[3.16][HC][ON BREAK] Caustic Arrow Raider, DoT Focused | Tanky | 6k+ Health | All Content | In-depth
"You can always respec redundant points, you get 20 respec points from doing side quests in the campaign and if you need more you can trade for "orb of regret" each one adds another respec point. " 1. Get a base flask of that specific type and level (be sure it's enabled in your loot filter). 2. Use 4 glassblower baubles if you have them while the flask is still white - will save you having to use 10 later if the flask is already blue. 3. If you have a lot of alteration orbs, spam them on the flask until you get either both affixes, or only prefix and no suffix. 4. If you have a flask with only prefix or nothing on it, go to einhar's menagerie and if you did his missions, you can go inside the arena, click the altar and choose crafting options with the beasts - any random beasts can work for flask crafts, and there's 1 for each remove ailment affix, pick the staunching one. 5. If you have no prefix because you didn't have enough alteration orbs in #3, use augment orb and hope you get bubbling or seething prefix. If not, you can scour orb it and retry from #4 or try with another flask from drop. Hope this helps. |
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How does this compare to Toxic Rain Pathfinder as a starter?
livejamie
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This looks like a character that will thrive in Heist, so I'm spending Labor Day Weekend getting used to her and actually trying to race instead of poking along scooping up everything off the floor that looks interesting, like I usually do.
Your guide is one of the most most comprehensive, reasonable and enjoyable that I've ever seen. I fully expect to finish with her as the highest-level character I've ever had. Won't be investing in cluster jewels. My lead character during Harvest was an Impale Cyclone-Claws Gladiator (and was hella fun), and the skill tree was so tight, I couldn't improve it even with creating: 2 8-skill Large Jewels (with 2 sockets, one with Wind-Up, one with Fuel the Fight/Martial Prowess), 4 4-skill Mediums (all with a Socket, 2 with Precise Focus, 1 with Enduring Focus, 1 with BOTH focuses) and 4 Small Cluster Jewels (3 with 2 skills: Battle Hardened, pair of Fettles, and a 3-skill Fettle). Crafting was fun and sometimes irritating. Ended up playing with the Socket-less Large with Wind-Up and Martial Prowess that I first bought to try out and get used to Clusters, thinking it was a waste at the start, then realized I couldn't improve upon it even with all the goodies I crafted... |
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I wanted to reply here a bit earlier but i also wanted to finally showcase finished gear project i've been working on. I failed at "finished" part, but more on that later.
Heist opinion Looks awesome, story and characters are probably great as well. Alternate quality gems so far have amazing (but good luck getting lvl 21 on them). I do have few concerns tho. I feel like league mechanic itself is gonna be dumbed down to your usual PoE playstyle with 0 care about alert level and stealthiness - because killing guards doesn't raise it very much. Simply equip your crew to lower alert level growth as much as possible. Running past enemies without killing them also seems like a possibility (should be doable on this build). I would personally like GGG to put more emphasis on stealthy approach but well... I know it's not really possible without losing signficant portion of your playerbase. I'll be playing obviously but more casually since i spent too much time in harvest. I'm going back to SSFHC, won't be racing in the event. Ideal CA gear progression and rng fiesta Putting this in spoiler since it's not really important.
