Burning Arrow

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StealthNerf wrote:

I use this arrow as my basic attack over poison arrow.

With added fire damage support, the DPS of this arrow is very high, and it's got higher burst than poison. With point blank passive a level-equal enemy is usually outright killed at point blank range from a fire arrow.

I link poison to pierce instead so can spread around poison clouds. It's not worth it for me to put all my supports into supporting poison, because that would drive up mana cost too high, and would mean I can't use those supports for other skills, like lightning arrow.

A lot of the damage from poison also comes from the damage over time effect, so against a tough opponent will start with a poison arrow then fire burning arrows until the poison DoT is exhausted.

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Islidox wrote:

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StealthNerf wrote:

I use this arrow as my basic attack over poison arrow.

With added fire damage support, the DPS of this arrow is very high, and it's got higher burst than poison. With point blank passive a level-equal enemy is usually outright killed at point blank range from a fire arrow.

I link poison to pierce instead so can spread around poison clouds. It's not worth it for me to put all my supports into supporting poison, because that would drive up mana cost too high, and would mean I can't use those supports for other skills, like lightning arrow.

A lot of the damage from poison also comes from the damage over time effect, so against a tough opponent will start with a poison arrow then fire burning arrows until the poison DoT is exhausted.

It's funny you mention this because this is how I'm using Burning Arrow and poison arrow on my lvl 53 Ranger. (Freshly arrived at Merciless :D)

Burning Arrow has been my go-to default attack (swapped the default attack out). Reason being because it's low mana cost (11 mana atm). It's probably one of the few arrow skills that costs so little in mana even with the Haste aura on. In conjunction with faster projectiles and faster attack speed support gems, I can spam this thing forever. Usually I have my Haste aura on (that thing sucks up SO much mana) and I can spam my Burning Arrow even faster. Without Haste or frenzy charges, it does around 1.7k damage.

Only problem is that I don't use any support gems that increase the elemental damage on it (my sockets don't support it either), but in a way, that's made it more effective for me as I've changed my strategy from having high DPH to decent DPS due to attacking speed. (I'm getting sick of having to dish out a fortune for items with high elemental damage mods.)

I use poison arrow with lesser multiple projectiles and faster projectiles for AoE/DoT/groups, Lightning Arrow for pairs/triples, and Frenzy as another method to increase my attacking speed. Last I counted, with haste aura on and 3 frenzy charges, I could spam Burning Arrow 2.53 times per second. For high health enemies, I use the projectile weakness curse to give me an edge. (The battle with Oak on Ruthless showed me that attacking speed isn't everything.)