Chaos Acolyte [Poison Arrow, Viper Strike, Shock] [IR/EB/MoM/AA] Potential 1.2.0 Tree in Latest Post

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Iao wrote:

Thanks, Velkor. Your build sounds like it'd be pretty cool. A bow with those modifiers seems like it'd be pretty damn rare, though. Definitely let me know how it goes man!

The Remote Mine + Trap combination turned out to be a bit too tedious after some testing. Although I didn't want to have to include it, Concentrated Effect seems to be a better candidate for the socket. The damage would be a little lower but when it comes to damage over time it's not very noticeable. Of course Carcass Jack would be optimal (other than Kaom's Heart) considering the reduced area of effect radius.

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Velkor wrote:

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Iao wrote:

Thanks, Velkor. Your build sounds like it'd be pretty cool. A bow with those modifiers seems like it'd be pretty damn rare, though. Definitely let me know how it goes man!

The Remote Mine + Trap combination turned out to be a bit too tedious after some testing. Although I didn't want to have to include it, Concentrated Effect seems to be a better candidate for the socket. The damage would be a little lower but when it comes to damage over time it's not very noticeable. Of course Carcass Jack would be optimal (other than Kaom's Heart) considering the reduced area of effect radius.

Here's the best bow I found for my build :

I still need to 5L it. But before investing fusing in it, I'll try to find a similar bow but with a Harbinger base instead of Spine bow.

Also, I'm still hesitant to start this build because the damage output I'm calculating for a Poison Arrow trap is underwhelming. Even if my passives provide pretty decent bonus to Poison Cloud trap damage (+283%), I'm calculating very modest dps, even at high level.

Lets take my planned 5L Poison Arrow setup with Trap+Concentrated Effect+Empower in a +2 to bow skills Bow. The 5th link would be Increased Duration or Increased area of effect but neither have an impact on the dps.

So the +2 bow and Empower means a level 24 Poison Arrows. I can't find it on the wiki but let's assume a level 24 Poison Arrows deal 400 chaos damage per second.

If we multiply 400 by 1.69 (for level 20 concentrated effect), we get 676 damage. Then, if we multiply 676 by 1.34 (for level 20 trap), we get 906 damage. We can then multiply 906 by 3.95 (283% multiplier from passives + 12% from the Carcass jack), we get 3578 damage per second. That's it.

Of course, it gets better if we multiply that number by 1.9 (with max shock stacks) and by 1.4 (Vulnerability curse). The damage becomes 9519 damage per second. Pretty decent.

However, if I want to compare PA dps with other skills' dps, it's fairer to compare the base dps (without curse and shock stacks) because almost any skill can be boosted by shocks and curse.

So the number to compare is 3578 dps. This seems low compare to skills I'm using with my other characters. For instance, my Freezing Pulse Shadow is doing 7500 dps with LMP. If it shotguns, that means 22,500 dps. My Spectral throw Ranger is dealing 10,000 dps with LMP. ST can't shotgun, but it can hit lots of targets (twice) in a large area. So, over a many seconds, the dps output is closer to 20,000. Each one of these ability can be increased with a curse and each of them can benefit from shock stacks.

In other words, I'm wondering if I miss something about the Poison cloud mechanics that would make it better than it seems on paper....

Of course, Poison Arrows can't crit so I think it loses lots of dps potential because of that. But is there anything that compensate for that ?

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Sydius wrote:

Hey really Love the build and took some ideas and made a 4 dot build. Would love some thoughts from your experience. Thanks for your time! http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/708579

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Araycan wrote:

Any gameplay videos in maps with this (not some similar) build?

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Iao wrote:

A lot of Poison Arrow and Viper Strike's power comes from the fact that you can use them a few times and essentially ignore the enemies you already "marked", letting the skills last their full duration to deal a lot more damage than just their DPS.

You can then start using other skills to stack damage and/or use skills that amplify the damage even further. Considering the total damage dealt over full duration, it is extremely cost effective and requires little preparation or time investment compared to the constant skill use of other builds. Less time investment also means more time to avoid the attacks of enemies, so it's beneficial defensively.

Less time investment in this case also means faster clear speed. Contributing to that, there's a guaranteed value of damage being inflicted every second, rather than being based on a range of values like almost every other skill. Poison Arrow's poison cloud also bypasses accuracy, and Viper Strike is so loaded with the Dexterity taken from the tree that you'll hit just about every time. Avoiding RNG makes these skills very reliable.

Overall it takes a bit of getting used to, but once you know the play style it makes playing solo pretty damn easy. The biggest problem with the skills is the loss of effectiveness in parties, considering the curses you need to use and the multiplication of enemy life. However, being a source of shock proliferation is pretty helpful and sometimes certain bosses like Storm Herald and Corrupting Blood are easy to handle in Nemesis. Basically there are a lot of subtle pros and cons to this kind of play style. I guess it just depends on preference.