[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)

• Complete 40 Challenge league challenges - 64 maps remaining
• Two of each League specific unique item
• One of each fated unique item, two Kaom's Way, The Griffon, and Amplification Rod
• Fishing Rod
• Continued work on Unique collection - Never done
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• Continued work on Karui Atlas - Missing 14
• Continued work on the Card Catalogue - Never done

I've spent a bunch of currency on these babies:



I now have 12 of them and I'm going to try some sort of Grand Spectrum build.

The interesting concept behind GS is that they scale O(n^2) - that is, on the order of n squared where n is the number of GS jewels you have. And since n squared increases very, very fast, once you get a lot of GS jewels you do a huge amount of damage.

From a game design standpoint, GS offers an alternative to crit. To take advantage of GS you'll want as many of the jewels as you can get while still maintaining some semblance of defense. The reason that it's an alternative to crit is that you won't have enough points after grabbing all those jewel nodes to invest in crit.

But with 12 Grand Spectrum jewels you'll be doing 5 * 12 * 12 = 720% increased damage (that's a bit over seven times whatever base damage you'd do without the jewels) - so crit isn't needed.

It seems to me that the best way to leverage these jewels is to equip your main skill in a +3 staff with empower and to use Vagan's blood magic crafted mod so that you don't have to worry about mana.

For defense, I'll go dual curse, grabbing all of the curse support nodes with lots of life. I'll either wear Kaom's Heart or Lightning Coil - not sure which yet but I'm leaning towards Kaom's provided I don't need to use a 2nd skill for single target.

For my main skill I'm still not sure what to use. I've been thinking about Lightning Warp - supposed bugs in that skill may nix that idea - or Ice Nova.

I think with this:


and the Elementalist's prolif, I'll be freezing the screen on a regular basis (though that may not even be necessary since I think I"ll be one-shotting trash mobs).

For bosses, I'm not sure if Ice Nova will cut it. I may need to use a second skill for single target.
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Although Grand Spectrum jewels offer an alternative to crit, maybe they best shine when augmenting builds that don't use crit in the first place. For example, Explosive Arrow really shines with GS.

I think I want a pure caster build though - no totems, traps or mines (except maybe for single target) - and no bows.

Along these lines, Incinerate might be really fun.
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What I think I'll do is build my character around this tree which is pretty generic and then try out some skills to see what I like best.

The GS build should keep me well-occupied until the league ends.