The True Fire Witch: Explosive Arrow

Hrimnor's Resolve. A perfect one gives 30% Fire damage, multiplied by conc effect, and multiplied again by burn duration from Marauder tree. It is one of the very few items that does not grant HP that I advocate, and significantly increases your DPS at endgame.



I don't like chance to Ignite. It just seems worthless. While all 5 charges are a singular damage source, Different charges are not. Having LMP, with a 20% Explosive arrow, against a group of mobs is:

20% x 3 x Y, where Y is the number of mobs hit by the splash effect. It ends up being way more then needed, especially with cloak of flames, Flamability, and Ignite Shadow Talent added in...

Just some food for thought.

Cool build, and nice guide.

I have a similar one up, but with a different concept and build.

I'll add it to my Variations if you don't mind.

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/114073

Tbh, your build would work better off as a Marauder or Templar, you spend a lot of points just to reach the Marauder's side and you barely take anything from the Witch's tree, it really looks like you went for Witch starter solely for EB and everything else you took around there could just be taken from either the Templar tree or the center.

That's just my opinion, maybe it works better than I'm assuming.

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Aristeaus wrote:

Hrimnor's Resolve. A perfect one gives 30% Fire damage, multiplied by conc effect, and multiplied again by burn duration from Marauder tree. It is one of the very few items that does not grant HP that I advocate, and significantly increases your DPS at endgame.



I don't like chance to Ignite. It just seems worthless. While all 5 charges are a singular damage source, Different charges are not. Having LMP, with a 20% Explosive arrow, against a group of mobs is:

20% x 3 x Y, where Y is the number of mobs hit by the splash effect. It ends up being way more then needed, especially with cloak of flames, Flamability, and Ignite Shadow Talent added in...

Just some food for thought.

Adding more arrows doesn't help with the burn value, burn doesn't stack, only the strongest will take effect. LMP reduces damage by 30%, you might get A BIT of this back when it's leveled, but it's 30% less dmg so even with some increased dmg% from the lvls it still loses a lot of power. So you get more potential sources of burn, but a weaker burn. You do get more explosions which can be useful. The point of using chance to ignite and a single arrow is that it can be used equally to ignite bosses. It's still a 85+% chance to ignite a single target. For AoE everything gets ignited regardless.

The helm is an idea but with Cloak of Flames and Quill rain already not having health, I don't feel it's such a good idea to add another no health item, especially since the damage gain isn't great(it's ok). This is a hardcore character and sacrificing survivability for damage rarely makes sense in hardcore, and specifically not for that kind of value.

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omgken233 wrote:

Tbh, your build would work better off as a Marauder or Templar, you spend a lot of points just to reach the Marauder's side and you barely take anything from the Witch's tree, it really looks like you went for Witch starter solely for EB and everything else you took around there could just be taken from either the Templar tree or the center.

That's just my opinion, maybe it works better than I'm assuming.

You're looking at the final build though. The marauder area is basically the very last thing you take, that's like lvl 80 to 92 or something. Starting there would actually slow down the build a lot. Starting as a Templar is a valid choice, Marauder not so much for this build, if you go Marauder you might as well go Blood Magic. I start witch because I like witches better than senile old men who lost their pants, matter of taste I guess. The witch start is very useful for this build however since it lets you use EA as soon as you are lvl 19 and add supports almost as soon as you can provided you have the correct gear which isn't possible if you start as a templar.

Every build can be made with a number of other classes since it simply changes the starting point, however for this particular build, I think Witch is the best start. It fits the needs of the build the best by providing what you need the most first, which is mana regen to sustain the heavy mana cost of your fully supported explosive arrow. Health comes second and is what I focus entirely on after that, which is why I go toward the Templar area and grab all the health on the way there, as well as they keystones that define the build, RT and EE. Once that's done I finish taking the damage nodes and finally with my last few expected points, I take what's the most useful that's in range, the marauder starting area.

I was thinking the same build, but with shadow, as there are very nice projectile damage options there and you can easily transfer to witch nodes to take up all the fire. is there anything in Templar area that is necessary except for resolute technique ? and as far as i understand, critting is something that you want to happen as it triggers burn 100% of the time ?

