[S]Explosive Arrow Marauder by Slaydemkidz (lvl 96 HC) - For EXPERIENCED Players! (1.2.0)!

Explosive Arrow Marauder by Slaydemkidz (lvl 96 HC / lvl 100 SC)

First of all some things you need to know:

- This build is meant to be played in Hardcore! ... well it can be played in SC too. ;)
- Explosive Arrow has a pretty interesting mechanic: you can stack 1 - 5 arrows on 1 target and those arrows will explode after you stopped shooting at that target with Explosive Arrows for 1 second. The more arrows you stack the more damage does the explosion.
- Burning damage scales with the damage of the fire hit that caused the burning. That makes the burning of a five-stacked Explosive Arrow extremely strong, almost overpowered.
- Explosive Arrow's damage can only be increased by the gem combination and 'increased fire damage by %', 'increased projectile damage by %', 'increased burning damage by %' and 'area damage increased by %' on gear or the Passive Tree.
- As the damage is extremely high with the right gem combination there is almost no need for dps nodes. That's why you can focus on defense in the Passive Tree.
- The downside of Explosive Arrow is Elemental Reflect, it can oneshot you if you play bad. There is no excuse if that happens. You failed, reroll an easier character. If you know that you lose focus often you shouldn't even touch this build. It's extremely tanky but it's for experienced players, not for new players!
- The build runs no auras because it has Blood Magic. you will need some gear to fix that. You don't have any aura but in the end this build doesn't profit a lot from auras anyways.
- If you play this you are a high damage tank. You are supposed to run into enemies, blind them, blow them up and watch survivors burn to death. Keeping your range is only required on extremely hard maps. You can take hard hits, so help your group by tanking large packs.

My Passive Tree:

lvl 100:

Of course you can make adjustments regarding Dexterity / Intelligence / Resistances and Life. This game is about build diversity. If you feel you need something more than the things I recommend, take what you think has the best use for your character at that moment.

Bandit Rewards:

I got the life reward from bandits in Normal and chose to kill all of them in Cruel and Merciless. Although I would consider taking the Endurance charge aswell.

I will go further into some decisions I made in my tree:

- Blood Magic: Allows me to not use a Blood Magic gem on my Explosive Arrow and is probably the only way to play this build as the manacost is 119. With a Blood Magic gem it's even more and hard to sustain if you shoot like 5 arrows per second.
- Elemental Equilibrium: I have cold damage on one of my gear pieces and I use a Split Arrow - Chain combination so i can apply Elemental Equilibrium on enemies with the Split Arrow to reduce their resistance for fire (I will go into this even more later).
- Resolute Technique: Missing an Explosive Arrow while stacking them up would be bad for your damage and crits are bad for you too as they will oneshot you on reflect. In conclusion Resolute Technique helps this build with both of its effects.
- The Passive Tree contains almost all the Intelligence and Dexterity you will need for level 20 gems. If you have some of those stats on your gear you might change a few points.
- Life Regeneration: I have 700+ Life Regen. The reason for that is, that I don't have life leech on my Explosive Arrow. So most of the life I lose gets regenerated. I have Life Gain on Hit on my Split Arrow - Chain combination to heal up fast if necessary.
- Attack Speed: I have close to 5 attacks per second allowing me leech life fast with Split Arrow and fast stacking of Explosive Arrows
- Endurance Charges: By now it is pretty easy to keep those up and they bring me close to 90% Physical Damage Reduction even without auras.
- Life: Get as much as possible. You don't need dmg, You need life to sustain any incoming damage and hits on reflect monsters.

My Gear and Gem Choices (I tested a lot and this IS the best choice of gem combination you can make):

I use quill rain because, as mentioned earlier, there are no bows that can increase my dmg more than this one except for a +1 / +2 Bow in combination with Empower, but that would just make reflect too dangerous. The attack speed helps to stack up my arrows extremely fast, I just need about 1 second to stack 5 arrows.

The Split Arrow - Chain - Life Gain on Hit - Blind combination allows me to permablind every enemy near to instantly, leech life extremely fast (if you shoot at a large group with 5 attacks per second you get like 5000 life in 1 second) and of course, as I have cold dmg on 1 part of my gear, it allows me to lower the fire resist of enemies by 50% with the help of Elemental Equilibrium. By the way you should keep in mind that Lightning Thorns can be a problem for Split Arrow - Chain.

Some people might think Flammability would be better than Elemental Weakness, but it is not. It reduces the fire resist of enemies by 8% less than Elemental Weakness does (with Empower and Enhance this is even worse). I can ignore the ignite chance increase on Flammability because I already have 74% ignite chance and as I use Elemental Proliferation I only need to ignite one target. I'm going for Empower and Enhance on my curse soon to have the ultimate Elemental Weakness of doom.

