Caustic Arrow

Ok I need to put in some feedback on this gem.

Details:

Hardcore league
Class Marauder
Build based around health and regen. buff and debuff durations.
Poison arrow placed in +1 skills bow, with increased duration, lmp, and gmp linked to it.
I rely on the dot damage, as well as other bow skills to kill off rares or higher hp mobs, I do have catalyze for this.

Strategy in most leveling, let poison arrows fly everywhere and hope I don't crash. I run through levels spreading poison, and use temporal chains, as well as vulnerability linked to a totem, and taunt totem which dies instantly in chaos.

Problems, I don't really get loot, but kill speed is fine mid level and upper level until chaos. Low level needs a boost.

Poison arrow scales extremely well around level 30 or so.

Poison arrow scales horribly early on.

Poison arrow scales horribly after character level 50, and then the gem is always like 10 levels under your level.

Damage increase around levels 30 +- 10 levels is like a 33% power increase for a level.

My last increase went from like 294 dps on the poison dot up to 318. A 24 dps increase is next to nothing. I really no longer have a reason to use a +1 skill bow, and my weak bow and lacking elemental damage i still kill faster with other skills.

In merciless its fine, I can't really complain too much solo. I can clear fellshrine fine if I don't care about loot or killing rares and blues.

In a party its too weak to make a difference.

In Maelstrom of Chaos its kill speed is way too slow.

Biggest problem that I would like fixed first is the scaling at higher levels, 28 dps increase is hardly anything, the higher tier of it needs to be tuned up big time. How else can you even bother using it in chaos, maybe i need to level the gem up more, but this last level was really disapointing, not sure what happens at the last few levels of the gem though, but maybe it wasn't tested properly at this tier, as it drastically needs help.

I really like the build, one of my favorites I have done so far. I would hate for them to nerf the fundamentals of what makes it fun. But the scaling really needs to be better at those high levels, I can't emphasize it enough.

"

yhateful wrote:

Currently playing a Ranger built around the degeneration effect of Poison Arrow (or what most games refer to as DoT), with Elemental Hit for single target damage.

I can say this much about it, its kind of viable. Even at level 52, it was able to do Fellshrine efficiently, and I quickly managed to hit 60 in time for Chaos. In Chaos, I could kill the majority of white trash mobs with the degeneration of one Poison Arrow, pretty much all white trash mobs with the Vulnerability curse.

But for blues, 2-4 was required, up to 5-6 for rares.

This may be the way you designed the skill, as a support skill, but there is no shortage of more powerful builds that can clear Chaos with ease, so I don't see a reason this skill couldn't get some minor love. I'd like to see more ways to build on Poison Arrow. I'm not sure how much you can do due to engine limitations, but being able to boost the damage or if that isn't possible, adding more duration passives. Also being able to get Item Rarity and Quantity to apply to degeneration kills would be great.

Also might look at the scaling of the degeneration damage, it scales reasonably well, but maybe could do with a bit of a boost at lvl 14+ gem level.

14+ boost yes big time in need.

"

SEOINAGE wrote:

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starsg wrote:

I would agree also, PA need a boost.

In solo situation, its fine as it is.

But when comes to party, its lacking. They feels as hitting with same elemental arrows against the same elemental resist mobs.


I think the another problem is the shots keep
hitting the ground. Same problem even for Burning arrow.

Unless i use multiple-projectile gem, most of my shots seem hitting the ground.


I feel its best to relocate the current default way of shooting Burning/Poison Arrow, and put it into a key.

You have to select a target for the arrows to fly and not hit ground.

You are missing the point. I want an alt key to use, when i want to manually shoot on the ground.

"

starsg wrote:

"

SEOINAGE wrote:

"

starsg wrote:

I would agree also, PA need a boost.

In solo situation, its fine as it is.

But when comes to party, its lacking. They feels as hitting with same elemental arrows against the same elemental resist mobs.


I think the another problem is the shots keep
hitting the ground. Same problem even for Burning arrow.

