[2.2] Lightning CoC Dual Curse Quillrain/Voltaxic - Crazy DPS, "all" map mods, T14+/Atziri solo
 Hey guys, I'm here with my first build guide since I've been playing ascendancy a lot and finally came up with my own setup that was very strong (strong enough to solo every map I've self-found and rolled which is up to T12 at the moment). I know CoC Quill rain builds seem pretty popular right now, but I wanted to give my take on it since Ascendancy opened up a build that wasn't possible before. Why?
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With Ascendancy, it is now possible to run CoC with any number of unique bows without hurting from base crit chance. That's because the assassin Deadly Infusion ascendancy grants +0.5% base crit chance per power charge. With a total of 7 power charges, that means it's possible to get crit chance in the 90s with a voltaxic rift!
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 This build was originally intended to make use of orb of storms, hence the lightning theme, but triggered skills don't seem to cause the orb to attack. However, sticking to a single element is still very nice for curses (conductivity for Quill Rain) or utility (chaos conversion through voltaxic). Also, I've always wanted to do CoC Quill Rain since it's one of my favourite uniques. Pros
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- Insane damage and clear speed
- Excellent sustain with Vaal Pact and Surgeon's flasks - Decent survivability (4.5k+ life, acrobatics, permanent 4 endurance charges, permanent flask uptime, CoH Herald of Thunder Enfeeble) - Can be pretty cheap (Quill rain + tabula is all that's really required) - Can run "all" map mods (Curse immune and blood magic are annoying, no leech is pretty difficult) - Absolutely 0 mana issues - 93% crit with voltaxic, 83% with quill, equally high crit chance with spells - Easily maintain power charges without PCoC or Voll's protector. - No problems equipping any gear with just passive tree stats Cons
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- Expensive on the top end (needs a 6L to outperform tabula and voltaxic isn't super cheap)
- Hard to cap resists (Diamond rings, lots of uniques, and wanting to roll crit on amulet/quiver make resists difficult) - Hard to roll right colors on bow for "complete" build - RIP framerates with CoC and carcass jack HC/Atziri Viable?
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A bit squishy for HC, but might be adaptable. Your biggest enemy is frame drops from a huge number of procs and spells. I ran an 8-mod T12 with absolutely no problems/deaths so it's certainly doable.
Quill rain version definitely can't do Atziri because of reflect. Quill Rain vs. Voltaxic Rift
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Quill rain has much smoother gameplay, instant blink arrows, is cheaper, maintains charges more easily, and runs purity of lightning to deal with reflect (easier to cap resists). It struggles a bit with curse immune monsters (relies on curses to bypass resistances), but lightning pen vaal storm call deals with those pretty well.
Voltaxic is slower, immune to reflect, can run wrath instead of purity of lightning for a huge damage boost, and can run assassins mark + enfeeble instead of conductivity + ele weakness for greater survivability. It also has 6% base crit over Quill Rain's 5%. Finally, it is quite a bit more expensive since voltaxic seems to be flavor of the month right now. In general, quill rain is better for lower tier maps (faster) and voltaxic is better for higher (more damage and safer). Skill Tree
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lvl 96 Quill Rain tree
Voltaxic tree v3.0 (switch to chaos nodes at start, pick up method to madness above vaal pact, pick up Fangs of the Viper) More damage Voltaxic tree (give up end charge generation for damage+life) The skill tree is all over the place, but I can't really concede any of the locations that I'm going to. Everything is driven by jewel placement and power charge generation. Power charges are pound for pound the best nodes on the tree. With Deadly Infusion, they can carry a CoC build on their own. The increased base crit chance is multiplicative with any %increased chance on your gear or in the tree. As for the jewels: 2x volley fire in the right two jewel slots grant AoE and a huge increase in charges/procs for barrage 2x ES on hit jewels combined with Eldritch Battery make mana issues a thing of the past while simultaneously letting you reserve all your mana with auras. Barrage costs 12 mana and fires 12 arrows, which each restore 4-6 ES with 2 jewels. Try to get %life on these and then crit multi with lightning/spells. Lioneye's fall in the left jewel socket allows you to grab Smashing Strikes, which gives 10% chance to gain an endurance charge on bow crit. It's a huge passive point investment, but unlimited endurance charge generation for no gem investment is pretty huge.  Other than that, we just grab life and crit multi where we can, whispers of doom for an extra curse, acrobatics, and vaal pact for instant leech. Aside from the power charges, you really don't need much more crit on the tree. They give a huge amount and apply to both barrage and your spells, which is better than anything on the tree really. For ascendancy points, Unstable Infusion gives you unlimited power charges with your rate of fire and number of spells/projectiles, Deadly Infusion is absolutely necessary to make the build work, and Ambush helps with the first few mobs before you have your charges. It's not great, but I think it's better than toxic delivery. Bandits
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Normal - Oak
Cruel - Kill all Merciless - Alira Links
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6L - Barrage (level 3) > CoC > Arc/Shock Nova/Spark > Life Leech
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Level 3 barrage is for low mana cost. Quality on CoC gives crit chance, so I highly recommend getting a high quality one. Did some testing with Spark since my vaal storm call wasn't one-shotting higher level map bosses. I think it's a superior alternative to ball lightning for single target.
