[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)

I still should learn how to price things...

Again I have done no work on the leveling section. I can work on formatting if you want, or wait until there is more information closer to the launch of the next challenge leagues. Just keep me updated on what you think the best course of action is for that post/section.

Here is the FAQ section. I expanded on some, and added a few new ones.


Q: Can you do a Gear Check for Me? What is the Gear Progression?
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I'm no longer going to be doing gear-checks on this thread. That takes up a significant amount of my time to run through everybody's gear-checks, particularly early in the league.

The thought process is simple: get as much life, as much resistance, and as much IIR as you can on everything that isn't a unique.


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Q: Does Item Rarity/Item Quantity Work with the Cloud?
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Yes. If you want to use the IIQ gem in Standard, I do not personally recommend supplanting a damage gem with it. But if you insist, and you want to run both IIQ and IIR at the same time, drop Empower if level 3 or less, and drop Rapid Decay if your Empower is level 4. If you want to run one or the other (rather than both concurrently), your decision between choosing IIQ or IIR is based off of C = (1 + [IIQ/100]) * (1 + [IIR/100]). Whichever gem gives you the higher C coefficient is the gem you use.
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Q: In a Standard League Build, Do you Think it would be Better to Take Item Quantity Over Item Rarity?
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Depends on the rest of your gearing progression, but generally, yes. You would need to be roughly at around 230-250 IIR to make it worthwhile though, in my experience.
IIQ/IIR: MF Balance and Diminishing Returns guide (v2.2)
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Q: What Modifiers Affect the Cloud Damage?
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There are currently five modifiers that affect the cloud damage:

• Chaos Damage, Passive Tree & Jewels
• Damage over Time, Passive Tree & Jewels
• Projectile Damage, Passive Tree & Jewels
• Area Damage, Jewels
• Global Damage, Jewels

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Q: How Should I Prioritize the Damage Modifiers?
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Does not matter. All five affect the cloud equally. Just keep in mind area damage will not show up on the tooltip. But don't worry, it works.

For a detailed explanation, please refer to this post..
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Q: Why not Aurseize too?
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reddit discussion comparing the effects of diminishing returns based on scaling Item Rarity above the balance threashold with Item Quantity.
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Q: How does the change to maps having IIR affect the build? And why not IIR boots instead of Goldwyrm?
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Drastic improvement for map rolls. Details on the math can be found here and here, the second link also goes towards explaining why we opt for dual Andvarius instead of Aurseize.
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Q: Should I Craft a +3 Bow?
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A: Early league, yes, but it's cheaper to do it yourself rather than go through a service or buy one off the market. But that depends on you getting Catarina 8. Mid to mid-late league, it's actually just cheaper to buy one, if all you care about is the +3 roll. So just keep tabs on the market. Self-crafting the +3 bow, using Method One, will cost you 3-4ex (1ex Cata mod, 1ex for the first exalt attempt, 1ex if you're unlucky, and maaaaaaaaybe ~1ex in alterations to get single-stat +2 bow gems).
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Q: Why not Phase Acro / Quickness / Etc?
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I've deliberately designed this guide to finish at 88. Any other things you decide to pick up afterwards, or in lieu of other options, is your discretion.
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Q: How do you progress to earning enough to buy all the upgrades?
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You can go pretty much self found gear. For the first bit.

All the expensive stuff is really just gravy. All you need to get this build going is a +2 5L bow. You can buy a cheap 5L for 5-7 chaos, and spend 60 alts or less getting +2 on it. Details of how fast it can progress to fully geared can be seen here

Stack as much IIR on your rares as you can, taking resist nodes on the tree as necessary. You'll be able to hit 100 IIR without much issue (12% per gold ring = 24% + 15% on amulet = 39%, let's say 12% explicit rolls on each of those slots = 39%+ (15x3) = 85% + 15% on helmet and gloves each = 115%).

Then as and when you get bank, start punching out the upgrades as per the Gearing Progression question(second question in the FAQ).
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Q: Why no Eldritch Knowledge jewel?
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Eldritch Knowledge gets you 20-25% chaos damage depending if you place in Witch or above Blood Drinker.