Spoiler
Despite the fact i died on my CA char to delirium, i still tried to craft gear upgrades so i can have perfect character to showcase build capabilities and push it to the limit. In general i'm almost done. I crafted helmet and gloves since then, no issues. Only boots left. I also had bow, quiver and amulet to upgrade. This is where things fall apart:
* Boots - i didn't manage to roll endurance charge on kill, but got T1 spell dodge instead. This complicated crafting process, but at least i have one part done. Later i managed to get T2 end charge mod but i'm trying to get as many T4 blue seeds to maybe improve it. * Bow - my strategy was to fracture +2 arrows, reforge until T1 DoT multi, craft +1 gems and multimod afterwards. Easy. Next step was to use "Remove non-speed, add speed" craft for 50% chance of removing multimod and rolling attack speed. I failed 5 times in a row, each costs at least 5 ex. Chance of it happening is ~3%. That's absurd, cursed item. * Amulet - another absurd. I need +1 to all dexterity mods and afterwards T1 life regen, then i can safely craft rest of the mods. I never hit T1 life regen despite tons of life crafts. Odds are quite awful so that's understandable. I decided to use Awakener's Orb in order to guarantee both mods, only to get 6 mod item with 3 affixless mods and 1 life mod. Just perfect. After tough battle of rng it was down to one last 50% chance to remove last bad mod which i naturally failed. Now the base is just useless and too hard to craft. * Quiver - not T1 life after ~20-25 life crafts. Maybe more, i don't remember. I'm fine with T2 for now, it's gonna be the last item to improve. I simply have too many Other feats of amazing rng * I didn't get a single Awakener's Orb from ~25 A8 Sirus kills. Chance of it is below 1%. All of my kills were carried by someone else (i just suck at this fight) with one guy being a cool dude who streamed every single kill and other one being a trusted person from my guild. * A single 6-link after ~5200 fuses on 40%+ items. Killed progression of bleed bow completely. * No Glorious Vanity after three or four 4-ways and one 3-way. I targetted Viper obviously. Everything else was fine RNG, i was lucky even. I simply fail at the most expensive parts which just blocks my progress very, very badly. I'll end this "what i've been doing recently" post with this screenshot from yesterday. " I'm aware that dash would save me. Back in Delirium it was the only reason i kept that skill on my bar. It interrupts your skill cast and doesn't care about action speed at all. I avoid using it now because it's not good enough for crossing gaps and i don't really need more clear speed. Another reason is that playing with dash causes pain to my left hand (carpal tunnel symptoms) because i instinctively spam it, so that's absolutely out of question. Viktranka gave pretty good answer to second part of your post. It's combination of damage reduction, mitigation/avoidance (block) and recovery from block. It's absurdly powerful for a long time now, but only recently it became widely available thanks to Glancing Blows. Dodge is nearly identical to block. There's only a few minor differences between them like blocking a hit still counts as being hit despite not taking any damage. If you have 75% chance on both of them, they'll mitigate the same amount of damage. While evasion characters are really good against attacks, they suffer against spells because there's only so many ways to get spell dodge from. On the other hand easy availability of spell block (mostly Gladiator and Glancing Blows) combined with recovery on block pushes them over the edge. However that doesn't mean evasion character cannot be tanky. They absolutely can. Simply stacking sources of damage reduction to avoid one shots and spell dodge to ignore Sirus' "DIE" beams. That's why since ancient days when the guide was created i'm recommending Kintsugi, Aspect of the Crab, elder influenced boots with spell dodge + endurance charges on kill. Well, maybe i put lower pressure on spell dodge because it wasn't that necessary back in the day. " For gauntlent in particular everyone was on the same page. In fact evasion is better early on because significant portion of the damage was elemental, something armour can't mitigate at all. Later it's normalised. " From my memory it wasn't a toggle but constant effect as long as you have that ascendancy point. I might be wrong tho. Regardless this particular node is so ridiculously powerful against heavy spell based bosses. Just imagine having ~65% evade channce (which is easy to achieve with Grace) on top of 75% spell dodge/block. You could completely ignore Sirus' "DIE" beams with that. I don't think this ascendancy node will survive until PoE2 in it's current state. When you think about it Raider doesn't synergise with CA at all. However it's powerful enough defensively that it's a great option for it regardless. It's not the only ascendancy like that, Juggernaut or old Occultist are basically the same case. You can slap almost anything on them and it will work because they're carried