[1.2.0] Lightning arrow bow ranger (3 Auras/ life based/ max dps/ good survivability)

Hi guys,


here is a new build I have made. It is a life based vaal pact bow ranger.


Pros:
- lightning is the best source of dmg in this game
- decent amount of life
- no probs with reflect or light thorns due to vaal pact/life gain on hit
- shock enemies with lightning arrow and chain projectiles to fast kill whole packs
- can do any map mods (see below section)
Cons:
- strong melee opponents can be annoying to deal with, especially if they leap slam/charge you or dig out on top of you (Devourers). This applies to pretty much any ranged build.


Idea:

Lightning arrow converts 50% of total physical dmg to lightning dmg so in effect it is 50% physical dmg and 50% lightning dmg. The idea was to stack a lot of phys dmg on the ranger part and boost that further with projectile and crit dmg nodes to support lightning and physical damage at the same time. The build is life based. With this spec you will shock enemies like crazy which is always a huge buff to any party or solo play. Also as your damage is of two different elements you won't suffer too much from reflect (eg if you had 300k raw phys dmg only without any conversion you might just die to reflect no matter the build)


Here is the build. (updated 1.2.0)

Vaal pact version (based on life leech and vaal pact):
http://tinyurl.com/l3uk33q


Alternative Life gain on hit version, due to life leech nerf in 1.1.0:

http://tinyurl.com/kepo35v - Acrobatics pure evasion build (ATM USED)
http://tinyurl.com/mokh5yh - Armor/Evasion mix build i.e. any defense option viable

Which version to take? The first one is based on life leech/vaal pact, the original idea behind this build. However the life leech nerf in version 1.1.0 has hit this build pretty hard. Right now (patch 1.2.0 and later) I would suggest to go for the 2nd version, which is based on life gain on hit.

Around 115 points (varies dependent on future tree changes) by intention to create an endgame build. Take the points last that you feel are least necessary (dmg/survival).
The projectile nodes are usually (depends on how much elemental dmg adds you have) preferred over raw physical nodes because they are applied to the final projectile dmg AFAIK based on threads like this one.
Example: 8% Proj node increases both, physical and lightning damage by 8%. On the other hand a 8% Phys dmg node increases both, physical and lightning damage by only 4% after conversion.
Update on the matter: Some tests have shown that you cannot generally say that either phys or proj nodes are better than the others. The final decision depends on your stats and the items that you use. I recommend to test it individually to optimize your build to the highest degree. If you are unsure or simply too lazy, just follow the tree above. It is very strong and the difference should be barely noticeable anyway (in my tests it was below 100 dps in case of a 8% proj node vs a 15% phys node).

Bandits:
Normal - kill all - 1 passive point
Cruel - kill all - 1 passive point (alternatively you could side with Kraityn for 8% IAS which is also quite good)
Merciless - power charge (frenzy charge also good)


Use the following skills gem combos:

Main attack (Bow): Lightning arrow, life leech, chain, blood magic (or weapon ele dmg if you are skilled into blood magic via passive tree), faster attacks, lower multiple projectiles 6L
Single target (Chest or other 4L if you use Kaoms): Frenzy, faster attacks, life leech, increased crit dmg (Increased crit chance, power charge on crit. Also good: Empower/Added fire dmg/Point Blank) 4-6L

Possible option for the rest of the gems:
Defense: Enduring cry, cast when dmg taken, increased area of effect, molten shell 4L
Curse + Immortal call: Critical Weakness (or conductivity/ele weakness), faster casting, increased duration, immortal call 4L
Auras: Hatred, grace, reduced mana, increased area of effect (Use one or two auras depending on how much mana is left if you dont use blood magic yet; once you reskill into it, you can spend all available mana on auras) 4L

One popular issue was that the blue geems needed too much int to use. You can get int most effectively via the 2 x 30-Int nodes which this build crosses, or from the unique amulet Astramentis, or other + high stats/int amulets. You can also stop leveling the gem for a while and continue leveling later, if you got enough int. Eventually you should try to max level all gems you are using though because the benefits per level are usually worth the effort to get some more int.

