Caustic Arrow

I think with ~130 points build, +3 to skill bow, empower and a pain of using Remote Mine you can finally farm Lunaris Level 3.

Forgot about increased AoE damage passives, so ~140 points build.

On a serious note, does anybody know the damage of level ~23 PA?

My friend and I spent 2 hours theory crafting and trying to make a post 1.0.3 PA (poison cloud) build based around a +3 gem bow. This is with all four damage over time and chaos damage passive clusters in the new 1.0.3 passive tree.

By our calculations, with a level 26 PA, level 18 concentrated effect, and level 4 empower, with no traps, the maximum damage for a build focusing solely on this is around 2k dps (around 3k dps with traps).

Basically I need to know, what is the purpose of the chaos damage passives if not to make poison arrow viable? I doubt they even make viper strike viable. We guessed that, without traps, the only way these passives spent on chaos damage would be efficient, is if we used viper strike AND poison arrow simultaneously. This would involve swapping weapons during combat which IMO shouldn't be necessary.

We achieved these numbers by looking at a post 1.0.3 level 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 poison arrow gem's chaos over time damage. Multiplied by 2.62 (162% Increased damage over time from passive tree), and multiplied by 1.68 (level 19 Concentrated Effect).

Finally, there is one unknown that could make us wrong, and this build viable: the scaling of the poison arrow gem after level 20. It increased by approximately 11% from level 18-19 then 19-20. We kept multiplying by 11% until level 26. This left poison arrow at 497 damage over time @ level 26.

I will admit that poison arrow is relatively safe compared to other abilities and has a massive AOE potential. Because of that, I am not arguing that it should do 10k dps. However, I do feel that poison arrow should max out at around 4k dps.

I would hugely appreciate a GGG post on whether my math is close, whether a level 26 poison arrow gem is around the damage we thought, and if our math is correct, what is the rationale for poison arrow doing such terrible end game damage.

Thanks GGG

^ Lvl 25 poison arrow's base damage is 460.9 chaos per second

With a trap poison arrow build you can get around 4K dps with a +3 bow. Even more with Vulnerability.

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Papyrazzi wrote:

With a trap poison arrow build you can get around 4K dps with a +3 bow. Even more with Vulnerability.

But what the hell is the point? Then its not a poison arrow build, its a god damn trap build. And there are MUCH more powerful trap builds.

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gummisaurus wrote:

^ Lvl 25 poison arrow's base damage is 460.9 chaos per second

Thanks.

Bow: +1 to gems, +2 to bow gems
Empower lvl 2 (because I only know how much DPS does lvl 25 PA)
PA lvl 25 (461 DPS)
Conc. Effect lvl 21 (70% more damage)
Remote Mine lvl 21 (50% more damage)

Build without mines (100 points, level 81?, gems maxed out):
280% increased Maximum Life
125% increased Projectile Damage
89% increased Damage over Time
73% increased Chaos Damage
Total DPS: 3032


Build with remote mine (99 points, level 80?, gems maxed out, can probably make a better build):
260% increased Maximum Life
65% increased Projectile Damage
89% increased Damage over Time
73% increased Chaos Damage
89% increased Mine Damage
Total DPS: 4890

If ~5k DPS is max for Poison Arrow, it's not worth it IMO.
Also using Remote Mine is such a pain, so it's pretty much capped at 3k DPS.

I have a question about poison arrow ..

first of all i understand that the cloud is affected by AOE dmg, Projectile Damage, The physical damage itself, increased damage over time and increased chaos damage .. which makes it very viable now that they added the new passives

but my question is .. Does a Crit affect the damage of the cloud like a crit affects the damage of puncture?

Just so i know if using poison arrow on my crit ranger is viable

I can understand being cautious when re-balancing skills, but I think Poison Arrow got hit with the nerf bat way too hard. The damage of the gem at higher levels needs to be increased significantly to make this skill even remotely viable. I was really looking forward to this patch, but I think this is another one of those builds that will have to be shelved for the time being.

It is definitely a step in the right direction being able to scale chaos/dot damage abilities in more ways, but for a build to be viable in a hardcore league there is no way you will be able to get all the dot/chaos nodes, the area of effect nodes and the projectile damage nodes as well as get enough life/armour etc. to be endgame viable.

As it stands, I am just going tri-curse so I help the group because there is literally no point doing damage when your poison cloud ticks for less than 1k damage a second and an LA ranger can melt a pack in half a second.

Please revisit the numbers while the patch is fresh so this skill is not dumpstered and forgotten.

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myrmician wrote:

I can understand being cautious when re-balancing skills, but I think Poison Arrow got hit with the nerf bat way too hard. The damage of the gem at higher levels needs to be increased significantly to make this skill even remotely viable. I was really looking forward to this patch, but I think this is another one of those builds that will have to be shelved for the time being.

It is definitely a step in the right direction being able to scale chaos/dot damage abilities in more ways, but for a build to be viable in a hardcore league there is no way you will be able to get all the dot/chaos nodes, the area of effect nodes and the projectile damage nodes as well as get enough life/armour etc. to be endgame viable.

As it stands, I am just going tri-curse so I help the group because there is literally no point doing damage when your poison cloud dot does less than 1k damage a second and an LA ranger can melt a pack in half a second.

Please revisit the numbers while the patch is fresh so this skill is not dumpstered and forgotten.

Agreed, and tone down the ridiculous mana cost too.

Edit: so I finally got to merc piety...

It took me roughly 20 minutes to clear through lunaris 3, and t takes 10 minutes to kill her with a lvl 20 Poison arrow (15+5) and vulnerability permanently on her... I am fully specced into the DoT, chaos/DoT nodes, projectile nodes, and my gems are aimed to increase dmg, conc and... well

PA really doesn't have a lot of gems that really strengthen its effect at all. Faster projectiles/slower projectiles are extremely mediocre and use up precious gem slots. You need empower, as PA without levels is utter crap. I could not even imagine using poison arrow at its actual level on similar leveled content. A level 15 PA would be utterly worthless in act 3 merciless, that's how bad its scaling is.

Empower and Conc on a +3 to gems bow is basically mandatory. I have LMP and increased duration added onto it in order to help with clearing. Both which are damn near useless on bosses. I could switch to a high level/quality slower projectiles instead of LMP for bosses/rares, but to do so every single boss or rare mob is extremely tedious. I don't belive there is a viable alternative to increased duration for bosses on a red gem slot since I already have Empower. Pretty sure the DoT doesn't work with life leech.

That's right, even with vulnerability, rare mobs take on average 20+ seconds to kill. If they have chaos resistance, your looking at 2 mins+. If they have chaos resistance+ life regen you either cannot kill them or it takes like 6+ minutes. If the mob also has curse immune you can forget about it.

PA could really use an Increased Damage Over Time support gem.
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In comparrision, I was at

I think the way to buff Poison Arrow while still re-introducing an old playstyle, is to revert how poison arrow mechanically works to how it did a long time ago.

What I mean is: Poison arrow used to poison enemies and then if those enemies left the poison cloud, they would still be poisoned for a limited amount of time.

Currently, if I understand correctly, poisoned enemies only take damage while in the cloud.
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If you were to change to how it worked before mechanically, people would be able to use this to do the "one shot of Poison, then run to next pack and forget about picking up loot the first time around" strategy which we don't see for other skills.