[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)

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Kingdestiny wrote:

What do you think about them deciding to add in the hidden potential gem? Would you consider using some blue's for the massive increase in damage?

No. Res balance becomes too great a concern. Our only available slots are amulet, gloves, belt, and helmet. One of those needs to be tri res (belt), and at least two others need to be dual res, otherwise you'll be (at best) 50/50/75 and/or alternately you would need to invest in dual res jewels which is not only bound to be expensive but also takes away a damage slot. That leaves you with one magic item for 25% increased damage, and takes away a jewel slot that can add life, resistance, and two damage affixes. And in doing so, you also sacrifice getting rarity on said equipped item, since you're bound to go for life and one resistance.

Hidden Potential is only 25% increased damage per magic item equipped. It'd be a res balance nightmare to get done between jewels and gear, when instead you can just use one jewel with two damage affixes each to get the same increased damage and sacrifice nothing to get it working. And the net result is more IIR.

EDIT RE: YOUR EDIT

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Kingdestiny wrote:

Also I noticed you don't use trap. Are the days of poison arrow trapping finally over? I mean in your video you have absolute god tier gear. It's very very expensive. A level 3 empower or just empower in general+a 6L bow. So does the damage still stand up without trapping with subpar gear?

I thought doing maybe Poison Arrow>Conc>Trap>Inc Trap Dmg(new gem)>Slower proj>IAoE/PhysicalProj

The change to Slower Projectiles adding more damage means that trapping isn't necessary. It's roughly equivalent to running trap in 1.3. And it effectively saves a gem slot when you're talking about 5L.

PA - Empower - Slower Proj - AoE - Conc.

Absolutely nothing in the above setup is better with trapping. And with the manual attack version you don't need to wait for trap cooldown, which results in a net faster clear speed. There gets to be a point when your PA trap deals so much damage that you end up having to sit around and kite mobs waiting for the cooldown. It sucks, to be honest. PA in 1.3 uses trap because the base PA damage with 1.3 frenzy charges and the 1.3 version of Slower Projectiles doesn't scale damage so it was beneficial to look for alternate ways to make pack clearing somewhat decent.

It's not required, now.

Also, PPAD is a no-go. You won't have enough damage on your bow to worry about it, we're scaling purely with gem levels.

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I've made poison arrow builds in almost every single league so far. This one is a MoM>AA Life Build. I may take the trapping out if you think it's not needed to speed up clear times. Eldritch Knowledge is going in the top jewel socket. Depending on your thoughts on the immense potential of Hidden Potential; that gem or the Proj gem you use is going in the other jewel slot.

Your tree looks fine on a quick scan but if you're going to avoid trapping (which I recommend), invest those 7 points heading down to ranger frenzy charge instead.

Eldritch Knowledge is fine as long as you're comfortable not doing things like getting extra resistance / life off the jewel.

Also, since you're not picking up the Pierce cluster, Drillneck wouldn't be a great option for you, and neither would Poacher's Aim. Use proj damage + chaos/area/general/DoT damage jewel instead.

You make some good points about it. But I intended to use a Blue bow. A blue quiver. Many other blue items because a lot of what you had was expensive. Drillneck has always been horrendously expensive. I'd prob use all blue jewelry. Than tri-res boots gloves and hat. With prob carcass jack until I can potentially get Cherrubim Maleficence.

Edit. Ya I actually just made adjustments to the tree because even before I read what you said I stupidly realized I left out empower haha. Theres just to many gems with trapping now. I did exactly what you suggested before you suggested it. Took out trapping. Fixed up the pathing a bit. Which ended up in more overall life, 152% now. Than I took the frenzy charge for roughly the same point cost. I wasn't heavily invested in traps.

That's 125% extra damage for me with cheapy crap gear that I can pick up and alt together in a few minutes time. Thats like having 125% to chaos damage on your skill tree.

This is of course sub optimal MFing. But I feel like before you can begin MFing you have to find stuff in the first place. It just seemed like the superior start. Until I can get an andvarious or a gamble.

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Kingdestiny wrote:

You make some good points about it. But I intended to use a Blue bow. A blue quiver. Many other blue items because a lot of what you had was expensive. Drillneck has always been horrendously expensive. I'd prob use all blue jewelry. Than tri-res boots gloves and hat. With prob carcass jack until I can potentially get Cherrubim Maleficence.

Blue bow means only +2. That means you're missing out on 1.5k cloud damage just off the gem level and tree scaling. Now factor in that you'll be missing out on an empower level as well by not having the +1, that's two gem levels you're missing. 3k damage.