Life Leech is must (you can sort of slide by with warlord's mark + doryani's belt on a quill rain, but it's totally not worth it). Additional skills are essentially more modifiers that beat out any support I can reasonably think of (second skill is 100% more and third is 50% more), plus it's more fun to cast a ridiculous number of spells. 4-6L - Vaal Storm Call > Spell Echo > Lightning Penetration > Concentrated Effect > Increased Duration > Increased Crit Multi (Quill Rain) Vaal Storm Call > Spell Echo > Poison > Concentrated Effect > Increased Duration > Crit Multi (Voltaxic)
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Vaal Storm Call is the best single target solution I could come up with. The lightning pen version fills up any weaknesses of the Quill Rain build, and the poison version makes use of voltaxic's conversion. It can be difficult to get these colors!! If you have 2 6L it might be easier to stick your CoC setup on your bow.
4L Herald of Thunder > Curse on Hit > Conductivity > Ele Weakness ( Quill Rain) Herald of Thunder > Curse on Hit > Assassin's Mark/Poacher's Mark > Enfeeble (Voltaxic)
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Your standard HoT curse on hit setup. Feel free to use any combination of curses. You are always critting and always using lightning spells, so everything is always shocked and you are always cursing as a result.
4L CWDT > Immortal Call > Molten Shell > Increased Duration
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Standard CWDT setup. Immortal Call actually has decent uptime because of the endurance charge generation from your tree. I use lvl 6 CWDT, lvl 8 IC, lvl 13 MS, but feel free to use whatever you feel works.
4s - Arctic Armour, Purity of Lightning, Blink Arrow-Faster Attacks (Quill Rain) Arctic Armour, Wrath, Blink Arrow-Faster Projectiles (Voltaxic)
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Blink Arrow and auras. Purity of Lightning necessary for reflect on Quill, can be replaced with Wrath on Voltaxic for a big damage boost. You can definitely use Vaal Grace or Vaal Haste in the extra slot since blink arrow is pretty fast by itself.
Gear
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This is my current gear:
" You do have a few options when it comes to stuff. Make sure you have at least some ES from your gear for Eldritch Battery! Helm
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Rat's nest with +barrage projectiles is BiS. Starkonja's is a cheap alternative with crit and a bit of life if you find yourself lacking that.
Chest
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I used a tabula for a while before getting a miracle 6L using Kuduku method (praise Kuduku). It's totally acceptable but probably too squishy for HC.
Bow
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Voltaxic or Quill Rain. No questions. 4L is fine since you're just using it for Vaal Storm Call. Can be really hard to get the right colors (I somehow got the right 6 off on my quill rain after ~30 chromes). If you can somehow get an extra arrow corruption, that's even better.
Quiver
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Rare spike-point beats out everything. Look for high crit/crit multi and life. Unfortunately the crit modifiers are suffixes, but you still have room for a resist if you want.
Gloves
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Gloves are the most flexible slot. Maligaro's Virtuosity has the best crit/crit multi, Shadows and Dust is a ton of fun to play with and gives extra damage/survivability with rampage and smoke clouds, Facebreakers give huge crit multi for unparalleled damage. I chose Shadows and Dust.
Boots
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Rare with MS, life, resists. This is one of the few spots you can get resists, so make good use of that. Armor base makes it easy to get the right colors for CWDT. Attack speed when you've killed recently seems to be the best enchant.
Belt
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Lightning Doryani's works great with Quill Rain version. Extra damage, resists, and a small amount of leech. For higher tier maps and voltaxic, life on the belt slot is much more valuable and lightning leech doesn't work with chaos conversion. For a rare belt, life>resists>flask mods/crafted move speed
Rings
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Rare diamond rings for crit. Life, resists, accuracy are most important. Remember that your proc chance is a function of hit chance as well as crit chance.
Amulet
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Rare with life, crit chance, crit multi, resists, spell damage. +1 curses is BiS, since you can triple curse with a glove corruption or spec out of whispers of doom.
Flasks
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Honorable mention to Writhing Jar for being good at replenishing HoT curses and giving extra proccs for bosses. Just didn't make the cutoff against surgeon's flasks in my opinion. I use the topaz flask for ele weakness maps since I don't have good enough gear. Atziri's Promise is BiS for both builds. It gives insane leech for Voltaxic and helps with resistant monsters for Quill Rain. Make sure to have an instant life flask, staunching flask, and freeze flask. I use a basalt flask of grounding for big physical hits, but Taste of Hate is obviously amazing. Vessel of Vinktar is probably excellent with quill rain because we already have vaal pact. Just make sure to carry a grounding flask with it if you choose to go with that.