Note: Usually at some point your main will require too much mana for you to spam, because each linked support gem has a modifier to the mana costs as an offset to the benefits gained. To solve this you can use the mana leech support gem instead of chain early on. Chain is a very good gem for lategame, but it should not be used too early because its mana cost multiplier is especially high (200%). Later on you can skill into blood magic via the support gem (recommended) or via the respective passive on the tree. The former allows you to spend all your mana on auras. As an alternative mana leech from gear (as a % of phys dmg) might be sufficient to deal with the costs provided your phys dmg is high enough and you got very good gear. As an example, you need like 5,000 dmg per shot physical dmg to leech back 300 mana with 6% mana leech (0.06 x 5,000 = 300). That means your lightning arrow damage has to be 10,000 pure, because only 50% of it is physical.
Note-2: Reading some of the comments and having done some tests on my own I strongly suggest to use blood magic over mana leech eventually (ie higher levels) with this build. The problem is the huge mana cost multipliers of the mentioned gems and that mana generally regenerates too slowly. Blood magic on the other hand is very reliable because you always got a huge life pool.


Gear:

Look for bows with high physical dmg rolls (> 200%), ideally a good rare Harbinger bow (base crit), the unique Lioneye's Glare or a rare Thicket bow with good rolls. Note that Lioneye's is a much better choice for a high phys build than Voltaxic Rift.
Defensive gear: High evasion rolls + life + all elemental res + chaos res. Hybrid gear (armour + evasion) is even better than pure evasion if you got enough strength to use it.
Helm must be Alpha's Howl if you want to use 3 auras, otherwise you can run only 2.


My old gear after 1 week playing in Domination league:



My current gear:



With that gear I can easily melt through maps. Most of the stuff is selffound/crafted. The armor was very hard to 6-socket, but in comparison easy to 6-link.
I cannot play much anymore so I progress quite slowly. Casual ftw.


Deal with reflect and lightning thorns?

vaal pact OR life gain on hit gem provide insta leech


When to skill into vaal pact?

Be careful not to skill into vaal pact too early. The right point in time is when you are sure you can create enough life through life leech to always heal you back to full life in combat. That means you got a high level life leech gem and a decent life pool (3.75k+). Moreover see the following section which describes the flasks required. Another typical sign that your build needs change is when you notice that your damage becomes too high and got issues with elemental reflect.


Flasks:

Before vaal pact/leveling:
You can use the usual good instant heal life flasks + 1 quicksilver, granite/jade flasks + a mana flask.

Once you skilled into vaal pact:
2 life flasks plus 3 dispel flasks (carry those which you need most often and keep some rdy to swap for certain map mods):
granite + jade + quicksilver + (ruby + amethyst) with the following mods:
anti bleeding, anti shock, anti burning, maybe anti freeze or chill but these last 2 ailments don't happen a lot, and
+ recovery on crit hits as the second mod on all of the flasks.
If you got mana issues you can also use mana flasks but I'd recommend to use a mana leech gem (see above skill combos section) or to get gear with mana leech based on phys dmg to deal with them more effectively. Mana flasks are unreliable because they tend to be always empty if you need them most ;) Also if you are skilled into blood magic, you can relinquish any mana flasks.
You can also use a Diamond flask for higher dps.


Map mods:

Can do any map mods. One objection was 'Degeneration' map mods (players suffer chaos dmg over time). But these are no problem either. Obviously the luxury of instant leech doesn't come for free. So if you are suffering dmg and have no regen this could become a problem but can be easily dealt with:
- At the beginning of the map pop an Amethyst flask to optimally reach max chaos res. This mitigates the dmg so much you shouldn't have any issues anymore.
- Also pop a Quicksilver, run into mobs and leech back to full life. Usually in maps you will encounter a lot of mobs, so you can always heal easily just by attacking. Once only a few are left you probably don't want to search for them with this build (it's a nuisance anyway).
- Long-term you can aim for gear that provides high chaos res and the other res and life. This is usually expensive.
- Generally don't do these map mods with bad chaos res. Try to reach a value of 20-30 at minimum.