Compare that to Poacher's Aim (25%) and literally any rare jewel with dual damage mods (10% + 10% at the minimum, capping at I think 13% + 13%), Eldritch Knowledge is, at best, a temporary jewel for this build.

The moment you get a well rolled dual damage rare jewel with any other useful affix (third damage roll, life, resistances), EKno. becomes sub-par. It's an interim choice.
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Q: What about Ventor's Gamble?
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Nope, not unless it's 7/40 or better. Analysis here.
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Q: Why Hallowed Seething Flasks?
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Math and discussion found here.
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Q: This tooltip? What the f**k??
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Look at the Chaos Damage Per Second in the Expanded Tooltip

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Q: How do you organize your mapping? I'm taking 9 years to vendor =(
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I made a video about it
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Q: Uncle Serleth waah y I no haz GG unique drops qq sadface =(
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MF setups are never about getting the uniques. You should be approaching it with the mentality that if you happen to get a good unique, great, but it's mostly about brute forcing the RNG to get as many rares as possible to have something halfway decent to sell at all times, and pushing the raw currency farming by vendoring rares and shit uniques for alterations, doing as many recipes as possible, and generally just grinding the hell out of currency farming faster than you would without any other MF.

The GG unique drops are meant to be treated as just gravy on the potatoes: adds flavour, but not the substance of the meal.

At the time of this comment, I earned 100ex in Warbands over 1 month or so of playtime. Of that wealth, these are the GG uniques I got: Lightning Coil (7ex), Soul Taker (5ex), Divination Distillate (2ex), Kaom's Heart (7ex).

That's it. 21ex from GG unique sales. The other 85ex came from more minor sales and just grinding the hell out of maps.
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Q: Why spec into "Master of Arena"?
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To help with the Blood Rage degen. It was more important in 2.0 before the regen from Growth & Decay. You can spec out of it if you want but I personally find it beneficial for things like desecrated ground maps, vuln maps, puncture, etc.
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Q: Okay, but why Blood Rage? Frenzy CoH setup takes care of the frenzy charges, amirite?
[spoiler="A:"]
Because the majority of the time you don't actually need to curse. You really only need to curse bosses and certain tanky rares / blue packs. Meaning that if you're stopping to fire frenzy, you're actually slowing down your clear speed. Blood Rage allows you to generate the charges automatically, which improves your clear speed, and thus your currency generation/hr.
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Q: Increased Area of Effect + Empower/Rapid Decay?
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If you choose to run the AoE gem before Ascending, you will have to decide between Empower & Rapid Decay, and the answer is you need an Empower "4" to justify using it.

In quotes, because you'll need a raw Empower 4 in a +2 bow, but an Empower 3 in a +3 bow, due to it becoming Empower 4 from the +1 all gems.

Once you have Ascended however, and drop the AoE gem, it's all about the dps. Remember that clear speed is effective IIQ. The faster you can kill shit, the more loot you'll drop. Therefore, in the 5L setup, it's more beneficial to run dps-centric rather than running IIR as your fifth link, because the more things you drop, the more chances you're giving your existing IIR to roll.
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Q: I Want to Run Caustic Arrow without MF? How do?
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There are a few guides elsewhere in the forums focused on a DPS/high survivability version of Caustic Arrow, but here are the bare bones of it:
Gearing non-MF Caustic Arrow:

• 6-Link +3 Bow:Caustic Arrow - Concentrated Effect - Rapid Decay - Void Manipulation - Empower - Slower Projectiles/Pierce
• Rings: Drop the dual Andy -> Rings with life and resists
• Bow: Can drop resistance suffices -> Mana Gain on Kill, Life gain on Kill, or attack speed
• Boots: Drop Goldwyrm -> Boots with 30 Movespeed, life, high evasion, resistances
• Jewels: Resistance is not a requirement -> 3 damage + life jewels
• Chest: Carcass Jack is easier to use because resistances are easier to gear -or- Kaom’s Heart if you are comfortable dropping 6 sockets -or- Really any good rare or unique chest piece
• Everything else: Life, high evasion, resistances

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Q: I Would Like to Play with Some Friends, What do You Suggest?
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If you are playing with a single curse support, don’t change anything, just ask them to have one of their curses be Vulnerability, and watch the monsters melt pretty quickly with the added bonus of party rarity and quantity.

