Explosive Arrow Marauder (Updated for Release)

I posted my new endgame build.

Thanks for the build.

I have 2 questions:

1) Isn't it better to go through "Armour and ES" instead of "weapon elemental damage" in templar's area?

2) Does EA quality bonus (1% "chance to Ignite enemies on hit with Fire Damage" per 1% quality) apply to explosion? Is it a "hit"?

1) You are correct, I accidentally forgot to move the two points in the end game build (I start out going through the weapon elemental damage simply because it's quicker. I've now updated the build to reflect this change.

2)It does. The explosion counts as a hit (which is why quality is so strong on it for this build).

What do you use for single target damage ? Right now the only thing I can do is swap to a 2H mace.

Also if you wouldn't mind looking over my gear.. Not sure if I should be looking for armor based gear or armor/evasion. Or would pure evasion based items be better since I'm running Iron Reflexes ?

I'm level 64 and right now and very disappointed in damage output, or lack there of. I'm wondering if I should respec into more burn nodes and less hp ? I have 3206 hp and 4k armor.

What do I need to do to increase my damage ?



Ignore some of the support gem placement, I haven't had much luck trying to roll bbggr on this chest. Just placed them in open slots to level them up. Also trying to 5l or 6l my bow.

If I understand correctly, the whole point of this build is to get some devastating burns which deal the majority of the damage.

Fully specced into burn, you can get 80% more burn damage, and probably get a good 10 seconds of burn duration. That means your burns will be doing 50% of original explosion's damage every second, or to put it another way, five times the damage of the original attack over ten seconds. Multiply the original damage by 1.5 if you're using Elemental Equilibrium, and the burn damage by 2.25 (as increasing the base damage increases the burn damage, then the burn is also increased by EE).

I don't doubt this build can melt things. Now if only I can get a 5l Cloak of Flame or Quill Rain :(

Evasion > Armor because it scales with dexterity before conversion.

If you lack damage, make sure you have elemental equilibrium and the burn damage nodes above the templar tree. Once I got those, I never really had much trouble with damage. Also, make sure your explosive arrow is up to level and you have fire pen and elemental proliferation linked to it.

If you do have elemental proliferation already, you should NEVER cast the flame totem. Doing so will mean that everything hit by it will basically always resist fire.

Respecced to roughly this at lvl 74, from ground slam. It is a great spec and I can't imagine anything else that's more fun to play. Packs just die instantly, so do bosses when you've got some burn damage.

Here's me at lvl 81 on HC:

Spec:


Gear:


As you can see, my spec and gear has huge amounts of damage in it. +19% fire dmg helm, +12% fire dmg ring, and some fire % passives as well. This makes reflect very dangerous to me, hence why I run a ruby flask to counteract reflect damage.

However, I just died to reflect anyway. Kinda sucks as I felt I was finally getting somewhere with the gear, as well as being in the process of 6linking a quill rain.

What happened was very stupid, quite unlucky but also to some extent my own fault for not being careful enough. I had been wrecking all maps without any issues, but now I was out of highlvl maps, just doing a lvl 68 one, not paying too much attention.

So I'm up against this rhoa with "allies reflect elemental damage", that is with just 1 more rhoa, so I fully stack it. As it charged me, apparently I had ran into a group of sand skitterers that unburrowed just as the EA was about to explode. Just so happened that the rhoa was just beside them at that point, making all of them reflect magic. Boom 1 shot, bye HC. I knew there were sand skitterers in the map, but it didn't occur to me that something like this could happen. I might have been able to prevent my death by using the ruby flask, though that would have required extremely quick reactions and I'm not sure it would've helped.

Moral of the story:
Play this spec, it's amazingly effective and very fun. But if you do, be very, very careful with reflect and NEVER stack them fully, even though it seems safe.

Good to hear you enjoy the build!

It will actually be going up on www.exilepro.com here in less than a day or so.

I completely understand your struggles with reflect. I often times bring a ruby flask with me for when I see a reflect mob. I find it funny to see Explosive Arrow builds using LMP/GMP, because I know that they'll always die to reflect. One of the big reasons for building it like this is to help prevent some of that.

I personally like my build a bit better than yours, (:P) but I've also considered doing something closer to what you have before. I just feel that mine is a bit safer, though it will do a bit less dps.

"

Pastromy wrote:

Good to hear you enjoy the build!

It will actually be going up on www.exilepro.com here in less than a day or so.

I completely understand your struggles with reflect. I often times bring a ruby flask with me for when I see a reflect mob. I find it funny to see Explosive Arrow builds using LMP/GMP, because I know that they'll always die to reflect. One of the big reasons for building it like this is to help prevent some of that.

I personally like my build a bit better than yours, (:P) but I've also considered doing something closer to what you have before. I just feel that mine is a bit safer, though it will do a bit less dps.

As long as you are careful with the elemental reflect mobs, I think it would be okay. Just use bear traps or whatever to kill 'em. Still prefer the burning dmg and single arrows.

"

Pastromy wrote:

Good to hear you enjoy the build!

It will actually be going up on www.exilepro.com here in less than a day or so.

I completely understand your struggles with reflect. I often times bring a ruby flask with me for when I see a reflect mob. I find it funny to see Explosive Arrow builds using LMP/GMP, because I know that they'll always die to reflect. One of the big reasons for building it like this is to help prevent some of that.

I personally like my build a bit better than yours, (:P) but I've also considered doing something closer to what you have before. I just feel that mine is a bit safer, though it will do a bit less dps.

Yeah, yours is safer for sure. However, in the scenario where I died, you might have died as well. It's just such an unlikely scenario though, usually I'm being more careful with reflect, killing them by stacking them with 1 or 2 EA's a time. Reflect mobs are really the only thing that's really dangerous to this build, so if you kill em slowly and carefully, you'll be safe at all times. I also used a decoy totem, which works great with this build.

I'm wondering why you're not taking Unwavering Stance? You can't evade anyway with IR. It's a few more points, but being stun immune gives you control at all times.

Also, I don't agree with taking Divine Toughness. Comparing our builds, you get:

+20 int, 26% life - for 4 points.

Where I get:

+30 int, +15 life and +24% life for 5 points.