Theros's Doomfletcher- Because Facebreakers Shouldn't Have All The Fun Stacking Phys

Pros:
Can handle almost any map mod, including half and noregen
Versatile; there's lots of ways to build for this
Decent DPS; probably better if you buy really nice gear that I can't afford
Split damage between phys and ele makes reflect much easier to handle
Easy to level; the bow's level 28 or so and once you have it, it's pretty smooth sailing to Merciless
Cons:
Probably less DPS than a Crit Windripper build; if you've got a lot of currency to invest, this might not be the build for you
Moderately expensive depending on how far you want to invest in the build
Not extremely newbie-friendly; the gear requisites can be kinda tough
Unless you go IR, phys spells will rip you a new asshole.
Not tested in Hardcore yet

Essentially, this is a build for players who have been playing long enough to have a feel for the game and a bit of a currency base, but not the large numbers of exalts necessary to buy gear for one of the more popular bow builds.

The biggest thing to keep in mind with this build is that Doomfletch's extra damage doesn't actually show up in the tooltip. Your tooltip DPS is always going to be kinda shit, but it doesn't matter as much because the massive amount of added damage makes up for it.

The basic concept of building around Doomfletch is to stack flat physical damage and crit modifiers as high as you can get them to take advantage of the gain modifier on the bow and the high crit chance. Generally, I prefer to get my crit from the tree instead of gear; this means gear requisites are going to be fairly similar to a Facebreaker; if you happen to have leftover Facebreaker gear, this would be a good opportunity to bust it out and try something new.

Also, due to how much this bow crits and how much physical damage can be stacked, it's fairly easy to inflict a boatload of elemental status effects on enemies. The key to these is to not be picky - if you get a freeze, burn, or shock, you need to be able to roll with it.

For my build, I used Split Arrow, Vaal Burning Arrow, and Frenzy as main skills, plus the obligatory auras.

Split Arrow was my choice for generic AoE attack. I am well aware that Lightning Arrow deals more damage, but the status effects Doomfletch constantly inflicts are heavier with Split Arrow, and there's just something so satisfying about watching a rare sit frozen while I obliterate his entourage. To facilitate this playstyle, I've linked it to Power Charge on Crit, Life Leech, Faster Attacks, PPAD, and Increased Crit Damage. You don't need to be able to support it with all of these gems to get it to work, though. Also, you might notice that I don't support my Split Arrow with Chain - I use the pierce passive and Drillneck instead, which functions just fine against everything but extremely huge packs, which is where Vaal Burning Arrow shines. Speaking of...

Vaal Burning Arrow is pretty much my favorite Vaal gem, so my use of it is extremely biased. However, I've found that with my current setup, it makes a brilliant clearing tool for bosses and extremely large packs such as those around shrines and boxes. I've supported it with GMP to get a ton of AoE out of it, Increased Critical Damage because it's the biggest modifier I can put on there, and Pierce so that it has a 100% pierce chance, which both increases the damage thanks to Drillneck and makes it ridiculously effective at clearing dangerous areas. A word of warning, though: do NOT use this against a reflect rare, or in reflect maps at all. You will die almost instantly if you crit.

And finally, Frenzy, the universal physical single-target skill. Good for both increasing your Split Arrow's damage with charges and for knocking tough monsters on their ass. Support it with generic physical projectile singletarget supports and life leech and it'll kick ass just fine. Of course, if you can't manage the mana for this (and I don't blame you, it's fucking expensive) Burning Arrow works just as well, with the downside of not boosting your AoE damage at all.

Of course, I'm running a couple auras - Grace helps keep me alive, and Clarity makes sure I can spam Split Arrows to my heart's content. It might be wise to run Eldritch Battery and drop Clarity in favor of Hatred or another defensive aura; that'd probably work fine too.

Now, with these four taking up at least 4 of the 4links available to an archer, it's probably safe to wonder what's going to be in the last link set that this character has available. Currently, I'm running a CWDT setup which is working fine. For people who need a cheaper build, you can run your Power Charge gathering skill on the side to open up a support slot on your AoE arrow of choice. You can also run a mishmash of other gems; at one point while leveling, I was using a 4-link to level a Crit Damage gem that I couldn't socket yet, Crit Weakness, and a Portal gem. So the final link set is really a matter of preference.

The current character tree at level 83 is at http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgIAAF4EfgW1CC4M8g5IEZYV8BmOGdUhdiP2JDwknST9JpUnqS9vMHEwfDH6Mww2PTnUOkI6WElRSn1LeFBCUUdVS1b6WkhabWJaY0NnoG17b_JwUnC7cNV0QXb3d9R31311fyt_xobOhxmHdohrjDaNfY2_lQWbjZ2jnaqgn6Gkoi6ly6c0p1yn1Kp_qrixMLVIu-PAUcSixqLKqdN-1CPVANaK2RPcFd2o4dvjhOdU6xTtg-4O73rv8PLh8-r5Vvyr_MX-uv7I_94=

I don't think it's necessarily the best tree, given that this character has potential for going up to Eldritch Battery then snagging Mind over Matter, or traveling down to Iron Grip and Marauder/Duelist life nodes, but it's functional.

