BotW#7: Elemental Equilibrium Burning Bow Templar 0.9.11

NEW UPDATA:
Burnhard_61

OLD UPDATE:
My current passives:
Level 49
My goal:
Goal

My items and gems:

My playstyle:
- activate Clarity, Anger and Wrath
- gather some creeps
- place Spark/Cold-Totem (low mana cost!)
- place 1-2 Fire Traps next to it (high mana cost!)
- curse the approaching foes with Elemental weakness
- start shooting Burning Arrows combo and watch them panic while burning
- gather more creeps

My comments:
- This is AWESOME!
- Elemental Weakness is often enough to kill everything quickly, but I can kill a group of rares within seconds if I do my little combo.
- Burning humanoids are damn annoying because they tend to run back and forth due to the aoe-burning effects. It's kinda hard to aim at them headless chickens. However, it gives amazing crowd control and melee mobs simply don't attack you while standing in a fire trap.
- My hp is at 1200+200ES right now (I think) and I'll enter Merciless soon. This will have to be improved by better gear.
- Speaking of it. My gear is meh! I pick my gear mainly for the sockets. It's not easy to find a proper red-green-blue-blue item. My gloves will be replaced soon. I just have to make sure to have some cold damage from anywhere. The bow doesn't have elemental damage mods, so it's crap, but at least it's fast. And finally, I'm constantly looking for a good dex-quiver. Mine is lvl 28 and adds a lot of fire damage, therfore it's hard to replace.
- I'd love to show you guys this build in action, so I'll submit it for the build of the week once I reach Merciless

END OF UPDATE

Hi,
this is based on a thread over in the witch forum, but with the new patch, I think my plan can only be come as templar.
So here's my plan up to lvl 54 (if I counted right):
http://i.imgur.com/WYabU.jpg

The plan is to use a bow which is not so easy for the old man. I prepared my lvl 28 fireball templar for this build and I have to use 4 or 5 items just to get enough dex to carry a decent bow, so getting to the extra dex nodes is important.

The rest of the build is basically built around the following combo.

primary damage attack:
Burning Arrow+Ignite+Add Fire+Add Weapon Elem+Elem Proliferation

Auras:
Anger+Wrath+Hatred (and hopefully more)

support spells:
Elemental Weakness and a spell with cold and lightning damage (best should be ice spear+lightning+totem+gmp+smp+pierce, but a cold snap+lightning should also work fine)

The plan is to use both support spells to lower fire resistance by 90% and then hit with the primary.

It's not fully tested yet, but it seems to work. I'm still missing a few gems to realize the whole build.
Next week I'll give an update.

Cool.

I was wondering if you would post what happened to this char in the new patch.

Do let us know how it goes.

Have you tried elemental proliferation on a bow user with any cold? According to the forums it just kills the creature that would have proliferated.

Could you post a full build link when you've decided?

Hi,
I played for a while today. I took a bunch of dex and acc nodes, so that's no problem anymore. I wonder how it will be later, though, because there are really not a lot of dex nodes aroung.
Anyways, here's my current build:
Update

Now does it work?
Yes!
Do I need Elemental Equilibrium?
No! but it's nice to have.
Do I need any extra burn damage?
No! I basically one-shot everything. I get flashbacks from my elemental witch. It plays exactly the same! Just that I have to take health potions instead of mana ones. Which brings me to the next question:
Mana issues?
Nah! but I will have them soon. I have to do soemething about it. I hope finding a clarity aura solves my problem.
What's my main skill?

Why no elemental proliferation?
Cause mine is lvl 47 and I dont want to spend all my orbs on it to decrease the level. I'll wait for a bit longer, if I haven't found a new one, I'll degrade it.
Why no multiple projectiles?
... awkward silence ...

Okay, so that's it for the update. Now some more comments and thoughts that came to me while playing.

Firstly, I was playing around a little with the new secondary weapon slot. It would be awesome if I can prime my victims with lightning strike (+cold damage). That would increase my damage output a lot. Right now I use cold snap with lightning to decrease the creeps resis and it's fine, the slow/freeze gives extra crowd control, but it does very little damage. Also, the cast time is annoying in addition to that of the curse. I think an attack would be much better, but then I cannot run anger and I can't have +fire damage on rings and such. That's a problem, because I want to push fire as much as possible. I'll see, maybe there's a middle way.

Also, I don'T have any AoE. That's just plain stupid! I know. Anyways, I kill monkeys quite effectively with fire trap which benifits very nicely from extra burning damage (I think) and it also stacks with normal burn status effect (I think). However, I have to link it to lightning as well, otherwise it makes the creeps resistant to fire. The same accounts for molten shell! This is all pretty tricky and makes finding proper gear hard. I look forward to higher levels where I can expect more sockets per item.

So, there you go. At the moment it's just a simple elemental bow build and it works pretty well.

Oh, one more thing.
I'm always happy to see a fire resist mob because then I can actually try out the combo. And yes, if I just shoot arrows it takes forever, but once I used ele weakness and my cold snap, it's fine ... it's very handy in these cases!

Hi,
I the following update to my original post.

