[LLD 1.3] Puncture, Puncture traps + Tornado Shot Budget Build

High flat physical bow damage, okay life, Acrobatics + Ondar's Guile help with the defense. I tried crit but this was more reliable and has higher overall dps, though puncture crits HURT. If I had better crit gear it might be better, I'm not entirely certain. Take oak's hp reward.

-REQUIRED GEMS-

Puncture: Supported by Multiple traps, Point blank + one other gem. Placed in Deerstalker boots for the trap support.

One of your main zoning and damage tools, lay down puncture traps and move in ways that make your enemy walk over them. Try to lay them down either in a way that they have to take the hit to engage (assuming they don't clear the traps) or place them in one area, and move far away to bait them into taking that route. Last gem can be added fire damage, Block chance reduction, Additional accuracy, a lot of stuff. I'm currently using additional crit damage; I personally use this because of the ridiculously high burst you get when you DO crit because of all the flat physical nodes you've taken. Sometimes when a matchup simply isn't going your way you're just going to have to hope for crits, and added crit multiplier can 100-0 some builds that aren't careful with traps.

Puncture: Supported by Block chance reduction, additional accuracy + one other gem (same as above). Place in bow/chest.

Long range poking tool. When you're keeping your distance, shoot out a couple of punctures. Simple enough.

Tornado Shot: Supported by LMP, Point Blank, Added Fire Damage/Stun, Additional Accuracy/Block Chance Reduction. Place in bow/chest.

If you only have a 4L, drop either one of the last two options depending on whether the enemy can be stunlocked or not, whether the enemy has high evasion, or whether the enemy has high block/dodge. Obviously added fire/stun are red, and additional accuracy/bcr is green, so you can only pick one pair to use, but keep it in mind.

If you're quick you can switch out point blank on the fly for poking around corners, but try not to get caught at close range without point blank.

-Optional but still pretty nice to have-

Mirror/Blink arrow, Smoke mine

Helps with mobility, smoke mine also blinds and gives a bit of move speed. You can fight head on in the smoke or use it to run away. Remember you need line of sight for smoke mine to work, which sort of nullifies the usefulness of it in some maps.

Clarity/Herald of Ash

Use clarity if you need to spam your abilities, otherwise you shouldn't really need that much mana, so use Herald of Ash for more damage. Ideally you'll have one piece of elreon jewellery so that your mana-costs are near non-existant, but with the budget build I'll assume you don't have one.

Cast when stunned + Molten shell + Frost Wall

I'm still experimenting with cast when stunned alternatives but frost wall is amazing against melee for two reasons; people without gapclosers such as flicker strike can't run through the wall easily, and it often causes desync for the enemy when it pops up and they try to attack but suddenly wall. Molten shell gives you extra survivability against physical damage.

Curse on hit + vulnerability + tornado shot / split shot / barrage / roa

If you want vulnerability instead of temporal chains but don't have vuln on hit corrupt, use this + rare gloves. If you don't have room for an arc and are using curse on hit you should probably use roa, it can clear traps as well.

Arc/Roa

Clear traps with one of these.

Buying gear off other people is good if you need uniques that you don't have in your stash, for high-end gear, or for low level jewellery that people are selling. Can be cheap or expensive, so look around on poe.trade for some good deals. Note that generally LLD shops tend to price items higher because they actually know the value of good items. On the other hand, they also know fair values compared to some of the ridiculous values that some people put out because they see level 28.

ilvl 36 is the maximum tier of mods that you can have on a level 28 item, so that's what you want crafting bases to be. You can find ilvl 36 gear at the Mud flats, Upper Sceptre of God, Piety, or in the Act 3 Normal vendor. Master crafting level requirements refer to ilevel requirements, not character level requirements, so master crafting is amazing. You can get a lot of top tier rolls such as flat physical on bows.

Elreon crafting is for people with money to burn. If you have the money for Elreon crafting, you probably don't need me to tell you what to do with it.

This crafting guide by Fightgarr is highly useful, check it out as well.

I'll link what gear I"m currently using in each item slot, as well as Budget / Mid-tier / High end alternatives plus possible swaps. Sockets are assumed to be 4L. My price estimates are based upon standard.





















Total budget gear set: ~20-30 chaos. That's all you need to make a very decent pvp set.

Total mid-gear set: ~2 exalteds.

Have this simple flow-chart to decide on your course of action during 1v1 matches.



Seriously though, this is about it. Kite and poke with puncture and puncture traps along with your mobility skills, all in with tornado shot when you have the advantage. It's not hard to play; the only hard part is getting people to run into traps when they have active trap clearing skills, or when you're at a disadvantage.

I might have forgotten if the enemy starts to kite you. Generally they're on the backfoot in that situation, or playing a caster build which can wreck you if you get close anyway. Try to lay traps ahead of where they'll run, or if you can, cut them off and try to stun them.

Mana is precious and if you're running herald of ash, you can't spam your skills. Luckily, you don't really need to spam with this build. Just play cautiously. If you find yourself in a matchup which does need long range spam, switch out for clarity.