[1.xx] Islidox's Build tips/critique section for Rangers

@DustyLenz: glad to have helped. Here's what I recommend:


Looking at your build, there's a few tweaks I can make with 100 points, which mainly involve speccing out of Unwavering Stance and getting Heart of Oak, Ballistics Mastery, and Aspect of the Eagle.

With Heart of the Oak, you really don't need Unwavering Stance, and you get life/regen bonus as well. Also, I took out the path leading to Inner Force. An 18% buff is no longer worth the journey if all you're using are 3 auras. At least, that's my opinion. It leaves you free to get more bow-related notables.

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Gobla wrote:

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Islidox wrote:

@Gobla: I've went up against a physical reflect mob, but it seemed like I was getting hit for a majority of the time. (45% chance to evade, translating into a 90% chance to evade projectile attacks.) I'll need to test this further because I know what you're saying sounds right, but my experience differed. It's possible that I used up my entropy cycles while fending off a pack surrounding the phys reflect mob, but I'll have to test that again to really see if you can avoid a majority of the reflect. That also means getting the boss alone for best results.

Well the evasion formula is still set up to highly disadvantage stacking pure evasion and with physical reflect coming from rare monsters who still have a lot of accuracy it's entirely possible that instead of 45% your actual actual evasion chance against that specific mob is much lower, causing it to burn through your entropy stack much faster. Even if all the other mobs are normal ones with low accuracy that mob alone would cause your entropy to cycle much faster.

If your experience is that then it may very well be that I've overestimated the decrease GGG implemented for mob accuracy and that, especially for rare monsters, it's still more than high enough to require practically impossible levels of evasion rating for a decent evasion chance. There's still an exponent in the evasion formula, meaning that every increase in accuracy must be matched vast increases in evasion rating up to the point where you can literally double your evasion rating to little effect.

If you're up for an experiment, you might try using both blind support gem and enfeeble on reflect mobs. Unlike stacking evasion, reducing enemy accuracy has, thanks to the same formula, huge effects on your evasion chance. This should produce a noticeable effect, although I'm not sure if blind actually applies to reflect ( it probably should, but seeing the bugs that existed with spell block, spell dodge and Ondar's Guile not applying I'd not be surprised if it didn't work ).

From what I could tell, it seems that Ondar's Guile isn't working against reflect damage. Evasion works, as it seemed like every other hit would be reflected back to me (45% chance to evade). But if Ondar's Guile is supposed to work, then I should be relatively free of reflect damage (90% chance to evade projectiles) but I'm most definitely getting hit by reflect every other shot.

This was after getting a phys reflect mob boss alone. Popped a Decoy totem up and watched my HP lower itself every other attack.

Dodge is viable on Onslaught now?

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jika wrote:

Dodge is viable on Onslaught now?

I have no answer to that since I dabble in SC/Anarchy. Dodge by itself (+ Phase Acrobatics) is nowhere near enough as a defense system. You need lots of Evasion and Enfeeble + Blind for it to really be a viable defense system in HC/Onslaught, backed up by tons of life.

Could I get another look at the Split Phys CI build? :)

It is on page 30, I assume most things are still the same apart from the passive tree.

Here is my go at it:


Thank you :D

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Islidox wrote:

The BOW builds

[snip]


Build 7: Elemental Frenzy/IceShot Ranger using IG, IR, RT, and Icebite

Spoiler

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgIBm42v6wgu7YMZjgBe0359df66u-PEotwVp9T-yBn-GwEF-RXwOlgEfocZ-WO95j7PGtvuDiP27_BaSFb6_MXdDVuvZ6CHdkp93UZjp_xOGNtDnA6tKaV08Z65LIVaGrZBIWBAoAUtYEt673Tt704yCUMx32-E72EhGlVkozboOlLfv1iveA2pbk3jrFn-j7Xybqoyfq6Tplc64Yjxeri3Psau_gryRedjPC3E9ift892sqnKpfNlZ88AakFWnhBo47DhX4jKJd-UEsxRNogDwHwJxkAo=

After the buff to the Duelist tree, Iceshot builds are becoming pretty neat to play around with. As such, grabbing the Icebite notable in the Duelist tree is key to this build. Also, since the Hatred aura adds cold damage as a % of your physical damage, the BM keystone is not chosen for this purpose and mana regen/leech is key. Frenzy for single-target skill and Ice Shot (with LMP + Fork) is your AoE skill. Ice Shot can also be used for single target, but Frenzy does more damage overall. 2 flat-cost auras and 2-3 %-based auras can be used.

With the new tree, I wanted to try an Ice Shot ranger for the first time. However, I was confused by your comment above that says "the BM keystone is not chosen", but then in the passive build tree, it *is* chosen. Is this a mistake or am I misunderstanding something?

Also, I noticed that this build uses IR, but I thought you said you were trending away from that now since the new build takes away our dex bonus. Is this just an old build that hasn't been updated yet?

I've decided to make yet another ranger loosely following your build/guide
(best attempt is 51, only played hc, usually die between 27-40)...

This time is an Evasion build.
Currently level 39, and i've got Leather and Steel,
and i'm planning Reflexes node to the left of ranger starting tree.