Auras (in case you use blood magic as a support gem):

Hatred for additional cold dmg based on your overall phys dmg (high dps increase)
Grace for ~ 2,000+ evasion
Haste for attack speed
Wrath for lightning dmg.
You can only use 3 of those auras using Alphas Howl and the above passive tree.


Why do you prefer life over ES, especially considering you are using vaal pact?

With this build you can get a lot more dps using life nodes. The ES nodes are too far away, especially the ones on the west side of the tree are not reasonable to get. I personally prefer to make use of all the good nodes which are nearby the ranger start. A build of high density is more effective than wandering around somewhere on the tree. Going for ES is possible (you would start as Scion), but does not provide as much dps AND we love DEEEEPS!


Some more on mana because it's been discussed quite a lot:

I absolutely recommend to go into blood magic eventually. Sustaining life is much easier than sustaining mana, and mana leech is generally limited (it works with a lag of some time until mana fills up + you won't have too much mana with this build just from leveling and without much int). You need rather high dps to make mana leech work, and some people argue that it is simply not a good option in case of a ranger LA build (pure phys builds are a different story).


Build has been finalized. Comments/critique/ideas always appreciated! Have fun if you use it.

So I was told Kripp stole my idea with life based vaal pact heh? :)
It was only a matter of time until people figured out that life pots are obsolete if you get vaal pact. You don't need an ES build to make it work

The main problem is the lack of any form of regen so you have to be a bit more careful, with CI you still get ES regen if you get smacked but if your get smacked to low health you either have to damage something or portal out. It works it just requires a little bit of watching and a few things can be annoying like poison stacks/ignite because after you kill the mob you still have the poison on you. You also are pretty much prevented from doing any chaos damage maps with this build which is one of the better map mods people prefer to do. The other downside is getting frozen as this build is almost guarenteed death if you do not have a flask.

"

Dan1986 wrote:

So I was told Kripp stole my idea with life based vaal pact heh? :)
It was only a matter of time until people figured out that life pots are obsolete if you get vaal pact. You don't need an ES build to make it work

Dunno if completely ignorant or troll.

"

Shipman wrote:

"

Dan1986 wrote:

So I was told Kripp stole my idea with life based vaal pact heh? :)
It was only a matter of time until people figured out that life pots are obsolete if you get vaal pact. You don't need an ES build to make it work

Dunno if completely ignorant or troll.

There was a smiley next to my comment in case you missed that. So I wasn't completely serious. In a game like this the options are limited and there are only so many things you can do so to invent sthg you would probably have to go back to closed beta.
Still it was amusing to hear that Kripp talked about a unique vaal pact life based build 1-2 days after I published this guide. It may be coincidence or not, and by the way who cares? Kripp is a very good theory crafter, so if he does it that only proves my point that it is viable.

"

Maethorr wrote:

The main problem is the lack of any form of regen so you have to be a bit more careful, with CI you still get ES regen if you get smacked but if your get smacked to low health you either have to damage something or portal out. It works it just requires a little bit of watching and a few things can be annoying like poison stacks/ignite because after you kill the mob you still have the poison on you. You also are pretty much prevented from doing any chaos damage maps with this build which is one of the better map mods people prefer to do. The other downside is getting frozen as this build is almost guarenteed death if you do not have a flask.

Fair arguments, however you are expected to use all kind of dispel flasks to counter the effects, as you cannot use life flasks. (made a new section above)
It is actually similar to CI, but better in that regard that you won't get stunned a lot, whereas in CI you basically are forced to use Eye of Chayula or the passive Unwavering stance (or the ranger passive Heart of Oak, but there was a thread which said that in effect that's not sufficient to counter stun. Prove me wrong if you tested it).
Also I made a slight change to the build to take the node which gives you 15% additional chance to avoid status ailment because it was only one additional point to reach it, and I took the armor nodes near vaal pact instead of the life nodes behind troll's blood (which is useless under vaal pact) to better deal with phys reflect and boost armor even more.

