Puncture vs Frenzy

I am currently on lv75 with my bow Ranger in Ambush league, and my main skill is Puncture (supported by pierce, mana leech, LMP), and Frenzy (supported by mana leech, increased crit, faster projectiles).

I mostly use Puncture for crowd control on right-click, and occasional Frenzy for keeping my six frenzy charges up. It works very well, and nothing sounds better than the sound of a mob crowd silently bleeding to death as they desperately try to get close to you. :)

For tough bosses, I tend to clear the area, then swap out Frenzy and Puncture gems, and bleed the boss to death using stronger Puncture (without the damage penalty that comes with LMP).

Mana is never a problem, as long as I hit something. Although, I noticed I have to slow down in maps with decreased regeneration mods - but that is to be expected.

Oh, and I have found out that Barrage, coupled up with Culling Strike is awesome boss finisher, since it is a bit hard to guess from the health bar when the health is below 10%.

I use Atziri's Promise Flask to do extra damage against bosses with Puncture. Plus it works great to counter the "spinning red globes of poison death" or whatever that junk is.

Triple DoT! :)


Any thoughts on what to drop for Corruption and Entropy?


Crit chance = 95% with Windripper and 50% with Lioneye's.

feyith that is very interesting - i really like it. puncture with a burn and the chaos dmg. that could be freakin sweet!!

so i think corruption is not worth your time. your chaos dmg won't be the brink of your dmg, but entropy will not only increase the puncture bleed but also the burn so it is worth getting. so heres what i propose.


this takes out the stun/block recovery as well as finesse at ranger start (15% stun and block + 20% accuracy +20 dex +8% atk spd) in order to put in 2x 20% accuracy with bows. since i figure you only want finesse for the accuracy, especially since you're crit you'd be better off with the much higher amount of 40% for the same points.
also i take out 24% projectile dmg at shadow start in order to pick up the added fire dmg and another 20% accuracy node.
next is taking out the crit dmg at ranger mid (only 25%), mind drinker, spell power (30% increased crit chance for spells) and the increased aura effect in order to grab up the 6 necessary nodes to pick up entropy.

i think its worth giving up spell crit chance cause if you're using puncture, i don't see you using spells let alone need only a 30% crit chance increase from it. also mind drinker won't be needed and is easily replaced by gear if you're using puncture which is not too mana hungry since you do not spam-cast it but cast and forget. the next thing is giving up atk spd isn't a big issue because again, puncture is not about atk spd.
all this given up gains you 45% damage over time, 40% more accuracy, 24% fire dmg, 5% chance to ignite.

if you are using lioneyes you don't need the accuracy nodes and can respec into the aura power if you want, or 24% more hp near entropy.
im not sure how good windripper would be with puncture since the bleed is based off the initial hits damage, but it doesn't specify its based off physical dmg so it would probably be pretty sweet especially with WED socketed.

this set up might actually do a lot more damage with the windripper

Interesting thoughts. Thanks!

I'm actually a party aura support, fire CoC build with Puncture as my rogue/boss killer. I could definitely dump Spell Damage and Crit Multiplier in favor of Fire Damage and Blaze. Now that you mention it, I wouldn't lose much by dropping Finesse. To hit is ~87% and only goes up by ~1% per 20% accuracy node. Not sure if that's worth it or not?

Puncture's bleed is based on the physical component only, so I'm not sure if the shock from Windripper would add enough to outperform Lioneye's base. The only reason I'm using Windripper over Lioneye's is because it's corrupted with Fire Leech. I'll play around with both on a weapon switch and report back. :)

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feyith wrote:

Interesting thoughts. Thanks!

I'm actually a party aura support, fire CoC build with Puncture as my rogue/boss killer. I could definitely dump Spell Damage and Crit Multiplier in favor of Fire Damage and Blaze. Now that you mention it, I wouldn't lose much by dropping Finesse. To hit is ~87% and only goes up by ~1% per 20% accuracy node. Not sure if that's worth it or not?

