[2.2] NeverSink's 20-Arrow Poison Animator - "The Venomancer" ☠ + Video Guide

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IMPORTANT: Questions: If you have questions, please ask them here in this thread or on my Twitch stream. I frequently check this thread and there are several other experienced players to help you here! I'm NOT answering build-related questions ingame and rarely check PMs! I hope you understand.

IMPORTANT: Trading: Please don't sell and trade items here. Thank you.



Hi and welcome to my Path of Exile - 20 Arrow Poison Animator - guide. This build explains

A little bit of background: I've played a lot of build in PoE. However, I didn't play any type of build more than archers. In the talisman league alone, I've been trying out Physical, Phys->Ele, Windripper, Voltaxic and CoC variations. Yet, there always was one unique that intrigued me. A unique that has the potential for amazing power yet largely untapped by the community: Null's Inclination.

This bow allows you to summon every single minion gem linked into the bow on kill. You can also proc several gems at once or link them to supports. Yet it always presented 2 problems:

- High int. requirements
- Low phys damage and some chaos damage, which is hard to scale.

This was previously a problem, that was solved by focusing the build around auras, that would amplify minions too. However, I disliked this solution, because I wanted something that can absolutely clear on it's own, even without minions. There will ALWAYS be situations where minions will die. Every good build needs to consider the worst case scenarios.

This build relies on the reworked poison damage from the patch 2.1. Since we only deal Phys+Chaos damage it's a perfect start to amplify it with poison. We use the fact that poison double-dips from projectile damage and generate a truly deadly venom, that is amplified by many things (we'll talk about it later).

Another unique aspect of this build is that it uses 4x volley fire jewels to turn barrage from a good single target ability into a swiss-army-knife... that shoots TWENTY arrows. It's good for AOE, good vs single targets, scales well with poison, culls and looks amaaazing.

Now we throw in some pierce, some good defensive mechanics, 95% increased duration, auto-cursing and a wall of minions and a good ascendancy soundtrack and THIS is what you'll get.

Did I manage to peak your curiosity? This was BEFORE the release of ascendancy by the way. No subclasses, no enchantments yet.



PROS:

• VERY fun to play. Insanely cool character concept too, great visuals.
• Very quick
• Can reach 5.5k life with 4 volley fire jewels and 6-7k with 2-3
• Pretty much reflect immune
• Doesn't need minions to clear stuff
• Good single target damage, even without minions. Damage increases over time thanks to the long duration stacking poison
• Can reach over 100 minions fairly frequently
• Good AoE coverage with 20 arrows and 100% pierce
• Minions create a great fleshwall or deal -insane- damage if stacked up
• Culling Strike
• 95% duration from tree. Crazy long vaal haste, rallying cry, flesh offering, poison etc
• You feel like a deathknight... with a bow, not like a robewearing summoner
• Most of the gear is very affordable (1-2ex to start, 12-20ex top end)

CONS:

• Minions can die to AoE attacks (bearers)
• Can turn some of your 6-socket weapons into weapons (~20-30% decreased jeweler orb gain)
• Fracture maps can cause lags (don't they do it anyway?)
• Keeping frenzy charges up can be a bit annoying sometimes
• No way to freeze enemies. Porcupines are a danger.
• Very edgy. If you want some brainless facerolling, I recommend to stay away
• Not optimal for Atziri and T13+ maps
• Low regen maps are sometimes annoying.
• Too many skills for the hotbar, activating auras on Login is annoying
• "Strange" pathing. Not optimal for a day-1-league start, due to mediocre leveling speed without Stormcloud+Static electricity

Mechanics:

Path of Exile has one rule - prioritize defense. If the defensive mechanics of a build fail, the build is bad and you should feel bad. That's why this setup relies on several combined defensive mechanics to protect your skin.

Bow Mechanics:

The bow will summon all minion-tagged gems linked inside on kill. It can cast several spells per kill if the conditions are met. You don't have to pay any mana cost or cast time to summon the gems.

However, you have to kill the mobs yourself using Barrage or any other bow gem. Monsters killed by minions or poison will not trigger any summons.

Damage Mechanics:

We use barrage as our main skill. Since 2.0 you can't hit a target with more than 1 projectile if the projectiles were fired at the same time.

Barrage fires projectiles in 4 volleys, so you can hit a single target at most 4 times, 5 with the deadeye ascendancy class.

Each of the hits deals chaos+phys damage. The combined damage is generating a poison (we create the poison using the Snakebite gloves). Poison stacks and deals 10% of the impact damage over 2 seconds, increased by all fitting damage modifiers.

The interesting aspect here is that poison can "double-dip". Several damage boosts can increase the initial arrow impact and THEN increase the poison damage.

Doubledipping modifiers are: Chaos damage, Projectile damage (if applied by a projectile attack), general damage. This applies to both "increased" and "more" multipliers ("more" multipliers have multiplicative stacking).

If you run the numbers you'll see that the poison is dealing at least over 4 times the impact damage over 5.4 seconds. This mechanic provides us with a steady, non-reflectable source of damage that does not rely on minions.

Those calculation do NOT include the damage/speed boost you get from rallying cry, chaos golem or flasks and were done pre 2.2. In 2.2 the number is significantly.

