[1.1.X] The 12 charges Frenzy Archer (MoM/EB) [Videos]

Introducing my level 86 ranger, Tuula : The 12 charges Frenzy Archer (Passive tree Link)

Highlights

-Use LMP-Frenzy as main skill for both single and multiple targets (~25k dps self-buffed)
-8 Frenzy charges (with Darkray vector boots) and 4 power charges
-High mana regen thanks to Eldtritch Battery
-Mind over Matter Keystone
-3 Auras : Clarity, Wrath (or Purity of Element) and Hatred (or Grace).
-High Evasion, particularly against projectiles thanks to Ondar's guile
-16% chance to dodge (with Darkray Vectors boots and 8 frenzy charges)
-Approximately 4000-4500 life

Build description: An evasion/life archer build that uses frenzy for both single and multiple targets. Frenzy's mana cost making it very mana intensive, particularly with a fast bow, the keystone Eldtritch Battery (EB) is the perfect solution. Eldtrich Battery + a good amount of energy shield provides the mana/mana regen required for frenzy, Mind over Matter and allows the use of 3 auras : Hatred, Wrath and Clarity. To maximize dps, the build pick up many +physical dmg passives, attack speed passives and Critical Strikes passives. To get the full benefits of the build, the bow should have high physical dmg (to maximize damage and mana/life leech), high speed and also high local critical strike chance. Why "12 charges"? Because, ultimately, the character get up to 8 frenzy charges and 4 power charges.

Class: The class that works best with this build is the Ranger because of her easier access to the build's most important passives :

3 x Maximum Frenzy Charges : +3 to Maximum Frenzy Charges
Eldritch Battery : Convert all Energy Shield to Mana
Ondar's Guile: Double Chance to Evade Projectiles Attacks
Mind over Matter : When Hit, 30% of Damage is taken from Mana before Life.

Bandit quest rewards (my choices are underlined :

Normal : 40 life reward, 8 to all resists or the passive skill point.
Cruel : Passive skill point or +18% to physical dmg.
Merciless : Additional Frenzy charge (This one is a must)


Skills used:

Main skill : Frenzy. With a Maximum of 8 frenzy charges, each providing 12% increased physical dmg and 23% increased attack speed. For a total of +96 increased physical dmg and 184% increased attack speed. With good equipment (especially a good bow) and supported by 4 gems : Added Fire Damage, Lesser Multiple Projectile (LMP), Physical Projectile Attack Damage and Power Charges on Crit, it simply destroys everything thrown at you. At 46 mana per attack and 4,6 attacks per second, it's not cheap. However, it pays off : 3 projectiles, each doing 22k dps at very long range. The mana cost, 212 mana per second, is covered with the mana regen (~100 per second), the mana leech and the large available mana pool (around 325).

This is your bread and butter skill, used for single targets and groups. Even with the damage penalty of LMP, its dps is high enough to kill single targets very fast and the multiple projectiles helps with the aiming. The other benefit of having only 1 main skill for both single targets and groups is that it frees up sockets for other important skills and auras.

Offensive Curse: Projectile weakness. Doing almost half/half elemental and physical damage, elemental weakness or vulnerability are out of question. That leaves Projectile weakness (34% More Damage, 74% Chance to Pierce, 23% chance to knockback, 68% reduced evasion from enemies) and Critical Weakness (80% more damage from Crit, 9% more chance to crit). Critical weakness would no doubt provides more raw dps, but most of that extra dmg would be overkill. Projectile weakness increases damage more evenly and also provide other beneficial effects : Pierce, accuracy and knockback. In large party (3+) and against high life bosses, critical weakness is probably better though. So, its not a bad idea to level both curses and use the best one for the situation.

Defensive Curse : Enfeeble. This not only reduce damage output of monster by a large margin, it reduces their chance to crit and their crit multiplier. Even better, it also significantly reduce their accuracy which really benefits an evasion character like our Frenzy Archer. In my opinion, for that build, it is better than temporal chains.

