[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)

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Serleth wrote:

AoE for Pierce/Slower Projectiles, depending on whether you have Drillneck yet. Which is pretty cheap to get, so get Drillneck then use Pierce instead of AoE.

Damn your response times are phenomenal!


For the gems linked with CA, what is your recommended order for quality?

Manually GCP your Caustic Arrow (unless you're comfortable waiting to buy a 20/20 failed corruption). Everything else, use the 20% vendor recipe. No particular order. Don't bother with Pierce/Slower Proj though, you'll want to save that GCP for Empower.

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Serleth wrote:

What do you mean exactly by league-starter? I need clarification on this.

I meant those builds that described as league-starters. You know, fast clearing with no special gear requirements (and will probably will suck at late game without them). Now we have something that will push us to late 60s and early-to-mid 70s. But if we have a well planned "alternate build" that will push us to 90 in almost the same time we spend on our current leveling alternate skills we will have faster access to higher tier maps, a buff to our main build gems exp and maybe some fast currency access as well. (or that's how I believe it would be). And don't tell me you can do all that, you don't count. This is for average players like me.
Edit: Of course something that is not so far from our tree to use as less spec points as possible to avoid too much currency investment.

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hankinsohl wrote:

I'm rocking 18IIQ/300-ish IIR

I used to like you Hank :p

"You don't count."

=D

I mean, maps in 10 hours... kinda slow, don't you think? ;)


Thing is, it isn't the levelling skills that are resulting in slow progression, at least, not exclusively. Part of the reason is that we're doing things like Frostbolt with only 9 points invested on the tree that impact THAT particular skill's damage, but a vast portion of it comes down to raw experience as well.

While I'm a good player and I can hit 80 on day 2-3, I'm not the kinda guy that can hit 90 on day 3. I honestly don't know what these players are doing in order to get there, but without a doubt it isn't solo. There's party play involved that allow quests to be completed faster, they often skip the side-quests until they're already in their 80s then go back and run them quickly, sharing map pools, etc.

If you're looking for a build that you can run that will *easily* dovetail into this build with less than 15 regrets, you aren't going to find it.

If you want to get a setup that will crush your way to 90, then respec, you need to plan an entirely different build and expect to invest 45+ regrets in order to get it done. Something this Bladefall Totem setup which requires a full blown respec.

I've designed this build specifically to swap around 60-70 to CA and be effective in doing so. I hit level 80 last night (end of day 3).

I'm not saying this to be disparaging, but it doesn't really matter what skill you use, there's a lot of player skill and experience involved in being able to get to level 80 and compete with the ladder, and to a lesser degree to do it as quickly as I did (which honestly isn't even competitive, imho). It's irrelevant what build you run if you don't have the player capacity to be able to push content quickly.

And yes, while I'm an experienced player, I don't do anything special in order to achieve 80 on day 2. I pick a skill, and I just hammer big packs down, ignore rares for the most part, kill the bosses, do some side quests, make sure my level is somewhat comparable to the zone that I'm in, and push the moment I'm -3 levels.

I'm trying to strike a balance between levelling quickly, and the respec cost of doing so. Namely, I'm trying to get it so that you can switch to CA ~60 using nothing but quest reward points, and thus save all your currency to start building the MF.

While I'm definitely open to suggestions on improving the process and providing a speed-leveling option that DOES require a bit more of an investment, it is my personal belief that as you become a better player, the current options I provide don't take that long at all. As I alluded to, I was within the mapping threshold (level 62-64) at the end of a 10-11 hour playing session, and that was with a LOT of distractions going on (IRL stuff, smoke breaks, food breaks, answering questions here, etc.) It can be cut down to probably about 8 hours with some focus and preparation, using the skills I already have suggested.

With that in mind, and again I want to stress here that I am not trying to be disparaging or condescending or anything along those lines, I'm inclined to believe that the issue is more about what's happening for you as a player and how you're going about leveling, rather than what build you're using to do so.


Again, open to suggestions entirely on trying to smooth the process out.

Thank you for the detailed replay.
First of all don't smoke, vape :p although I got a massive horizontal expansion due to that so be warned :/
In all seriousness;
If your build wasn't the best I found (for my play-stile) I wouldn't stick around for three leagues and a chunk of standard before them.
I tend to start off mapping by T6+ as soon as I get my hand on them so that what I meant by getting a handful of maps by the time of swapping. And by too much respec I meant not too much over an exalt (considering how cheap the are early in league start plus what we get from drops/vendor). Plus for a 20+ ex invest-required build an extra exalt (for example) is something I'm willing to pay. It comes to weighing the pros/cons of such act. This build is great, but a mid-to-late game great. So the sooner we are farming T8+ maps the better. And this is where you come in. The experience you mentioned. To see if I have a valid point and thus decide to make plans in accordance, or if it's not then continue as it is. So again, the idea is to: be able to start at least T6+ mapping, leveling the gems faster and gaining some currencies faster in an equivalence to what we will make in the same time spent (in our current state) as we wouldn't be THAT MF'ing anyway.
Once again thank you very much for your guidance.

Realistically then you're looking at something like a Bladefall miner or Blade Vortex build taking advantage of Tabula for the 6L clear speed.

Spells are the way to go, in general, as they require little else other than a Tabula to get going, and most often you can level with something like Firestorm/Totem in a +1 or +2 Sceptre until you get a Tabula, then 6L and blammo.

Take this with a grain of salt for now 'cuz I'm playing and haven't really sat down to think about it, but:

In my opinion, I'd do something of a hybrid build rather than going full-tilt clear speed, adapting Mr_G's Greedy Roomba build a bit to go more dps-oriented with crit nodes and the like and throwing in an early Andvarius and Goldwyrm to get 14-20 IIQ and ~ 100 IIR, while not really taking too much away from your dps either than one diamond ring slot.

This will allow you to crush maps fairly quickly basically just by spamming your Quicksilvers, and you don't need to necessarily pick up much more than good bases and recipe items. But what it will do is provide you with MORE good base rares while you're speed-farming so that you can still generate some reasonable currency as you go.

It would require that you adapt your loot filter to only show, say, T1-T3 base types to avoid confusion and clutter, but it'd be reasonably effective.

As you can see from his tree here, he starts from Shadow but we can easily adapt it to a Scion start. The advantage of running a build normally based out of Shadow is there's at least a few points that are in common with CA, so it wouldn't be a massively full blown respec.

By simply removing a jewel socket, we have the build as a Scion start.

You can then remove the Templar area and Vaal Pact connection to loop around to Acrobatics and complete the Scion > Ranger > Shadow connection, and then readjust all your points from there.

It's a total of about 85 regrets to get it done to switch to CA.


Just an initial thought.


Also, thanks for your kind words =)

this build is so fun running corrupted low tier maps :P

Ive never been so unlucky trying to 5l/6l took me around 500 fuses to hit 5l :/

but the boost was worth it going from a +2 to +3




Managed to find this cool item :D

:O

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Serleth wrote:

Yeah, alt-farming's a big portion of this build. Alts lead to fuses, and fuses lead to exalts. .

This is probably a dumb question but can you explain this? How do Alts lead to fuses exactly?

Vendors.

A2-A4 merchants will let you convert your alterations into jewelers at 2a:1j, and your jewelers into fuses at 4f:1j (net 8a:1f).