Thank you everyone for all of the feedback and questions! This build is mostly complete, but I'm continually tweaking it so check back occasionally for updates!
September 10th, 2014: Revised tree for higher life; changed to Curse on Hit setup; added some Atziri videos with budget setup
September 9th, 2014: Added budget setup & more videos!
Hey all! This DoT (damage over time) build centers around both the newly buffed Chin Sol bow, and the Three Dragons helmet. If you enjoy watching a roomful of enemies melt in seconds to a single arrow, or if you like dropping the toughest bosses in the blink of an eye — all at a reasonable cost — you've come to the right place!
Chin Sol is an affordable weapon, and now offers great end-game damage. Its hallmark modifier is: "100% More Bow Damage at Close Range", and with this build we're going to take advantage of that in our single-target setup, using the Puncture skill combined with the Trap support gem to quickly assassinate tough map/rare bosses.
To supplement the above boss-killer, we are going to be using the newly buffed Ice Shot to clear mobs, also based heavily on DoT. Ice Shot is incredibly strong when paired with the right items and gems. A lot of our physical damage is going to be converted into cold, which is where the Three Dragons comes in to turn all of that icy goodness into Ignite damage on crit, which is spread to nearby foes with the Elemental Proliferation gem. Paired with the fire damage granted from the new Herald of Ash skill, and Three Dragon's ability to Shock enemies with fire damage, we've got ourselves a formidable AoE setup. Shoot into a room, and everything burns to the ground!
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As you can see, this variation of the build uses 100% unique items. This setup works and hits all of the resistance/stat requirements. Though, the only 2 items that make this build "work" are the Three Dragons helmet and Chin Sol bow (even the Chin Sol could probably be upgraded to a high-crit/DPS Harbinger bow later on).
Explanation
Central:
Chin Sol: This bow takes front and center stage in this build. With the recently buffed 80-100% to 150-180% physical damage, it turned from a leveling item to an end-game viable bow. It provides more than enough DPS for our single-target purpose of hitting once and hitting hard, while still providing enough DPS for Ice Shot to clear mobs at far range. The best part is the cost of this bow (1-5 chaos unlinked on most leagues!)
Three Dragons: This helm allows our fire damage (from Added Fire + Herald of Ash) to Shock, and cold damage (from Ice Shot + Hatred) to Ignite. This is a staple item, as we want the exact 2 status ailments: Ignite and Shock. We don't want to freeze enemies, as shattered enemies cannot proliferate burn. The helm also provides much-needed resistances.
Optional (can be replaced with rares that offer life/crit/resists/stats):
Drillneck: This quiver is an all-around great item. It has decent survivability mods (life/evasion), and gives an excellent boost in damage with the flat phys, attack speed, 10% implicit pierce, and the "projectile damage increased by pierce chance" modifier. Since we are getting capped pierce chance (100%) on Ice Shot, we are taking full advantage of the damage this quiver provides
Voll's Devotion: A great amulet that is usually used on Discharge builds, but also a great defensive amulet when paired with Romira's Banquet. It gives decent life, elemental resists, STR/INT to reach stat requirements, and the signature "endurance charge on power charge expiration" modifier. This means that you will always be capped on Endurance Charges for use with CWDT+IC.
Romira's Banquet: As stated above, Romira's Banquet provides the Power Charges that feed your Voll's Devotion. With a Chin Sol, You will be shooting a lot of non-crits (~56%), so Endurance Charges will generate quite quickly. The power charges also help boost the average crit chance a bit. Other good stats on the ring include the 2% mana leech (saves 2 passive points), 300+ accuracy (big amount), crit multiplier, and implicit 30% crit.
Doryani's Invitation: The belt provides a good amount of resistances, and the 30% physical helps all damage; not just Trap damage. The extra strength is also needed to equip certain gems, and 1% physical leech is a nice bonus.
Belly of the Beast: With the patch-1.2 buff to flat life per level (and nerf in life nodes), Belly of the Beast now gives a lot more boost to HP than a flat +100 life chest would. The chest also provides just enough resistances to hit the 75% cap, and a nice boost to life recovery rate from the new Eternal Flasks (Catalysed seems almost instant).