In most situations for party play you will want to replace your golem with Flame Totem - GMP - Cull - IIR, unless your party prefers other curses, then you can Frenzy - Cull - GMP - IIR - (Faster Attacks/LMP).
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Q: I Do Not Have Enough Intelligence!?
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That’s right, you don’t. Well at least not to level your Vulnerability and Wither gems to level 20. Thankfully those gems are not required to be level 20 in the completed build, the two intelligence gems you are looking to max out are Concentrated Effect and Item Rarity. The former maxes out with a 111 intelligence requirement (114 if level 21), and the ladder also maxes out with a 111 intelligence requirement (114 if level 21). So let us say the target number is 115, this is really easy to reach. We have the base starting attribute of the Scion (20), three travel nodes (30), Coordination (10), Mana Flows (20), and the travel node on the Ascendancy Tree (40) for a total of 120 intelligence without needing to pick up intelligence on any pieces of gear. As long as you keep the intelligence requirements of your other skills at or below 120 you should be fine.
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Q: Divination Distillate?
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This is personal preference, are you willing to drop a quicksilver flask? How about a life flask? Can you reliably have the flask active when killing bosses? For me it is more trouble than it is worth, but if you can make it work the bonus IIR/IIQ is nice to have.
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@Serleth

Thanks for amazing explanation which covers most of my concerns - and really thank you for showing how to run shop early - tabs are not a problem, so will surely keep your advices in my mind.

I lied. I had more.



Now I should be done. At least until the updates for Prophecy really get started. Also When updating the main post, depending on how you decide to do it, could link at least one of the Chemist's Quicksilver in the flask section. (I didn't have one to easily link)

I actually don't have one either, lol.

I ended up rolling Ample first on both my Perandus quicksilvers and just kept with that.

I'll see about getting one done in Standard before June 3.

New formatting is up.

Much thanks once again to ChronoExile.

Still a few things to edit in, most notably the flasks which I forgot to include a new version with the Chemists prefix, but by and large it's cleaned up and beautiful.

I'll fold in the flask change (and anything else I, or others, spot along the way) closer to Prophecy release.

Now that the league is about to end, my chaotic darling MrsReagan has assembled some nice gear:



She will reach 89 probably tomorrow - I have got another lvl 89 char, but none higher. Considering that I have invested quite some time into her, this outcome is hugely below what Serleth described above. Level 88 on day 4? :-) Well, on weekdays I usually only play for 3-5 hours, but that's most likely not all there is to it.

Also, I don't even get close to the numbers stated above in respect to ex per hour.

And usually I am fine with that. I attribute the results in mfing to the slow pace at mapping. I like that pace, I'm comfortably listening to audio books while mfing. I assume that the slow leveling also derives from that and also from the simple fact that i die much too often - no miracle here, I could play less damage-prone and pay better Attention. Sometimes I choose to, sometimes I don't.

But a skype talk with some guy from this forum touched the matter of how I might start another char for the next league, and I simply assumed that I would, for the sake of getting to know other builds and their requirements, change to some energy shield build, thus getting better at pricing finds and selling them.

I came to the conclusion that I don't want to, mostly, because as of right now, I haven't even touched a lot of content with this build. Of course, I could resume playing in standard, but then I'd miss some of the new content. So I'll play another CA-Rogue, and will try to reach endgame faster.

How, though?

How do you advance fast? I'm not asking the gems or passive tree, though. Do you run solo or pair up? Do you form groups? Do you kill only rare or blue bmobs? Do you advance as fast as possible or try so stay in an optimal relation to the mosterlevel around your? what would that be?

Thanks for answering!

Is this correct setup for a 6l without MF gems?

Caustic Arrow - Rapid Decay - Void Manipulation - Concentrated Effect - Empower - Pierce/Slower Projectiles

If it is what is better, pierce or slower projectiles? Pierce has lower mana cost multiplier and does not reduces projectile speed, so does that mean its better?

"

Donnerdrummel wrote:

So I'll play another CA-Rogue, and will try to reach endgame faster.

How, though?

