Chin sol / burning arrow / proliferate traps

So I played this build to 86 in beyond and I like it a lot. With the buff to burning arrow and chin sol, it hits much, much harder than was possible in previous patches. In single player, one proliferated burn can kill a lot of map bosses up to 75 (maybe higher, idk), and white mobs usually get incinerated almost instantly. It relies on getting tons and tons of multipliers to both initial damage and burn damage, then proliferating a very powerful burn. You just throw a trap and it makes a nice big campfire that lasts about 8 seconds and kills anything that comes nearby. This is a very nice build for beyond, because it kills a lot of beyond spawns as they pop up. It helps to curse them, but I kill beyond spawns on accident much more often than I kill them on purpose. Getting a fractured mod on maps is also basically free quantity.

Some napkin math shows about 46k burn damage per second on mobs with my lvl 18 flammability up. My gear and skills are fairly defensive, because I was in Beyond. A less conservative setup (or one with better gear) could do much more damage.

This is the build I use, although there are plenty of possible deviations:
http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgYAAnEEBwSzBbUOSA-rEZYSaRRNFHUWbxa_GGUaOBpsHwIhsCP2JKomlSqNLR8ulDBxMHwyATT3NsU22DbpOkI6WDwFPV9FfEbXSRtLeEyzTZJRR1JTVUtVxlb6XcZd8l5FYeJmnm1sd9d_K3_GgziD24uMjDaNfY2_kFWS85Ugl4WXlZeXmyadY52un9-iAKKjpLGkwqcIp4SsmK-NsNiyGbQ4tQS1SMAawfPPetQj1orYJN2o4XPjauQi5Rnljud06NbsVe0g73zxbPrS-uv79Q==



I use traps because they guarantee that you get the full bonus from chin sol and point blank, and to make the build immune to reflect. Because I only have a 64% chance to ignite, I also use a full setup with vaal burning arrow, which is guaranteed to ignite a bunch of mobs and get a good spread of proliferations. So it's basically just alternating between regular BA traps and vaal BA traps, casting flammability after throwing a trap, and always aiming for mobs with the lowest fire resistance. Vaal BA is great because it's a guaranteed screen clear. Against large packs, it can actually refill as many souls as it costs.

My skill points strongly prefer elemental and fire damage over physical, burning, damage over time, and elemental damage with weapons, because fire/ele apply to both the initial hit and then double dip on the burn. The same is true with flammability. This build would do a lot more damage if you add in elemental weakness with double cursing, but I found flammability alone to be good enough. Grabbing double curse would only be a four point detour though.

You have a lot of good sources of damage to choose from. Static fire dmg is very powerful, and % increased fire damage is also extremely good. Added physical and elemental damage with weapons are less powerful, but still good.

For my gems, I use BA, trap, ele damage with weapons, ranged physical, and proliferate. Swapping out ranged physical for chance to ignite could be a good idea with higher damage, since it would give 100% ignite chance. Or getting a 6L would let you do that without sacrificing anything. Added fire would probably be the ideal sixth gem for vaal BA.

I use herald of ash and grace, and rely on two sacred hybrid flasks to keep life and mana up. Never had any problems running out of flask charges, since it's very easy to clear the screen. With double jade flasks and lightning coil, damage is pretty well under control, so flasks work well. Getting the 20% increased life recovery from flasks node helps.

I had one open gem setup that I never really decided what to do with. I settled on a hardcast burning arrow with life leech, but didn't get much use out of it. I'd probably go with another BA trap setup, or maybe a jacked-up decoy totem or some minions for tanking if I played this build again.

Why use weapon ele over Increase Burn damage? I thought weapon ele only effects the ele damage on weapon. Also don't you need resolute technique so you don't miss mobs with burning arrow?

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Brian2one0 wrote:

Why use weapon ele over Increase Burn damage? I thought weapon ele only effects the ele damage on weapon. Also don't you need resolute technique so you don't miss mobs with burning arrow?

weapon ele is much better because "more" multipliers dominate "increased" multipliers, except in cases where you have little or no "increased" damage. Hit chance is pretty good with this build, since it's high dex, but you don't even need good hit chance. When a projectile is evaded, it just passes through the enemy, and can hit the next one behind it. Since you tend to be throwing traps at clumps, a missed arrow will often find another target behind it. RT is mainly for low accuracy builds that happen to be relatively nearby and can pick it up without sacrificing too much.

does the trap nodes increase the overall damage of BA?

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lokidaecon wrote:

does the trap nodes increase the overall damage of BA?

Yes it double dips with burn dmg but for some reason the creator of the build skipped out on every single trap node on the tree...

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lokidaecon wrote:

does the trap nodes increase the overall damage of BA?

Yes trap nodes are good if you're going more offensive. On a defensive build like mine they're not worth going for, as I'm already skipping out on even better options, like high % fire damage nodes and the 15/45% burning nodes that are directly along my path. I only went out of my way for damage nodes with really critical stuff like chance to ignite, increased aoe, and burn duration. But if you're going more offensive, you can afford to pick up some trap nodes. I'd recommend getting the the projectile damage nodes in between the coordination and quickness nodes first though (those are actually what I'm working toward atm). Those also double dip with burn damage, and they're higher value if you're right next to them because you don't have to eat any "increased speed" modifiers that don't work well with the build.

It's also possible that you could get much higher damage by just skipping the ~30 or so points on the way down and around point blank, and just getting ele/projectile/trap damage nodes instead of making that big detour toward point blank. PB is a good node and has a lot of nice defensive stuff on the way down, but offensively it doesn't nearly compete with spending ~30 points on nearby double-dipping damage nodes.

Would fire pen help much with this build?

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wadexnz wrote:

Would fire pen help much with this build?

yes, but I don't think it's a good choice for most situations. here's my understanding of it:

Like the other gems in this build, fire pen will only directly modify the damage of the initial hit. You don't get the increased penetration on the burn damage, although it will raise the burn damage due to giving a larger initial hit. Against 0 res mobs, which is apparently the majority now (there was recently a big change to mob resistances), a fire pen gem would be less effective than weapon elemental and ranged physical.

The lower a mobs resistance is, the less of a relative increase you get from adding more penetration. This build already uses flammability, so with a level 20 gem, a 0 res mob will have -41% resistance (if you take the 25% fire/2% fire pen node). A lvl 20 fire pen gem would increase that to -76%, which is not quite a 25% increase in damage. Compare that to a 59% increase from weapon elemental, a 49% increase from physical projectile, and a 39% increase from added fire.

Of course some mobs have higher fire resistance, and it would be better in those situations. But they would need over 60 fire resistance for fire pen to start becoming comparable to physical projectile. OR, they would need to be curse immune and have fire res, or have reduced effectiveness of curses and fire resistance(like map bosses). So it could be a good gem to use on maps with 75% fire resistance, or curse immune maps that have a bunch of mobs with high fire resistance.

Getting the 10% additional penetration from traps would be nice though, if you're going for that cluster.

u have some prob with that build...
for start u have to take resolut tech.. u have pretty much 0 accuracy...
and if i were u.. i would have taken the 60% burn for only 2 points...