What to use, offensive or defensive curse ? My suggestion is to use the defensive curse for most content. Enfeeble basically work like the Armor the character doesn't have because of his focus on evasion. Also, the regular dps of the build is so high that the benefit of an offensive curse is limited, particularly when soloing. In "Players are cursed with enfeeble" maps or when you need to pierce, projectile weakness can be useful though.

Totem: Rain of Arrows totem. Supported by Faster Attack and Increased critical damage. The totem benefits from pretty much all my offensive passives and auto-aim with a big area of effect. For a small mana cost (56), the totem is dealing a constant 5400 dps with my current gear and passives. I use it all the time. It effectively increase my dps by approximately 25%. Its simply too good to ignore, especially against hard content.

Auras: Wrath, Hatred (or Grace) and Clarity. Hatred aura is boosted by pretty much all the "damage focused" passives and provides a huge dps boost as well as defensively useful status ailments (freeze and chill). Wrath also gives a big dps boost thanks to the very high attack speed, crit chance% and crit multi of the character. In addition, it provides very reliable shock stacks. Against harder content, I suggest to use Grace instead of Hatred. They are both green gems and cost 60% mana so they can be easily swapped. Similarly, In Elemental weakness maps, I use Purity of Element instead of Wrath.

Mobility skills: Lightning Warp.

Other skills : Other skills like frost wall, zombies, spectres, skeletons, etc. could be useful but the problem is the lack of available sockets. So you'll have to prioritize. I'd rather have fewer well supported skills than more unsupported skills. But your mileage may vary.

My gear and skills setup:



Offense:

With my main skill Frenzy, linked with Physical projectile attack damage, Added Fire dmg, LMP, Power Charges on Crit and Item Rarity, I deal approximately 22,500 dps (with 8 frenzy charges + 4 Power charges). With a 5th support gem (increased critical chance), the dps is over 25,500 dps. Rain of Arrow, linked with Ranged Attack Totem, Increased Critical Damage and Faster Attack, deal approximately 5,500 dps (with 8 frenzy charges + 4 Power charges).


Defenses:

With so many points invested in Dexterity (302 dex from passives), evasion% and Ondar's Guile keystone, the best choice for defense on gear is evasion. With my current gear and without Grace, I have about 5,500 evasion which is enough to provide 37% chance to evade melee attacks and 74% against range attacks (vs level 79 monsters). With Grace, I have 11,106 evasion which translates into 51%/95% chance to evade melee/range attacks. In term of life, the build provides +126 flat life, +204% life and +1% life regen per second. That's enough to get your life to around 4000-4500 and your life regen per second to approximately 40-45.

In addition, 8 frenzy charges combined with Darkray Vectors boots provides 16% chance to dodge.

Finally, Mind over Matter provides up to 30% damage mitigation and I have 400 available mana. If the incoming damage is higher than 1200 and/or the mana globe isn't full (under 400), then the MoM damage mitigation is lower than 30%.

How to deal with Physical Reflect

Doing very high physical damage (especially with high crit chance/damage) means physical damage reflection can be a problem. Against physical reflect Rare Monsters, the best solution is to use Rain of Arrows totem (5.3k dps). With slow shooting, granite and life potions, you can also use frenzy.

Also, there's a hidden benefit of MoM against reflection : It makes you go out of mana when you hit reflect monsters. When out of mana, you can't hurt yourself anymore (or not as much - you use normal attacks) and also it quickly makes you realize something is going wrong.

In Physical reflect maps though, I've found this not to be a very good solution because RoA totems keep getting killed by their own reflections, so you constantly have to recast it. Tedious.