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PyrosEien wrote:

Adding more arrows doesn't help with the burn value, burn doesn't stack, only the strongest will take effect. LMP reduces damage by 30%, you might get A BIT of this back when it's leveled, but it's 30% less dmg so even with some increased dmg% from the lvls it still loses a lot of power. So you get more potential sources of burn, but a weaker burn. You do get more explosions which can be useful. The point of using chance to ignite and a single arrow is that it can be used equally to ignite bosses. It's still a 85+% chance to ignite a single target. For AoE everything gets ignited regardless.

The helm is an idea but with Cloak of Flames and Quill rain already not having health, I don't feel it's such a good idea to add another no health item, especially since the damage gain isn't great(it's ok). This is a hardcore character and sacrificing survivability for damage rarely makes sense in hardcore, and specifically not for that kind of value.

Adding more arrows improves burn CHANCE. Which is why I prefer it to Chance to Ignite, as it does more overall damage, and provides higher utility.

As for items, how do you think it isn't a great damage gain.

30% is the equiv of FIVE 6% Fire nodes. That 30% is then multiplied by Concentrated effect. It is then AGAIN multiplied by Burn duration. It ends up being 30 x 1.69 x 1.66 ( with 30% increased burn duration at 5/3rds ), which is 84% increase in total burn damage, from ONE item.

As for Cloak of Flame, I haven't done the math, but I would be shocked if it actually did anything substantial. If you have 68% Chance to ignite on fire damage, and your average monster pack is 6, your chance to ignite ONE of them, is 408%, then Elemental Proliferation sets it. It grants you some damage reduction, which is great, but so does armor/evasion, and ES/health gives you survivabiltiy.

The chance to ignite is irrelevant on groups because everything will burn regardless of which system you use. LMP will have a slightly higher chance to proc, but assuming my explosion hits 4 targets, that's 4x 85% chance to proc, and any proc will proc proliferation and burn everything in the area. In comparison LMP might be 12x45%, so it might be slightly better but the difference is minimal, and the damage loss on the burn is substantial

This isn't the case for single target where LMP will be worse than Chance to Ignite.

For the helm my point is that it's a damage gain. An ok one, but an entirely unnecessary one. I don't even have the fire damage % passives yet on the videos I shown, yet most of the mobs die instantly unless they're highly fire resistant or I didn't shoot enough arrows into them. Having 30% fire damage isn't going to make or break the build, however losing 350health is a fairly noticeable change.

Cloak of Flames isn't used for the DPS. The DPS is a nice side effect but I originally took Cloak of Flames after my first EA died to Vaal rocks due to not having enough damage mitigation(and very terrible luck since I got rocked 3times in a row). Cloak of Flames reduces physical damage taken by a flat 17%. That's a very large amount considering how armor works on large hits(it's not much against crap mobs however). They are completely different items, I took the Cloak of Flames to increase my survivability, taking the helm would be a net loss of survivability. I'm not saying it's not viable, I'm just saying I don't really think such a damage boost is necessary at the expense of 350hp. I also lose a noticeable amount of lightning resist using it which is something else I'd need to make up for.

This build might be a "cool" play style, but its not nearly the damage of an EE build that uses Arc totem and Fire trap.

Spell totem + arc + elemental proliferation + faster cast + Culling strike

Searing Staff 5L with Firetrap + chance to ignite + elemental proliferation + w/e + w/e


Arc totem stacks 3xshock in 1 second + debuffs lightning EE.

Spec into heavy burn dmg (80% from passives, 70% from staff) everything dies nearly in one tick of ignite.

I DEMAND THAT THE OP CHANGE THE TITLE OF THE THREAD!!111

As a fireball witch i found it a lack of respect! You god damn fake fire bow arrow witch of hell

Ps. just kidding =D

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wnightmare wrote:

I DEMAND THAT THE OP CHANGE THE TITLE OF THE THREAD!!111

As a fireball witch i found it a lack of respect! You god damn fake fire bow arrow witch of hell

Ps. just kidding =D

Heh, heh. Wow. :)
I agree with wnightmare, can the OP please change the title to more accurately describe the build?

Thanks!