockets are not quite the right colors, and I did know you could not change the colors on corrupted items, but oh well (I can eventually use the red socket for empower if I can ever manage to level it).

Concentrated effect really does make a huge difference. My tooltip dps dropped by ~500, but it takes things down much quicker. I am guessing it probably raised it from ~4900dps to 6 or 7k. Better, but still not quite enough given my hp and evasion stats to help me clear maps closer to my level (now 76).

Going to re-do my Ascendancy to Trickster and save up for some better evasion and hp gear now and spend some more time on hp nodes to see if I can keep progressing from here.

Thanks for all the advice.

Yeah looks much better. You can change the colors of sockets on corrupted items with masters just takes a gazillion vaal orbs so not really worth it. Nice fitting Less Duration in your red slot. Might want to try Increased AoE in the other blue slot instead of Item Rarity but if it is not big deal might want to just keep in Item Rarity. The leech from Warlord's Mark is still on hit so I would change the curse to Vulnerability and use Enduring Cry for Endurance Charges if you want any. With Drillneck you are right next to pierce nodes might want to get those will give lots of damage and respec out of crit nodes. Also try out Vaal Lightning Trap for single target adds shock.

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Hunt8722 wrote:

Yeah looks much better. You can change the colors of sockets on corrupted items with masters just takes a gazillion vaal orbs so not really worth it. Nice fitting Less Duration in your red slot. Might want to try Increased AoE in the other blue slot instead of Item Rarity but if it is not big deal might want to just keep in Item Rarity. The leech from Warlord's Mark is still on hit so I would change the curse to Vulnerability and use Enduring Cry for Endurance Charges if you want any. With Drillneck you are right next to pierce nodes might want to get those will give lots of damage and respec out of crit nodes. Also try out Vaal Lightning Trap for single target adds shock.

After playing another build for a while (spark inquisitor), I am realizing the main issue with this caustic arrow build is the low hp pool and lack of damage reduction. The spikes in damage that come with evasion-based characters seem to require a larger pool of HP or ES, but it is unclear how best to deal with this as HP is already hard to come by and ES gear is quite expensive (and acrobat takes 50% off of that).

Perhaps Vaal Pact, but that would require more hits/second, which a caustic arrow build does not have by default. It would be great if they had leech for DOTs, but unless there is some amazing gear piece out there that allows this, I haven't found a way to effectively leech.