Need help with LA build. Mana and survivability issues.

Hi fellow exiles,

I have gone some advanced research and testing and saw those re-occuring issues Rangers are meeting in their Path.

Lemme explain some basics (not only for the original posters) :

Mana issue :
This is the main thing to solve playing a ranger, you need to be 100% sure you can spam your volley. As stated before, Mana leech is capped to 12.5% so the best way to increase your mana sustain is to increase your mana pool.
Beginner : You can either go for Mana Nodes, which cost a lot of defense/offense passives nodes (I advice that for a starting point) and get some base mana on your gear (Rings, Amulet, ES base gear have mana mods).
Advanced : Once you get a decent gear, you can mix the Clarity Aura & Mana Regen brought by your gear. Clarity can be set on Blood Magic and tuned between lv 3-15 (higher is a waste).
Mana sustain will be defined by those 3 factors : Clarity level, Mana regen & Mana Increase. The good thing is you can change those numbers pretty much easily and add some mana leech in your gear (1-2% is enough on a single piece).
Expert : If you succeed in applying the 2 first method, and get comfortable with numbers you can get precisely tune your mana sustain, you 'd take those factors as input sustain : Eldritch Battery User, Mana Leech, Max mana, Mana Regen, Clarity Level. For a 5L/6L user (which is pretty damn affordable for a couple chaos) the average numbers to get a comfortable mana sustain are around 800-1000 max maan / 100% mana regen or 600 max mana with low level clarity and 1% mana leech.

Remember well that Mana leech Gem, Clarity and passives nodes can be changed to gear tuning.

Squishyness / Survivability :
Most of the time, Passives nodes are spent for defense, this applies currently to most of builds but its quite a bit different for rangers. HP is most likely where you ll put all your passives to get around 170-220% hp multiplier. Survivability is affected not only by Defense Passives Nodes but also your overall dps, killing fasster means a lot in defense (less kitting, more leech, less monsters able to hit you).
Armor & Evasion with High value is pretty much overrated in most cases, I'd recommend using Flasks to increase defenses (active play) which cost less in passives/gear input.
Reaching 5k armor and over 8k evasion have a high cost for like not a good increase in overall survivability.

Feel free to ask question in game (ign : nyakudachosen), 90k dps being Split Arrow Ranger.

I'm following Omjak's guide and since I started using Grace/Hatred and ended up with 7-8k ev I am doing notably better than I used to. I also switched lmp for gmp for LA support as well as PCoC instead of increase crit and I'm not one shotting myself anymore.
Soloing up to 69 amps so far without issues, bosses die like flies.

€ edited silly typo, sorry Omjak...

Thanks a lot for the information. I found with 3-4% mana leech and about 110 mana available i am sustainable enough. Especially with 4 surgeons flasks that net me mana. I may switch out a surgeons mana flask for a granite flask though for survivability. It's not trash mobs that kill me, or even reflect but its the high dmg bosses that I can't get away from (2nd phase Dominus [first phase is a breeze at range] and the leap slamming rogue exile). Also with not a lot of life regen around the ranger tree chaos degen affects me a lot. I will hopefully reduce that by getting around 0% chaos resist (thus making my blood frenzy hurt less), respec my bandit reward to frenzy charges so I can get more life regen from The Blood Dance and taking the 1.5% regen from the duelist tree. With the resist node near the duelist tree I can also free up space on my amulet for more life and possibly mana. Maybe even more evasion on my chest will help but its really the big hits that I need help with and armor doesn't do much for that.

I leveld my LA Frenzy Ranger to lvl 70 now and have no mana issues.
I have a 5link bow with LA/LMP/LGoH/BM/WED and use this for packs of at least 3 mobs.
For others i have Frenzy linked with FA, Mana Leech and Item Rarity.
DPS could be better, but right now it's enough i think. Still have to finish Act 3 in Merciless though. So i have no idea if Piety or Dominus would be a problem. Kole is one hard enemy of course, because he could almost onehit me.
Resists are capped and life is at 2700. I know thats not much, but with 2 life flasks, 1 granite flask and 1 hybrid flask i can survive pretty good.

I also have CoDT linked with Immortal Call, Summone Skelletons and Enduring Cry and also have a Ranged totem with LA, FA and Lighning Penetration.

This all together is ok, but i badly need health on my gear.
But since i only use self found gear on that char i think its not that bad.

So i think mana issues are solved with my char, but to a cost of some dps.
I also must say, that i currently run only either hatred or grace and not both of them, since i have no Alphas Howl or a reduced Mana Node yet. Only a reduced mana Gem, but that would leave me with only 10% of my mana if i activate both auras and 55 Mana is way to low :).

If anyone of you has any tips how i can switch my gems to get around this problem a bit it would be great. Otherwise i think i will level this char to lvl 75 or something to get reduced mana nodes and then start finishing act 3.

Actualy if I use one aura I'm so fine with mana and im not a tank I use my totem to tank for me when I just Crit weakness spam LA. If I had another 5 or 6 link I would Use mana leech on totem. Also I will use 2 auras but I think later when I get better gear.

So now i tried kole once again and with lots of kiting and doing my totem most of the work i killed him without dying :)

Piety was a lot easier. I just had to kite her in her fire form, since she hit me with almost every blow.
Bot the other forms were a peace of cake. Ice Shots never hit me, and the lightning was not that hard :).
So after all, my version of the build seems not that bad of a choice ;).
I'll post update when i met dominus :)

Let me explain advanced things around Mana & Life Resources :

You can always have a solution to solve mana & life issue (I mean life regen in most case) but this is not the result every good player wants.
Reducing or Using a support gem has a huge cost, on top of that you have a lesser dps which leads to lesser survivability (Kill before you get killed, simple as that).

As explained above, you can choose many solutions to tune your mana regen, I've split the tips for players experience and you can combine the 6 source of mana to get what you need.

For example I am using Dual strike at 66 mana per strike each 0.12 seconds, I knew that I'll need a lot of mana without playing clarity & mana leech gem (since those reduce a lot of your Mana reserive/Life reserve/Gem Space). I went for +250 mana gear, base Int (200) and 2% mana leech on shadow tree. It handles the mana fine since I have 125 mana per second and the mana regen (1000 max mana and 50% mana regen on gear) which is 23 (Total of 150 per second).

For a 6 Link Ranger using LA, you need a bit more of mana Regen, so it requres Eldritch Battery with a large ES Armor, choice went for Carcass Jack and base mana leech playing a physical Harbinger Bow (1300 mana with only carcass Jack).

Using Clarity, Mana leech Gem, Blood Magic is a big choice, but not DPS wise. I personaly use them as a leveling sub before I get my final gear.
-I run Clarity in lowest levels, flat regen works wonderfully.
-I use mana leech in mid levels with a low level clarity, since physical gear start to kick off.
-I finally get Eldritch Battery, yeah ES is shit on Life base Character.
-I lack somewhat mana when i reached lv 72 with Eldritch Battery, I swapped gear to get mana & ES since i need the 5L armor base (no ES damn).
-I increased my attack speed, I need even more mana (yeah having more attack speed requires more mana per second) so I used clarity on blood magic with blocked level 6.
-My gear went to end game, so I reached 1000 mana. I removed clarity. Everything is fine.


Hope history helps a bit.