[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)

Is it better to level with evasion / armour hybrid bases, or just rely on evasion and avoiding damage 100% ?

Made a Shadow, first time with evasion

Guessing you're HC.

Don't deliberately go hybrid if you can help it. Coming from Shadow I recommend going pure evasion due to the quick access to Acrobatics. Ultimately it just comes down to what you have access to for gear. If you end up having to go hybrid, that's fine.

Either way, run Grace immediately.

Thank you

Is there any leveling trees at all for this build? or a semi general outline of key nodes to get first ect

Thanks

I wonder if the upcoming changes to poison will be worth looking into at all for this build.

Obviously we don't currently use poison, but if they are removing the dependency of the poison damage roll from being determined by the initial hit, then maybe all of our chaos damage and DOT nodes would turn a poison support into a viable option?

Not sure if it would go on our Caustic Arrow, or perhaps on our Frenzy once we had some extra links to play with?

Would be interesting to try out.

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Viris wrote:

Is there any leveling trees at all for this build? or a semi general outline of key nodes to get first ect

Thanks

This may or may not be good advice, but as a more experienced player I tend to make a beeline for Acrobatics, while picking up every damage node along the way. After that I focus entirely on damage nodes until around level 55 where I start picking up life to get ready for maps.

This probably wouldn't work for everyone, but if you are skilled enough to avoid most damage sources manually, then this method will allow you to level very quickly.

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Viris wrote:

Is there any leveling trees at all for this build? or a semi general outline of key nodes to get first ect

Thanks

I'm not doing leveling trees anymore, and because of the wide variety of how people choose to level these days, an outline is entirely dependent on what skill you choose to use while leveling AND what your skill level is. Some people can avoid getting as many life nodes early, while others need to get more.

Anyway, it's not terribly complicated. CA sucks while leveling (I'm not including the ability to get +3 Silverbranch as you can in Legacy, because that probably won't stay for 3.0) so you pick an alternate skill, grab life as you feel you need it and try scale some damage for your chosen skill, then around level 54 when you can make the swap to a +2/3 bow you switch out for the CA damage nodes and start using CA.

This isn't the kind of build where Keystones are critical or anything. I like to have Acro by A3M but that's just personal preference.

When you make the switch to CA you're looking for ~3 clusters worth of damage nodes as that's when the skill starts to become decent. This typically ends up being Fury Bolts, Dirty Techniques and Entropy.

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Nick42 wrote:

I wonder if the upcoming changes to poison will be worth looking into at all for this build.

Obviously we don't currently use poison, but if they are removing the dependency of the poison damage roll from being determined by the initial hit, then maybe all of our chaos damage and DOT nodes would turn a poison support into a viable option?

They would have to change CA itself to poison damage (not chaos), otherwise it won't affect how we use CA (given that the ADC gem does nothing for the cloud).

Further, they aren't removing the on-hit requirement to apply poison. It's just that the poison is no longer based on the hit damage.

It could potentially present an option for an alternate skill to help with single target, similarly to how a Decay-rolled bow helps out, in that it sounds like it MIGHT make ED more potent for a build that does zero spell damage scaling.

Thanks i kinda assumed that much but wanted to ask just to see what peoples thoughts were. Appreciate the info!

@ChronoExile
Grats on 40/40!

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hankinsohl wrote:

@ChronoExile
Grats on 40/40!

Thanks Hank!

I have now started a SSF version of this build. Still in Normal, still using Shrapnel Shot, but so far so good.