[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)

Sorry if this is off topic but...

You mentioned Flame totem is good for leveling and I've read that flame totem MF is pretty good too.

How is flame totem MF compared to PA MF in your opinion? pros cons?

Flame totem MF is considered "good" because you can do it with literally nothing other than a +1 magic sceptre straight into maps, and you can craft it by level 9.

It gets a lot of hype because of its simplicity in building, it's efficiency to set up monetarily, and that it goes very reasonably with a Tabula very early on.

But it's honestly flat out terrible for a solo MF build unless you go crit, and since the change to shotgunning, unless you're using Sire of Shards, I'm of the opinion that it's being done wrong.

FT's central advantage as an MF build is that it's an amazing culling skill and great for party play as a result.

For solo play, in a crit SoS setup, it's only marginally slower than PA (i.e., PA clears Promenade in about 2:50, crit SoS FT does it in about 3:05, 3:10).

The issue is that any crit build ultimately has a much more significant choice to make than non-crit builds. If you sacrifice one ring slot for say, an RT Ice Crash build, missing out on one ring worth of flat phys damage is going to mildly suck but it's not a build-altering decision.

But as a crit build, trying to go for MF (and let's for argument sake say you plan on using the same gear setup I use in the PA build), you've already got Goldwyrm and two Andvarius rings taking up gear slots, sacrificing life and resistances and move speed to get it done.

As a crit FT build, you would normally pick up at least one of either Three Dragons or Maligaro's Virtuosity, if not both. But now that you've already sacrificed three defensive slots for MF instead, compromising survivability, now you're forced to also sacrifice damage to compensate. Which PA doesn't really require you to do.

But at the end of the day, both have their solid points:

* PA MF is perfect for the solo player. It has great clear speed, solid boss kill times, and can crush the Apex with ease.
* FT struggles a bit with Apex by comparison, but still works, but allows flexibility for you to decimate maps as a soloist AND switch into damage gear in party play while your friends tank the damage and you still all drop mad loot.
* But it loses clear speed slightly compared to PA in solo play and that adds up over time. Twenty seconds per map in a 2 hour session means you're probably running about 1-2 or so less maps per hour than PA will.



* Both setups are easy to gear and get functional, and both require fairly good investment to get potent damage and clear speed.
* PA offers greater flex in terms of survivability and ease regarding defensive mechanics, while FT shines just a little better for boss damage as long as you can keep the totems alive.
* For bosses like Terrace or Academy, which just murder totems, your boss kill time actually goes up, but you also don't have to pay the extra 4ex for Drillneck (+3 bow and SoS cost about the same now after the metamod crafting was revealed).

I mean it's all just nitpicky analysis shit but at the end of the day this is what you need to know:

If you're a pure solo player, PA is better overall.

If you're a party player or mixed player, FT lets you both solo MF and MF for your friends.

Thank you for the fun build it has more than payed off the effort to get it running.



My current gear.



It's kind of hard to move on from here without dropping lower than 75% res but, I was thinking of getting a rare ring with res and swapping the gloves for Legacy Sadima's and also getting legacy Goldwrym boots for near 50% quantity ( 90%+ later if I get the IQ gem in a 6L). I would lose Rarity tho...

Just a thought I had, but would probably cost me too much.

Mastercraft a resistance on your bow to help out with that. If you can get a gold ring with 40%+ IIR as well I think it's a reasonable exchange to make.

Hello Serleth, hello everyone :)

I'm still playing that build, it is really fun, but in week or two the league ends. And my char goes to standard. And, I have a question.

At standard, I have IQ gem. And was thinking about swapping IR for IQ in 6L bow. Right now got 20/311, at standard after swap my stats will be like 64/241. C value will increase by 24% from 7,73 to 10,15 (at "typical" rare map 100IQ/45IR). Should I do that, or not, because even now with "only" 20 IIQ quantity of yellow and red items are too high to carry all of them to vendor.

Or just stick to previous plan, add IQ gem to golem with Culling and the same IR gem and let him do the Bosses?

Thanks for the guide, once again!

PS. What build are you gonna play at next 1M race league guys?

Imho, stick with rarity and cull bosses with an alternate setup (such as golem like you suggested). The central reason I recommend that is because I've noticed I tend to complete a lot more recipes with IIR rather than IIQ, even though the alteration farming from vendor trips is about the same.

I'm going to stick with this build for the 1mo. Lots of extra-loot league modifiers, no reason to not take advantage of it since it will merge with Standard at the end. Excellent excuse to make some extra profit.

Thank you for answering my question about MF FLAME TOTEM so thoroughly

You're welcome =)

but your PA vs Flame totem comaprison doesnt take in account the fact that you can get more iir-iiq on flame totem, since you can use sadima-perandus and require less gear

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xenochaos1 wrote:

but your PA vs Flame totem comaprison doesnt take in account the fact that you can get more iir-iiq on flame totem, since you can use sadima-perandus and require less gear

There's nothing stopping you from using Perandus/Sadima on PA either.

The only advantage in terms of gearing that going FT provides is that you can 1h + Stormsail for 40% extra IIR.

You can otherwise throw in the exact same combination of gear that FT can, other than Stormsail, down to IIQ and Greed's Embrace or whatever. After that it just depends on how squishy you're willing to be to make up for resistances by either pushing to Charisma/Influence (just like FT typically goes for Sovreignty/Influence) for auras, whether you're willing to drop Empower to BM your PA to aura-cap, etc. etc.

PA can do everything FT can, except cull (and even then you can set up an FT somewhere to cull bosses, if you want). It can even go low-life. I actually built an LL tree for someone in the early stages of this thread.

But the point of this guide isn't to put together a full-tilt MF spec but rather one that can comfortably solo high level maps with good MF values and sacrifice very little in the way of damage or survivability.

FT actually requires a lot more work to get the same clear speed as PA, since you need to go crit FT to match up damage-wise and you're probably only going to end up with about 3.7-4k life with FT compared to the 4.8-5k you can get with PA.

So yeah. It's been accounted for. The comparison just assumes you're going to go for a similar balance between dps, life, res, and MF.

The only time you "require less gear" for FT to achieve that balance is if you're a culler and you're getting carried dps-wise in a party. Which is implied as a culler spec.