[3.3] Low Budget - Animate Weapon Bowmancer

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How to play this build:

You run around and "one shot" mobs with your bow and auto cast everything by doing so.

Videos:
Using Tornado Shot: T15 Dark Forest Map

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How it works:

These two items do almost all the work for you:

Your animated weapons cant kill enemies on their own, but they will stunlock them until you finish them off. This will trigger the gems socketed in the bow all the time and you will turn every white weapon drop into an animated weapon. You also have perma Onslaught from the support gem linked with your bow skill.

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Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• High damage, 1 Mio.+ dps
• Budget friendly
• No six-link needed
• Easy to play
• No Porcupine spikes or Detonate Dead

Cons:

• Can sometimes take a few enemies until the first weapon drops
• Heavy AoE can wipe your weapons. Flameblasts, Bearers bloodline, Gorge Map boss etc.
• Not potato PC friendly
• Bosses with longer phases that you cant just oneshot can be troublesome
• Not suited for end game bosses (Shaper, Guardians, Uber Atziri)

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Skills:

Animate Weapon:
5-link is enough damage. Even 4- and 3-link works.
AW + Melee Splash + Minion Damage + Elemental Damage w. Attacks + Added Lightning

Ice Shot/Tornado Shot/Split Arrow:
Killing enemies, auto-casting AW/Flesh Offering, applying Elemental Equilibrium and granting you Onslaught.
You can use Tornado Shot/Split Arrow instead of Ice Shot if you have added cold damage on one of your rare items or if you are willing to give up a link for Added Cold.
This is pure utility, no dps. All your damage comes from your animated weapons.
Level 1 Ice Shot/Tornado Shot/Split Arrow + Greater Mult. Projectiles + Onslaught + Faster Attacks

Flesh Offering:
Socketed in the bow with the 5-link Animate Weapon to auto cast it.

Mirror Arrow:
Used to kill the first pack of each map to get the auto casting going.
You can put a Golem of your choice in there as well.
Mirror Arrow + Minion Damage + Elemental Damage w. Attacks + Golem

Elemental Weakness/Vaal Haste:
Almost doubles your dps. Use it for bosses.

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Auras:

You can run Wrath, Anger, Haste, Vaal Haste and Clarity with this:

Wrath, Anger, Vaal Haste and Level 1 Clarity socketed in the Chest.
Haste somewhere else so it affects you.
Clarity to make use of the "Commander of Darkness" Ascendancy, that grants 3% attack and cast speed per aura.

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Other Gear:

You want Life, Resists and Dex on your rares.
Added cold damage if you want to use Tornado Shot instead of Ice Shot, to proc Elemental Equilibrium.
Penetrating Arrow Quiver for the pierce.
Important: No lightning or fire damage on any of them because of EE.

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Optional Uniques:

This makes clearing and boss killing even faster.


This will increase the average number of your weapons.


The more Dexterity the more damage the minions do, these items are good options for that:


This gives a lot of Dexterity, Strength and Intelligence.


This gives Life, Evasion, Mana and some Energy Shield. It also synergizes well with Astramentis.


This turns some of the Int on the tree we dont need into some Dex:

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Jewels:

Try to get Life, Minion Damage and Dex on your rare jewels.
The unique jewels I posted above are not necessary, but they are way cheaper than good rare ones.
Abyss jewels are also a really good option. Mods like flat added fire/lightning minion damage and increased minion attack speed are really good for this build. But the best mod is the taunt on hit one for your minions, you have so many animated weapons and they have such a high attack speed that they should perma taunt everything.

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Passive Tree:

Level 90

If you decide to use a "Spirit Guards" jewel, the socket at the scion start can fit dexterity threshold jewels.

PoB link to my character: https://pastebin.com/050jE0ZX

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Ascendancy:



Since you should level as SRS until maps, "Invoker" is the last Ascendancy to get.
The order of the other ones depends on what you personally prefer at your current level.

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Bandits:

Kill all for 2 passive points.

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Leveling:

If you level as SRS there is almost no respecing to do later.

Passive Tree with 11 points
Passive Tree with 24 points
Passive Tree with 39 points
Passive Tree with 57 points
Passive Tree with 84 points

After this path to the aura nodes as shown in the final passive tree. Respec out of "Occultist's Dominion" and the the cast speed nodes when you are ready to switch to Null's/Speaker's/AW. This costs only 8 Regret Orbs.
I also recommend to do the first three labs with SRS still.

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Doing Labyrinth with this build:

The Animate Weapon setup doesnt work for the Izaro fights, but you can use one of the following setups to do it:

• Use the Mirror Arrow to kill him. That's what i use. I have a 4-link setup with Mirror Arrow, Stone Golem, Minion Damage and Elemental Focus. Put in Elemental Damage with Attacks instead of the Stone Golem for the fight, this is enough damage to kill him.
• Take some weapons with you, drop them before the fight and manually cast them using a 5- or 6-link in your weapon swap.
• Get a "Femurs of the Saints" and two "Dead Reckoning" jewels and use skeleton mages to kill him.

Feel free to give feedback!

And make sure to check out my other build guides:
Stone Cold Steve Austin - The Cold Resist Stone Golem Champion Tank Summoner
Zombiemancer - High Survivability - Guardians/Shaper viable

Seems fun how much dps do you have ? Edit:And can you say if you are able to do higher map ?(like T14-15)

Might go for this when i make a new char, seems fun!

nice build, thanks for sharing.
Why don´t you take the skill effect nodes next to scion? Should increase your AW by alot.

Why you don't use added lightning damage instead of added cold since you use Wrath and it would increase dps by alot

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Seems fun how much dps do you have ?

With my build right now about 30k per weapon, 20/20 gems and EDWA instead of Faster Attacks would increase it to about 50k. 6-link with Elemental Focus and Elemental Weakness alone would push it to 100k, not counting for other gear optimization.

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And can you say if you are able to do higher map ?

I'm still working on my atlas, so i cant tell with the boss health changes, but so far bosses melt pretty fast up to T10.

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Why don´t you take the skill effect nodes next to scion?

My bad, i simply forgot to get that node creating the tree for this build, thanks for pointing it out.

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Why you don't use added lightning damage instead of added cold since you use Wrath and it would increase dps by alot

Because i proc Elemental Equilibrium with Lightning Arrow. Wrath adds flat damage other than Hatred so it is still better even with increased lightning resistance on the enemy through EE.

Do you happen to have a leveling guide? What are you leveling up as/with?

I'm thinking about starting this up with my friend and it does seem very budget indeed!

Update:
-Added a leveling section and some other info.

i dont get it why shaper gloves? phys damage dont up minions damage

yeah. was going to say. why shaper gloves? all u really get is life from them...

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Cutos wrote:

i dont get it why shaper gloves? phys damage dont up minions damage

They are cheap and offer nice stats: Life, Accuracy, Mana, Evasion and some ES.
Perfect rolled rare ones are not really better and you dont need resists.