[3.3] Power Siphon Deadeye Build Guide

Hi folks,

this is my third attempt at writing a guide. It will take a while, it will not be pretty and i wont post any videos because i dont have the time nor the experience to do that. additionally i will keep it bare-bones and short.

however, the build will compensate for that with extremely beautiful visuals and a great feelgod feeling :)

Let's start, shall we?

Tl:dr collection
Spoiler

Link to pastebin

passive tree for people without PoB

Bandits: Alira
Pantheon: whatever you like


What's it all about?

Sick and tired of playing a slow clear build? You don't want to touch KB ever again because you feel like a cheater doing it? Why not try the new competitor on the market - Power Siphon!

It was one of the most garbage skills for some years now, but the rework brought new life and changed the most visually pleasing skill in the game into the most visually pleasing skill in the game :)

So how do we do it?

If you are familiar with KB wander builds - you basically do exactly the same with some adjustments. It is as easy as that.
If not, you start like a default ranger and transition into a wander as soon as you feel ready for it and your passive tree supports it.

Getting started
Spoiler

Level with whatever you like. I used a random bow with Split Arrow + Mirage Archer + Onslaught.
When you reach level 12 you gain access to Power Siphon. Grab that and level it in your offhand

OR

Get yourself a pair of those:


seriously, they will carry you to mid-level maps.

At level 25 you can get a


for some real deeps. At level 32 get yourself a


for even more deeps. The usual other leveling stuff is still great. Use it if you can (wanderlust, string of servitude with resists / goldrim, ...)

at level 28 you can get a

for a nice dps boost if you need / want.

Personally, i swapped to playing as a PS wander at level 25 when i got my 2 Storm Prisons and a Prismweave. It went really smooth from the start.

Storm Prisons have decent values and give +1 Power Charge each, which have great synergy with PS from the start. You basically start with perma 5 PCharges giving you 350% inc crit chance and 50% multi right from the get go.

4-link: Power Siphon - Added Lightning - Elemental Damage with Attacks - Chain/Onslaught/Faster Attacks/Slower Projectiles

Chain is a bit of a pain early on and i would advise to just level it in the offhand while using Pierce or one of the other supports there for a while. The campaign doesn't have huge packs normally which makes using chain a bit overkill. And you gimp your singletarget hard. So at best wait with the chain gem until you have a 5-link AND at least far shot from your ascendancy.

Do the first 3 labs as fast as possible, even if that means buying a carry for cruel / merci lab.

Ascendancy - Deadeye
Spoiler

1. Gathering Winds
2. Far Shot
3. Ricochet
4. Fast and Deadly

Reasoning: Gathering Winds is THE best thing that ever happened to Deadeye. It gives great survivability early on, and it makes you fast. Like really fast.
Afterwards, getting your damage and clear up as fast as possible is very important. You want those more multipliers asap so you can safely get Point Blank from the tree after Merci lab and start dealing serious singletarget damage.
Double Accuracy is important on higher maps, so we take it last.




Gem Setup
Spoiler

6-link: Vaal Power Siphon - Added Lightning - Elemental Damage with Attacks - Lightning Penetration - Chain/Faster Attacks - Slower Projectiles
Main Damage Setup, for ST you can swap Chain with Faster attacks. Links are in order of importance

4-link: Cast when Damage taken - Immortal Call - Enfeeble - Frost Bomb
defensive trigger. keep cwdt on level 1 and only level up the other gems accordingly. Frost Bomb is almost a necessity in Incursion with all the heavy regen everywhere.

3-link: Decoy Totem - Lightning Golem - Minion and Totem Elemental Resistance
Golem and the Decoy Totem that is just glorious versus difficult bosses. Level it as far as your STR allows it.

3(4)-link: Herald of Ice - Curse on Hit - Assassin Mark (- Onslaught)
Herald autocurse setup, if you don't want to use Tombfist gloves you can add onslaught

3-link: Flame Dash - Faster Casting - Blood Rage
Best in weapon or shield slot, that way you can turn off blood rage by weapon-swapping

3-link: Phase Run - Smoke Mine - Increased Duration
makes you run fast, like, REALLY fast. Especially useful when backtracking or in Lab. I usually use it after every second pack.