So, here's the best solution I came up with : Instead of Frenzy, I use Lightning Arrows (LA). LA, in addition to converting 50% of your physical dmg to lightning, hit more targets for lower damage (70% dmg effectiveness instead of 110%). So monster armor are more efficient against the physical damage it deals. For even less physical dmg and more elemental dmg, I replace Physical Projectile Attack Damage by Faster Attack and Added Fire Dmg by Weapon Elemental dmg. And instead of RoA totem, I use Frenzy supported by Weapon Elemental Damage, Added lightning dmg and Faster Attack. Like this :



With this setup, Lightning Arrows deals 14,700 dps. And elemental frenzy deals 32,353. Since Lightning Arrows hit more targets than Frenzy, this setup is almost as good as my normal one to clear maps.

Video :

5 min gameplay video - lvl 71 map (Level 86, 12 charges, Patch 1.0.5)
2 min gameplay video - 71 map (Level 83, 11 charges, Open Beta build)

In the Open beta video, there are many difference with the current build : Lower total Life (6 life per level and 6% life passives), 7 auras instead of 3, No Mind Over Matter, No darkray Boots. It still give a good idea of the gameplay.

Saw your post a while back have been following it with my own changes in the last 20 odd points to *complete* your tree.

Can I just ask if you faced any difficulty following your build. It just seems there is a lot of focus of high socket bows as well as high mana pools and life/mana leech.

Just want to share ideas with you and make this work.

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgIBAdEFtQzyDkgPqxEvEZYUUhUgFfAZtBn-GwEhdiT9JT8mlSo4Kk0qWyyFLOkwfDH6Mn42PTnUPs8_J0p9UUdVS1b6Whph4megapNsFm1sbXtuaW6qb_JwUnDVdEF08Xb3d9d_K3_Ggh6D24bOhxmHdohrjDaNv5LNlQWbjZ2jnrmgn6GkokCio6XLpzSqf6q4q8WsR66Tr-uxMLQatUi2Qbb3vea-p8APwFHB88SixLjKqc5x0hnVANX41orW0dsL3Q3exuKA4svjhOdU53TqYvPq9Pj5Y_qx_Ev8q_zF

Hi, very nice build!

I have a question regarding mana. You wrote that you have 2100 mana.
How do you do it? According to my estimations, you have 600*1.18 = 708 (from eldrich battery gear), 192*1.18 = 230 form discipline, 70*1.3 = 91 (from int), 308*1.3 = 400 (from level), That adds up to around 1330 mana.

What am I missing?

"

jmilosze wrote:

Hi, very nice build!

I have a question regarding mana. You wrote that you have 2100 mana.
How do you do it? According to my estimations, you have 600*1.18 = 708 (from eldrich battery gear), 192*1.18 = 230 form discipline, 70*1.3 = 91 (from int), 308*1.3 = 400 (from level), That adds up to around 1330 mana.

What am I missing?

You forgot +energy shield from int. I have 200 int so +40%. And also, I have +36% mana from passive (not +30%) and this also apply to my energy shield.

"

Dykari wrote:

Saw your post a while back have been following it with my own changes in the last 20 odd points to *complete* your tree.

Can I just ask if you faced any difficulty following your build. It just seems there is a lot of focus of high socket bows as well as high mana pools and life/mana leech.

Just want to share ideas with you and make this work.

Link

As you can see, I updated my original post with my current progress. I'm doing pretty good overall. I don't even need more than 4 links to deal close to 30k dps (10k dps x 3 projectiles). So imagine with a 5L.

A High mana pool and mana leech is pretty much mandatory but Eldritch battery and Mind drinker passives take care of that. Life leech is nice but its not a "must have". Currently, I have 0 life leech and have no problems.

I see that you picked up Iron Grip and Vaal Pact. Iron Grip is a 5 passives investment. With my current Str, it would give me 22% increased physical damage. That's a total of 4.3% per point. Not very good at all. So I don't think it worth it that much. For me at least. You may have higher str than I.

Same for Vaal pact. I'd need a lot of life leech to sacrifice life regen and life potions. I don't think i'd ever pick it up. I like my current life regen that offset chaos damage per second in Maps.