Bandits:
Normal - Oak. 40 base HP is too good to pass up.
Cruel - I honestly can't remember who I picked. Oak or Kraityn both work fine; just don't side with Alira.
Merciless - This is where you want to side with Alira. Even with Frenzy as a singletarget, the free power charge edges out any use the frenzy charge from Kraityn could have.

My current gear is in the spoiler below. Please note that you don't need gear like this in order to make the build work.


As you can see, getting flat physical on gear is a huge priority for this build - I grab as much of it as I can. Drillneck really is almost perfect for this purpose - it has more than the maximum amount of flat physical damage available on a rare quiver, as well as pierce chance and some damage increase in case that wasn't enough. The only thing that could really compete with it is a very well-rolled Broadhead quiver with crit mods, res, and high life. However, just about any Broadhead quiver with a flat physical affix will do just fine until higher-end maps. Quiver aside, you want a decent physical roll in your amulet, ring, and glove slots. Amulet is probably the most important due to how high physical rolls can get on amulets. After that come rings, then gloves. If you're missing out on phys damage on one of these pieces of gear, do your best to make up for it on something else. Also, it's pretty much mandatory for this build to use Meginord's Girdle due to the added flat phys. If the flat phys on the rest of your gear is great, you might get away with using The Magnate or the phys variant of Doryani's Invitiation, but don't count on it.

Other than flat physical, you want to shoot for the standard defensive measures - life and resistance out the ass. It might be possible to use Purity of Elements to cover res holes, but that probably means either cutting one of the current auras or speccing into more aura nodes. In terms of life, 3000 is pretty much the benchmark for this build in Softcore Merciless Act 3; if you can't hit that, run lower areas until you find something or level far enough that you can. Also, you generally want to prioritize evasion items, but it's not a huge deal if you end up using something without evasion with great stats because most of your evasion's gonna come from Grace anyways.

Only after your defenses are in order should you start stacking other offensive modifiers on your gear. Generally, these aren't going to show up a lot; they're mostly going to be on uniques like Starkonja's Head.

And since I mentioned those helmets, I should probably talk a bit about the four unique helmets which function really well with this build (or variants of it): Starkonja's Head, Rat's Nest, Bringer of Rain, and Abyssus. Please note that you should only be using these if you don't need resistance in your helmet slot; otherwise use a decent rare. Anyways, let's start off with Starkonja's: the baseline. It's good for helping you reach that minimum amount of health for merciless, it's cheap, and the offensive modifiers on it are surprisingly good when you're not on low life. I'm currently using it because I'm a cheap bastard who doesn't want to shell out for a more expensive helmet. Next, Rat's Nest; the embodiment of the more expensive helmet. It's best for EV based builds like my current tree, but it doesn't have life. As a result, you probably want to skip out on Rat's Nest if you're having trouble getting life on the rest of your gear. Next, Abyssus: the Rat's Nest of IR variants. With my tree the way it is, using Abyssus is pretty much a death sentence; the added physical damage makes it the strongest offensive helmet out of the four, but the increased damage you take because of it is too much to justify the boost. It might work if you go IR, though, so it's worth a mention. And finally, BoR. This is a weird one; it gives you flat phys and block chance, but limits you to a 6L with faster attacks and blind in addition to eating up your chest armor, and thus your free 4-link. I'll honestly admit that I haven't tried the build out with a BoR yet, but I think it could potentially work well.

Finally, flasks. I didn't link mine because I'm currently rerolling them and sharing a few between characters. However, I do know what kind of setup works nicely:
1x Surgeon's Life Flask of Staunching. This is here to refill fast, keep you going, and get rid of any Corrupting Blood charges that might come your way. It can be a Sanctified flask or a Hallowed flask; that's a matter of preference. I recommend trying them both and figuring out which one you like more.
1x Seething Hallowed Life Flask. This is the "oh shit" button. In terms of suffix, pick whichever ailment bothers you the most - shock, freeze, burn, curses, whatever - and roll for that. Or roll for stun recovery if you don't want to throw too many alts at it.
1x Surgeon's Quicksilver Flask of Adrenaline. This is a really great mobility flask, and generally recharges fast enough when you're killing things to have almost 100% uptime. You can skip the Adrenaline part if you're short on alts, but it's really nice.
1x Surgeon's Jade Flask of Reflexes. The other "oh shit" button. Not much else to say, other than that you can maybe skip out on Surgeon's for another charge-benefit mod.
1x Atziri's Promise OR 1x Diamond Flask. This is the flask you pop when you need to kick a very large amount of ass in a very short time. Great for bosses, obnoxious rares, whatever. If you can't afford a Promise, then just roll up a Diamond flask with extra charges or charge recovery and removal of your least favorite status ailment or movespeed.

