[1.3] Purple Rain; a shockingly chaotic Voltaxic Rift build (w/ budget version!)

New BOTW uses a Voltaxic Rift, so the price *might* see some inflation on the temporary leagues, where the # of them floating around is quite low. Just fair warning if you want to try out this build with one.

It will be interesting to see if the prices stay high in the next three month leagues. I've seen a sharp rise in Voltaxic builds again, where as for a while previous to this they were almost non-existent with all the Buzzsaw and Windripper builds taking focus.

Terribly sorry about affecting Voltaxic Prices :D. I'm going to try this build or something like it soon, seems fun. I'm curious why not go for some Crit, however? Even on a 5% base crit, bow crit passives are awfully good.

Grats on BOTW, man! I'm going to try out a Voltaxic caster in Standard once mine is over there for sure!

Yea, I'm having a lot of fun with this build. It's a blast to play and feels so lightning-y!

Originally I planned to go for crit, because like you say those bow crit nodes look very tasty and are right there, but I couldn't get enough to go pure crit (25%~crit is so not fun to play) and the low crit was going to make it hard to keep shock up for mana regen. Plus, it just didn't seem to mesh well with all the flat elemental on my gear - it left no room to get crit on gear, for one, but I also feel like scaling WeD and AS is better when you have so much flat than crit is (could be wrong, just a feeling).

I could definitely go for a mixed tree where I pick up some of the best crit nodes while still focusing on my thing. It wouldn't be too hard to get 10~15% crit that way without *too* many points. I haven't done that simply because I'm very point-starved as is. Getting all the way up into the Witch while still gathering all the life and acro stuff around Ranger is pretty hard! The Witch points are giving me so much damage and shock chance per point spent that I don't see crit as a worthwhile tradeoff.

That said, if I manage to play this into the high 80s and early 90s (I'm only playing PoE very casually atm) I would probably do just that and pick up the bow crit nodes. I'm all out of WeD/Ele/Light nodes and just picking up the last of the defense right now and after that I want more damage - it's either those crit nodes or some AS or projectile nodes.

(The stun possibility on bosses with a bit more crit is insane, though, due to the nature of pure lightning damage. As is, if I roll near the top end of my massive lightning damage, I stun things a lot. If I manage to crit AND roll near the top? Damn.)

edit: derp, forgot to add that Herald of Lightning can't crit and Vaal Spark won't scale off bow crit - they are both quite important parts of the build's damage.

Cool build, simple solution to not having berecks pass is to pick up eldritch battery, run clarity like you said and mana regen on gear if needed. Not sure if you mentioned EB. But using some Evasion/es gear in slots will help, only problem is acrobatics might gimp the bonus you get, but it would still boost regen for the 1 point.

got lucky and trade drill neck + 4ex with voltaxic the other day

will try this build for sure :p

Wouldn't this build use Drillneck VERY well, if you're not going for Crit? That's if you're not going for Rain of Arrows, of course.

Also, instead of your boots, perhaps the Chaos Damage boots? Those at least have 20% Movement Speed and Life, even if the DPS is half or less.

If I go up to a 6L, I'm tempted to try Drillneck+Pierce (as my 6th gem). I'm not sure if that combo is worth replacing one of my gems in a 5L set-up, though. If I do get it as a 6th, it's a good dps boost for sure! I'm still leaning towards a +1 arrow rare over a Drillneck - TS stacks so well with that mod.

If I do go for it, I'd have to ditch the boot slot, I think.I need all the rare slots I currently have to res cap with the amount of uniques I use - it unless I buy some truly GG rares.

And I'd rather just get a good rare then those chaos boots. Chaos does not stack well with this build. Since it's all about boosting lightning damage that is then converted to chaos, the 1-120 lightning is much more than it seems. Those boots are not bad, but I'd take a rare over them.

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Astaroth_PoD wrote:

Another thing that worked really well for me; link Life Leech with Herald of Thunder (since I'm not using Purity of Lightning). It will keep you topped up!

i find that linking curse on hit and warlord mark with herald of thunder is better, not only u leech from herald of thunder dmg but ur atk dmg aswell. not to mention the mana leech u get before u can equip berek's grip

Yay! My char is now on Standard!

I bought a 6L Lightning Coil and a 20/20 Added Chaos to test out as a 6th slot option. Chromes are an issue right now, but once I get the right colors I will test some things out and report back with my new tooltip numbers.

edit:

I've got the colors for Added Chaos now. Sadly, it's not a huge dps increase. I was hoping for a bit more, but it figures, seeing as so much focus is put on boosting lighting/elemental damage.

A 5L covers all the important links, so unless I go with a different skill (I was thinking of trying a point blank / conc effect Rain of Arrows) or get a Drillneck and switch to piece, I think it's a good idea to just use a support gem, like Life Leech or Item Rarity.

Any news from the new update 1.3 ....
new skills update
etc...