It's just dumb how strong Caustic Arrow + Toxic Rain are with 0 investment

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SisterBlister wrote:

CA is awesome at the start and performs well into mid-tier maps. But its clear speed is too low. When you start serially failing your incursions because timed contents requires quicker kills, you'll start calling for buffs to it.

It's my favourite play style, but it needs really good gear to feel nice against later bosses and it will exclude you from some timed content.

That's the precise CA description, pretty accurate.



Clear speed could be somehow improved by playing occu - recently the best CA ascendancy - mostly because of the splosions.
But it still won't help with bosses in high tier maps and endgame ones.

Once it hits the soft damage cap, CA becomes very item hungry and player will soon realize he'd be unable to even tickle the gear he needs - like a bow with the longest column of + gems and preferably extra DoT, empower 4, thick hunter gloves and iolite rings, mirror tier ammu.

Great skill and I also love it and play it when I can, but truly requires too much to even feel comfortable lategame.
I also agree it scales the way skills should. The problem is, it's falling behind the loads of power creep unloaded in the game on a regular basis.


P.S.

I don't think OP is trolling, but rather lacks experience.

CA has a nice advantage of the secondary damage.
If you don't kill stuff with CA hits, the secondary damage will take care of it.
Compared to something like Lightning Arrow or Ice shot, it is indeed stupid because you scale the dot and hit portion with basically all generic bow nodes.

But I'd say it is not super OP, but clearly it has advantages over other "pure hit based" bow leveling skills because you lack that static secondary dmg which scales with just gem leveling.

I have no idea what would be a balancing approach to that, maybe some keystone "do more damage with hits and no dmg with ailments and dots" to give some counter balance in favor of regular bow builds.

Caustic Arrow and Toxic Rains are both just "feels good" type of skills. Even Scourge Arrow built towards poison is "feels good" skill compared to something like Ice Show which starts to feel good only at godly level of investment.

@OP you could be right about how easy TR/CA is to run during acts, which is true for some other good “starter” skills as well. But everyone’s jumping down your throat because we don’t care about acts, we care about endgame mapping and bossing. You’re just not there yet.

"It is the hubris of men to see their own destiny in all things. Von Carstein. The Everchosen. Dead men. Exalted men. In their skin they are all still men. This... will be the Age of Trololol." — Almost Throgg, King of the Trolls

CA is amazing leveling (Silverbranch -> Silverbough. Occultist -> CI + Soul Strike).

it has bad clear? get Pierce! clear fixed

you can get to red maps on corrupted ES 6Link chest and lvl21 CA gem you get for 5c. want more damage? get Decay Support, also 21 (noone gives a f.. about it, 5c)

it wont be enough for end-endgame but red maps? Alva in red maps? (splosions fix ALL your clear issues) no problems

red maps require caution (still talking about no-budget setup) but it is a playstyle issue, not CA issue. get maim, wither effect and utilize Curses - everything you can do to make enemies slow.

CA, just like any other gem-gives-all-the-damage skill is perfectly fine in endgame. do not underestimate the power of '100% damage uptime'. 500k CA damage is worth a lot more than 2mil bloated attack build damage that spends half the time running away and gets 60% of its dps from flasks and/or totems that die after 4 seconds


sure, end-endgame gear setup requires SERIOUS investment but in reality - that investment gets mandatory much latter than some might think. what is cool about scaling CA - there are many vectors. so your endgame setup is not hinged on one, uber-expensive item you just cannot afford. there are several cluster jewel options, small upgrades there and there. it is much easier to gear for than ie: accuracy stacker that is mediocre unless you fork 50ex+ on Shroud..

When it comes to endgame scaling, it would be better to just overall discuss regular - weapon scaling vs level scaling.

If you tag to it "dot multiplier" vs "increased damage with dots" as sub section for that discussion we will get to culprit that Caustic Arrow has a lot of advantages yet it still isn't that popular :)

Map bosses got buffed a lot in patch 3.9 (more hp and resists) and i would suggest you compare the skills at least in mid yellow maps to see how they perform on bosses with bigger HP pools and different movement skills.

CA & TR get their damage mainly through skill gems which makes them easier to start with in early content (campaign + white maps) but will reach its dmg scaling earlier once you hit lvl 21-22 and have trouble finding a +3 bow.


Also this

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...Caustic Arrow/Toxic Rain could use a small nerf as I can e.g. kill Kitava in act 5 without even trying on throw-away gear...

You can feel powerful with lots of skills (that get strength through gem level) with no gear in tutorial(campaign)-mode but as soon you enter maps and fight bosses with more HP and 30-50% resits you become suddenly zdps if not prepared enough.

i dont know what they are talking about
i played a starter with toxic rain once

acts were more or less smooth (but not as smooth as summoner btw), white-yellow maps ok, but then t14+ conquerors and sirus were complete pain in the ass and i hit the wall

and i had ok essence bow, few gear pieces with dot multi, 6 link, and even one dot multi cluster jewel, i can fucking assure you, you cant have more on day 1

then i changed to quill rain and it didnt work out too. conquerors took like several minutes to kill

yeah i didnt have empower4 or Badass bow or high-tier dot multi, but i mean it was a leaguestart, so i needed like a week of pure grind (LOL) to get the build running, and even then the bosses felt a bit underwhelming and, by the way, pathfinder survivability was questionable (ocassional one-shots), so you cant do 100 lvl in one week either

i dont know how the fuck someone kills sirus a8 day 2 with this skill, link me full run video from hillok till sirus a8 or I CALL THIS BULLSHIT

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Revnaut wrote:

Unfortunately, a lot of people think you need 10s of millions of dps, that if your build doesn't kill end game bosses in 5 seconds, it's a bad build.

Can't say I blame those people.

In a game where bosses can easily 1shot you, especially when it comes to some like Sirus, more time spent fighting them is more chance you'll get killed. Add flask dependence to avoid DoTs or curses, time is extremely important.

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Pizzarugi wrote:

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Revnaut wrote:

Unfortunately, a lot of people think you need 10s of millions of dps, that if your build doesn't kill end game bosses in 5 seconds, it's a bad build.

Can't say I blame those people.

In a game where bosses can easily 1shot you, especially when it comes to some like Sirus, more time spent fighting them is more chance you'll get killed. Add flask dependence to avoid DoTs or curses, time is extremely important.

true
thats where player skill or rather expierence and bossknowledge comes in

the fact that you only have to attack once every 2sec with ca helps a lot
even if you arent able to beat these boss on the "first" 6 portals the 2sec attack window allows you to learn and improve you knowledge/"feeling" of bossskills

ca is one of the best bossskills to learn the mechanics (imo)
the bets one for me seems to be triple curse (temp chains,enfeeble,despair) ed + bane occultist

the fights will take rather long,but you can see a lot more compared to skill you have to spamm
as soona s you learn them,fighting them with a high dps but spamm skills can be very easy and safe