3.7* - Caustic Arrow Trickster Mapping + Delving Unkillable Machine

Yeah i was just wondering comparision.

I farmed a couple of shaper and red elders deathless, my only problem is minotaur targeting the wither totems but that's all.

Also its pretty since since TR slow + spider allows you cheese bossfight's and Arakali pantheon + trickster tops your life every time you kill an add.

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Pimmalage wrote:

If you're not SSF you can buy the beast required for the Aspect of the spider. It's not too expensive http://poe.trade/search/oyokotayogamey

Thanks, I think I will probably end up going down this route. I expect my CI golemancer should deal with the fight ok assuming it's a lot of chaos damage!

Hey Pimmalage,

Just started off my CA Trickster. Leveling felt a little slow in comparison to golems and arc totems but certainly picked up once I hit level 60 and also picked up some extra pierce. I just used a 4-link silverbranch as I had one spare and a lvl 2 empower rather than buy a silverbrough. I stopped bothring with the syndicate somewhere in act 2 once I had gotten research to keep spawning.

Just hit lvl 72 and starting to map now. I've switched over to my "proper" bow with a 21/20 CA and lvl 4 empower and damage has unsurprisingly gotten a little nuts in comparison.

Still need to pick up Uber Lab at some point as I'm missing the final skill effect duration / DoT nodes - I went with Weave the Arcane for Merciless as that gave me a decent amount of free mana for MoM. Currently at 2k ish un-reserved mana & 4k life. Just running Aspect of the Spider to reserve some of the mana and using Solstice Vigil to gain a free blapsh + temp chains.

I normally try Uber Lab at around lvl 88 - 90 as I suck at it sooo bad XD Hopefully get there by the weekend. I'm hoping the damage will be enough so Izaro isn't too tricky. I've gone full acro / phase accro and at least MoM should make the trap portion easier.

I'll let you know how things go once I get there and get into yellow maps and above! Thanks for the guide and your advice - it's helped a lot!

Hi Pimmalage,

This is my progress so far in relation to gear / items.



I did go MoM in the end but by grabbing the actual MOM cluster on the passive tree. Currently at around 5.7k life & 2.1k un-reserved mana. Feel fairly tanky.

Also have a pretty much max level temp chains + blasphemy being linked to a lvl 4 enhance & having the curse effect enchant on the helm. Quite liking the Solstice Vigil amulet as it seems to extend the uptime on your power / frenzy / endurance charges and flasks as well as onslaught gained from my abyss jewel. I also use a red dream socketed at scion sentinel to give 28% chance to gain an endurance charge on kill so I get a lot of benefit from my CWDT + IC. My Vaal Grace lasts a good 20 seconds or so as well!

I was initially aiming for a Kaom's Heart body armour but upon some reflection I realised that because of my routing through Witch I was basically building a Essence Drain character so thought I would try to get a 6-link ED into the chest slot. It's still low level atm but I hope to get the lvl 4 empower and lvl 21 ED in the next couple of weeks (assuming I continue to play that long)! It did mean crafting my bow a little differently since the non-ailment chaos damage over time craft also seems to affect the ED too so I crafted the bow as a +1 7-link with that craft rather than +2 to support gems that would ONLY benefit my CA.

Otherwise happy with the build. The damage feels really good and the max level temp chains plus aspect of the spider makes mapping feel pretty nice. I'm still getting used to having to aim the CA correctly to fully clear a pack which is a little different from the lightning arrow bow character I played before where you basically just fire and watch the whole screen shatter! I prefer the playstlye of the latter but certainly the tankiness and single target of the former.

Oh, and Uber Lab was one of the easiest I have ever done - so very happy in that regard. Got a little un-lucky on the enchant for this character. Should probably spam some merc lab at some point to try and get at least some sort of useful enchant.

Anyway, thx again for the guide. Let me know if you have any tips or suggestions.

It will be interesting to see what this new DoT aura Malevolence will bring to the table.