1-link: Wrath
Wrath is one of our biggest damage providers, a must for this build!


Gear
Spoiler

Weapon:

You will have big troubles finding a better ele wand than this thing. Double corrupt Pen and local crit chance if you can ;-)

Shield:

expensive but BiS. You can use a big evasion shield before that.

Helmet:

Go for 15% attack speed with Power Siphon enchant if you can

Body Armour:

We gotta go faster!

Rest:
default rare items with life + resists + some STR and INT if possible. Try getting WED, flat lightning damage to attacks and multi on as much slots as possible.

My current state:


lots of upgrades possible everywhere :)

Most important - Searching Eye Jewels
these babies are what gives the build damage. Get as many jewel slots as possible and get yourself jewels with:

* #maximum life
* #lightning damage to attacks
* #lightning damage to wand attacks
* %crit multi

you can try to craft those yourself with alt spamming and then regal it. chances are not that bad to hit something decent!


have to end here, if you have some questions feel free to comment. i check this thread daily :)

edit1:

Chain VS Fork VS Pierce
Spoiler

Ok so there are not very many Power Siphon guides out there yet, but every single one of them seems to go a different route (which is awesome!)

The most popular one (link to forums) uses the whole abyss set with double abyss jewel sockets + pierce with seemingly great success. However, using all those 2 jewel slot pieces drives the prize even higher than it already has to be.

First of all, to reach reliable clear with PS you actually don't need anything. The auto-aiming feature of PS paired with a standard Herald of Ice setup is most of the time enough to clear everything easily.

That said, especially with Incursion being as dense as it is, more clear doesn't hurt ;-)

We have 3 ways of improving this:

1) Chain

Chain lets every projectile auto-aim 2-3 more times after hitting an enemy. This provides HUGE clearspeed improvements even around corners or many screens away. However, it comes at a steep price of gimping your damage with a ~30 less multi. Because of this you have to compensate this with gem swapping VS tough bosses + chain node from deadeye ascendancy, giving you 10% more damage per remaining chain. It provides the best clearspeed of all 3, but slightly reduces your damage output.

2) Fork
Surprisingly enough, Fork support on PS works similarly to Frostblades where the forked projectiles "inherit" the auto-aiming capabilities of it's parent projectile. Means: your PS aims on 8 targets, all of those enemies hit split the projectile in two, and those search out for other nearby enemies within a narrow angle (quite similar to frostblades actually). It provides a decent clear that is close to comparable to chain projectiles. It comes at a slightly lesser negative multi than chain. However! Because you cannot equalize the damage loss through remaining chains you strangly enough end up with slightly more clear on VPS (a lot of projectiles that hit every enemy, fork into 2 and then chain once because of deadeye ascendancy) but even less damage than chain. Worth to try, but not ideal in my opinion.

3) Pierce
Pierce has absolutely no innate synergy with PS whatsoever. You have to be lucky for enemies standing behind your targeted mobs. That happens but more often than not the piercing projectiles just fly into nothingness...compared to KB where every pierce triggers the explosions, this feels really weak. it comes with a small more multi instead of a negative multi, so VS small groups it actually works out better than the other two variants. That said i would strongly advise against it, because Pierce always comes first and often times is unlimited or has high pierce limits and therefore "blocks out" other projectile modifications like chain or fork. Don't use it on PS builds if you are not 100% sure what you are doing!


edit2:

Jewel slots
Spoiler

Someone brought up the topic of taking jewel slots or wander wheel at the top right of witch is more efficient. Link to the other PS Guide

While that build has another apporach going for the complete abyss set in order to aquire a lot more jewel sockets it is still relevant in my build.

all values are estimates and change slightly depending on your stats. The difference should be marginal though.

I will list some per point efficiency values from my current build. That way you can more easily see why and when jewel slots are more effective than taking certain passive clusters.

