[3.12] Barrage & TS Impale Boss Slaying God with Full Screen Clear Too

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Lakh wrote:

I semi-league started this build (did a miner to maps, decided I hated it before I got past tier 5 & rerolled with nothing except a tabula).

The build's a lot more starter friendly than it's made out to be imo. Not a great beginner setup, but if you know how to gear a physical archer it's fine. It's meant I've had to adapt a bit, but my end result has stayed close to the original.

I leveled with, and am mostly still using, Vaal Rain of Arrows. Tornado Shot's definitely better once you've got the damage to support it, but Vaal RoA doesn't require chain/GMP so its bare bones damage-versus-spread is easier to start with. It has the side bonus that it happily uses identical supports to Barrage, so if you only have one 6-link you can just swap which skill is in that slot for boss fights vs clear. I'm working on crafting a 400+pdps bow & once I've got that going I'll swap permanently to TS.

Chin Sol is a beast of a bow up until about tier 14ish (and cheap). Its damage buff combo'd with point blank at sub 20 yards makes barrage lethal, but its weakness at 20+ yards range means that clear becomes just too painful somewhere around mid red maps.

There was a period where survival became a bit painful (again, around T14ish when i was only on about 4k hp). Pushing out to grab more gem sockets & running Arctic Armour helped (when we've got Inspirational ascendancy but don't yet have enlighten+pride, we can comfortably support the 35% reservation of arctic armour without enlighten). I've been spec'd into Wind Dancer most of the time, and have taken advantage of champion naturally supporting both armour & evasion.

Rather than go up past blood drinker & towards the shadow area, I grabbed an 8 passive physical cluster & used it with regular jewels (that had life). It means you can skip using intuitive leap & just path normally to those nodes, giving you fractionally higher dps in exchange for fractionally less life - but the major bonus is that you get more life+dps at the level 95ish point (most of the best stuff toward shadow is from the last 5 points).

All up, it's been enjoyable & doable. To really get the DPS going up past 3-5 million is going to be expensive, but that's the nature of physical archers. Despite this, it's definitely possible as a league start. You just need to be able to adapt a bit. Not sure I'd be quite so keen on doing it in SSF tho ;)