Leveling Note
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Level with your standard leveling build (flame totem/firestorm, blade fall, whatever). I highly, highly recommend not switching over to CoC before getting your 4th Ascendancy point (Cruel Lab). You can sort of make do with the increased critical strikes gem and assassin's mark, but it's super painful and not fun until you get a couple of volley fires and Deadly Infusion. The 5th and 6th points don't make a huge difference.
" Videos
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Very high quant (155) Courtyard T13 - fast boss kill
Quick Gorge run with tweaked tree, spark, and poacher's mark Deathless Atziri Kill Super rippy Academy T11 8-mod Shipyard T12 (one silly death) 7-mod Shrine T14 Voltaxic Dried Lake Quill Rain Dried Lake As you can see, Quill Rain is much faster and eats through weaker enemies. Voltaxic shines in higher maps when resistances and enemy damage/reflect are bigger problems. Can this work for other Ascendancy classes?
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Yes. See t0nsofdamage's tree for Ascendant Berzerker/Assassin on the second page of this thread.
Changelog:
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3/29/2016: added Courtyard video
3/28/2016: updated all trees with Assassin points and to spec out of Coldhearted Calculation. Picked Celestial Judgement over Amplify in Quill Rain tree in direct response to switching to Spark. Added note about Carcass Jack in direct response to switching to Spark. Added note about t0nsofdamage's Ascendant version (thanks for testing!). Copy pasted leveling trees from answering a question. 3/27/2016: switched Ball Lightning for Spark, added Gorge video with new links/tree 3/22/2016: added 131quant/45pack size academy video, Atziri kill, fixed a few typos 3/25/2016: added 8-mod Shipyard, revised voltaxic skill tree, added poacher's mark to HoT curse list, 7-mod Shrine Thanks for reading! Post any comments, criticisms, suggestions below.[/url] Last edited by RemonRaimu#2309 on Mar 30, 2016, 1:03:08 AM Last bumped on Apr 28, 2016, 10:54:35 PM
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Why shock nova over spark?
Other than that running similar build but im Scion Zerker/ass and it works great! Last edited by McDunk#1583 on Mar 22, 2016, 10:39:40 AM
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Could you also do this as Scion grabbing the Assassin and Berserker ascendancies? Berserker is for th 10% more damage and more importantly the 1.5% leech so you don't need the life leech gem and can swap it out for another spell or something like void manipulation. My concern is that maybe you don't reach enough crit. What do you think?
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" I actually tried the build with every lightning spell (even storm call), and decided on the three that I'm using. Spark is fantastic and definitely interchangeable with any of the other spells. Here's my take on why I don't use it. Spark - Higher clear speed (can off-screen mobs and has better coverage in general) - Great single target in claustrophobic areas - Synergy with Quill Rain proj speed - More projectiles = more lag Shock Nova - Unconditional maximum damage output against immediate threats (monster in or around melee range) regardless of directionality - Synergy with Carcass Jack - Less lag Ultimately, I chose nova because I felt my damage output was sufficient, vaal storm call was one-shotting most bosses anyway, and it seemed like a safer bet both for frame drops and for killing monsters in my blind spots. I ran the math really quickly so this doesn't take into account flat damage additions such as HoT and Wrath, but: lvl20 spark 6x projectiles @ 44-832 damage each = 438 avg damage per projectile lvl20 nova 185–555 damage *1.5 (second ring) = 555 avg damage You would have to hit 5 enemies in order for nova to do more overall damage on average than spark, and you would have to hit an enemy with 2 sparks to out-damage nova for single target. Both pretty reasonable scenarios. As for the other skills, Arc is good because it has great multitarget efficiency without supports and Ball Lightning has directional off-screening for scary enemies as well as a bunch of tiny hits to generate power charges reliably. Of the three, I think Spark functionally replaces Ball Lightning best. " Seems like it would work, but it would take some testing to see if the crit was enough. You could use an increased crit strikes gem to make up the lost 2.5% base crit, but then that cancels out swapping out life leech haha. You do get the rest of the Berserker perks and maim on crit this way though. Void manipulation is not as good as it sounds because of the way conversion works. You'll get the reduced damage on the lightning damage before it converts and then the more damage on the chaos. It's a net positive, but I'm pretty sure something like increased crit damage or an extra spell would give you more overall damage. Assuming every other stat is the same (which it wouldn't be exactly), my character would have 68.5% crit chance on an Ascendant tree. On paper, that's 12(# of projectiles)*.85(chance to hit)*.685(chance to crit)*.69(lvl 20 cast on crit chance to proc)*3 to 4 spells = 14-19 average spell casts per barrage if every projectile hits. Compared to 12*.85*.93(my chance to crit)*.69*3 spells = 19.63 avg spell casts per barrage, it seems like it breaks even with 4 spells and would be totally viable in a 5-link. Lower crit chance on spells would probably hurt your damage a bit though, and make it harder to generate endurance charges with your bow. |
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Added Atziri kill and Academy map with crazy mods to videos. Hopefully this shows people what the build is capable of since I squeeze by with no deaths even though I play terribly.
