Tweety Explosive Arrow Marauder - A new Tree for an Old-School Cheap Endgame Build (UPDATED 1.3)

I've updated the trees for 1.3. A few more thoughts on top of what I said below about 1.2:

Suddenly I'm WAY short on int. I have a couple of 30 int nodes which are really just because I'm geared for being short on dex, and didn't want to regear. These shouldn't be necessary (and in fact if you can skip the one by Duelist there's a better path by just going along the bottom), I'm just too lazy to regear for more int.

I've updated my trees for 1.2. A few thoughts on what changes:

1. Short bow/quill rain nerf sucks, but isn't that big of a deal, it's a small attack speed decrease, but that's fine.

2. You may notice in my final build that I DON'T take any burning damage nodes. Ever since they changed the way fire damage works, burning damage is not nearly as good, and with all the fire/ele dmg available on the new tree, I go for that. Especially once you get up to a 6L and run increased burning damage, I think that it's better to run straight fire damage off the tree, and the burning damage isn't worth it.

3. Ways that you could change my tree: You could easily drop some life/armour nodes for more damage, either ash, frost, and storm elemental dmg nodes, the rest of the witch fire wheel, berserking for attack speed, etc.

4. I think that leveling became a bit more of a pain in the ass. I posted a new intermediate tree, but take it with a grain of salt, as I've never played it on this tree.

5. There's now enough ignite chance on the tree that it might actually be possible to drop chance to ignite as a link. Just a thought. You could replace with faster attacks or conc effect if you were so inclined.

As always, if you have any questions, I'm happy to talk about the build. I recommend PMing (possibly in addition to posting) as I don't necessarily check this thread that often.

Ridiculous life total - My lvl 94 character gets over 250% life from tree for a total of about 8.5k life. Admittedly, I run Kaom's, but even with no chestpiece at all, I'm sitting at 6.8k life.

Obscenely cheap to gear - You shouldn't look at my gear and be discouraged. My character is geared the way you'd expect a lvl 93 character to be geared. Here's a complete list of what you need to make it to level 70: 4L quill rain. That's it. Seriously.

Solid AOE clear speed - A single 5-stack will clear just about any white pack, and then you can move on. If you've never played with it before, burn proliferation is an extremely powerful mechanic.

Good (and safe) single target - Later in the game, you can swap in conc effect whenever you're fighting bosses to increase your damage significantly. If you get the ignite (which you should most of the time, with a curse, my ignite chance is something like 88%) you'll burn down bosses quite quickly. I say safe because you can use hit and run tactics very effectively. If you 5-stack a boss and get the ignite on them, you don't need to be attacking them again for the duration of the ignite (~8 seconds), so you can run around, hide behind things, whatever during that time, as opposed to most builds that need constant line of sight to DPS.

Can do ANY map mod - There is no single map mod that this character cannot do, and some of them it gets for free (ele equilibrium and blood magic, for two.) I've done no-regen, I've done reflect, I've done double-boss on most of the hard bosses. The one PAIR that I try to avoid is -max and reflect, as that's just asking to die. Fire resist is annoying, but doable.

Free regen - We're going to run Split Arrow - Chain - Life Gain on Hit to proc EE and blind everything and it gives us free regen as well.

Reflect - You have to be careful around reflect. That's it. In reflect maps, don't do more than 2-3 stacks at a time. If it's a big pack, keep it to 1 at a time (large packs of low-life mobs should have all the trash cleared by a single stack). In -max maps, try to make sure that you can see packs pretty well before 5-stacking them. Like I said above, you can deal with reflect because you have a lot of control over your damage output.

Parties/Auras - Because you run Elemental Equilibrium, partying with people running anger, and to a somewhat lesser extent wrath and hatred, is tough. I proc EE off a small amount of lightning damage on a ring, which means that things will be pretty much always +25% lightning res and -50% cold/fire res. You just need to be careful about who you party with. Especially if you're building for a new league and know what your normal party members are building, then this can be an advantage, however. Just make sure they do the right types of damage to benefit.

Ele Resist Mobs - Can be a pain in the ass, but EE + curse helps a lot.

Explosive Arrow - Chance to Ignite - Elemental Proliferation - Fire Penetration - Increased Burning Damage (5L) - Increased Area of Effect/Concentrated Effect (6L): This is obviously your main skill. Like I said in the intro, you can get away with the 4L into the beginning of maps, but you will eventually want a 5L or 6L to add the last couple gems. I used to swap increased AOE for Conc Effect on bosses for extra single-target DPS, but I have an off-hand weapon setup for single-target damage now (see gear).