You *really* want a rare bow once you can afford it.

Cherrribum's, forgot about that, yes, since you're going to both AoE nodes that'd be a great option for you.

Going for as many blue items as possible means your damage might end up being somewhat comparable, but all blue jewellery means you'll have almost nothing for IIR while still trying to maintain good life and resistances.

As for the expense, remember that those are just end-game gravy additions to scale PA to super-awesome levels, but they aren't actually required. All you really need to get started is a +2 bow 5L'd, which costs 5c to get the 5L and then 60 alts or less to get +2.

From there, you can start adding lots of IIR on gear. Andvarius is relatively cheap. You get Aurseize first, temporarily. Then once you get Andvarius, you get that. Then everything else starts to get affordable really fast. Once you hit 20/150 to 20/200, you start making roughly 0.3 ex per hour without selling anything at all. 20/300 pushes you to 0.5ex/hr. But let's deal with the lower value. 0.3ex per hour means 3 hours = 1ex. Every 9 hours you play you can (on average) expect to get at least one item worth 1ex+. So for every 9 hours, you're making 3ex raw + 1ex from sales. 4ex in 9 hours. Play for another 6 hours, that's at least 6ex banked, total, probably more.

There's Drillneck, or a +3 bow.

I'm going to repost this from an earlier post in this guide but I think it's worth mentioning again:

To give you an idea of how I progressed this build in Beta (granted, I had days off, so 8 hour playing days):

Day 1: 0-55ish, Merciless Ledge
Day 2: 56-70, bought a 5L ilvl 64 bow, crafted +1 all gems on it. Bought empower, socketed it immediately (made it level 2). Bought Aurseize and Goldwyrm, got some decent alcs, had about 20/120 MF.
Day 3: 70-78. Dropped Pledge of Hands. Traded it straight up for a +3 bow. Fixed some gear, 20/180 MF.
Day 4: 79-83. Dropped two Alphas Howls, and a Rat's Nest. (1ex each = 3ex). Had enough recipes done and misc currency to have another 2ex worth. Bought Drillneck and 5L'd the bow.
Day 5-7: Took a break from mapping, farmed Docks for sets like mad to sell for fusings.
Day 8 83-86: 1k fusings. Spam. 6L bow. Continued levelling. Dropped more uniques. Sold for Andvarius rings. 20/220 MF.
Day 9: 86-89: Finished the build, put together the guide. And here we are.

So in 9 days (72 hours of playing) I went from nothing to a finished MF build, and was starting to pull in 0.5ex / hr.

On top of that, in another 3 days or so I bought a Consuming Dark and 5L Infernal Mantle to test another build. All told in about 12 days of playing I made 39ex or so.

Do not let the so-called "expense" of this build discourage you. It pays for itself a lot faster than you might think.

(Edits for spelling mistakes).

Hm. That's encouraging although getting a pledge of hands drop was quite lucky. That helps a lot. It's nice to hear that you had sufficient progression to MFing. This is not my first time trying to get together Poison MF. It's been getting better and better and it seems this time it actually works. It failed miserably for me in the last couple leagues. With just terrible clear speeds even with trapping involved.

But the thing you pointed out is why I thought hidden potential sounded so good. You say the perfect start is a 5L blue bow with +2. I didn't plan to use it if I was rich enough to buy the things you have already. But price comparison wise in starting out. How can you beat 125-150% damage. Especially since you don't need tons of life in early mapping in order to survive.

Edit. Ya the other thing that made me decide to stop using carcass jack as the "end-game" armor is because of the nerf to conc effect. The diminishing returns on your AoE investment become huge. It's not that big a nerf at about 80%. But 100%? x.75 halfs it. thats 50% small AoE. So it just becomes not worth it.

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Kingdestiny wrote:

Hm. That's encouraging although getting a pledge of hands drop was quite lucky. That helps a lot. It's nice to hear that you had sufficient progression to MFing. This is not my first time trying to get together Poison MF. It's been getting better and better and it seems this time it actually works. It failed miserably for me in the last couple leagues. With just terrible clear speeds even with trapping involved.

But the thing you pointed out is why I thought hidden potential sounded so good. You say the perfect start is a 5L blue bow with +2. I didn't plan to use it if I was rich enough to buy the things you have already. But price comparison wise in starting out. How can you beat 125-150% damage. Especially since you don't need tons of life in early mapping in order to survive.

Yeah, it was, but realistically the Pledge drop only saved me maybe.... 8 hours? Not too bad.