How do you advance fast? I'm not asking the gems or passive tree, though. Do you run solo or pair up? Do you form groups? Do you kill only rare or blue bmobs? Do you advance as fast as possible or try so stay in an optimal relation to the mosterlevel around your? what would that be?

Thanks for answering!

These answers are coming from the prospective of 'Race Mode.' I enjoy the competitive races in PoE and here are some of the basic tips used in solo events. Stay under leveled for a zone, there is no experience penalty when you are three levels under current zone level. The full formula for this is {Safe XP Gain = (3+(Character Level/16)}. So levels 1-15 you can be three levels under, levels 16-31 you can be 4 levels under, etc. If you are not comfortable constantly being at the edge of effective experience gain, just aim to keep ~2 levels under the zone.

In races, rare monsters are not worth it. They have too much life, are generally more dangerous, and the xp of one rare is only a little greater than the xp of a magic monster (and magic monsters show up in packs!) Kill large packs of normal monsters(think similar to shrine density) or if they are in your way in narrow passages, most if not all the magic monsters you encounter, and skip most of the rares.

Being able to kill via Area of Effect skills also helps progress really quickly. The last two seasons or so the go to skills were firestorm/traps/totems for spells (either hit a large area, or could continue to kill for you while you advanced forward), Leap Slam/Sweep/Cleave for melee (large area, or area while moving), and for ranged it was mostly Shrapnel Shot/Blast Rain (100% pierce for effective area, or just big area damage)

When it comes to party events or a group of friends, it is usually safer and most of the time faster. You can split up in act 2 (from town some player left, the others right), Act 3 (mostly to rush the Gardens/Library WP, while the rest of the group goes towards Piety), and Act 4 (Some to one dream WP, some to the other). Public parties are a bit hit or miss, but even then I will join public parties to go through the Dreams of Act 4.

The general consensus when solo racing is each act should take about 30 min, some will be faster others longer, but 30 is a good average to strive for in competitive racing events. When starting a new league this is not as important, you will likely do the new content (I don't know how long the average low level Prophecy will take), complete master missions, vendor and trade, etc. I've not tried to match this 'rule of thumb' with Caustic Arrow, but I found I was making it through the acts at a decent clip while trying to remember and apply some racing strategies.

"

mulerin0 wrote:

If it is what is better, pierce or slower projectiles? Pierce has lower mana cost multiplier and does not reduces projectile speed, so does that mean its better?

Pierce has the higher potential for Min/Max in a Caustic Arrow build. Less mana cost as you mention, but you can potentially gain three passive points and still reach 100% pierce change. Pierce is my recommendation if you are looking to run the non-MF version. (Assuming no changes to either gem at the launch of 2.3)

ty!

"

Donnerdrummel wrote:

So I'll play another CA-Rogue, and will try to reach endgame faster.

How, though?

How do you advance fast? I'm not asking the gems or passive tree, though. Do you run solo or pair up? Do you form groups? Do you kill only rare or blue bmobs? Do you advance as fast as possible or try so stay in an optimal relation to the mosterlevel around your? what would that be?

Chrono covered most of it, but I'd like to add this:

It also comes down to just raw experience: knowing what quests you can skip, what quests you might want to come back for later, and what order to hit things in, etc.

I think 30 minutes per act is probably a bit aggressive for your average player. Even I don't go through the acts that quickly (that's partly because I kill a lot of rares, but also because I like to keep my character relatively in-line with the zone level, so I'll grind Cruel and Merciless ledges, then Merciless docks).

I would say if you're averaging 45-60 minutes per act, you're going at a reasonable pace. I end up at Merciless Docks typically in one day (depending on how involved this thread gets), which is 10.5 acts in, putting me at roughly 45 minutes per act on average (I always put in 8 full hours on Day One. I like to be as close to maps as possible on the first day so I can start running a shop immediately on Day Two).

There's also http://poetools.com/experience-penalty/ which will simplify your maximum XP gain, but it's a bit out of date in terms of accurately depicting current zone levels per zone name, so just pay attention to the actual zone level # range that tells you what zone level # you need to be in order to retain 100% xp gain.

@ChronoExile: Thanks for the spot on the missing (list) tag. I've reworded the Distillate answer a bit, for a trim more brevity, and added a note about what flask to remove.

Now, time for some more Overwatch.