The combination here is obvious, I always get free Endurance Charges and Molten Shell. I keep the trigger gem on level 1 to get those skills casted as often as possible. The Lightning Warp is just for quick repositioning and not affected by Cast when Damage Taken!.

Rest of my Gear:

The Ruby Flask might save your life when you shot into a reflect pack as it reduces the damage you receive by a lot.
I know the gear is crazy, but you need some decent gear to be resistance capped in Elemental Weakness maps without Purity.
Quality on gems is extremely important and I recommend having all gems on 20% as soon as possible.
With this gear I am able to do the craziest stuff like solo Double Boss + Minus Maximum Resistances Vaal or Double Boss Temple Piety with Multiple Projectiles. You can do stuff where usually everybody would leave the map - solo.

Now the most important part: How do you actually play this character? How does it work? In which order do you use your abilities? Why do you use cold damage to trigger Elemental Equilibrium and how and when do you do it?

So what I do is:

- I spot an enemy / enemies to kill.
- I shoot 5 Explosive Arrows on one of them, trying to hit an enemy that is in the middle of the group while also preferring to target monsters with low resists
- During the time it takes the arrows to explode, I curse them with Elemental Weakness.
- Before the arrows explode I start shooting Split Arrow to blind them, leech life, and to trigger Elemental Equilibrium with the small amount of cold damage that I have on my quiver. I chose cold damage because there are not that many builds that focus on cold damage out there. During the time I shoot Split Arrows I grant the enemies 25% additional Cold Resistance and reduce their Lightning and Fire Resistance by 50%. This helps my damage and the damage of any lightning damage build (and there are a lot of those out there). In groups you can support a bit with Elemental Equilibrium that way.
- The explosion itself triggers Elemental Equilibrium too, so that the monsters get 25% additional Fire Resistance during the time they burn. Because you don't want that to happen you continue shooting Split Arrows until like 1 second after the explosion so that the burning also profits from your Elemental Equilibrium.

Of course this has to go really smooth and needs some training.

That was a full rotation, that you can do on any boss or any monster, just care about reflect and you'll be fine. If you see Elemental Reflect just don't stack 5 arrows on them, try to shoot 2-3 arrows but not more.

If you receive too much damage, just spam Split Arrows, there is almost nothing that can kill you when you spam them.

If you happen to be in a minus Maximum Resistance + Elemental Reflect map try to replace your Increased Burning Damage gem with a Ranged Attack Totem gem to be safe. Don't dare to stack arrows in a map like that!

If you have any questions read the Q&A below or feel free to ask. You can also ask me ingame for some live footage of my build. ;)

Have a nice day everyone!

Slaydemkidz


Q&A:

Q: What would a 5 link setup look like?
A:
Q: Do you use arctic armor? It works vs reflect too.
A:
Q: Why Elemental Weakness and not Flammability? With Flammability +% quality gives burning duration.
A:

I would rly like to see all your gems and eq because i cant see the images and i dont think its only me :P could you update that?

On which level i should go for BM? You should make lvl progress with passive skill tree like... lvl20 tree lvl 40 etc.

That's weird, that you can't see the images, works fine for me and also for other people I asked :/

I will try to add more skilltrees for lower levels soon and explain how I leveled up, thx for the input :)

EDIT: I put the items in spoilers it might work for you now.

What bandit rewards did you get? thanks

Im confused with these EA builds, i have a level 62 EA mara before patch, and that build is VERY HEAVY fire damage and burn damage.

Whats changed? why are folks getting all this attack speed, and sooo little fire damage? Hate to spend my points if i dont fully understand whats up.

This build is considered for Hardcore and the thing which is most likely going to kill you is Elemental Reflect. So you try to scale most of your dmg into the burning. You want to keep the dmg of your explosion as low as possible and focus completely on tankyness as you don't need fire dmg nodes because of the ridiculous dmg of a 6L with 6 dps gems. I calculated my dps with this build and that's around 33k. No reason to go for more ... except you want to rip to reflect ;). The attack speed is great for leeching life with your Split arrow and you can stack up your arrows way faster.

I got the life reward from bandits in normal and chose to kill all of them in cruel in merciless. Although I would consider taking the Endurance charge if I had the possibility.

"

Xantaria wrote:

That's weird, that you can't see the images, works fine for me and also for other people I asked :/

I will try to add more skilltrees for lower levels soon and explain how I leveled up, thx for the input :)

No problem bro. But i still dont know on which level i should go for BM :DD
And since i cant see the images please tell me which gems ur using with EA. Thanks

Do you use arctic armor? It works vs reflects too :)

As Blood Magic you can't use that :/