[1.2] 'Say hello to my little friend' 40K Puncture/28K LMP Lightning Arrow

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Asidra wrote:

I am not sure where you get 30% from as your baseline, but I don't agree with it at all and it seems pretty arbitrary. Your DPS will increase a ton just going from 10 > 20%. Crit Chance/Multi is the highest damage scaler in the game. While, yes, it snowballs incrementally on top of itself, it's still generally more potent in smaller quantities on the tree that other options as well. As an example, I play a non crit Lioneye's Build, and on the tree a 25 crit multi multi node gives me more dps than an 8% projectile, even though I only have 9% chance to crit. An amulet with crit chance on top of flat physical gives me double the DPS as one with just the physical damage roll.

On your tree right now, just to test - remove the talons of murder ones and add either the Pressure Points or Assassination trio - they will impact your DPS more. And that "more" gets bigger the more crit chance and multi you have.

And since Lightning Arrow gets even a bigger bump because crits shock - you generally want to get the potent crit nodes that are at least in your way, as they will give you more DPS than any other tree elections.

If you have a 20% chance to Crit, thats 1 Crit in 5 shots. If the other 4 shots do reduced damage, say 30% or even 20% reduced damage. Then that 1 crit shot you have needs to do a LOT more damage for the Crit to be worthwhile.

4 hits at 15KDPS + 1 hit at 30KDPS = 18KDPS

or 5 hits all at 20KDPS = 20KDPS

Sure the shock from Lightning arrow is nice, but I'm only using it against group mobs, which get cleaned out in 1-2 shots without Crit. I'm not sure I'll notice a great difference against these by adding 15% crit chance. It's really only against larger enemies where Crit might offer a benefit but I'd need to be consistently Criting, which is where I think 30% becomes valuable. Otherwise too many of your no Crit hits are low damage.

Remember one crit shocks basically everything, so your next non crit attack would still do 30% more damage on the shocked enemies. There is a lot of value in 1/5 critical strikes

Also what tends to happen without crit pumping damage is your damage sort of plateaus as each new 12% damage adds less DPS than the last 12% damage your DPS doesn't rise as quickly as mob HP going from low > mid > high level maps. My Lightning Arrow DPS with Pierce is over 10k, and it certainly doesn't clear out packs in just 2 shots in high level maps (it's a Split arrow Build with a LA swap for phys reflect) - so yours won't either as it probably climbs up to a bit over 7k.

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Asidra wrote:

Remember one crit shocks basically everything, so your next non crit attack would still do 30% more damage on the shocked enemies. There is a lot of value in 1/5 critical strikes

Also what tends to happen without crit pumping damage is your damage sort of plateaus as each new 12% damage adds less DPS than the last 12% damage your DPS doesn't rise as quickly as mob HP going from low > mid > high level maps. My Lightning Arrow DPS with Pierce is over 10k, and it certainly doesn't clear out packs in just 2 shots in high level maps (it's a Split arrow Build with a LA swap for phys reflect) - so yours won't either as it probably climbs up to a bit over 7k.

That seems counter to my experience though, I've been running lvl 76+ maps now constantly for the last two weeks on this character (only around 20maps as I had to go away for a long weekend to celebrate the gf's birthday). I've been able to 1-2 hit level 76 white mobs, 2-4 hit blue mobs with the LA, frenzy 2-3 hits blue mobs and I am wiping out rare's in 1-2 seconds of sustained fire with frenzy, uniques are 3-5 seconds. I think the reason is that my damage is 100% and not dependent on that 1 in 5 crit.

My gems are still working their way back to level 20 now that they are 20% quali. And I am running both frenzy and LA on 5Links. Currently LA is at 7K self buffed, which should reach 10K self buffed when all gems are levelled to 20 with 20% qauli.

Frenzy self buffed is sitting at 22.5K and it's only level 17, supported by level 17 gems. I'm hoping to see that hit 30K self buffed using level 20 qauli 20gems.

Also all of this DPS can be 100% sustained, I don't have to drop any attacks through bottoming out my mana. I can't see how all the changes people have suggested to the passive tree can be sustainable, you're gonna drop a lot of shots through lack of mana?

Let the crit experiments begin.

Thanks to some help from Asidra I'm going to respec my character a tiny bit to allow for some crit, hopefully hitting 20% crit chance.

I'll then chance my gems around a little to allow for an added lightening damage gem. I'll qaulity this which will give me 10% chance to shock on top of the 20% crit. I'll spend 2 passives on getting the 5% chance to shock node near shadow start which will give me a 35% chance to shock. This should give me a nice boost to clear speed and help to melt bosses.

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Panini_aux_olives wrote:

And what will you give up for added lighting? With either ppad or wed out, you will lose tons of damage. Not sure it's a good choice.

Yeah I agree, I'm simply going to get my crit rate up to 20% which should see a nice bump in damage during sustained fire, and add the potential of that one hit crit on mobs.

If I can eventually craft/buy a 300+dps 7+ crit bow that will make a massive difference aswell.

I'm running a similar evasion based LA build ( Drillneck, 35% pierce node ) and I really don't see the point of using a piece gem instead of faster attacks AND cursing the whole map with projectile weakness ( granting additional 74% chance to pierce at lvl 20). If i switch to pierce gem instead of faster attacks my dps drop from 8.4 k to 7.1k ( tooltip in the lab with hatred and wrath auras, setup is LA/LMP/FA/WED/BM/LGOH).

So, shouldn't the additionial 74% to pierce from PW scale similar to , lets say, elemental weakness? Maybe I get something wrong here, so any input would be greatly appreciated.

Any Pierce Chance from Projectile Weakness does not get counted in your chance to Pierce the Drillneck calculates for added damage.

Got it now , 45% global chance to pierce vs. local chance with pierce gem....so there's no point in using a pierce gem , faster attacks works better imho. Thanks for your answer.

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Biti wrote:

Got it now , 45% global chance to pierce vs. local chance with pierce gem....so there's no point in using a pierce gem , faster attacks works better imho. Thanks for your answer.

Actually Chris stated that using a Pierce gem will give you a benefit when using drillneck, I've tested this myself and I lose a significant amount of DPS when I remove the Pierce gem from either of my attacks.

Also removing Pierce from the LA attack defeats the purpose of this build, you want to be piercing as many things as possible to create as many multiple LA hits as possible.



I have also started playing around with Crit, I have my LA Crit at 20% and my Frenzy at 25% it is making a serious difference. Incredibly surprise at how big a difference is making.