Then onto Nulification / Void Barrier / Mind Drinker into Acrobatics and phase acro.

My question is, is the pure evasion nodes good idea?

Currently undecided on pure phys or ele or bit of both for this build.
Any of those are safer for an evasion build?

Also, going to get frenzy charges too, as I'm using that for single target (if i'm lucky for ele hit to drop for me, i might switch to that).

Current build;

@Insomniam: your build is quite similar to mine. Mine is located on the front page as Build 8.


@dfscott: Thanks for pointing that out! I made a mistake in that build as I forgot that I didn't want to go BM for this. Build should be updated now. You can also click on this: Build 7. In this build's case, you're getting a good amount of dex, but you also spend a lot of points on Str. Builds that have in excess of 350+ Dex will be hit the hardest, and those are Rangers that mainly hang around the dex side of the tree. If you're a Ranger hanging around the Duelist/Shadow, it's best to go full evasion/dodge.


@havenrl: As I mentioned to dfscott, Rangers that hang around the Duelist/Shadow, it's best to go full evasion/dodge. However, I'm not saying you can't go IR, but you lose a good amount of bonus that's supposed to go towards your IR-armor conversion. For that amount of loss, I'd go full evasion/Ondars. Acrobatics is optional IMO, but I need to test it.

I think you're better off relying on Frenzy and supporting that with the proper supports (e.g. Added Fire Damage, Weapon Elemental Damage) and scaling off of physical damage, which Elemental Hit doesn't. Going phys/ele doesn't really have an impact on evasion as both types of reflect can be evaded/dodged.

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Islidox wrote:

From what I could tell, it seems that Ondar's Guile isn't working against reflect damage. Evasion works, as it seemed like every other hit would be reflected back to me (45% chance to evade). But if Ondar's Guile is supposed to work, then I should be relatively free of reflect damage (90% chance to evade projectiles) but I'm most definitely getting hit by reflect every other shot.

This was after getting a phys reflect mob boss alone. Popped a Decoy totem up and watched my HP lower itself every other attack.

The Patch Notes do specifically mention that Ondar's Guile now does work on evasion. So my guess would be that it does work. But since Reflect uses the monster's accuracy this would mean that rare mobs have significantly higher accuracy, reducing your chance to evade to around 25%. Meaning that with Ondar's Guile bonus it'd be around 50%, matching your results.

That's kinda the thing with how evasion scales right now. With armor, if you take double the damage then you need double the armor to maintain the same reduction. With evasion, if you face double the accuracy then you need more than double the evasion rating to maintain the same hit chance, much more once you start facing higher and higher levels of accuracy.

An earlier post mentioned the number 7.5k, it didn't specify what exactly but you seemed to mean evasion rating I think? If so then that would mean that, to get 45% chance to evade for the average monster of your level, monsters at level 76 would need to have just above 500 accuracy for that to work out.

Doubling that, a decent guess for a rare monster, would yield around 29% chance to evade. Which would, more or less, match what you're finding. To reach a 45% chance to evade against that accuracy you'd need around 17.5k evasion rating. To reach the 47.5% chance needed to make Ondar's Guile reach the evasion cap would require around 19.5k evasion rating.

To put that in some perspective, by my calculations you'd have around 5k evasion rating without bonuses from Dexterity. So IR would make that 5k armor. If that rare mob deals less than 1k raw damage per hit (attack speed is irrelevant to armor damage reduction) then you'd be better off with IR. If that rare deals more than 1k raw damage per hit then you're better off as you are. Normal mobs would have to do less than 500 raw damage per hit to make IR more effective in your case.

Of course, this is all just me theory crafting and may not translate at all to how things actually work. But hey, it's amusing either way.

@Gobla: that would certainly make sense, but damn I wish we had some numbers here so we're not operating in the dark.

I actually did not know that reflect also scaled off their accuracy rating, that's good to know. (You learn something new everyday.) And yes, the 7.5k is my evasion rating with 7 Frenzy charges up, 6.7k EVR with no charges up.

As for the Armor rating, you're forgeting one thing - Determination aura. Prior to patch .11.2, I had 11k armor with IR and Grace/Determination. Now consider this patch, there's a loss of a 66% modifier (330dex/5) which is huge. Taking Grace and EV equipment, that's a base of 6.7k EVR. According to my calcuations, I lost nearly half my armor. (I had some errors adding my base EVR and multiplying the added sum of all evasion rating bonuses. [6k vs 6.7k... not sure how I came up with such a big margin of error.])

Maybe not losing half my armor, but certainly I'd lose over a third of my armor, and that's a significant hit. That's 7.3k or less armor I'd have without the IR Dex bonus and Determination. In that case, I'd rather go full evasion and be godlike and dodge all projectile attacks under the sun. (well, almost)

EDIT: I completely forgot about the base evasion and evasion earned per level. (50evr base + 3evr per level including level 1) So now my calculations are far more accurate. I end up with a total of nearly 7k armor with IR Grace/Determination. That's a third of armor lost because of the change in IR, which is nuts. (These calculations are going off my build and its equipment, so you can try and recalculate what I calculated using the EVR from equip and Grace and my EVR passives @ 330 Dex.)