[3.16][HC][ON BREAK] Caustic Arrow Raider, DoT Focused | Tanky | 6k+ Health | All Content | In-depth

How much HP are you guys comfortable with and at what difficulty?

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DankawSL wrote:

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high_as_duck wrote:

Spoiler

Good guide. Awful build.
It can be playable, but you will have to spend a ton of time and currency.
Not worth it.

If your last characters were summoner and a miner, then everything else will feel like trash. Both of them have ridiculous damage for close to no investment. This build is opposite with main focus on being as tanky as possible first, then focusing on damage upgrades.

About killing Sirus, many people have done that with the build already. My guildmate in SSFSC included. You can find his kills on budget gear in video section.

Tbh it looks like CA has higher damage potential nowadays than essence drain or bane and doesn't require you to play low life with pain attunement for max dps contrary to spells. I don't think anyone claims ED is "unviable" though.

I don't think it's that expensive among bow builds, checking typical iceshot/barrage build or darkscorn poison bow build both are much more expensive. There's some hype around explosive arrow but it looks like awfully annoying playstyle (personal opinion).

And comparing it to Saboteur is a bit unfair, yes, they can do great damage but the average Sabo is very squishy unless you use Kaoms or go ES route. Watched Ghazzy's guide to ball lightning miner and like 3 times across the vid he complained the char has too little life to kill Sirus comfortably unless he swaps to Kaom's chest... Doesn't really encourage me, I hate all these "kill or be killed" binary builds.

Think I'm gonna roll CA this season myself after realizing I won't be able to afford all the expensive gear for any of the scourge arrow builds I had in mind for this league (plus it got nerfed). The only expensive item in the whole build is the bow and maybe the empower gem, doesn't rely on any uniques, doesn't need 6 link chest and bow can be made from cards, meanwhile did anyone notice how much costs a void battery or cospri build nowadays? In comparison this qualifies as a budget build.

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weppe1337 wrote:

How much HP are you guys comfortable with and at what difficulty?

5k HP is, at the very least, necessary. Obviously you could drop damage for more hp and the trade-off is up to the individual. 6k is easily doable but damage will be lackluster unless you have insane mix-maxed gear.

This league is quite rippy due to the metamorph's potential to one hit anyone. Lucky for us we have evade and we are able to shoot CA from afar. If this is your first character this league, aim for 5k HP and make changes from there. If you think damage is low, get more Damage over time modifiers. If you feel like you're squishy, drop some damage to get more hp on gear/tree.

Great build for league start. Managed to do all content, exept uber elder and delve bosses, coz they not rly profitable. 5.5-6k hp enough for all content, just grab as much chaos res as u can. General mapping is good, need swap arrow nova vs one of gems and swap it back for bosses, can be tedious but w/o it single target damage not that great.

I finished my standard project for the build pretty much. The results:



Crafted or re-crafted most of the stuff myself. Most lucky moment was to hit the frenzy mod on the gloves. Sadly i was'nt able to hit +1 chaos and/or dex-gems on the amulet yet, but for now i'll stay with the liferoll and try to get a double-aisling to finish it.

The build got 7k life, 76/77/76/77 resistances, bleeding, stun and freeze immunity, up to 80% evasion, 50% dodge, 50% spelldodge and up to 209% movement speed.

The biggest differences compared to a regular league setup is the bossing of course. With the current setup i am able to kill any endgame-boss safe AND quickly including sirus, uber elder etc.

Basta, looks like you made some good stuff there

What would be the price of such a bow, basta?

RIP #3 - Suicide on metamorph

This really isn't my league, steadily doing worse with each death. This is 100% on me because i knew the Volatile Crawlers were there, i avoided them for nearly the whole fight. Stopping for those two seconds was a death sentence. It doesn't matter that i couldn't see them through pile of corpses, i knew they were coming. Brainlag at it's finest.

It means i should take a break from PoE. I'm obviously still going to be active in my guides.

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weppe1337 wrote:

How much HP are you guys comfortable with and at what difficulty?

The higher the better. 6,5k is something i usually want to have minimum in the very end game with Crab aspect. Should survive nearly everything,

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Viktranka wrote:

Spoiler

Tbh it looks like CA has higher damage potential nowadays than essence drain or bane and doesn't require you to play low life with pain attunement for max dps contrary to spells. I don't think anyone claims ED is "unviable" though.

I don't think it's that expensive among bow builds, checking typical iceshot/barrage build or darkscorn poison bow build both are much more expensive. There's some hype around explosive arrow but it looks like awfully annoying playstyle (personal opinion).

And comparing it to Saboteur is a bit unfair, yes, they can do great damage but the average Sabo is very squishy unless you use Kaoms or go ES route. Watched Ghazzy's guide to ball lightning miner and like 3 times across the vid he complained the char has too little life to kill Sirus comfortably unless he swaps to Kaom's chest... Doesn't really encourage me, I hate all these "kill or be killed" binary builds.

Think I'm gonna roll CA this season myself after realizing I won't be able to afford all the expensive gear for any of the scourge arrow builds I had in mind for this league (plus it got nerfed). The only expensive item in the whole build is the bow and maybe the empower gem, doesn't rely on any uniques, doesn't need 6 link chest and bow can be made from cards, meanwhile did anyone notice how much costs a void battery or cospri build nowadays? In comparison this qualifies as a budget build.

CA has higher ceiling than ED for multiple leagues now i believe. It's mostly extra Blight setup that makes it deal higher total damage. Then again Toxic Rain exists which does exactly the same but requires weapon swap. I obviously don't opt in for TR because imo high end CA already deals enough damage to comfortably kill everything.

I'm aware of Sabo's problem with defence too. As it's often the case with many glass cannon builds, they're awesome until you make small mistake and/or get unlucky crit that kill them. For majority of players it's only 10% exp penalty, so it's obvious which style people prefer. Not me tho.

Figured I'd share.
First of all, gear:



Nothing too much, nothing spectacular as you can see, but it works. It just works, damage while mapping is absurd, not even 20q gems, gear isn't the best, still need to flip gems into 20q, no empower, plenty of room for improvement. That being said, with such gear, bosses pose no issue, neither do Metamorphs. Quite literally, everything is melting. Trash is one shot, conquerors are no issue, bosses, metamorphs, you name it.
I've yet to tackle guardians and awakened stuff, but everything else is just melting, quite literally.
I've came to terms that I'll need to upgrade for awakened stuff, but just wanted to give my share about the build. It works as intended, not one shot build, you need to play the game and know mechanics, but if you pay attention, you're golden.
Only issue is, do not stack regen on metamorphs. Everything else, easy game, for anyone having their doubts, build is fully functional and from my experience, I'm confident that it can do all the content in the game.

Hey I've been playing your build for the first time this league and it feels great, thanks for it! Anyways, I found Three-step assault boots and thought that they seem pretty awesome with this ascendancy with pretty much permanent phasing and onslaught. However I didn't find any talk about them in the guide so could you comment on why they're not mentioned or is there a reason not to use them over atziri boots or rare boots?

Thanks!

Edit:

I realized atziri boots still have more spell dodge than three-step assault.