Why are you prevented to do chaos dmg mods? I think you confuse some things here. As a life based character chaos dmg is not a problem. By definition it bypasses energy shield, but as a life based character you don't have much energy shield anyway. If you mean in terms of regen - yes you are expected to attack mobs to leech back to full life, but that's not different from a regular ES vaal pact build in any way? I mean ES only replenishes if you are not attacked, but if you are suffering from chaos dmg per second I would assume that accounts as an attack, or not? With regard to Ignite and Chaos dmg you can use dispel burning and Amethyst flasks.

Finally I wanna add that in absolute lategame there is only 1 thing that can really kill you: reflect or lightning thorns. Vaal pact makes sure that this issue is solved. There might still occur dangerous situations, but if your dmg and your leech is high and you constantly attack, that's the safest way to deal with it imho.

How would you rate this Scion start build?

I haven't played PoE since Closed Beta and now that I've returned, I wanted to do a VP build with crit, and I've always enjoyed Lightning Arrow. I was just making some builds with ranger/shadow/scion starts when I came across yours. But I've also come across threads about how LA got nerfed and it can't even shock on crit, stuff like that. Dunno if they're true or not, so I would like some fresh info about that if possible.

Thanks in advance :)

Hi,

LA was stronger in that it had a chance to shock on hit pre-nerf (which was a long time ago), and I think the chance increased with the level of the gem.
But that doesn't affect the gem too hard, because you can still shock via the regular crit chance which can be boosted up by passives. Imho it is still one of the strongest gems, because you can stack so much lightning damage. If you compare that with other lightning skills (eg arc, nova etc), the dmg can become much higher, which in effect makes shocks last longer.

Your build looks pretty good! It is similar to mine, but you chose to take the Scion projectile nodes. I could take these as well eg instead of the armor nodes near vaal pact to increase dmg even more at the cost of safety. You also didn't take some of the AS nodes I took. The thing is that dps is scaled by both, dmg and AS, and if you got too much dmg already you will profit a lot more from AS increase - therefore you want to have a good mix of both. But it really depends on the particular numbers. However, you also leech faster with higher AS, which in effect gives you more safety as a vaal pact life based build. But it might not be necessary. Especially as a ranger you are not directly at the front so you can stack more dps over safety if you like to play 'cannon-mode'. The only thing I would not take is the scion mana regen point, because you won't have much mana anyway and regen is kind of a joke (even with all possible supports it is hard if possible at all to regen enough mana to spam a 6-linked ability). Instead I'd suggest to rely on mana leech.

Looks like you modified your build to an extent after checking out mine :)
I've finalized my LA build, with a ranger start, 505% crit chance / 190% multiplier and decent life/armor while staying under 110 points. Pretty sure you'll love it so here you go:

Feel free to suggest improvements.
Gl & hf.

Hey Ulquiomaru,

Yeah due to your build I came to the conclusion that the 3 elemental nodes at the Ranger start are not the best idea, because they only boost lightning damage, whereas the projectile nodes at the Scion start boost both, phys and elemental dmg. Also I think Unwavering Stance is a huge bonus in boss fights vs eg Dominus. You can play the Ranger like a tank.

Your new build is actually very similar to one I had made before 1.0. I like it, but it is very much a glass cannon build - you don't have as many life or armor nodes. A lot of armor comes from all the evasion nodes I take near the Scion area, which is converted via Iron Reflexes, and a lot of life comes from the life circle there. Also you are taking Golem's Blood for 1.5% life regen but you cannot regen anything with vaal pact.

Here's a little bit of a safer version. You could go even further by going for the whole life circle, but it really depends what you wanna do - Nemesis/Domination, PVP, full dps mode.

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