Caustic Arrow

TL;DR - scaling bad, skill good


Hi everyone,

Caustic Arrow is one of my absolute favourite skills in the game, and playing it makes me happy, it's so smooth and especially on occultist Profane Bloom makes it such a bloody satisfying mapper.

I'm currently playing it on a level 94 character called YoinkedAtBirth on Sentinel trade league, and I'll be honest, even though I'm having a blast actually playing it, getting meaningful upgrades hasn't felt... satisfying.

My character is currently worth a good couple of exalted orbs now (well, Ashes alone is already more than a few...) and aside from levelling my Awakened Gems to 4, replacing my 2 damage-stat quiver with a 3 damage-stat quiver and chaos DoT gloves that are in the making, I've not got that much I feel I can do to improve (granted, each upgrade is quite meaningful to my damage). Maybe getting a +3 bow with DoT Multi and Chaos DoT Multi crafted on it as well. Upgrading all of that will probably put my DPS at 2 million Sirus DPS in PoB and... It just doesn't feel worth it.

If I didn't have so much personal and emotional investment in Caustic Arrow, I'd have dropped it long ago in favour of other builds who can scale to 5 million Sirus DPS with just 5 - 10 ex invested. Scaling its damage is unsatisfying and unrewarding for the effort and currency going into it.

Is it viable? A level 21 gem and a +3 bow is enough to get you started, but if you want to kill like Sirus or Shaper, you need 10x more time and investment than most meta builds, otherwise you just don't have the damage. Currently I don't think I will be able to do Uber bossfights with Caustic Arrow. It needs a steeper scaling curve, honestly.

Thanks for listening to my TED talk, I am Hairyloco, if you actually read up to here, thank you for your attention. I only wish the best for my favourite skill in the game.


-HairyLoco

PS. If you want to check out my build, you can import my character in PoB with account name HairyLoco.

Edit: I have as of time of editing cannibalised my character's gear. I can quickly summarize my gear and key stats on them (focusing on offense) to give an idea of what's equipped:

Gear


Gems

Caustic arrow hit scaling needs a buff. The damage is low, that are not many players trying to scale it (I found only two on poe.ninja poe.ninja/challenge/builds?skill=Caustic-Arrow&caustic-arrow-support=Added-Chaos-Damage-Support).
There is a reason why many people play mechanically similar Poisonous concoction (same AoE overlapping, even explosion radius is the same). It has huge added damage from life flask, and also scales well with gem level and ancestral totems.
Caustic arrow has nothing of that list. As a result added chaos damage support is by far the best possible DPS increase (up to 75%).
Other bow attack skills, that just hit once and don't provide special utility, have added damage (Burning Arrow, Galvanic Arrow, Ice Shot, Lightning Arrow, Puncture).
Scourge Arrow with 35% damage effectiveness has (20-113) to (30-169) Added Chaos Damage. Caustic arrow with 64% effectiveness can have 50 to 80 added chaos. That way there would at least be some scaling with gem level.

Hi everyone,

So my previous post above is already about a year old. Since then, Vaal CA has been introduced. That was my leaguestarter last league, and it felt GREAT! Until you started fighting bosses... Bosses that, well, move. The moment you drop your Vaal CA charge and the boss moves out you've just lost 70% of your damage. It'd be an awesome addition to an amazing Vaal skill if the target you hit with Vaal CA will drop Caustic Ground underneath him while moving.

Moving on to the normal version of Caustic Arrow. This league I didn't play Caustic Arrow. Why is that? Simulating a decent leaguestarted character on day 2 for me set me up to 700k DPS (non-boss damage). Upgrading to end of week 1 for me set me comfortably at 1.2M DPS (boss). Further upgrading that to week 3 gave me about 3M DPS.

>maybe your build is bad
Possibly. But after having played Caustic Arrow almost every league for 6+ years, I kinda know how to scale this skill.

I think the main problem Caustic Arrow has to scale its damage up to relevant levels is appropriate high-scaling modifiers. It doesn't have pen scaling, crit scaling, proj scaling, attack speed scaling, attack damage scaling, phys as extra scaling, etc. All the big boy scalers are just out. It'd be cool if we have some alternate way of scaling the damage on top of what currently exists. Like I've said in my post above, it just needs a small nudge for damage scaling. My suggestion is to let caustic pools scale damage based on your projectile count, but that's just one of the many options we have to make CA great again.

If Vaal CA can stick onto enemies or if we can just get another scaling method to make base CA feel better during downtime windows of Vaal CA, then maybe finally CA can live amongst the legions of Leaguestarters nowadays that do everything CA does but better, faster and stronger.