Split Arrow - Chain - Blind - Life Gain on Hit: This skill provides incredible utility. It does 3 things: First, we use this combined with a small amount of lightning damage on gear to set EE on all mobs. Spamming this into a pack a couple times should easily hit everything. Second, blind has the obvious utility of severely reducing the damage of anything that deals damage with attacks. This is why we don't take unwavering stance, but if you did take unwavering stance, chance to flee would also be a viable option for this link. Third, the many arrows plus chain means we hit a lot of times, and hence get a massive amount of life regen from Life Gain on Hit. (Attacking ~5 times/second * 6 arrows * 3 (initial hit +2 chains) * 54 LGOH ~ 4k life regen/second) You're not gonna hit all those arrows, but the regen you get from it is huge. This helps when you're taking a lot of damage. This also helps early when EA is very expensive compared to your life pool. This basically single-handedly allows us to do no-regen maps with bunches of free regen.

Decoy Totem - Faster Cast - Lightning Warp - Flammability

Cast When Damage Taken - Enduring Cry - Immortal Call - Increased Duration

These two are self-explanatory utility links.

I don't run a 5th set of links currently, as I run Kaom's Heart, but one option would be something like Split Arrow - Chain - Culling - Increased Rarity for some utility.

Choosing Rares:

The beauty of this build is that it needs absolutely zero damage from gear. Having extra fire damage rolled on a ring or amulet is great, but not necessary. This frees you up to get pure defensive items. Look for things with life/resists/dex/int. The one thing that you CANNOT get on gear is flat fire damage. This will completely ruin your EE setup, and occasionally makes shopping for gear a little awkward.

Good unique choices:

Carcass Jack - Damage, life, AOE, and resists, all good fits. I used to run one of these before I got Kaom's, and it's easier to color for EA than a quill rain is. I think this is best in slot aside from a Kaom's.

Hyrri's Bite - Attack Speed, Dex, AOE, all nice. I've always run a light quiver for the dexterity, but since they're going away this should fill much the same role.

Devoto's Devotion - I just happened upon this one recently, actually, and it can get kinda spendy but good AR/EV, attack speed, movespeed, chaos res, and massive dex all make this great for this build. (plus we don't care about the reduced phys dmg)

Kaom's Heart - This is eventually best in slot for this build, but far from necessary. Interestingly, this is one of a few builds where the new Kaom's is probably BETTER than the legacy version.

Cloak of Flame - A decent chance for leveling with fire res, chance to ignite, burn duration, and a mini lightning coil-type effect.

Infernal Mantle (AKA Troll Shav's) - I put this one in here, not because I'm convinced it's good, but because I find it intriguing. Technically, I believe that BM users are never "low on mana" so the downside is gone, it gives +1 to fire gems, and increases fire damage. However, the chaos conversion, while good for reflect concerns, is bad for ignites. It's worth looking into, but I'm not sold.

A Word on Quality gems:

This build, more than any other that I've played benefits HUGELY from quality on all of its gems (except conc effect, where we don't really care). As a result, investing in high-quality versions of all the gems in the main link will pay huge dividends. There was a long time on my character where my gems were worth more than my gear. That being said, I bought my quality gems for this character before the 20% gem recipe went public, but now you can level and prestige all your supports without much loss. The only thing that you really NEED to buy quality is an EA gem.

Order for gearing:

0. Get a quality Explosive Arrow gem that you will be levelling ASAP. Ideally this will be 15+, but anything over 10 is nice, and honestly anything helps.

1. Get your Quill Rain and two 4Ls, one should be GRBB for EA - Fire Pen - Chance to Ignite - Elemental Proliferation. The other should be GGGR for Split Arrow - Chain - Blind - Life Gain on Hit. As I've said elsewhere, this is all you need to start using EA.

1.5. Get quality versions of Chance to Ignite, Fire Penetration, Increased Burning Dmg, and Elemental Proliferation (AOE is lowest priority). The same goes for these as the above - 10+ is good, 15+ is great, anything helps. I put this step here because this is something that the sooner you do it the better. Alternatively, if you want to go the budget route, you can just prestige all your gems (except the EA gem) when they hit lvl 20. You don't lose much by going to a lower-level quality version in any of these cases, and they'll get back to lvl 15 super-fast anyways.

2. Get all your resists to merciless cap, this means 135% all resist between all your gear, and as much life on gear as possible.

3. Get a Carcass Jack. This is a huge quality of life improvement for the AOE, and has nice stats for you.

4. 5L your carcass jack. I recommend 5L-ing a Carcass Jack and NOT the quill rain for a couple reasons - your 5L colors (GRBBB or GRRBB) are much easier to roll on a carcass jack than a quill rain and carcass jacks are generally easier to resell which brings us to...

Note: I'm pretty sure that you can do just about any map in the game after this step. Everything else is just gravy.