Maligaro's Virtuosity: An all-around great glove that provides high crit chance and multiplier, with some other nice DPS mods (dex/attack speed).
Atziri's Step: Since bow-users in general don't have access to spell block (aside from Rearguard), the only other way to increase defenses against elemental damage is with spell dodge or +max resists. Since we have no room on gear to run purity auras or hold shields such as Saffell's Frame, Atziri's Step allows us to boost our Spell Dodge % up to 46 from 30. The boot also gives max run speed (30%), up to +75 life, and high evasion. Nothing to dislike.
Le Heup of All: Probably the most easily-replaceable item in this build. It gives +stats and +resists to hit the requirements. That's basically all I use it for. Could probably be replaced with a ring that has some +life. But Le Heup is a solid ring nonetheless.
Rumi's Concoction: Since bow users usually lack solid defenses such as Armour, the new Rumi's Concoction flask is used to preemptively safeguard the player when entering potentially sticky situations, offering a much-needed +3K Armour, 40% block, and 20% spellblock boost.
Budget setup
In this setup, we keep the Chin Sol bow, Three Dragons helmet, Maligaro's gloves, and Belly of the Beast chest. Aside from the addition of Meginord's Girdle belt, all of the uniques in the previous setup are now replaced with rares that offer life, resists, and stats. Some other things to have on the rares are mana leech (saves you 2 passive points), movement speed on boots, and crit chance wherever you can fit it (rings/amulets/quiver). Notice how in this setup, we also use two 5L's. With the general improvement to the crafting system, 5L's are virtually attainable by most players now, and is the "sweet spot" for this build to function properly. Total cost should be no more than 7-10ex, even in temporary leagues.
Below are gems listed in order of importance, from left to right.
Single-target 4L/5L/6L
4L:
Optional:
The reason why we use the Trap gem instead of simply going self-shot Puncture is because Chin Sol requires our character to stand close to the enemy to take advantage of the "100% more bow damage" modifier. In many cases, this is inconvenient and possibly dangerous. Trap solves this nicely by letting our character throw a trap at far-range, and instantly Puncture the target at close-range, while still benefiting from the Chin Sol modifier. On top of that, Trap gem offers a 34% more damage modifier, which is further amplified by Point Blank's 50% more damage modifier. So, while the tooltip DPS of Puncture might seem quite low, it's missing a lot of "hidden" damage.
For the other supports, we choose to use as many gems that increase the physical damage of Puncture, as Puncture's DoT only scales off of physical (not elemental). If your tooltip is below 30% critical strike chance, I would equip the Increased Critical Strikes gem over Increased Critical Damage in a 5L setup.
AoE 4L/5L/6L
4L:
Optional:
Unlike our single-target Puncture skill which deals high physical damage, the mob-clearing skill we're going to use is (Ice Shot), which relies heavily on elemental damage to do the deeps. The recently buffed Ice Shot now has a 120% damage effectiveness, with 40% of that physical damage converted to cold. We use the Physical Projectile Attack Damage gem for a huge increase in elemental damage, which is bolstered by Hatred and Herald of Ash.
But possibly the most important support here is Pierce. Aside from the 1:1 damage increase we get from Drillneck for each pierce % (up to 100%), Pierce allows Ice shot to hit multiple enemies in a single volley, which sprays enemies behind each target hit with a cone of ice. And whenever we crit with Three Dragons equipped, cold damage will Ignite and fire damage will Shock (50% increased damage from all sources including burn), both being proliferated onto nearby foes via the Elemental Proliferation gem.
Other supports that work well (as a 5th or 6th link) include Weapon Elemental Damage (boosts both cold & fire damage), Cold Penetration (helps cold damage a ton resulting in up to 140% extra cold/burn damage on resist-capped monsters), Added Fire (for higher Shock duration), or Life Leech (if you're having trouble surviving).