Bit of a pain for my character being MOM as even if I use an essence worm I'm still going to be down to 50% mana res with Aspect of the Spider and the Blasph + Temp chains which I just realised is 100% reduced, not less mana reservation so equipping an essence worm does make that previously free aura now cost mana.

I've crafted a new ring with Aspect of the Spider on an unset ring as I'll need the socket just in case I do end up using the essence worm with the new aura. Requires a bit of re-jigging of my tree and will be an effective EHP loss of around 800 - 1000 and some DPS loss which hopefully the aura will more than compensate for.

why did you end up going MoM? and especially on the passive tree. gonna eat up an insane amount of passive points

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xMustard wrote:

why did you end up going MoM? and especially on the passive tree. gonna eat up an insane amount of passive points

A few reasons really; none of them enough to justify it on it's own merits alone but taken together I was willing to try it.

1. The reason I decided to consider CA was one of my mates was playing it and it looked really good. I tried it a number of years ago and really struggled to make it work then but given the recent buffs to chaos DoT I was excited to try and get a CA build working properly. However as he was mostly a harbour bridge farmer he was making a ton more currency than I was and I didn't want to make something that was just a "worse" version of what he had. That meant changing the build enough that our gearing would necessitate being fairly different!

2. I had this +1 Curse chest I wanted to use for something this league and figured that a 6-link ED would be a fun thing to try and cram into the build which would somewhat make up for the single target loss from getting less CA scaling.

3. Trickster does do MoM really well IMO! You get a lot of extra mana from Weave the Arcane and a lot of mana sustain from the aforementioned node and patient reaper. There wasn't a really amazing aura besides Aspect of the Spider I was particularly fussed about running so I felt having a large un-reserved mana pool wouldn't feel too bad. With the reveal of Malevolence though that is likely to change and I almost certainly would make a different decision if building CA next league. Even if Malevolence itself isn't amazing if it allows for a good watcher's eye mod that would still be a good reason to run it.

4. Lastly - I suck at lab......I mean really suck! XD
MoM makes lab traps and trials quite a bit easier for me so I quite like having it on that basis.


I knew that my version would be somewhat inferior to the OP's version. I mean, I haven't really played the skill at all so I accept I don't really know what I am doing. I was happy to go in a little blind and see how things worked out. Like I say, I was pretty happy with the way that it did. I fully accept it's not the "best" way to do it; maybe not even a "good" way to do it but that's fine with me. I had some fun experimenting with stuff and although at this juncture I likely won't finish the build off completely; not really going to play Betrayal more now, I was still happy to have a "working" CA build as opposed to the last time I tried one which was a "terrible" CA build ;P

Credit to the OP who gave me some really good advice and for the guide which explained things well.

Small post/update now that we have the full patch notes.

Caustic arrow basically was untouched in its entirety.

The new "Malevolence" aura seems insanely good for the build, especially since the mana reservations were a underutilized part of the build.

Trickster got some insanely nice buffs to the tree and ascendancy, a Ci version seems a little more possible although i would still recommend occultist if you decide to go this route.
A possible playstyle change/Buff to the build would be working in a blight setup for boss encounters since Swift killer now gives frenzy/power generation while channeling, Being able to drop CA and channel blight getting the benefit of power/frenzy, hinder and the damage shouldn't be useless either since it's a chaos/dot skill.

Not sure which of the mods we will be missing out on from the 3.5 added crafting, The +2 support gems mod with +1 socketed gems was a nice combo and will still be a good option for bow crafts. Even if this is changed (And becomes much more expensive) there is still the option of +2 bow +1 socketed/Vicious proj.

I'm not going to "update" the guide as i haven't re-played the character myself and there are very little changes to it since delve. So i would suggest sharing new build additions from synthesis.

TL;DR - Trickster buffed, CA untouched, Malevolence extremely useful and Blight + new Swift Killer makes for some boss improvements.

I think I'll try this build as my league starter. Not sure whether I have enough game knowledge/skill to improve anything on this build, but I'll post a message here if I ever get to experiment :)

How would you go around the new skill tree?
Not sure if taking the whole wheel or just Resourcefulness.