5. 6L a carcass jack. This might sound like a tall order, but the fact that we have a relatively cheap unique item that we're trying to 6L makes our life MUCH easier. Here's why: There will always be a number of unlinked carcass jacks on the market. They're more or less interchangeable (although the roll does matter some). They cost somewhere in the 1-2 exalt range. Go out and buy the best roll you can find. 6-socket it. Start dumping fusings into it. If you hit a 6L, GREAT! If you hit a 5L before getting a 6L (which will usually happen), that's fine too. It's now worth ~3 exalts more than it was when you bought it. Hopefully you didn't spend too much more than that trying to link it (if you're lucky, you spent less, 5Ls are easier to get than they used to be). Sell it (or your current chest if it's a worse roll) and start over. In this way you can always be working on 6L-ing an item without throwing away the value you lose when you roll over a 5L.

6. 6L a quill rain. Same strategy as the carcass jack.

7. Buy a Kaom's.

8. Go try to get whatever luxury upgrades you want, amazing rares, Doryani's belt, Devoto's, 6L +3 bow, corrupted lvl 21 EA gem, whatever. (This last step is really just for the hell of it)

For an idea of what an extremely geared-out version of this character would look like, here's my gear at time of writing:

For those of you who may not be familiar with explosive arrow, the way that it works mechanically is when you hit a mob with it, the mob gets a fuse charge which can stack up to 5 with a one-second timer that refreshes every time a new charge is applied. This damage is counted as non-weapon fire projectile AOE damage, and so anything that affects those keywords affects the explosion damage.

The way that play on this character will usually go is: 5-stack a mob in a pack --> curse --> split arrow a couple times to set EE both before and after the explosion --> move to next pack. A single 5-stack is enough to clear just about any pack outside of the very hardest maps, and the prolif stretches basically the width of the screen. If you've never played a burning prolif build, it's worth noting also that corpses proliferate burns as well, which means things like rhoas that are outside an initial blast and then charge you are often dead of the prolif burn before they even reach you.

The high cost of EA means you cant run it until you have blood magic and a significant amount of regen. This makes leveling until you can start using EA a little bit dicey. I suggest using a two-hander with groundslam/leapslam and heavy strike and taking the melee phys passives near the marauder start. Then start to get the connections you need to eventually swap. Get an EA gem ASAP and level it in your offhand. If you need more dexterity, don't hesitate to take nodes on the tree/gearpieces to make it happen. This is absolutely crucial. The absolute minimum, in my opinion, to spec into BM and switch to EA is 4% regen, some ele dmg, and RT. A bare minimum EA tree might look something like this:



You will then be using EA - Chance to Ignite - Prolif - Fire Pen. This link lasts you until maps basically. Right when you switch, the cost of a 5-stack EA will be a decent chunk of your life, but you can use the split arrow/chain/LGOH link to regain life quickly. From here, you can go where you want. Need defense? Take life and armour nodes. Need dex? Fill out the duelist part of the tree. Need damage? Head towards Elemental Equilibrium or take more ele nodes. (these are both pretty huge boosts to damage) My current tree looks like this:



For bandits, I do Oak, kill, kill. I originally had taken the endurance charge, but didn't use it much.

Defensive page:



These numbers are all solo. I regularly run with a group that runs both grace and determination, in which case I have something like 30k Armour. Even now, with a Granite popped, I'm over 20k.

For offense, I'll link the screenshots but they mean just about nothing. EA is one of the few builds that tooltip DPS is meaningless for (not unlike Detonate Dead). So I have a spreadsheet for trying to calculate rough damage numbers: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArU8pATdWV7hdGZfdGtpMFVQSDNfUndIa0JmOVBNd2c&usp=drive_web#gid=0

The upshot here is, with flammability on I do about 250k damage with a 5-stack and an ignite with the main-hand weapon. With the off-hand conc effect/empower setup I do about 800k with a 5-stack and an ignite, and will do something close to a million with lvl 20 EA and lvl 3 Empower.

Primary Weapon:



Weapon Swap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlLqeBzY9Ug&feature=youtu.be

Sound-free version for those who can't watch youtube video because of music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76lVmeCrKWA&feature=youtu.be

One thing that's great about this build is that the fact that it runs a super-cheap unique bow and a relatively affordable unique chest (carcass jack is best in slot until you get enough to buy a Kaom's - a large hurdle for most players) is that you can acquire these en mass and bootstrap your way to a 6L. What I mean by this is you can buy a quill rain (ideally with high proj speed roll), 6-socket it, and then dump every fusing you get into it. If you get a 5L, use it. If you already have one, sell it and start over. In this way you can work towards a 6L without wasting 5Ls and lots of currency. Same goes for the Carcass Jack. This is how I got my 6L quill rain and the 6L carcass jack that I used for a long time.