[2.3 Occ] KuteKitteh's CI EA Regen Tank - Durable w/10k ES, instant clear, EZ-Atziri, affordable!

For min-maxing, you can use Leo to craft "20% faster start of Energy Shield Recharge" on each of your rings, totaling 40%, which will bring down the recharge time from 0.75 seconds to 0.65 seconds!

Well, level 27 now!

Interesting turn of events. I was using ice nova/fire traps/herald of ice/thunder and damage was going pretty well. But then when I was buying a reverb this really amazing guy dumped a ton of fire gear on me for FREE. It was kind of shocking but really amazing.

Cloak of Flame
2x Mokous
Plus a bunch of other uniques.
I'm currently at about 450 life/550 ES.

I picked up a couple of life nodes and I'm thinking about grabbing the chaos resist/life nodes near the templar. But, I've got a lot of ES now so maybe I'll just start stacking ES now and may be able to skip the HP nodes.

Also, I decided it was time to switch over to fire spells. I put firestorm/reduced aoe on my reverb (BB) but I'm not really liking it. The double cast sort of leaves me standing and it doesn't nuke people running at me. I was thinking I would try flame surge. What do you think for fire spells?

I was thinking double cast fire nova trap might be nice too. It's been kind of hard to sustain traps though, i might be missing something.

Oh, another thought.

If you get cast-on-damage- immortal call to .75 duration, won't you basically be immortal because shield will ALWAYS restart? I don't know much about the cast-on-damage, but does this seem likely?

Oh, I don't know if you noticed this, but my buddy showed me a unique staff, 20% chance to start ES charging on block. Sounds pretty OP with vile ward!

Oh,

Another thought!

Could you potentially use a herald of ice/thunder to apply curse on hit such as flammeability? Would this proc before/after the AOE explosion of explosive arrow?

Thanks!

I uploaded some level 79 and 80 map gameplay to show the clear speed and defensive mechanisms in action in high-tier maps.

@FnTsTiC - I believe that roll is a prefix, in which case you could use Elreon's %ES mod for higher eHP (because frankly .75 second recharge is sufficient)

@intangible_s

Flame Surge is great when synergized with multi-firetraps. I personally don't like the narrow cone but it's a fine skill for leveling otherwise.

In early-game, you're not meant to sustain anything. Just keep guzzling mana flasks.

I recommend not skipping the life nodes. I generally aim for a minimum of 1k life by the end of normal and 2k life by the end of cruel, regardless of your ES. (Otherwise the Weaver in A2M will two-shot you through your ES). You can only really rely on ES when you get Soul Strike.

Yes, if your CWDT-IC is long enough, you will be "immortal" in theory. A 20/20 ID with IC gives you .7 seconds of invul, which is as good as .75 seconds for all intents and purposes. In practice: I find that IC with any decent level of ID (~.65 seconds) will work for the same purpose. Usually, however, you're taking in a significant amount of elemental damage as well, and the cooldown on Wicked Ward and IC means they rarely sync. Thus, I would not make serious investment into a .75 second IC. Acquiring a 20/20 ID is as far as I would go. It is, however, very helpful when you make the initial jump into a pack of purely phys mobs.

The ES-recharge-on-block staff is not appropriate to this build for obvious reasons. Moreover, getting block chance on a staff build is very tough.

This build doesn't actually apply enough non-fire damage to either shock or freeze, so heralds won't proc.

Is it possible to use a different skill instead of Explosive Arrow? I like the idea of having 10k ES and not needing to have Shavronne and having 4k ES regen per sec which only takes 0.75 seconds to kick in, but in general I don't like delayed skills, like with explosive arrow you fire the arrow, the mobs don't take much damage, and after a bit of time they explode. Feels like a trapper, delayed skills just kill the enjoyment, I want when I press the button and when the skills lands to immediately deal damage, otherwise it feels like playing trapper

"

FnTsTiC wrote:

Is it possible to use a different skill instead of Explosive Arrow? I like the idea of having 10k ES and not needing to have Shavronne and having 4k ES regen per sec which only takes 0.75 seconds to kick in, but in general I don't like delayed skills, like with explosive arrow you fire the arrow, the mobs don't take much damage, and after a bit of time they explode. Feels like a trapper, delayed skills just kill the enjoyment, I want when I press the button and when the skills lands to immediately deal damage, otherwise it feels like playing trapper

I feel you on that one - I love skills that instantly deal damage. You could hypothetically use any phys-fire bow skill and use Avatar of Fire, or you could also use any lightning bow skill with Phys to Lightning. Either one will allow you to stock up on physical and elemental damage nodes that surround witch, templar, and shadow. DPS will be much lower though.

I've found that the sheer damage of Explosive Arrow and the insane clear speed it provides is well worth the slight delay. Considering I can fire three arrows in .5 seconds which will explode in .5 seconds and clear an entire pack even in level 80 maps, it's hard for any instant-damage skill to beat the amount of damage that EA can lay down in a single second. (Check out the gameplay videos - the delay isn't significant, and I adopt a playstyle that accommodates it effectively).

It's important to get a high-leveled and quality Less Duration to make gameplay feel more fluid.

I want you to know that the pursuit of this build has put me through a lot of suffering. I was riding the struggle bus for so long. Now that I'm actually leveled up enough to start using the quiver, even with a fraction of the gear I should have, I'm finally seeing some returns, and it feels ... great!

Just being curious, what's the dps of your Explosive Arrow? I need a number so I'll have something to strive for when theorycrafting what other skill to use instead of Explosive Arrow

"

Excellency wrote:

I want you to know that the pursuit of this build has put me through a lot of suffering. I was riding the struggle bus for so long. Now that I'm actually leveled up enough to start using the quiver, even with a fraction of the gear I should have, I'm finally seeing some returns, and it feels ... great!

Yea, the early game build and the transition into mid 60s is among the toughest because it's not just a life-to-CI transition but also a spell-to-bow transition, which is highly unusual. Keep me posted on your late game transition!

"

FnTsTiC wrote:

Just being curious, what's the dps of your Explosive Arrow? I need a number so I'll have something to strive for when theorycrafting what other skill to use instead of Explosive Arrow

I have a tooltip DPS of about 210. Not kidding.

Explosive arrow doesn't show the damage of the explosions, unfortunately, and the situational multiplier due to the shotgun AOE as well as EE further complicates any attempt to calculate its true damage. If I were to compare it to a bow skill, I think I would need about 30-50k chained split arrow DPS to compete (don't take this estimate to heart, I've only done a handful of actual phys bow builds). Needless to say, that kind of tooltip DPS is very hard for a bow witch to achieve, so I strongly recommend EA.

Another alternative I thought of was using a lightning spell with Voltaxic and building lightning-chaos, but that would really boost the cost of the build, and I strongly doubt that the DPS will come anywhere near that of EA.