In short: your damage is alright and exceeds 400k+ DPS once the poison is stacked up. I'll link the spreadsheet with the calculations, later on.

Defensive Mechanics:

Wall of minions, lot's of health, dodge, evasion, strong flasks and increased duration.

I'll expand this section in the future, but that's pretty much it.



Video material:

Full video guide! - this covers pretty much everything we'll talk about here in video form.
Rare Plateau full clear - A nice demo that gives a feel for the gameplay this build generates.

Other things:





http://www.twitch.tv/neversink - I livestream every monday, thursday and saturday at 20:00 GMT +1 and participate in all major PoE event. I'd be honored if you'd join us to have a chat.
Twitter - If you want to get information on my updates of my guide/videos/lootfilters, streaming schedule and just some general stuff, feel free to check out my twitter.



Level 60 minimum requierements skilltree - This is what you need to start playing this build. It doesn't matter how you level until then, but I recommend using the Stormcloud + Static Electricity combo.

Level 89+ skilltree - I played this build with that setup. If you want to play HC, replace one or two volley fire jewel nodes with more life to stay safe. If you get a higher level grab more life or minion damage

Bandit rewards:

Normal - Help Oak
Cruel - Slay all
Merciless - Slay all

The skilltree focuses on life, projectile damage, jewel sockets and increased duration. It also has to take some awkward routes here and there in order to enable 4 volley fire jewels.

We start off by going right to the ranger area. Grabbing a static electricity in the jewel node under the shadow area is recommended. Combined with Storm Cloud it deals high DPS and is great for leveling. Afterwards this jewel socket can be used for the DEX->INT jewel once you can equip Null's. This will help covering the int. requierements until you can afford an astramentis.

We grab more life in the shadow area, combined with some potent physical/chaos damage.

I recommend moving into the duelist area before proceeding the right side path into the ranger area.

You want to get the increased duration nodes and the hybrid mana/life leech nodes from the duelist area. Get the projectile damage and potent life bonuses in the area afterwards.

Get all the jewel sockets whenever you have some jewel available, but you want at least 2 jewel sockets that qualify for volley fire until you can equip null's Inclanation.

Use the following levels to enable more damage, life and volley fire jewels in the duelist, scion and ranger area.



I recommend using the Deadeye-Necromancer combination. This will polish the build all around. It'll boost your single target significantly, will give both you and your summons more damage and survival, it'll further boost your auras and will even allow you to replace your pierce gem with something else if you so desire (such as rapid decay or blind, be creative).



Other good combinations are Pathfinder-Occultist and a real Ranger-Deadeye (has way worse pathing though). There might be also a good way to play this as a witch, but so far I didn't find a good way to adjust the skilltree to make it worthwhile.



NULL's:
4L6S: Animate Weapon - Minion Damage - Multistrike - Melee Splash (+SRS +Flesh Offering)
5L6S: Animate Weapon - Minion Damage - Multistrike - Melee Splash - SRS ( +Flesh Offering)
6L: Animate Weapon - Minion Damage - Multistrike - Melee Splash - SRS - life/melee Damage/Duration

You can also go for a tanky variation with minion life, minion resist. and lifeleech. This might be better in some maps. Didn't try it to be honest



ARMOR:
4L: Barrage-Chaos Damage-Voidmanip-Culling
5L: Barrage-Chaos Damage-Voidmanip-Culling-SlowerProjectiles

5L+Drillneck: Barrage-Chaos Damage-Voidmanip-Culling-Pierce
6L+Drillneck: Barrage-Chaos Damage-Voidmanip-Culling-SlowerProjectiles-Pierce

Every single gem scales our poison damage.



ALPHAS/HELMET:
Haste+Wrath

You can also run a CWDT convocation to quickly "summon your meatshield". I'd likely do it, if my vaaled gloves wouldn't have the wrong colors.



GLOVES/BOOTS/HELMET:







Mirror Arrow, Fire Golem, Convocation, Frenzy (the unlinked frenzy helps will keeping frenzy charges up in fights)
Inc.Duration-Vaal Haste-Rallying Cry-Flesh Offering

Really try to support those 3 skills with increased duration. By the way a 18 seconds vaal haste is pretty awesome. You can keep it up all the time.

Replace Convocation with Temporal Chains until you get a corrupted Snakebite.

Using vulnerability is an option too. However, I prefere more defense, though it's up to you.

QUALITY RECOMMENDED ON:



Animate Weapon, SRS, Culling Strike, Inc.Duration

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CREDITS wrote:

- Thanks to ObsidianDawn for providing the awesome Arcane Circles Photoshop Brushkit that I've been using for the images!
- People, who I'll add soon o.o
- GGG

epic :D

i love your builds o/

reserved! for sure :D

Legit

GIMME GIMME

Thanks Neversink! i use ur ranger tornado shot build it has done me well in the past so this build should be exciting as well :D

So which jewels do you need? And where do I put Volley? Seems like it's not until later in the tree that you get a spot allocating 50 dex within the range of the jewel, is this correct?

Intriguing build. Beautifully presented guide too, those icons look great. Loved your Tornado Shot Ranger guide as well.