As a reference my usual searching eye jewels will have +35 life(T3), 3-44 lightning damage to attacks(T4), 4-43 lightning damage to wand attacks(T3). Those kind of jewels are still achievable on a decent budget (50c to 1ex each / better roll them yourself as good as you can ;-) ): poe.trade link

let's get into it:

2-Point Jewel Slot: 3,4% total damage, 0,9% total life
3-Point Jewel Slot: 2,3% total damage, 0,5% total life
Fusilade Wheel: 2,5% total damage
Throatseeker: 4,0% total damage
Arcing Blows: 3,8% total damage
Heartseeker: 3,3% total damage
Primeval Force: 3,4% total damage
Ballistic Mastery: 1,1% total damage
Ranger Start Proj Node: 2,2% total damage
Sniper: 2,0% total damage
Wandslinger: 3,0% total damage (if you path south and not north of it)

all those values will change with your build depending on your other sources of crit, multi, damage, speed, whatever.

As a general rule of thumb: The better your total gear level the more efficient Jewel slots become in comparison to normal nodes
Last edited by Skilez on Jun 21, 2018, 9:10:02 AM
Last bumped on Nov 2, 2018, 1:54:27 AM
can i understand why non of the projectile damage node except for the fury bolts circle is picked up?
especially those at the beginning of the ranger path.

were you able to get up to that tier with these items?
"
Krueladin wrote:
can i understand why non of the projectile damage node except for the fury bolts circle is picked up?
especially those at the beginning of the ranger path.


the build is super point starved. i had to fiddle around with the tree over quite some time to find a good balance. the projectile nodes are not bad, but crit multi and jewel sockets are like always better. in PoB you can hover over a node and check the "allocating this node and all nodes leading to it" section for a "per point efficiency". with this you can compare single points or clusters with each other quite easily. the build is pretty much optimized in a way that i have taken the most efficient clusters whereever possible. if you are able to find something more efficient please let me know!

"
were you able to get up to that tier with these items?


not sure what you mean honestly. i am currently at ~t9 maps and strangely enough it seems to get EASIER and not harder. i was thinking with all the hefty amount of money you have to invest in good searching eye jewels i would start hitting a brick wall of sorts until i can fix those but it doesn't look like it.

my current state which absolutely reks all content so far:
PoB pastebin

some additional notes:

1) Esh's Mirror is worth the hefty prize. While clearing it makes sure you deal absurds amounts of damage especially for 4sec after you cleared 3 screens at once by using VPS. Its especially helpfull in incursions.
2) Jewels make or break the build. if you have too low life -> get more jewels, if you lack damage -> get more jewels
3) smoke mine is only good in very rare occasions. one example is lab. use it before a trap section and just speed through it. otherwise it is too clunky to use.
4) phase run is absolutely great. phase run + adrenaline quicksilver should be insane movement speed (lacking the adrenaline atm because no alts...)

In case if I use a glove abyss with two slots, how would the settings of the gems?
"
everkk wrote:

In case if I use a glove abyss with two slots, how would the settings of the gems?


kick smoke mine, it's very situational anyways. put phase run + inc duration in there. if at all. should be good.
Insane build. I have a lot fun with this. As a advice, i just switched Faster Attacks/Chain with Innervate, and hell yeah, thats a ton of more dps and a heavy boost on single target.
Maybe u try this, if u lack of some damage.
my last link will be light pen. im pretty sure i need that VS bosses. my ST damage is starting to drop off in t9 now. time to 6-link the thing...
Hi, your guide looks good really good to me and it's using a ranger which i haven't done ever ( except that wander project in 3.0 which failed at act 4 >.> ) and i got the gem links etc sorted, what is troubling me tho is that after Finesse in the passive tree, do i head down and left, or right and up?

don't think i need a leveling guide, but a slight guidance on where to head firstly would be highly appereciated, thanks! :)
Last edited by Steel_Bacon on Jun 26, 2018, 5:34:18 AM
"
Steel_Bacon wrote:
...do i head down and left, or right and up?...


You pretty much have to go top heading to shadow and witch first because of the INT requirements of both gems and wands. Feel free to take 1 or 2 +30 STR nodes temporarily to satisfy gear/gem requirements. Decoy Totem needs a lot of STR and i would advise you to level it up slowly. I managed to go to ~110 STR without extra points used on the tree so that means only a level 12-14 totem. It is still good enough mostly. With better equipment you can increase it's level further.

Personally i went with arcing blows / wander wheel and afterwards going for the duelist area aka leech.

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