What kind of bow would beat Darkscorn DPS-wise for a Scourge arrow build?

One way to get more frenzy charges is through a glove corruption. However Snakebite is not a particularly popular unique so the only way to get double corruption (curse on hit + frenzy charge) is to do it myself. Not ideal.

The other way is to get a yellow bow with despair on hit. Then its possible to get the curse and the frenzy charge. Unfortunately most bows I see don't seem to compare to Darkscorn even with the additional charge.

I am looking at

flat chaos damage
60% for 100% more poison damage
%damage with poison
%chaos damage over time multiplier
despair on hit
attack speed/critical strike chance

Thing is, 99% of the crafted bows are thicket or imperial, which are not the best base. And even though some of them do appear to give more DPS on paper (path of building) ultimately the damage per poison would be lower no matter what, +1 frenzy charge included.

So anybody having experience with this? Is it worth looking for a rare bow or Darkscorn is clearly BiS for Scourge arrow no matter what?

Thickets are the ideal base for crafting because of the base speed - you're not looking at physical damage numbers when building scourge/TA setups.

Also, unless something changed in 3.9, Scourge/TA rely heavily on plus skills boosting skill rank for the scaling damage boost, not base multipliers on the bow.

I still remember seeing one player had his scourge arrow read over 1mil per second. In comparison I only managed a fraction of that, between 250k- 400k or so per second. For me to build beyond that got prohibitively expensive, at least at the time.

This not caustic arrow though, scourge arrow's gem increase is purely % based. The damage increase from levels is minimal at best.

Thing about thicket bows is that their base crit is low. Nowadays crit chance/crit multi is actually pretty effective for poison builds thanks to

Besides, I always look at the poison DoT damage, not the physical damage unless PoB is lying. Finally, 80% of the high level scourge arrow builds on poe.ninja use Darkscorn. Something that shouldn't be the case if a crafted thicket bow is ideal.

If you want to build around crit you would aim for 400+ Pdps Harbinger with "60% chance for Poisons inflicted with this Weapon to deal 100% more Damage" delve mod which is not easy to get (or maybe faster bow)
I haven´t played SA for some time but you need lots of attack speed to feel comfortable to play.
You can compare it in PoB but poison mod on Darkscorn isn´t calculated in PoB yet (you need to create it by yourself).

You need at least to hit 1* t1 (either %phys or added phys) + delve mod and finish the craft with multi mod etc.
There are also new influenced mods you might use but I have no experience with them.

It also needs to have physical converted to chaos though. Or physical as additional chaos.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

It also needs to have physical converted to chaos though. Or physical as additional chaos.

Well you can have (21–25)% of Physical Damage Converted to Chaos Damage i.e. on elder bow (it will eat one suffix mod and will be much harder to get all mods)
if you want but I see no real benefit DPS wise compared to pure physical bow.

Although the best thing about Darkscorn is "25% of Physical Damage from Hits taken as Chaos Damage" mod if you have capped chaos resistance or being CI.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

This not caustic arrow though, scourge arrow's gem increase is purely % based. The damage increase from levels is minimal at best.

Thing about thicket bows is that their base crit is low. Nowadays crit chance/crit multi is actually pretty effective for poison builds thanks to

Besides, I always look at the poison DoT damage, not the physical damage unless PoB is lying. Finally, 80% of the high level scourge arrow builds on poe.ninja use Darkscorn. Something that shouldn't be the case if a crafted thicket bow is ideal.

Ah yes, my mistake, I confused caustic for scourge. Scourge builds look at the flat damage, so physical is indeed a factor, especially given conversion.

The thickets I was originally referring to are typically geared towards ta/caustic setups where speed and levels are the focus.

Since I haven't kept up to date since blight, I'm not caught up with the 3.9 changes - but I can definitely see a high physical damage bow with the right mods outperforming a darkscorn. However, like I mentioned previously, it can get prohibitively expensive, especially with a custom-tailored bow.

If I remember correctly, an alternative bow was surprisingly a storm cloud/tempest despite the lack of physical and relying on the speed to accelerate the charge time. Given the nerfs to flat damage jewels, that setup may or may no longer be feasible though.

Ok, after spending some hours looking at bows and learning which affix gives how much damage - there are two ways to go about it.

The first way is obviously the good old thicket bow with crit chance, attack speed, chaos damage, despair on hit, 60% chance for 100% more poison damage and a 40% chaos damage over time craft. The poisons will be slightly weaker but the attack speed increase will make up for it.

The other way is to swap one of the suffixes (crit chance, attack speed or despair on hit) for the damage over time multiplier suffix. With it the poisons will be actually stronger.


I really like the second option but it is definitely the harder one to craft.

The poison chance + damage is a throwaway affix that doesn't give much, its for the best if it is not present.

Update, been running with this for a bit



Comparable damage, much faster. Better kiting against bigger targets, better coverage while simply running maps.

It can get better, the multiplier can be substituted with either 50% poison damage or ~25% damage over time multiplier. Everything else is perfect though.