[1.0.3] Vaine's Blood Magic & Critical Frenzy/LA Build

Great build there, though I have a little trouble balancing resists with it (but I guess late game gear will take care of it).

What do you think about this bow? Will it last me till the end of merciless and after that?

Welp, at level 81 I can say without a doubt this build works better than Blastrophe's does when using best in slot, or close to it gear.

the only problem it seems to have is your survivability takes a huge shit with the blood magic gem. Even with a legacy kaom's the mana cost mod of the BM gem on LA makes it cost way too much health compared to just speccing into BM and not running auras.

I get about 800 more DPS with this build solo than I do using blastrophes, but I also don't survive as well when tanking a pack of monsters in 71+ dungeons. The health cost is just so high with those BM gems.

One more thing, I really prefer how Hatred is working with this build, as opposed to Anger and Wrath you're using. Hatred adds a good pile of damage to the build, and also when you crit (and you crit a lot), you get cold crits as if you were a cold crit witch with FP, freezing mobs en masse. Sometimes I can freeze the whole screen of monsters, sometimes using Frenzy I can freeze a rare mob a few times mid-swing as he tries to strike me, each time for a couple seconds, so he can't effectively hit me or move, just eats more arrows.

Anger and Wrath add flat ele damage (and I think at my current lvl 61 it's less than from Hatred for both these auras), so they don't scale as well as Hatred that just adds 1/3 more damage, and neither does the sort of paralyzing effect that Hatred causes through cold crits...

hmm. for LA, how is fork instead of chain?

and I'm lev 57 and my damage feels reall low. 420 dps on LA.

what is wrong?

My bow dps is 62-189 1.40attack speed.

and in the passive tree I"m going for the damage nodes first from the build in this guide but I feel my damage is toooo low...

can you help me sir....

WOW

the 1.02 patch just reordered the Heavy Draw and Deadly Draw passives

now it seems it takes more points to reach?

How did you change your tree Vaine?

hope he updates this build soon

I respecced into the same major nodes today. Works at least as well as before the change. I think it costed me one extra DEX node to get to the Deadly Draw cluster. I also took all the +30 INT/STR nodes near my route, very tricky playing with red and blue gems on your gear without having more than a 100 base of each attribute (which allows lvl 15 of gems).

I still strongly prefer the setup with blood magic gems as opposed to going through half of STR tree to reach BM passive. So that extra STR is warranted IMO. Two (three?) auras well make up for any support gem I could possibly put in there with my frenzy and LA. They do even in solo, in party play they are just priceless.

My entire skilltree had got a reset today, not only the few points in the area that changed. Actualy a good thing because I wanted to respec stuff and now I don't need respec points for that.
My problem was the older build that used the BM passive at the far left. pretty "cheap" but I couldn't use any auras, not even with reduced mana gems and passives. So the overall DPS was lower without some damage supporting auras.
Now I could respec to the current build but the problem is I only have 4l items so I would have to trade one valuable damage slot per skill for BM support gems which again cost DPS (or life leech if I replace this gem). I have to claculate which is better because the use of BM support gems has obviously many advantages when it comes to aura usage these days. Hmm...

What do you think, BM support gem build even viable with only 4l items at all? Or do I have to use ye olde BM keystone again that prevents me from using any auras?

Updated. Naturally lost some dps due to the changes to the Deadly Draw cluster. I wonder how many times they're going to nerf the ranger area before they're satisfied.

I'm not sure what to upgrade next. I know I'm packing a lot of bad MF gear. I'm slowly switching that over to better gear.

Not exactly sure how I will do MF, I may end up with 2 sets and just swap gear on dom/piety kill. I may do that with another character or I may just level a MF farm character.

Some of those gems are extras/other character gems that I'm leveling.
I took advantage of the free respect and finally went BM gems.

What should I focus on? I was leaning towards Jewelry.