You do bring up a good point I guess pre-MF stages, but the moment you pick up even one Andvarius is the moment you're going to have to switch to full on rares. That -resistance penalty hurts like a bastard. And the thing is, if you want to get affordable, faster, you're going to have Goldwyrm and Aurseize for sure, and my guess is at least one very well rolled resistance item.

But consider this: all your blues are going to be life, and resistance. When instead, you can get rares with life, resistance, and even a moderate amount of IIR. Let's say you go blue everywhere else except for Aurseize and Goldwyrm, and probably at least one tri-res item (likely the belt). That's 20/50 (if you get perfect-rolls, which is unlikely off the start) which will get you maybe 0.1 ex/hr.

Now instead, imagine getting two gold rings with 15% explicit iir and let's say 10% implicit. And same for the amulet. With life and resistance. That's 75% more IIR, and more defense, putting you at 20/125. Now throw in a 20% rarity hat for roughly 20/150. That's 0.3ex per hour. Let's say going for a Drillneck @ 6ex, your setup (without sales, probably dropping a 1ex unique every 15 hours, earning 0.1ex/hr) will take you roughly 35 hours or so.

As mentioned in my previous post, 20/150 gets that done in 15 hours. Less than half the time. In fact, you're spending almost a full real-time day longer than me (20 hours).

Now extrapolate that into the cost of everything else. 6ex +3 bow (another 15 hours for me, 35 hours for you), 2ex Andvarius x 2 (10 hours for me, 23 hours for you). Going just Aurseize/Goldwyrm + blue items puts that at well over 93 hours of playing without RNG on your side. 40 hours for me.

Do you really want increased damage that badly at the cost of survivability and farm speed, taking double the time my setup does in order to get gear?

Or would you rather gear twice as fast, and thus start farming full MF spec twice as quickly? Literally almost two full days in real play time time by running with rares and IIR on gear, at the cost of a bit of damage?

Now obviously these values aren't going to illustrate how it happens in real time, because you'll be adjusting your gear along the way, so this is purely for illustration purposes and nothing more.

Let's say I'm fully geared at 72 hours, and it will take you double that to start getting full MF. So 144 hours.

In that intervening time frame, I will pull in an extra 36ex. You would earn (again, illustrative purposes only) 4ex.

So, while I'm re-rolling my second build, you're still working on your first.

I get why you want to try out Hidden Potential, but trust me, the damage benefit isn't worth it in terms of how much longer it's likely to take you to hit a full MF spec.

As for Conc Effect, it's still more damage multiplier. It might not be as good, but it's still way more beneficial than not using it.

I never considered not using conc effect. I was referencing how detrimental stacking AoE is now. The damage took a hit ya but that doesn't affect anything. For instance

20% AoE poison arrow
40% Skill tree

1.6x.75=40% diminishing returns. Already 10% more than current Conc Effect

39% IAoE

1.99x.75=49.75% dimished AoE

Carcass Jack
20%

2.19x.75=54.75%

Carcass jack only gives you around 15% AoE. Doesn't really seem as attractive as it once did.

But ya taking in the factors you listed just trying to find nice MF gear might work better. With my MFer last league when flame totem was still good. I didn't even worry to bad. Had dual andvarious on him and his resistances weren't fully maxed but because he was so far away it didn't make too much difference. Just made sure I carried a heat flask since that was my low resistance. (Cold) I don't typically play on hardcore and deaths were pretty rare. Usually only died to stupid Merviel fight when you get trapped in a tiny room with her on certain maps.

Ah, sorry, misinterpreted you on the AoE. My fault.

No problem. You had some good information. It's rare for anyone to ever have good info about poison arrow. I'm excited to try it this league. Might finally be able to atziri farm with a poison arrow build. My flame totem MFer could never do uber atziri. He got annihilated by the trio. They used to stunlock the totems to death.

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Kingdestiny wrote:

No problem. You had some good information. It's rare for anyone to ever have good info about poison arrow. I'm excited to try it this league. Might finally be able to atziri farm with a poison arrow build. My flame totem MFer could never do uber atziri. He got annihilated by the trio. They used to stunlock the totems to death.

I haven't tried this versus Uber, so I can't provide feedback on that unfortunately but I'm pretty sure I've seen some PA uber vids in 1.3, meaning that Uber should be doable in full MF for the trash mobs at least, then swap out for defense during boss fights.

And OMG, Lockstep is so fucking amazing for the Trio and Atziri fights. =D

I agree. I've been building more risky lately because I've played the beta and it's way easier to full evade now. I don't have to rely so much on the actual evade stat. I can just simply walk out of the way of all the attacks in the game.