by defences. So if your build doesn't have a synergy with ascendancy - that's fine. It can still be used if there's a good reason for it. GGG is slow to rework ascendancies indeed, but at the same time we're getting lots of new stuff to play around with. Annointments, cluster jewels, harvest crafting and now replica uniques along with alternate quality gems. Also Chieftain was reworked this league. I think that currently majority of ascendencies are worth picking for some reason... except maybe Elementalist indeed. " This is such generic question that i can either make an essay or answer in similar fashion. Pathfinder has more damage and AoE, Raider is significantly tankier with lots of QoL. Toxic Rain deals more damage but requires you to keep firing, effectively lowering your survivability. Caustic Arrow deals less damage but you have time to safely dodge enemy spell and keep up debuffs on enemies. Now combine skill and ascendancy and there you have your answer. If you're wondering about "league starting" capabilities, then they're equal because they use nearly identical gear. Both are dirt cheap. If you want more detailed answer, you'll have to specify the question. https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3053600 - My Guides
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" Heya, as someone who is also planning to leaguestart a ranger for the first time, could you go a bit more into detail? I have played a tr character this league and it was a lot of fun and easy progression, however I was able to bankroll the character from the get go so it was quite a bit easier. I tested a leaguestart with ca and I kinda fell in love with the surviveability of it, especially the fact that you do not have to continously shoot all the time. The ease of damage avoidance is really nice. From looking at gear progression, I think ca is actually easier, but I'm worried that you will run out of damage without investment. Do you have experience in what it takes to comfortably clear t14+, a8 sirus? Damage wise specifically? Can you do it on like a 2ex budget? (so I guess kintsugi, +2 bow gems bow(no multi) random life resist gear without +lvl or dot multi) Or do you need multi mod bow, malevolence eye, empower 4 etc? |
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" Depends what you mean by "comfortably". I'm very tolerant when it comes to damage outpute as long as build is tanky. I can only give you rough estimate based on damage numbers. To note, build reaches roughly ~400k+ dps with little to no investment. Single target damage is obviously higher with all debuffs up. Tooltip DPS: 300k - easily achievable even with suboptimal 6-link bow. Can clear all map tiers easily, but some tanky rares and bosses might take a while. 500k - requires medium investment. Multimodded bow (likely +2 arrows), empower 4 and either couple more levels or little extra damage on gear. A8 Sirus viable, but slowly and likely with couple of deaths (this build has lots of issues with this fight, needs optional setup). Most of the videos are recorded with this level of damage. 750k - possible with extremely good gear or sacrificing defence for damage. At this point you'll be steamrolling maps completely. 1000k or higher - harvest level gear. This is complete overkill. About Sirus - since i'm hardcore player i can't freely try this fight. Not to mention evasion characters are especially punished fighting Sirus due to his purely spell based skills with physical damage. It should be really easy with alternate setup tho. Atziri's Step with 8% spell dodge enchant, rare armour with 10% spell dodge craft. This alone should allow you to survive almost any mistake. Flame Dash - Faster Casting or Withering Step for mobility is likely recommended. I wanted to finally test it this league but i still have other projects to complete so... postponed for now. https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3053600 - My Guides
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Any suggestions before harvest crafting is over? Thank you for keeping up with this build & thread. It is extremely impressive how well put together the guide is, especially someone like me who is new to the game and learning crafting.
Last edited by Adinay#8075 on Sep 11, 2020, 7:32:41 PM
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"Make a -9 chaos res helmet. It's more impactful than getting the enchant. It's very easy in harvest and very low chance to roll outside of harvest (i.e. fossils). Example: You need a lvl 85+ hunter helmet. -9 chaos res is guaranteed within 2 chaos augments if the prefixes are filled and suffixes have room for 2. |
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" I had no idea, thank you! I may have time to do this. Edit - you were right, still some work to do but easily up to this already: Last edited by Adinay#8075 on Sep 11, 2020, 10:55:29 PM
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Phew, managed to make a last moment glove craft, will probably never have similar item again. :D
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