IllustriousDjinni's Elemental Spectral Throw Ranger Hardcore Viable Build (Buzzsaw) 2.0 patch!

This build has to pick up a decent amount of life as although you will evade or many attacks some will still get through and so you need a good life pool to survive these.

Dead things can't hurt you.

The life leech gem helps to heal a lot of damage due to this builds very high dps. Unfortunately life leech on gear mostly doesn't apply to elemental damage so it has to come from the gem. Vaal Pact should you chose to use it will make this leech apply instantly which can be very strong but you will lose regeneration.

This build uses a cast when damage taken to help deal with hard hitting physical damage due to the lack of armor on this build.

This build no longer gets acrobatics in the 1.3 tree compared to the 1.2 tree. It doesn't get a 40% chance to dodge attacks and a 30% chance to dodge spells. However is still gets Ondar's Guile which combines well with your chance to evade attacks to dodge projectiles.

The use of Whirling Blades as a mobility skill allows you to zoom around areas and so many mobs will have a very hard time catching you. With fast reflexes you can also use it to escape so aoe spells and projectile attacks.

This build can essentially gain immunity from reflect through the use of Vaal Pact if required. This means that life leeched from Spectral Throw applies instantly. The build can do fine without using Vaal Pact although the player must then be a bit more cautious and potion if required.

No longer the case! This build manages to become all but immune to reflect through the use of Ondar's guile. This doubles the chance to evade projectile attacks making it easy to reach the cap of 95%. As Spectral Throw is a projectile you will evaded 95% of reflect and then you could just miss yourself. Even if you do get hit assuming you have capped resists this damage will be almost completely mitigated by your elemental resistances.

This build gets quite a high amount of Elemental damage. This damage comes from the use of auras and elemental damage combined with a very fast attack speed to deal a lot of hits quickly making use of the flat damage from auras extremely well.

This build gets extremely fast attack speed due to all the nodes on the passive tree and using a weapon with at least 2 attacks per second base.

-Spectral Throw
-Lesser Multiple Projectiles
-Blood Magic
-Weapon Elemental Damage
-Life Leech
-Faster Attacks
This doubles as both your area of effect attack and single target attack as it is all you need. The high attack speed applies all your elemental damage very quickly and a lot of times to the enemies.

-Anger
-Wrath
-Herald of Ice
-Reduced Mana
-Herald of Thunder


-Haste
-Purity of...
-Reduced Mana


-Grace
-Purity of Lightning
-Purity of Fire
-Purity of Ice
-Reduced Mana

You should socket the first 4 gems in an Alpha's Howl when it becomes available as the +2 to auras will give you a good damage boost. I would say that Alpha's Howl is essential for this build as without the reduced mana you cant run all the auras stated and they will be two levels lower so do less damage. This +2 does not apply to Herald of Thunder or Ice so you may prefer to run Haste )or Grace if you want) in the 4th spot instead of both Heralds . I then run Herald of Thunder in a separate item linked to it's own Reduced Mana along with Elemental Weakness and Curse on Hit. This Curses targets without making you have to do it yourself allowing for faster clear speed. I have the 3 purity auras Haste and Grace socketed in an offhand weapon too so they are constantly getting experience and so that I can swap them out should I want to use them. The increased max resistance to the relevant element from Purity auras is very nice and reduces the damage taken by a surprising amount.

With Just the ranger aura nodes and an Alpha's Howl the build can run all 4 damage auras or swap out the two heralds for haste for more attack speed. After collecting the Templar Aura cluster and additional purity can be run if using both Heralds or you can use 1 Herald and Haste. Use Whatever Aura set up you prefer.

You could at some point have an unfortunate amount of mana so that you are only 1 or 2 short of being able to. For Example if you have 100 mana with the heralds cost 15% each and aura's costing 35% each you can run them all. However if you have 99 mana it will round the amount of mana used to the closest amount so the Heralds will still need 15 each and the auras 35 so you will be unable to.

I put the curse on hit setup in my gloves linked to Herald of Thunder, reduced mana, and Elemental weakness. Then in the Alphas I have Wrath, Anger, Herald of Ice and Reduced Mana. To run the purity you have to put it in the shield with Reduced Mana so you will be unable to keep the culling set up. This isn't a big issue as the Culling set up isn't that important.

-Cast When Damage Taken, Level 7
-Immortal Call, Level 8
-Enduring Cry, Level 9
-Increased Duration, Highest level possible

This is one of the most important defensive skills for an evasion dodge based character. This is because it will go off after taking large hits like a Rhoa charge preventing death from subsequent charges. Being a pure evasion dodge character means that we will have little to no armor to mitigate physical damage. Although we will evade or dodge many attacks some will always get through and so this is vital as Immortal call will make you immune to physical damage for a short duration. This is also vital as there are a few skills in Path of Exile that cannot be evaded yet do physical damage. One example of this is Ethereal Knives, which is a physical damage spell. Evasion only helps you evade attacks,not spells and so other than our 30% chance to dodge spells due to Phase Acrobatics Immortal Call is one of the only things that will help you survive it.

-Whirling Blades
-Faster Attacks
-Blood Magic

-Freezing Pulse, Level 1
-Culling Strike
-Increased Item rarity

-Elemental Weakness

-Decoy Totem

I have Whirling Blades and it's supports socketed in my one handed weapon. This is used as a mobility skill to help you zoom around any map. I then happened to have 4 mana left after all my aura reservations and so a level 1 Freeze Pulse is one of the few skills that I could run off this amount of mana. This is used to cull bosses and rare mobs to give a boost in the rarity of items dropped. For my curse I use Elemental Weakness linked to curse on hit and Herald of Thunder so it requires no effort to use. Elemental Weakness greatly increases the amount of damage you do due this being an entirely elemental damage build. The reason most of my skills are linked to Blood Magic is that the auras used in this build will reserve almost 100% of your available mana pool. I uses Decoy totem in just a stand alone socket as My chest is not 6 linked yet. Alternatively you could use an unset ring. One thing to note with this is that you will have to adjust your running auras to give enough mana for this.

For the Sword I recommend anything with a high attack speed as well as a good amount of flat damage of as many elements as possible. Increased weapon elemental damage and accuracy are also good on it with projectile speed being helpful too.

High life and resistance rolls are good on a shield. Additionally extra block chance and evasion are nice.

The chest can be either evasion or armor/evasion hybrid with pure evasion being preferred. It will be easier to roll the required socket colors on a hybrid piece so this is fine. High life and resistance rolls are good on this as well as a flat and percentage evasion roll.

This can be either evasion or armor/evasion hybrid with pure evasion being preferred. Life and resistances are good on this. Rarity can be nice.

This can be either armor, evasion or hybrid with pure evasion being preferred. Life and resistances are good on this. Due to a lack of a good movement skill a movement speed roll is required with 30% being preferred.

This can be either evasion or armor/evasion hybrid with pure evasion being preferred. Life and resistances are good on this. Additionally attack speed is very nice.

Life and resistances are good on this.

Life and resistances are good on these. This is also a good slot to boost your strength or intelligence as required.

I recommend running 3 Life flasks, 1 amethyst and 1 Granite. You may wish to swap out the amethyst for an elemental flask as required.