Curse
Optional:
For our curse of choice, we run Assassin's Mark. You may wonder, why Assassin's Mark over Vulnerability? While Vulnerability does offer a damage boost to physical and DoT for Puncture, Assassin's Mark offers more benefits to the overall build. Firstly, when we throw down 3 traps on a boss, we want at least 1 of them to crit, because if it happens, bosses will almost always die in 1 hit. If none of them crit, then we have to waste time throwing down more traps (as non-crit Puncture damage is quite low). Since Chin Sol has a relatively low base crit chance, which results in a final tooltip of around 35% chance to crit, Assassin's Mark gives us an additional 9% crit on top of that, bringing us to a solid 44% chance to crit. Furthermore, for our AoE skill (Ice Shot), only about 1/5 of the damage comes from physical. The other 4/5 comes from elemental (fire + cold), and when we crit with Three Dragons equipped, enemies get Shocked/Ignited. Thus it's in our best interest to crit as often as possible, for as much as possible.
Alternatively, depending on the colors you're able to roll on gear (and your playstyle), you could use Temporal Chains as your main curse. This has the nice effect of allowing you to kite enemies better, and set up traps for fast-moving bosses.
Lastly, we apply the curse with Split Arrow via the Curse on Hit gem. This has a couple upsides. First, Split arrow (even at level 20) has a really low mana cost that fires 5 projectiles. With Pierce gem, we are able to reach 100% pierce chance, meaning curses are applied to monsters quickly (even off-screen). And unlike self-casting curses, applying curses via a leveled Split Arrow means we are able to damage monsters in one fell swoop. Credits to TirpitzLuminare for this CoH idea :)
CWDT
For our CWDT setup, we go with a standard Immortal Call + Increased Duration combination. The only thing missing is Enduring Cry, which isn't necessary since with Voll's Devotion + Romira's Banquet, we get a constant supply of Endurance Charges (4 max). I also added Frost Wall into this setup, as it's one of the best defensive CWDT gems for ranged characters. Whenever you are hit by an enemy, Frost Wall pushes everything back and gives you time to breathe before you are hit again. With a 100% chance to pierce with your arrows, you can shoot right through the Frost Wall (which lasts about 3 seconds with Increased Duration).
Note: if you are using the budget build, the Frost Wall gem will need to be replaced with Enduring Cry gem.
Auras/Buffs
The two auras/buffs that boost physical-damage-based characters the most are obviously going to be Hatred, and now Herald of Ash. Herald of Ash is an important buff in this build because it is our main source of fire damage when using Ice Shot, shocking enemies on crit via the Three Dragons helm. The 50% damage bonus really helps boost both the Puncture bleed-DoT and Ice Shot burn-DoT. Furthermore, each enemy that is killed by a direct hit from Ice Shot will ignite nearby enemies for any remaining "overkill" damage, whether Ice Shot crit or not. This overkill burn can then be proliferated if you link an Elemental Proliferation gem, which is what's used in the last gem slot. This guarantees that low-HP enemies (that can be easily 1-shot) can proliferate burn onto nearby high-HP enemies, even if you go on an unlucky non-crit streak with Ice Shot.
This build can be completed either with a Ranger or Shadow, as I hit both starting positions. The link above is for a 113 point build (L90 with 3 non-passive quests), but is able to be finished at around L80. Though, obviously the more nodes you collect the higher you will be able to push your DPS. There's nothing too exciting about the tree, as your goal is mainly to collect all of the crit nodes, bow phys nodes, and trap nodes on the left side of the tree, prioritized in that respective order.
Some other notables are the 'Entropy' DoT nodes and the 40% pierce cluster. Since we don't have regular/spell block, we use Acrobatics/Phase to get our much needed defense. It's also important that we collect the 'Survivalist' cluster, since we are dealing heavy cold damage. The extra 1% max cold resistances will help us mitigate up to 4% more damage when jumping from 75% to 76%. And the cluster also provides us a large amount of evasion to go with the 'Ondar's Guile' keystone, preventing the projectiles we shoot from killing us on reflect mobs.
Bandits:
Normal: +8% resistances (Kraityn) for 100% unique setup; otherwise go with +40 life (Oak)
A: No! This build can be done with nothing higher than 4L's, preferably with 5L's. Look in the gem section to see which gems are required/optional.
