[2.4] Queen of the Forest Volley Fire Barrage Pathfinder

This league, I decided to finally join the poison double-dipping meta while trying to put my own spin on it. I wanted to do some sort of phys crit bow pathfinder, the details were a bit fuzzy, so I experimented some. I started out as phys/chaos poison with Split Arrow clear and Barrage singletarget, which felt awful because I wasn't used to Barrage's near-melee range requirement; I then respecced to a more traditional phys/ele tornado shot, partially inspired by Neversink's guide, only to then return to the poison goodness with pure Barrage, Added Chaos, and 2x Volley Fire for clear.

I decided on Pathfinder because free poison is pretty awesome, and I wanted to run really fast. Queen of the Forest is the best way to do that, and QotF in turn scales incredibly well with a Jade flask of Reflexes.

PLAYLIST

Screenshots

Fully-buffed Barrage tooltip

This includes Atziri's Promise, 5 frenzy charges, 4 power charges, and Bloodrage. Witchfire Brew and/or Diamond Flask further improve DPS, but don't show on the character sheet.

Hideout Barrage tooltip


The only buff is Ice Golem, which has really high uptime.


Defence sheet

Unbuffed, only Grace:

Buffed with 5 Frenzy charges, Witchfire Brew (Stibnite), Quicksilver of Adrenaline and Jade of Reflexes:



Flask modifiers


Flask effect doesn't show up in this tab, but it's just the 20% from Pathfinder.


Gear Discussion

Body armor

I chose Queen of the Forest because I enjoy running fast. Of course, you could also use Belly of the Beast, Kintsugi, Lightning Coil, Kaom's Heart (since you only need one 5L/6L) or a rare chest.




Bow

Death's Opus is the best-in-slot bow, no doubt about that. Reach is worth considering, but since this isn't a TS build, extra arrows don't scale all that well. Mine is only 5S4L, because I really don't need any more than that. Make sure to get a good roll and bless up the implicit; the difference between 30% and 50% crit chance is huge.



Jewellery

You want life rolls on all of them, and crafted flat chaos. If you can afford it, Steel Rings crafted with Essence of Envy are best, but they're not really needed. I had to compromise a bit because of limited budget, but I'm sure you can get the general idea.


As for the belt, get a rare Rustic Sash or Leather Belt with life, a flask mod and one or two resists. Not much to say here.


Drillneck is an obvious choice and doesn't need much discussing; 100% increased projectile damage and a decent added phys roll are just too good.



Helmet

You have quite a bit of choice here. Rat's Nest, Devoto's Devotion, Starkonja's Head and a rare Lion Pelt (for evasion) are all good choices; I ended up going with Devoto's because gotta go fast.




Boots

There are once again several options here. You're running around with 40/30 dodge from Acro and Phase Acro, which makes Atziri's Step quite appealing; the build gets up to 7 frenzy charges, so Darkray Vectors are quite decent; or you could just go with rare boots. I chose Atziri's Step because they're a cheap way to get some decent extra defense against spells.




Gloves

This is a bit of an interesting one. Normally Facebreaker would be a no-brainer because 90% crit multi is just too good, but I've found that decent rare Gripped Gloves offer nearly the same damage while of course adding a sorely-needed life roll.




Flasks

This being a Pathfinder build, I can hardly leave out flasks from the discussion.

First, the life flask. I've found a single one to be sufficient, but I switch between Seething and Eternal depending on the map. In general, I prefer the Eternal flask because it just recovers so much life; the build has something like 70% increased flask life recovery, so the fact that it isn't instant is rarely a downside.


Damage flasks are switched out depending on the map. The normal setup is Atziri's + Witchfire, but I'll switch out one or the other depending on map mods. On Hexproof maps, I run a Diamond instead of Witchfire; on Ele Weakness maps, I run a Diamond of Resistance instead of the Atziri's, because I'm not normally capped under EW.


Since I'm using Queen of the Forest and my goal is to run very fast, I'm devoting two whole flask slots to that. I have ~19k evasion normally, and ~40k with the Jade running. When activationg both movement flasks, my MS modifier goes from +83% to +223%.



Passive Tree



Bandits are Oak (+40 life), Kraityn (8% attack speed) or point, power or frenzy charge.

Don't mind the random 16% projectile damage node at ranger start, I just respecced the pierce cluster and didn't have anywhere else to put the point.

If I were to level some more, I'd pick up the last frenzy charge in Shadow and the Heartseeker cluster, and eventually buy a +1 arrow Drillneck. There's some moderately unusual pathing near Shadow and Ranger jewels, but that's because of the need for 50 dex near them to satisfy Volley Fire's requirement.

Link setups

Main setup

The links are, in order of importance: Barrage - Pierce - Added Chaos - Increased Critical Strikes - Void Manipulation.

The last link should probably be Faster Attacks, but Slower Projectiles and PPAD may be worth trying out as well.

If you have to prioritize, levels and quality on Added Chaos are most important, since it provides close to half the build's damage.




Utility setups

Of course, (almost) no build is complete without some form of CwDT - IC.

I chose to go CwDT - Immortal Call - Increased Duration - Vaal Haste, so that I could doubly utilize the Inc Duration gem.

You'll want a Blink Arrow setup; I chose to be greedy and link it with 20% quality culling strike as well as Faster Attacks. The Ice Golem is thrown in there for random culls and slightly better cast speed; it is of course the best offensive golem for this build.



Bloodrage is self-explanatory; the Frenzy-Cull-PCoC-FA setup is meant to keep up frenzy charges on bosses and provide some extra crit chance. Cullins strike is also suprisingly useful.


This being a chaos build, a Wither totem is invaluable, and this build can fit a 3L Wither - Totem - Faster Casting.


I chose Grace as the 50% aura because of Queen of the Forest; Arctic Armor is the 25% one, which I picked because the build is somewhat lacking in defense, heralds aren't very appealing for a phys/chaos build, and Blasphemy is rendered obsolete by Witchfire Brew.


I'll come back later and update with screenshots and possibly video, but for now this is all I can write. Please feel free to ask any questions yu may have.
Last edited by Solonarv on Nov 29, 2016, 11:28:16 PM
Last bumped on Jan 11, 2018, 12:44:07 PM
Bumping because I added (accurate!) screenshots and updated the passive tree.
Now with YouTube playlist! All highlights from tonight's short stream.
Anyone have an updated guide for this build for 3.1?

Report Forum Post

Report Account:

Report Type

Additional Info