But if you want to take Vaal pact, then there's no reason to pick up the 1% life regen passives. And you might as well take the 8%-8%-12% life cluster right by Vaal Pact Keystone.

With the same amount of passives, it would provide an additional 12% to life :

Suggestion

Very nice and strong build, thank you!
What do you think, about this? I tried to create build, according to you?
I hope, that you find something what help you to.

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgQAmy0XHbe2jX7NmL6nbmnEuNX43sbqYvqxGbTK0yzpapO2QVoaLIV08Z65IWBAoAUtxFgn1WBLeu907e9OMgndDbQa4sslP9qNh0H8xVb6dEF3138rZ6CHdkp91oowfFFHPs-95m_yOdSgnzH6dvfKqY2_BbUM8qXLqriqf4cZNj2Ia-OEwFFw1XBS8-oOSKc0EZado_yrf8aio8Hzgh7bC9A5F9he-iF28Xa29xEvmZrrYw==

I cannot see your passive skill tree, it just shows a default 113 unspent points

This guy who posted above's tree works and is based on it loosely:

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgQAmy0XHbe2jX7NmL6nbmnEuNX43sbqYvqxGbTK0yzpapO2QVoaLIV08Z65IWBAoAUtxFgn1WBLeu907e9OMgndDbQa4sslP9qNh0H8xVb6dEF3138rZ6CHdkp91oowfFFHPs-95m_yOdSgnzH6dvfKqY2_BbUM8qXLqriqf4cZNj2Ia-OEwFFw1XBS8-oOSKc0EZado_yrf8aio8Hzgh7bC9A5F9he-iF28Xa29xEvmZrrYw==

I've been following this build as a general guideline and having fun. I've been paving the world in arrows and loving it.

As far as feedback, the cornerstones of this build are quite nice. I can say that Arrow Dodging is awesome, and having skeletons around makes your lifespan ever-so much better, and a Range totem throwing Rain of Arrows with Culling strike is amazing. 6 stack frenzy with the two duration things is very comfortable, and EB helps tons with mana (yay discipline aura).

One thing to be wary of: OP claims that if the triple-split Frenzy hits the same target with three projectiles, it'll take triple-damage. From what i've read and my experience, his is not, in fact, the case. Only one projectile hits.

Once I take some crit nodes and get some more HP nodes in I think I'll be doing well. I've soloed with this build through to Merv on Cruel so far.

"

The idea of this build is to use a Bow with Frenzy as your main skill. Frenzy's mana cost making it very mana intensive, the keystone Eldtritch Battery (EB) is the perfect solution

imho
any +%physical mana leech ( even mind drinker ) is a much better solution, if it is just to handle the cost of frenzy.
Saying that you chose EB for having many auras is more of an argument though.

IF you go for EB, get at least arctic armour because you should be able to handle the cost of it.

My first post about the Crit Frenzy Archer build was in January 2013.

Since then, lots of patches and changes went through. They generally improved the build quite a bit. Accuracy and Evasion were buffed. Physical damage was buffed. Critical chance % nods were buffed. Life nods were nerfed but so was monster damage. Elemental resists passives were nerfed but the build isn't affected much (-2%).

So with very similar gear and level (from 78 to 82), my dps went from 10,000 (4L) to 18,500 (5L). And despite the nerf to normal life nods, my life went from 2,700 to 2,850 because of the newly introduced evasion/life nods. Also, my build includes more life nods and less dps nods than before.

Also, a new gem, "Power Charge on crits", was introduced. with 1 passive to get an additional power charge, I now get +200% crit chance for 110% mana modifier instead of 125% crit chance (Critical Strikes support gem) for 115% mana modifier. As an added bonus, the power charges are also boosting my Rain of Arrows totem dps which now deal 5500 dps (4L) compare to 3000 dps (4L) in january.

All in all, the build that was already strong in january is even stronger now.

I decided to change the name of the build to "The 11 charges Frenzy Archer". Its easier to say and to remember.