[1.3] Sidra's Necromancing Ranger of Chaos (Poison Arrow) Videos/Atziri capable

That's what i saw a little late yep :/. Drillneck are at 3/4ex in the HC league, which i obviously don't have. And since the +2 & +1 can only be obtainable at lvl 64, it doesn't help much. I think you still can have a +2 at lvl 55 but i don't know how much it'll help really. Drillneck boosts so much the damages it's hard to consider the build without.

I guess i'll check the others builds to try continuing this character in HC. I'll definitely try to come back to this one when i'll be able to anyway.

I'm not sure if this was mentioned before but i just noticed when using Drillneck the tooltip dps doesn't furher increase with pierce chance when the pierce chance already reaches 100%. Maybe it's just a bug in the tooltip dps but if not, its not effectiv to take the 5%pierce/5%proj dmg nodes in the pierce cluster on the tree because it's just 5% increased dmg from proj dmg. Also quality pierce wouldn't be necessary because you can reach 100% pierce chance with the piercing shots node, Drillneck and lvl 20 pierce (in a +1 gems bow).

Thanks for clarifying this. I'm actually playing a PA build with out zombies and using almost the same tree. I started as witch because i orginally played a PA trapper but i prefer playing with normal PA.

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Panini_aux_olives wrote:

It's perfectly normal, chance to pierce is capped at 100%.

As for most effective route, piercing shots cluster should be taken last after all other dot/chaos damage clusters, and through the 10/10 path. The 5/5 path is not efficient. Here's what I think is a more optimal tree.

Actually Piercing Shots cluster is 10% increased damage per skill point which is better than both the 8.2% of Method to the Madness and the 9.1% per point of the Corruption cluster as well as completing your chance to pierce up to 100% for better clear speed.

This is of course assuming that you have Drillneck, which you should for non-trap PA.
Also I personally prefer to skip both the minion nodes (what do they add anyway? zombies slow down gameplay and extra dmg on skeleton totem/vaal summon skeletons is insignificant) as well as Ondar's Guile since there are very few ranged attacks that pose a threat.

These points are better spend in mana/life or the chaos dmg/pierce cluster while levelling.

Once you have the life in the Blood Drinker cluster to the right of shadow starting zone the cluster is 50% increased damage for 5 points (20% dmg + 30% pierce chance). And you want to be using the highway to Entropy and later EB as soon as possible so you should (in all versions of the build) be at 5 points for 50% dmg.

Edit: Well this is for levelling/new player, once you have a 20/20 pierce gem the efficiency decreases to what you said but I dont think that most people ever reach 20/20 gems so the extra 15% pierce chance from quality may never matter to them.

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Panini_aux_olives wrote:

Yes, all my assumptions are with 20/20 pierce (which I have since a long time, from my LA ranger in domination).

And all my assumptions are with build starting out in temp leagues :^)
Besides the 15% useless pierce chance allows you to get a drillneck with chaos resist/+1 arrow as corrupted implicit. (actually managed to find one with 4% chaos res in BL but the guy quit)

Still even with 7% dmg per point calculated, I'd go for it to raise pierce chance from 85 to 100 as I've gotten used to that and dont like playing without (1M HC levelling w/o pierce was getting pretty bad in early maps clear speed wise, but maybe that was lack of drillneck/high lvl pa or +3 bow).