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Very interesting build, planning something of the same but only with quill rain. Some suggestions i have -but not tried yet-. It depends on your crit chance ( especially with quill), but those melee crit nodes under your lioneye fall jewel look really sweet! Even If you dont really need them, you could try and replace one of your spells with controlled destruction. I am also thinking of using poachers mark as a second curse instead, for the extra frenzy charges (maybe try surgebinders?) and that little lgoh.maybe even drop vaal pact and replace with lgoh gem.If only I can find a way to remove LL from the 6L... Tests are to be made soon! Thanks for your effort!
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" Could you link the tree you used for scion start? Also, if you don't go for the endurance charge notable in marauder you get a lot more points to spend on the right side of the tree don't you? Is that node really worth traversing half the tree to get? Last edited by t0nsofdamage#0101 on Mar 23, 2016, 9:58:37 AM
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"Definitely test out your own versions of the build! It's super flexible for curses, skills, and tree choices. Poacher's mark seems like a great choice with the -evasion and frenzy charges. You don't really need the attack speed for quill, but they give more damage as well. You could consider using a Blood Dance to get charges, but then you'd be pretty pressed for resists. LL is too good to pass up with the amount of damage you output and how squishy you are in my opinion. Let me know how LGoH goes though. The melee crit nodes under lioneye's fall are nice, but I'm just too spread out on the tree to find extra points for them. Sitting at over 90% crit anyway, I feel like I don't need them, but they would definitely be not a bad choice. "Unfortunately I didn't mock up an ascendant tree, which is why I said "assuming every other stat is the same." I just extrapolated the values based on the reduced base crit chance. I don't have a leveled scion to play around with, so it'll be up to you to test it out. As for the endurance charge notable, it seemed like the most effective survivability boost in my opinion. For 10 points, you get essentially 12% physical damage reduction and 70% crit chance with bows. 2 more points for an extra endurance charge makes that 16%. You have to go to the top anyway for eldritch battery and power charges, and you can grab a nice chunk of life, extra charges, extra curses, and resists while working your way over to the other side of the tree so it's not too big of a cost. There are some really great options on the right side that I didn't try out, but was considering. You could use warlord's mark for leech/endurance charges and get 10 points back to put into Arcane Potency (crit multi), extra jewel sockets for damage, or Arrow Dancing and King of the Hill on the right side. You lose out on an extra curse and ability to sustain charges in certain fights (for example, Daresso and Atziri), but probably net a bit of damage. I really, really wanted King of the Hill but didn't have spare points of it. Unlimited knockback seems like it would trivialize a lot of fights. Last edited by RemonRaimu#2309 on Mar 23, 2016, 6:49:25 PM
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" Here is the skill tree I came up with:https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAAAADsosVsAwQOWpjKEU249AwTv_WBDqHIQYoMJb57KSpykX7CHE5u1dwfDOoTFieAki-ZYD6uTH21sFr9JEzY9tUjssCaVaoydqhvIjAth4vVvbIzP3eOEuXxVS8gUYqzxiisKDdGMNqLZtMURL13yY0OJ07DYwuwqC3BSBbWNv1FH1CMwfDfU51QwcY19fyvI3O0_JP3dqCP2OdT_3kt4TZKjim_ydvc6Qu4OoJ8x-vzF73oNjdN-W6-Hdn11IXbjn_66hs5KfcEzDkgRlgcelS7w1UlRj_rr9cMJuZPyHQBeGY7tgwguhQ40ICImAAA= Let me know what you think! Last edited by t0nsofdamage#0101 on Mar 24, 2016, 10:01:55 AM
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"Seems to get a good amount of crit and life. Here's a few changes that I made. I grabbed up the jewel socket and life at scion start, Vaal pact, Acuity near the bottom right jewel socket to activate volley fire, and Arrow Dancing. I specc'd out of the chaos/phys damage nodes near shadow (don't seem worth it). Without Eldritch Battery, you'll have to find a different way to maintain your mana. Mana on hit jewels would work, but then you'd have to get reduced mana reserved somehow. That's why I grabbed up Charisma for 4 points. It's a smaller point investment than EB, gives increased aura effect, and would make barrage usable. Last edited by RemonRaimu#2309 on Mar 24, 2016, 9:27:35 PM
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