Time to reroll?

I had the idea of making a cast on crit cremation character using a bow. Kinda like some of those unique weapons in diablo 2 that cast spells on hit. It wasn't easy to level, probably because I insisted on playing CoC the minute I got the gem, but I've made it to maps now. Right now I'm lvl 79 and I really like the build, but it feels like I'm really squishy at times. So squishy that I don't see this ever working in higher tier maps, only started doing yellow tiers just now. By comparison the selfcast bladefall character I made first is just sweeping through everything without any real danger.

So I was wondering if maybe it's just me and I should just keep going at it a bit longer and maybe the survivability will follow. You do get more life as you level and obviously I can still get some bigger life rolls on my gear. Or maybe there's something I'm missing that would add a lot of tankiness without to much effort.


Path of building link to my current character
https://pastebin.com/NFnF12qG


Pretty damn happy with the bow I crafted and it'd be a shame if it would just collect dust :(
Not that it's a hard thing to craft, just think it looks nice :P



TLDR:
Anything I can do to get more tanky or is it time to reroll?

I can see why you are struggling. You need better defense. Your life is very low. You should have good life rolls on every rare and shoot for 200% increased in the passive tree. You are below glass cannon levels of defense.

isn't 200 a bit excessive? Don't think I've ever had a character with that much haha. But I guess I usually do have other defenses in place too, this one really doesn't have much aside from the (little) life :p

If you are a HC player 200% is about par for course, it depends on what base you are as to how much you can get away with but most aim for 6-7k life with some fairly substantial defences from somewhere.

I usually aim for 5.5k-6k HP. Anything above that is really huge investment. 150% that you have is about OKish. I would aim for 170%, maybe with the help of some jewels.

Your character seems to lack pretty much everything though. Even if you had better rolls on all your gears, and your HP went from 4k to 5k, or even 5.5k, you have hardly any damage to go beyond white maps. Little damage means little leech as well, which is why you've allocated so many skill points into leech.

Primarily, while your bow is 6linked, it has hardly any DPS.

The skill points in Templar area, Retribution and those behind, they do nothing for you, because you are not casting spells. And all the other skills in that area are generally wasted for you. You've spent 20 skill points, and you got 1 jewels slot, 1% life regen and 20% extra HP. That's incredibly inefficient (some minor other stuff as well but it's super small). And it's not really clear how you're scaling your damage either.

The skill points behind Acrobatics are also often neglected, unless you're going full dodge/evasion, where you expect to almost never get hit.

I would personally think this build is beyond repair, just making a new character would be easier and faster, but then again I don't invent builds myself, so you've already done here more than I ever have :)

Thanks for the big reply!

My next talent points are all going into more life nodes and 170% should be doable, it'll be a grind though ;)

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MBQ wrote:

The skill points in Templar area, Retribution and those behind, they do nothing for you, because you are not casting spells. And all the other skills in that area are generally wasted for you. You've spent 20 skill points, and you got 1 jewels slot, 1% life regen and 20% extra HP. That's incredibly inefficient (some minor other stuff as well but it's super small). And it's not really clear how you're scaling your damage either.

My damage mainly comes from cremation and unearth casting on a crit. Because I've got some added fire damage mobs will also always ignite after getting hit, when they burn my immolate support adds another big flat +fire damage.

The spell damage usually wouldn't help me on my bow attacks, but since I'm using crown of eyes it works as increased attack damage too. So the spell damage actually does boost my barrage damage a bit too, although I admit the interaction with crown of eyes isn't the main source of damage.

Finally, I make my way to the templar start node to get the 5% resistance penetration from the pure talent jewel. :)

Hope that explains some of my reasoning for the spread out pathing :)


Maybe I should start saving for a kaom's chest to get a big life boost

Well if you think you're killing things fast enough that's fine, I just saw 12.3k DPS on burning arrow and that's just bad.

Those were just my thoughts on your build that you seem to have thought wasn't working.

The problem with your build that it's pretty janky, to begin with.

You are going CoC bow with a harbinger that usually has slow attack speed, to cast slow using fire spells. But also trying to scale both the bow damage (which has almost no physical damage stats or flat ele) and the spells themselves.

There are a number of on-hit builds (ngamahu cyclone) as well as CoC builds, that I highly recommend checking out to get behind the theory of why these specific ones are good and not yours.


1. If you are going CoC the focus is usually the spells and not the method of attack you are using to proc the CoC, otherwise go on hit build.

2. You need to find a combination that is effective with both your attack and the spell you are using. If you are using a projectile attack to proc your CoC, you want a projectile spell to scale with the same projectile nodes. Even better you can do something like scale both a physical projectile attack to also scale a physical projectile spell. (etheral knives for example)

3. Before anything though, if you're going to make a complicated build. Really understand how they function well and successfully before making up your own build.

"

MBQ wrote:

Well if you think you're killing things fast enough that's fine, I just saw 12.3k DPS on burning arrow and that's just bad.

Those were just my thoughts on your build that you seem to have thought wasn't working.

Burning arrow was the first skill I thought about using, I'm actually using barrage at the moment.
The original thought of the build would be to convert 100% to fire damage and then scale fire damage while casting fire spells, but I figured that would be even more impossible. Since it would require a high physical damage bow with high crit, and I won't be able to afford one of those. ;)

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RagnarokChu wrote:

The problem with your build that it's pretty janky, to begin with.

You are going CoC bow with a harbinger that usually has slow attack speed, to cast slow using fire spells. But also trying to scale both the bow damage (which has almost no physical damage stats or flat ele) and the spells themselves.

1. If you are going CoC the focus is usually the spells and not the method of attack you are using to proc the CoC, otherwise go on hit build.

2. You need to find a combination that is effective with both your attack and the spell you are using. If you are using a projectile attack to proc your CoC, you want a projectile spell to scale with the same projectile nodes. Even better you can do something like scale both a physical projectile attack to also scale a physical projectile spell. (etheral knives for example)

3. Before anything though, if you're going to make a complicated build. Really understand how they function well and successfully before making up your own build.

1. I chose the harbinger bow for it's high base crit chance. Originally I wasn't planning to use both unearth and cremation, I figured if I could only cast 1 spell every 0.5 seconds the attack speed wouldn't really matter as long as I crit every hit. I guess now that I'm using both unearth and cremation it would be beneficial to get a faster bow if I can keep the crit capped.

The bow indeed does not have a lot of elemental damage on it, and neither does my gear, as you said the main point of the bow is a delivery system for the spells. However I figured a bow with spelldamage would be better for the spells than a regular bow with no spell boosting stats. And if I was going to use a spelldamage bow I thought I might as well grab a crown of eyes so the spelldamage also scales the little ele damage my hits with the bow do carry. Anger, herald of thunder and immolate all apply to both my spells and attacks after all.

I don't see how the crown of eyes would be detrimental to the build or the spells in particular?

2. I am using a projectile attack and casting projectile attacks. Only unearth is a physical spell, but I'm not picking up any +physical damage nodes.

The offensive nodes I'm picking up are projectile damage, spell damage and elemental damage. Although maybe I'm picking up to little to get high damage from cremation?

3. Yeah I tried to find up to date info on CoC builds, but mostly found old CoC data. Even worse: the wiki wasn't functioning properly when I was coming up with this build Even now that it's semi working again the info on CoC is outdated.


Thanks again for the replies! I hope my reply doesn't sound as if I'm telling you guys your wrong, I'm just trying to explain my thought process behind my choices so PLEASE correct me if I'm saying something that's wrong.

Again, thanks for the help :)