[0.10.5] Aimlessgun's Crit Archer Guide [with videos!]

'Final' build at level 90.

Around level 30.
Around level 50.
Level 70 going into maps. Drop the accuracy node if you have Lioneye.

Lightning Arrow without Static Blows?!
You stack shock with crits, and you don't need shock duration because your crits do huge damage.

EB without Inner Force?!
This build is about doing tons of damage, and trekking over to Inner Force is not a DPS optimal route (this goes double for Catalyze). However, it's not a bad choice for the build because of the defensive benefits.

No Iron Reflexes?!
Armor doesn't protect you from reflect. Evasion does. It will save your ass over and over and over. I have died to reflect only once in 14 levels of maps, on a character with tens of thousands of DPS and only 3k HP.

Also, armor isn't useful against large physical damage bursts, which is what this build fears.

Lightning Arrow
4link core: Weapon Elemental Damage, LMP or Chain, Faster Attacks
5th/6th link: LMP or Chain (whichever is not already on there), Increased Crit Strikes, Increased Critical Damage

Other options for the 5th link are LoH/Lifeleech, but this build doesn't have the HP to tank even with LoH running. Added Lightning Damage is worse DPS than either crit gem.

New in 10.5, Power Charge on Crit:
This is a very interesting and potentially powerful gem. You can easily modify the build to pick up 1 more power charge in the shadow area, for +200% crit on the gem (+250% if you take the Alira merc reward). So it is almost straight up better than Increased Crit Strikes.

However, building and maintaining the power charges is not easy, since you might only have 25% crit chance without them up. So it is a tradeoff of consistency and ease vs potential.

Single Target: Elemental Hit, Frenzy, or Burning Arrow
Elemental Hit is the highest DPS (doesn't show in tooltip), Frenzy gives Frenzy charges, Burning Arrow costs nothing in both currency and mana. They're all fine.

Support with Weapon Ele Dmg, Faster Attacks, Increased Crit Strikes. Because of the extreme socket requirements of the build, you may not be able to support this with 4links, and I even dropped the single target attack entirely for a little bit, because Lightning Arrow did enough single target DPS with this build.

Totem
Link with Ice Shot, Weapon Elemental Damage, Faster Attacks or LMP/GMP. LMP provides superior crowd control and AoE, but I don't run it because much of its use is in taking down ele reflect uniques and tough bosses.

Summon Skeletons deserves an honorable mention as a great defensive option.

Curses
Elemental Weakness is your main curse, essential for dealing damage to resistant enemies.
Temporal Chains is your defensive curse, allows you to maintain range and lowers enemy DPS.

Projectile Weakness gets an honorable mention because piercing is nuts vs packed enemies, but such enemy formations are the exception rather than the rule.

Auras
You won't be able to run all of these immediately. You won't even be able to run all of them right after getting EB (unless you have really crazy twink gear). I'll list them in the order I think they should be added. Link all of them to Reduced Mana of course.

Wrath, Clarity, Anger, Grace, lvled Discipline (free mana with EB), Purity, Hatred if Lioneye, Haste if not.

If your gear is sufficiently pimp, you can drop Purity for Haste.

Leveling Gear
You'll want twink gear. This build is not designed for self-found. Early on Sadima's Touch and Ignomon are good. Midgame, Maligaro's gloves and Death's Harp. You'll need lots of good sockets, elemental damage, HP/resists, and energy shield to fuel your EB.

You'll also want a Surgeon's Quicksilver Flask of Adrenaline and a Surgeon's Granite Flask of Iron Skin. These are important.

Endgame Gear
You'll want at least some of this lined up and waiting for you. You don't want to map on this character with bad gear.

Armor Type: Combo of EV and ES. You need ES to power Eldritch Battery, but you don't need it all to be high ES. Getting some evasion will make your more resistant to burst damage and protects you from reflect.

Bow: Lioneye is great, of course. However, it has weak base crit, meaning the build is not hugely worse with a good thicket, and a godly rare Imperial will beat Lioneye. On a thicket/imperial, look for triple elemental prefix, and then crit chance, accuracy and attack speed for suffixes. Crit chance is more important than IAS for this build. Once you get a good bow, try to 6s/5link it, this build needs all the sockets it can get.

Quiver: %Elemental damage with weapons , Crit Chance, Crit Multi are the most important. After that look for HP/resist and flat elemental damage. Blackgleam is also very good if you have a physical bow (Death's Harp, Lioneye), but is surpassed by a great rare quiver.

Gloves: Maligaro's Virtuosity. A godly rare with IAS, HP, elemental damage and triple resist is good too though.

Boots: High movespeed, HP, resists, evasion/es in that order.

Hat: HP, resists, evasion/ES, accuracy.

Chest: High ES, chest will power a lot of Eldritch Battery. HP, resists

Prismatic or Resist Rings: Flat elemental damage, %elemental damage with weapons, HP, resists, accuracy, mana regen. Getting all of this on a ring is basically impossible, but try to get as many as you can.

Onyx or Paua Amulet: Flat elemental damage, crit chance, crit damage, HP, resists, mana regen. As with rings, getting all this is very hard.

Leather Belt: %Elemental damage with weapons, HP, resists.

You are not a tank. You are a ninja. Or in CoD parlance, a scout sniper >.>

Use your range and speed with quicksilver to avoid damage. Dodge incoming chargers and projectiles, outrange archer packs and flickerstrike. Premptively granite if you're going to take a hit. In dangerous areas put your totem in front of your and lay waste to the enemies that aggro onto it.

EB also lets you spam offscreen quite a bit. If you think there's some bad shit in a certain direction, throw a few volleys over there and listen for hits.

Your worst enemies are chargers, flickerstrike, and very fast enemies. Know what zones they are in, and be on the alert for them. Decent reaction time is important: you want quicksilver and granite to go up ASAP when these guys show up.

Be paranoid about reflect. Watch for the graphic, and if you start taking damage without something beating on you, stop shooting because you're probably hitting a reflect offscreen. Your Ice Shot totem will do enough DPS to take down reflect rares quickly, and you can throw in DPS by carefully getting in shots and letting evade mitigate the backlash.

Impossible Mods: Blood Magic. Elemental Reflect is very, very bad, but if you're a masochist you can regem LA to GMP, Chain, LoH, and slowly slog through.

Dangerous Mods:
-Temporal Chains makes avoiding hits more difficult.
-Fleet mod combined with charging mobs makes them extremely hard to avoid.
-A combination of two damage mods carries potential for catastrophic burst damage, especially something like Vulnerability + Increased Monster Damage.

Replace Faster Attacks with Mana Leech to do 'Smothering' and 'Stasis' mods.

If you have a Lioneye, physical reflect actually hurts, so use a Blackgleam for those maps.

Map Bosses: I wouldn't do Shrine Piety because there is literally zero room for error. Everything else is fine. For Kraitlyn/Flickerspider, get away from them, put down a totem, get to max range while they aggro your totem, shoot them until totem dies, repeat.

Bandit Rewards?
Help Oak in normal for the HP. Help Kraitlyn in Cruel because his reward was buffed to 6% IAS. Take the skillpoint in Merciless.

Mana regen doesn't sustain 5link/6link Lightning Arrow?
This is a potential problem without some good mana regen on gear, or insufficient ES powering Eldritch Battery. Other than more mana regen gear, there are a couple things you can do.

-Try not to have your auras reserve almost all your mana, you want at few hundred of buffer.
-Using one Surgeon's Mana or Hybrid flask is totally fine, and should be enough to keep you going.
-If using a physical bow like Lioneye, 2% mana leech from gear or from the shadow passive actually works really really well.