The way this build would prioritize gems is as follows:

Split Arrow + Life Leech + Increased Critical Damage + Power Charge on Critical Strike* + Faster Attacks + Physical Projectile Attack Damage
*:Power Charge On Critical Strike doesn't have to be linked to Split Arrow if you choose to gather your power charges with another skill.
I choose Life Leech here instead of LGOH because the crits deal a fairly significant amount of damage and hits don't land often enough for LGOH to make up for reflect the way leech does.

Frenzy + Increased Critical Damage + Faster Attacks + Physical Projectile Attack Damage + Life Leech + Pierce/Point Blank/Whatever the fuck
In case you can't tell, I haven't tried Frenzy in a 6-link yet. The 5-link does just fine, though. You'll notice that Life Leech is prioritized farther down the list than it is for Split Arrow. That's because I've found that life leech is more important in multitarget situations than singletarget ones on the premise that interrupting your split arrow spam might result in getting overrun, but you can always throw in a split arrow against a single target if you need a bit of leech.

Vaal Burning Arrow + GMP/LMP + Pierce/PPAD/Chain + Increased Critical Damage
It's pretty much pure offense. The Pierce is there so that it has 100% pierce chance - if you're doing a build deviation or just don't have a Drillneck, you might want to switch that to something else depending on whether you want to use this more for boss disposal or for large pack disposal - use Physical Projectile Attack Damage for the former, and Chain for the latter.

Reduced Mana + Grace + Clarity. This is pretty much mandatory unless you want to mess around with Blood Magic. Since this only takes up 3 links, I threw a Smoke Mine into the fourth socket to help with boxes; that's just a personal choice. You might be better off using Crit Weakness or Projectile Weakness there instead.

As I said before, the other 4-link is pretty much up to preference. CWDT setups work nicely, you can use another skill for power charges so your split arrow kicks even more ass, or you could do something I haven't even thought of.

This section is pretty much for all the folks who don't like my approach to using Doomfletch, but after seeing someone use it they want to design a build for it. Well, my fellow theorycrafters, I've got a whole boatload of things I haven't tested with this bow, and I'm pretty much giving those ideas away. Call them your own, call them your dog's, say that the gnomes who talk to you after too much vodka gave the idea to you, I don't care. So if you're interested, here ya go:

Doomfletch + BoR. Completely untested because my only BoR is in Standard and all my Doomfletches are in Ambush. It might be great, it might be utter shit. Who knows.

Doomfletch + Standard LA Crit. Y'know, the bow build that was popular a while back, but with a boatload of flat phys and random elemental gain.

Doomfletch + Iron Grip. Iron Grip seems like it'd work great, but as a node it's too far away from all the crit I wanted to get, and the gem isn't anywhere near as good as other things. However, I just know that this has potential to someone with crit gear to spare.

Doomfletch + IR + Abyssus. The key to negating that extra damage taken that Abyssus throws at you might be to stack armor out the ass. I wouldn't know, I haven't really tried.

Doomfletch + Elemental Proliferation. I honestly don't know how I haven't tested this by now, but someone should really give it a shot, it could be hilarious.

Basically, this is a short list of corruptions that are good for the build that I mocked up because I have a problem when it comes to using too many Vaal Orbs on things.

Bow:
Any elemental leech is nice for obvious reasons.
+1 to max power charges is AMAZING. I've tested this one, and while it's not worth using over a 6L, it comes pretty damn close.
Additional arrow is relatively useful, although it can throw your aim off with singletarget.
Chaos damage is marginally useful, to the point where I'd only use it if I didn't have a better Doomfletch around.
Pierce chance is alright with Drillneck, but meh otherwise.

Quiver:
Don't corrupt. At all. Either the pierce from Drillneck is too useful to lose, or the flat phys from Broadhead is too useful to lose.

Helm:
Nothing particularly useful here other than white sockets. + Level of Vaal Gems is okay with Vaal Burning Arrow, but nothing to write home about.

Rings:
Don't corrupt in most cases, the implicits are too good to lose.

Amulets:
See Rings. Yes, even the Paua Amulet implicit is too nice to throw away on the off-chance that the RNG may grace you with extra max res.

Chest:
+ max res, + level of gems in this item, and 95% mana multiplier are all nice if you're a lucky bastard. Otherwise, it's not worth it.


Belt:
No.

Boots:
+1 level of gems in this item and + max frenzy charge are both good.

Gloves:
Curses on hit, level 10 Crit Weakness, and +1 to level of gems are all nice. Otherwise, MEH.

My guild, for being encouraging and hilarious.
SayyadinaAtreides and websterep for helping me out with the skilltree and not yelling when I fucked it up anyway.
The Blacksmith in Dunes for dropping the Doomfletch that got this whole ball rolling. Leap slam on, you magnificent bastard.
All the folks who helped out in ways that I'm probably forgetting.