Unless i use multiple-projectile gem, most of my shots seem hitting the ground.


I feel its best to relocate the current default way of shooting Burning/Poison Arrow, and put it into a key.

You have to select a target for the arrows to fly and not hit ground.

You are missing the point. I want an alt key to use, when i want to manually shoot on the ground.

I'd venture to say it would then be too powerful as you could select the ground, and fire off arrows, and it will fly off like it would if you selected a monster. And hit all those monsters beyond the screen. Sounds too strong as you would never fear getting hit, and constantly kill unseen monsters.

Edit: I'd rather get proper scaling with the damage on poison arrow at high levels than this change.

Surprisingly I'm doing Maelstrom with poison arrow, and buffed my elemental hit up a bit. Its really slow, but a little poison damage would fix it. I know its been mentioned of passives to increase damage to hits dot, but sadly it will be balanced around it, and likely its base damage will be dropped some more. Which would prove detrimental to my build, also cause likely they would be in a far off area, and I need my points.

Oh well, a damage boost at higher levels would make it pretty viable.

I basically have to spread poison on an area, and move to another and poison, and keep trying to spread it as far as possible.

The hardest part is a fresh map, and if there are blues or rares and I don't have room to run. Use temporal chains and spam totems and try to avoid hits, just makes the start ridiculous for a while. Ledge map kind of stinks cause it is narrow and I can't hit multiple places at once. Whereas leveling up ledge was always the best cause large quantity of low hp mobs that died fairly well and i could run around htem avoiding hits.

Would like to see the poison cloud this skill generates made a little more visually transparent, as it gets well nigh impossible to see things under the cloud at times, especially when it's being spammed into a dungeon room. :D

I'm a lvl 55 psn bow ranger, this is my main attack and while im lacking in DPS when in groups, solo it is pretty decent.

However one issue I have seen is the load it puts on my CPU when adding lesser/greater projectiles. its HUGE.

Single arrow my computer handles most of PoE under 20%, after adding lesser when spam firing it keeps a couple of cores in the 40-60% range which I think is insane. Further more adding Greater starts to lag the screen and drop my FPS a lot. If in a group with other stuff going on I have dropped down to as low as 6-8 FPS which is nearly unplayable.

It seems as if the "green cloud" is having to render a great deal, I have turned all graphics down to the lowest setting possible and it still has not improved much.

With split shot and 12 arrows I get 0 lag, with poison arrow and 3 arrows I get a ton.

my specs are:
3.0ghz amd APU (quad core)
8gig ddr3


One thing I will be trying is putting PoE onto a USB 3.0 stick and see if it improves, this helped a lot with D3.

(if a mod thinks this belongs in another section feel free to toss it around, but the problem is directly with this skill, none of the others cause the same amount of CPU load)

OP. Why? LOW mp cost, chaos dmg over time lets you 1 shot all mobs 2 shot blue and elite, bypass shield and ele resistance.
I suggest decrease initial dmg and increase dot.

they already toned down the DoT's damage... and they never touched the literal arrow hit's damage boost yet. i suppose they can make it 20% instead of 30%... but i never heard of anyone one shoting mobs with this as a ranger... maybe with the physical damage boosts that were increased on the passive tree but bows STILL don't deal enough damage to one hit things in the end from listening to global chat.

"

soul4hdwn wrote:

they already toned down the DoT's damage... and they never touched the literal arrow hit's damage boost yet. i suppose they can make it 20% instead of 30%... but i never heard of anyone one shoting mobs with this as a ranger... maybe with the physical damage boosts that were increased on the passive tree but bows STILL don't deal enough damage to one hit things in the end from listening to global chat.

i can confirm that when i played with ranger i 1 shoted mobs till 32lvl (then died because of lag which means delete char in HC). Maxed physical dmg with 5% belt, rings and quiver. Bows were +20% quality and +80% physical dmg boost with + physical dmg bonus.
I made such sets of bows so i can power lvl new chars fast.
1 shot everything. Bears, golems, you name it. SO NERF PLEASE