1% per 20% node right now, but if you optimize gear to get more flat accuracy you'll see an enormous boost. but since you don't gain too much accuracy now and you may use lioneyes maybe its better not to get it.
if you have room to improve rings/amulet/gloves for more flat accuracy though, i'd definitely pick it up. my build has 56% add acc soon to be 76% because my gear has a lot of flat accuracy which will boost my chance up from 86% (when i only had 20% and not much flat acc) to 92-93%

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feyith wrote:

Puncture's bleed is based on the physical component only, so I'm not sure if the shock from Windripper would add enough to outperform Lioneye's base. The only reason I'm using Windripper over Lioneye's is because it's corrupted with Fire Leech. I'll play around with both on a weapon switch and report back. :)

really? hmm. does it say that anywhere? i'll take your word for it cause you can test it and because it doesn't say so anywhere, that i can find. but it would be nice if it cleared it up somewhere in text, considering this game is pretty specific with how it uses words.

but i really like the idea of adding burn and chaos dmg to punctures DoT. that would probably wreck if it was your main source of dmg even.

I use Frenzy as my main single target with Blood Dance, but I was thinking about the possibility of using Puncture as my weapon swap for bosses/tough rares. I'm guessing Frenzy charges and the bleeding debuff both would persist even if I was to swap out the respective weapon with the gem.

In this sense I could also use a pure phys Quiver with no +ele or defense just on the Puncture swap to get the most out of the debuff. Kite and shoot one Puncture (perhaps with Increased Dur), then swap to keep frenzy DPS on (and charges), repeat after ~5/9 seconds.

What do you guys think of this? I'll have no crit (RT) but I think Puncture would still do better than just pure Frenzy on those tough targets.

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PhoeniXSkye wrote:

I use Frenzy as my main single target with Blood Dance, but I was thinking about the possibility of using Puncture as my weapon swap for bosses/tough rares. I'm guessing Frenzy charges and the bleeding debuff both would persist even if I was to swap out the respective weapon with the gem.

In this sense I could also use a pure phys Quiver with no +ele or defense just on the Puncture swap to get the most out of the debuff. Kite and shoot one Puncture (perhaps with Increased Dur), then swap to keep frenzy DPS on (and charges), repeat after ~5/9 seconds.

What do you guys think of this? I'll have no crit (RT) but I think Puncture would still do better than just pure Frenzy on those tough targets.

Ah no I don't think so. Too much swapping going on. While I can see switching out the Frenzy for Puncture gem once, trying to do some kind of back and forth thing will probably get you killed.

Just build up a Frenzy stack, switch the gems and go at it. I run Power Charge on Crit on my LA/RoA skill group and then lay in the Puncture to bosses when I have my crit stacks up.

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Skywalkerfx wrote:

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PhoeniXSkye wrote:

I use Frenzy as my main single target with Blood Dance, but I was thinking about the possibility of using Puncture as my weapon swap for bosses/tough rares. I'm guessing Frenzy charges and the bleeding debuff both would persist even if I was to swap out the respective weapon with the gem.

In this sense I could also use a pure phys Quiver with no +ele or defense just on the Puncture swap to get the most out of the debuff. Kite and shoot one Puncture (perhaps with Increased Dur), then swap to keep frenzy DPS on (and charges), repeat after ~5/9 seconds.

What do you guys think of this? I'll have no crit (RT) but I think Puncture would still do better than just pure Frenzy on those tough targets.

Ah no I don't think so. Too much swapping going on. While I can see switching out the Frenzy for Puncture gem once, trying to do some kind of back and forth thing will probably get you killed.

Just build up a Frenzy stack, switch the gems and go at it. I run Power Charge on Crit on my LA/RoA skill group and then lay in the Puncture to bosses when I have my crit stacks up.

Does swapping require some time before you can make an attack? Just pressing X then right click, it shouldn't get me killed if it was instant, but I'll go try it out once I find a good phys bow for my offhand.

sometimes, depending what you're swapping and stuff it will change the order of your hotkey active skills, which is annoying when it happens.