[3.2, Playable state Reached] Poison Quillrain Assasin. (300k reasonable/1m+ min-maxed dps)

New video: DPS Calculations here

If you would like to watch/listen instead of reading this guide, I have a video guide that includes most of the same information. Click HERE for that. I'll also be playing it live on twitch as 3.2 releases, you can find me HERE for that :)

I really want to try a poison quill rain build this league, bc of the changes. The last league there are some builds for the raider, but with the assassin buffs, it is going to be insane this league. I think you still need to thief's torment to sustain, bc as synergises so well. Only problem being, what is the defensive for the build? You be dead from one hit. And can you relink your twitch?

Thanks for showing some interest in the build. Theifs torment is defnitely a great idea for the build, I just hadn't fully fleshed out the guide at this point, partially because I wasn't entirely sure how well it was going to go.

For the skill gems, I planned to include things like a CWDT setup and potentially taking things like aerobatics. Like I said, this was just a barebones look at "Theoretically, would poison tornado shot work?" And while I still think the answer is a resounding yes once you reach endgame, its leveling was atrocious.

Personally, I league started this and really struggled. I got to about lvl 50 and Killing bosses sucked, sustaining without thiefs torment sucked. TLDR, it just sucked. I know once you get to maps and get a solid gear base it has potential to be great, but the leveling process was way too uncomfortable. Eventually I'll probably explore a new leveling tree that involves going CA or ED+Contagion and transferring to tornado shot once reaching maps.

I'm a huge altoholic and usually go through like 8 builds in the first 2-3 weeks of a league, so once the build got too uncomfortable I just started working on something new.

I'm having trouble streaming due to internet issues, but I will try to put a video out explaining my issues with the quill rain assasin, and what I would do differently sometime this week. In the meantime, I'll just shill my friend who is working on another assasin guide,
his concept is way more fleshed out and he's doing a great job at maintaining it while he plays.
Here

I'm kinda heading in this direction as well. But instead of using Tornado shot I'll be using Barrage for more poison stacking especially on bosses.

Regarding the tree you posted (didn't check the PoB yet). It seems you have 70% chance to poison from the passive tree alone.
That's quite a bit more than you need, since you'll have 40% from noxious strike from Assassin and if you use Dendrobate that's another 40%.
So you only want 20% chance to poison from passive tree. 10% from Toxic strikes on bottom right, because it also gives poison damage and just 1 more node of 10% somewhere (doesn't really matter which one)

I was thinking more along these lines:
www.poeurl.com/bOgS

So far I'm at lvl 37 and things are going pretty well. Boss killing is rather easy because of Barrage. I have more trouble with large groups coming from every direction.
Gem links so far:
Barrage + LMP + Lesser Poison + Deadly Ailments
and aiming for:
Barrage + GMP + Deadly Ailments + Added Chaos damage + (Lesser Poison from Dendrobate)

Most importantly, I'm having a blast ;)

"

Soll wrote:

I'm kinda heading in this direction as well. But instead of using Tornado shot I'll be using Barrage for more poison stacking especially on bosses.

Regarding the tree you posted (didn't check the PoB yet). It seems you have 70% chance to poison from the passive tree alone.
That's quite a bit more than you need, since you'll have 40% from noxious strike from Assassin and if you use Dendrobate that's another 40%.
So you only want 20% chance to poison from passive tree. 10% from Toxic strikes on bottom right, because it also gives poison damage and just 1 more node of 10% somewhere (doesn't really matter which one)

I was thinking more along these lines:
www.poeurl.com/bOgS

So far I'm at lvl 37 and things are going pretty well. Boss killing is rather easy because of Barrage. I have more trouble with large groups coming from every direction.
Gem links so far:
Barrage + LMP + Lesser Poison + Deadly Ailments
and aiming for:
Barrage + GMP + Deadly Ailments + Added Chaos damage + (Lesser Poison from Dendrobate)

Most importantly, I'm having a blast ;)

Yeah the passive tree could do some major cleaning, I believe the point of grabbing the extra poison on hit nodes was to make leveling smoother, especially with dendrobates high-ish level req. What you have makes plenty of sense though..

Reguarding using barrage, I think thats a brilliant idea. I didn't really mention it here as I did in the video explaination, but the idea with volley was that theoretically if you could shotgun the proj, I thought you could get 4 hits per arrow (1 initial + 3 from tornado shot) plus the overlap from GMP. However, I don't think this is how it is functioning most of the time. Concentrating all of the hits into barrage is probably way more reliable.