Q: Can I use the Pyre unique ring for increased burning damage?
A: No! There's 2 reasons. First, this build relies on burn proliferation to do a lot of AoE damage. Pyre causes burnt enemies (when hit again) to leave no corpses, which means there will be no corpses to proliferate burn. Secondly, Pyre converts all of the cold damage into fire damage. But in this build, Three Dragons makes cold damage Ignite enemies. So if you don't deal cold damge, you won't be able to Ignite.
Q: Can Chin Sol be replaced with a high crit/DPS Harbinger?
A: Yes! Even though this build centers around the Chin Sol bow, a rare Harbinger bow will offer more consistent crit chance, and with high enough rolls will offer you more DPS than a Chin Sol will. A Chin Sol is simply used in this build since it's a relatively accessible/inexpensive item that can be obtained on all leagues fairly early on. And with the recent buff, the DPS is sufficient for all of the toughest end-game content.
Q: What about reflect mobs?
A: Elemental reflect-mobs will put a small dent in your HP, but will not 1-shot you. You are able to single-out the rare reflect monster with your Puncture Trap (Traps can't reflect damage back at user). However in most cases, burn damage will be proliferated from one of the trash monsters nearby, and the rare reflect monster will have already died by then.
Also, it is important that you collect the 'Survivalist' cluster on the tree, since we are dealing heavy cold damage. The extra 1% max cold resistances will help us mitigate up to 4% more damage when jumping from 75% to 76% cold resistances. And the cluster also provides us a large amount of evasion to go with the 'Ondar's Guile' keystone, preventing the projectiles we shoot from killing us on reflect mobs.
Q: How do you manage mana?
A: The only source of mana recovery in my setup comes from the 2% mana leech on the Romira's Banquet ring (even 1% works). Since you still do a considerable amount of physical damage with Ice Shot, that's more than enough to sustain the cost of skills, as you will only be firing at 2 attacks per second (with a 6L cost of about 41 mana per use). If you're not using a Romira's ring, the Mana Drinker node (2% mana leech) is only 2 points away, or you can also get mana leech on a rare ring/amulet/quiver.
Q: Why didn't you take the Point Blank keystone nearby to save a gem slot?
A: At first I did. Then I realized only my Puncture Trap benefited from the Point Blank modifier. If I use my AoE ability (Ice Shot), the damage drops off too significantly at range.
Q: Is Voll's Devotion absolutely necesary?
A: Not an absolutely necessary item in the build. Just nice to have. Without the Devotion/Romira's combo, you would need to replace the Frost Wall in the CWDT setup with an Enduring Cry gem, as you need at least 1 source of generating Endurance charges. And without Romira's, you would need to pick up 1-2% mana leech elsewhere (2 more points in tree). Other than that, your amulet/ring slots can be filled with rares that contain life/resist/stats (preferably on Diamond rings, as you need as much crit chance as possible). Also, Voll's Devotion can possibly drop in all leagues now (source), so it should be soon accessible to anyone looking to use it.
Q: Isn't the HP too low?
A: Yes and no. This build is definitely on the "squishy" side of the tankability spectrum. However, the purpose of this build is to kill your enemies before they kill you, while relying on the player to manually avoid damage — AKA the glass cannon archetype. And if it's able to do Atziri with 0 deaths, then it can be argued that 3K HP is perfectly fine for its intended purpose.
With that said, if your goal is to avoid all deaths for a long period of time (Hardcore league), I would definitely advise against trying my exact 100% unique build, as you probably need to swap out some uniques for higher-survivability rares (+life/res). The DPS is already more than enough, so switching to a tankier version of this character is definitely possible. Also, if you look in the "Tree" section of my guide, I've recently respecced my tree a bit to collect more defensive nodes since the release of my first video.
Q: Why not Burning Arrow instead of Ice Shot?
A: While Burning Arrow does give a higher total fire damage, which results in higher burn, when actually in-play, Burning Arrow begins to lose effectiveness the more mobs there are around. Since we are firing a single arrow, Burning Arrow flies right through, and only begins to deal serious AoE damage when it crits (and proliferates).