UPDATE:

My current passives:
Level 49

My goal:
Goal

My items and gems:

My playstyle:
- activate Clarity, Anger and Wrath
- gather some creeps
- place Spark/Cold-Totem (low mana cost!)
- place 1-2 Fire Traps next to it (high mana cost!)
- curse the approaching foes with Elemental weakness
- start shooting Burning Arrows combo and watch them panic while burning
- gather more creeps

My comments:
- This is AWESOME!
- Elemental Weakness is often enough to kill everything quickly, but I can kill a group of rares within seconds if I do my little combo.
- Burning humanoids are damn annoying because they tend to run back and forth due to the aoe-burning effects. It's kinda hard to aim at them headless chickens. However, it gives amazing crowd control and melee mobs simply don't attack you while standing in a fire trap.
- My hp is at 1200+200ES right now (I think) and I'll enter Merciless soon. This will have to be improved by better gear.
- Speaking of it. My gear is meh! I pick my gear mainly for the sockets. It's not easy to find a proper red-green-blue-blue item. My gloves will be replaced soon. I just have to make sure to have some cold damage from anywhere. The bow doesn't have elemental damage mods, so it's crap, but at least it's fast. And finally, I'm constantly looking for a good dex-quiver. Mine is lvl 28 and adds a lot of fire damage, therfore it's hard to replace.
- I'd love to show you guys this build in action, so I'll submit it for the build of the week once I reach Merciless

Have you sent this build into the build of the week yet? Or at least provide some visual for how this plays out.

Not yet.
Honestly, I have to get to Merciless first because I'm already lvl 50 and Ruthless is no challenge like that.
I was farming Fellshrine Ruins for too long. Now I'm constantly 2 lvl above the creeps. That's not really representative.
I try to do it by the weekend, but I hope they don't show some other elemental bow templar in the meantime.

One more question on my mind : Do you have any idea if this build is viable for PvP? Main problem I see with it is that it is most effective with your combo, which can be hard to pull off in PvP and that it seems heavily gear-based, and cut-throat is merciless in that regard.

How do you get fire trap to interact/not interact with the Elemental Equilibrium?
I know that the burning does not trigger the EE but the initial fire damage would only have cold. So should add resistance to fire and cold and reduce shock resistance.

With the setup you listed wouldn't the firetrap activate a totem?

It looks really fun. I am tempted to try one myself with very little variation on the skill tree to that.

Edit:
Oh and what are the bonus effect you get out of your +40% buffs?

Does it affect the Wrath and/or clarity?

Hi,

"

SmallestGriff wrote:

...PvP...gear-dependent...

Sorry, no idea. I have no experience with PvP in this or other games.
But I can give 2 comments about that anyways. Firstly, in PvP I'd probably not use a totem in the first place, depending on the number of enemies. I think cold snap with lightning would be ideal. It hits instantly with great range, it slows/freezes, the new cooldown is no issue and with 20% increased buff duration, I think the EE debuff will stay long enough. Also the low damage isn't an issue either.
About the gear. That truely is a bitch, but if you boil it down, the only problem is that you need to get at least a green-blue-blue-red combination. The rest is just 3-links and in many cases you can replace cold and lightning supp gems, but of course more is always nice to have.
The other issue is, that I still haven't decided yet what typ of gear to get in the end-game. Earlier, I basically stacked armor. that was nice damage reduction and being slow didn't disturb me too much. However, I am not planning on getting much more str, so I think that's actually the only option I'll have to exclude. Evasion gear would be okay too, I guess, but I hear that in the end-game neither evasion nor armor really help, so I might go for full ES gear after all. Taking ES+EVA or ES+armor would be better to get the slots right, I guess, but if you have enough cromatic orbs, that should not be such an issue either. Anyways, if someone has some advise on that I'd be glad to hear it.

Now to the (for me) easier questions:

"

Necessitysslave wrote:

How do you get fire trap to interact/not interact with the Elemental Equilibrium?
I know that the burning does not trigger the EE but the initial fire damage would only have cold. So should add resistance to fire and cold and reduce shock resistance.

Well, fire trap initially deals fire+cold, so it does screw my EE buff, but at least it doesn't give fire res. I always place the fire trap right on or next to the totem, so EE gets refreshed very quickly. In the long run, I'll probably connect it to lightning and cold to avoid that. In my dreams I connect fire trap, molten shell, cold, lightning, concentrated area and increased duration (I'm actually not sure if this effect the burning ground effect). If I face necromancers, I swap the fire trap with detonate dead, by the way.

"

Necessitysslave wrote:

With the setup you listed wouldn't the firetrap activate a totem?

Fire trap is uneffected by the totem (also no mana increase). I just put it there to safe a slot. However, nowadays I replaced it with either faster projectiles, greater multiple projectiles or pierce. I didn't figure out yet what's best. But it's not so important.

"

Necessitysslave wrote:

It looks really fun. I am tempted to try one myself with very little variation on the skill tree to that.

Please go ahead. It's actually quite easy to realize imo. But keep in mind, you'll be super overpowered with elemental bow damage. So, you don't really need EE, but it will become usefull in merciless ;-)

"

Necessitysslave wrote:

Oh and what are the bonus effect you get out of your +40% buffs?
Does it affect the Wrath and/or clarity?

Yupp, I my case, all auras, molten shell and phase run. All numericals are increased. But don't don't think the damage of molten shell is increased. That's part of the spell, not the buff! Similar for tempest shield, fyi.

BTW, if you can somehow adapt this to wand instead of bow, that would be awesome! I thought about that for so long, but I can't figure it out. For me burning arrow is just irreplaceable with the 20-30% ignite chance and extra fire and burn damage I get from it.
Edit: I should add that you cannot do this build with a full crit spec because you have to use cold damage for EE to work. And if you crit with cold there are no corpses and elemental proliferation doesn't continue burning after the kill. (reminds me, I think I never mentioned that burning corpses also burn nearby enemies)

I also just learned that the fire damage is also increased by projectile damage passives, so maybe one could also do something like this as ranger/shadow and beeline to all the burn damage.

Okay, I think that's all I had to say. Oh, and I'll nominate this build for the build of the week now. Go vote for it ;-)