Very glad to hear you're enjoying poison though, and when I revisit this later in the league I will probably look at barrage vs tornado shot more in-depth.

Have you thought about incorporating Ranged Attack Totems?
If the intent is poison stacking, you could get 2 or 3 totems barraging for you.

Bit of a snowflake, but could be an interesting way to scale damage up.

"

Icaros wrote:

Have you thought about incorporating Ranged Attack Totems?
If the intent is poison stacking, you could get 2 or 3 totems barraging for you.

Bit of a snowflake, but could be an interesting way to scale damage up.

I'm not too familiar with playing totems, but I may play around with it some. The main problem is the fact that our max totems would be 2 without either altering our ascendency, or pathing all the way to ancestral bond on the literal opposite side of the tree.

Another major problem is that estimating how many stacks of poison you actually achieve per 4 seconds (to be buffed by the "recently" modifier) is incredibly difficult. Of course if you could theoretically achieve some ridiculous amount of poison stacks your damage would be well. ridiculous, and my hope with this was to give conservative estimations that were realistic instead of outlandish 2m POB only achieveable numbers. This partially leads me to believe its possible that things like ranged attack totems or even mirage archer could potentially be more DPS, without having a viable way to prove it.

In the meantime, I did purchase a thiefs torment and temporarily re-purposed my tabula which made the build pretty smooth honestly. I killed my cruel izaro at lvl 51 or 52, and while there were definitely a few "oh shit" moments, it worked pretty decently.

Currently I'm running a 6L tabula with Tornado shot+Unbound Ailments+Deadly Ailments+Added Chaos+GMP+Mirage Archer. Of course you could swap the archer out for another poison support like vile toxins to do more damage, I was mainly using the mirage archer so it continued to gain stacks while I was running around Izaro like a little girl.

The video is still processing, but for anybody interested: HERE

Also playing this at the moment. I leveled until lvl59 with WEP,Added Fire linked to TS and with Hatred aura and at 59 i got the dendrobate and the embalmer and switched to a poison setup with quill rain. Barrage for single target on the dendrobate and TS for clear on the embalmer so far. Single target damage skyrocketed. I did the cruel lab at 59 and as i was very low on hp i wanted to kill the adds in izaro fights and i had to specifically avoid Izaro himself to not kill him accidently before the adds.

On PoB i get a ridicilous shaper dps at lvl90, something north of 1,5M but i dont know if that many poison stacks are ever possible in the real.

But overall i really really like the poison duration node. I have something close to 5 APS on Barrage atm and 8 projectiles for use and the poison stacks you get if you manage to stay on a target for couple secs seems really fun. Will see how it goes into the endgame.

Also the new fenumus gloves can add to this build for sure.

"

Bznga wrote:

Also playing this at the moment. I leveled until lvl59 with WEP,Added Fire linked to TS and with Hatred aura and at 59 i got the dendrobate and the embalmer and switched to a poison setup with quill rain. Barrage for single target on the dendrobate and TS for clear on the embalmer so far. Single target damage skyrocketed. I did the cruel lab at 59 and as i was very low on hp i wanted to kill the adds in izaro fights and i had to specifically avoid Izaro himself to not kill him accidently before the adds.

On PoB i get a ridicilous shaper dps at lvl90, something north of 1,5M but i dont know if that many poison stacks are ever possible in the real.

But overall i really really like the poison duration node. I have something close to 5 APS on Barrage atm and 8 projectiles for use and the poison stacks you get if you manage to stay on a target for couple secs seems really fun. Will see how it goes into the endgame.

Also the new fenumus gloves can add to this build for sure.

Glad to hear you got something working nicely off it. I'll have to check out the gloves you mentioned, and yeah the dps can get pretty crazy.


I wanted to explain my number crunching, how im calculating my poison stacks, ect so I did that all in one video also showing my estimations for reasonable gear and somewhat more minmaxed stuff.

Youtube Here


Also I'll include the POB here https://pastebin.com/90xnXnCV


Ill update the thread soon!

Glad you are playing something like that, since it's my build for this league but I have very little time to play (only lvl 55).

My calculations made me favor Lioneye Glare over Quill Rain, the ''hits can't be evaded'' being too good to pass.