On the other hand, Ice Shot always fires a cone of ice for each enemy hit by an arrow (sort of resembles what Fork does). The cone created behind each target hit means that every monster behind the 1st monster will be hit at least twice (once by the piercing arrow, and once more by the cone generated in front of them). This provides greater crowd control, and when Ice Shot does crit, the entire mob takes damage in an AoE simultaneously.
If I could describe the interaction, Burning Arrow sort of resembles a chain of proliferation, while Ice Shot's proliferation happens all at once.
Q: Why not Lighting Arrow (+ Herald of Ash) instead of Ice Shot for the burn/shock effect?
A: Since monsters can't be "shock-stacked" anymore (only 1 flat 50% modifier), stacking high Lightning damage is generally less useful that it was before, as you simply need the bare minimum to get the Shock ailment going. If we used Lightning Arrow, it would've provided a bit too much lightning damage, and not enough fire damage from Herald of Ash + Added Fire alone. The 40% conversion to cold of Ice Shot, plus the 120% damage effectiveness, combined with Three Dragons gives us a much higher burn damage.
Q: Why not also use Trap + Ice Shot for your mob-clear skill to take advantage of Chin Sol's close-range bonus?
A: For a single-target setup, Trap is perfectly usable. However when it comes to mob-clearing, I generally don't like using Trap as my main skill, since they're sort of clunky to use when there's too many enemies on screen trying to swarm you (max 3 trap, 4 sec cooldown, low trigger radius). Self-shot skills are instant and provide enough DPS for the purpose of killing mobs quickly. Also, a pure Trap build means you can't leech life, relying on pots for sustaining HP.
Q: Isn't 2 APS too slow?
A: While many other builds rely on fast attack speed to do damage, this build does just fine with close to 0 attack speed bonuses from tree or gear -- AKA slow and heavy hits (2 APS). Some would argue that this would prove difficult in reflect situations, however with this build a large chunk of the damage comes from DoT, so for our Ice Shot setup, it achieves just enough damage (10-16k tooltip) to quickly burn down tough mobs, while still being under the damage "threshold" where elemental reflect would become a problem. As for Puncture, the physical damage can be pushed as high as possible because the physical reflect problem is negated by using traps.
Q: If I'm on a limited budget, which gems would you suggest to get quality on?
A: Some gems where it's useful to get quality are: Pierce, Increased Critical Damage, Elemental Proliferation, Immortal Call, and Increased Duration.
Q: Why not use the Infractem unique bow?
A: While Infractem does offer the 100% pierce chance, it pales in comparison to Chin Sol. Chin Sol offers a faster base attack speed, the ability to leech (important in sustaining life/mana), and of course the "100% more bow damage at close range" modifier.
Hi there mate, could you please post a link for a shadow variant for me please? I am a newcomer to the game, i have ahigh level shadow that i might be able to respec soon into this, if you wouldnt mind?
is critical damage gem or physical projectile gem better for ice shot?
Let me know your thoughts.
Assuming about 300% crit mult beforehand and 30% crit rate, a 20/20 crit damage will put you at about 500% crit mult.
With crit damage instead of phys proj, you are looking at 100% (base damage) x (1 + 30% (Crit chance) x 500% (crit mult)), which is about 250% damage.
With phys proj, you are looking at 100% (base) x 149% (lvl 20 phys proj) x (1 + 30% (crit chance) x 300% (crit mult)), which is about 283% damage.
-I would take the physical projectile damage, because you'll get more out of it with every other "MORE" multiplier you have, as well as increasing the output on your non-crits (all 70% of them).
@OP if you are trying to go for an exactly 108 point tree I think you could improve it by dropping the first shadow/ranger point depending on which class you select and going around the pierce chance side of the Piercing Shots wheel.
I got yesterday my gear together and respect my ranger (49 respec ponts needed, ouch). So far i am realy impressed by the build. No dead, no problems so far and massive damgage. All i have to do now is to build me up a map pool over 71+ and maybe try to get the items for the full unique setup. Here are my items i have so far (the amulett will get crit-chance as soon as elreon reach level 6):
