How does Bear Trap scale?

I'm interested in a character who uses several Bear Trap gems as the primary skill. I'm wondering how well this skill scales and what the best supports are.

I haven't used it in long time. Is a Bear Trapper a viable build?

There's no wya you can make a Bear Trap character when it takes like 10 seconds for each charge to come up.

might want to throw in some fire traps for aoe

You can equip multiple gems at the same time!

Bear Trap scales ridiculously high (Protip: If you run Hatred, and slap on Added Fire Damage-- jeez. DPS in the thousands?), except there's a few things against this kind of a build.

A) Bear trap is single target. Mob of enemies? Better have fire traps on hand, or enjoy running around. A lot.

B) Bear trap does little on ranged mobs. You'll either have to throw it right under tank, tanking a few hits, or attempt to slap it down, and lure them into it. Not exactly time, or cost efficient. Not to mention traps actually have life-- and while they're not able to be hit by spells directly, things like AoE explosions will take them out rather fast.

C) The listed DPS for bear trap is kind of a misnomer. Yes, your bear traps can easily do upwards of 4-5k DPS. How? By stacking 3 on top of each other, and having an enemy walk into all 3 at once. Tada, burst damage, but no real sustain. [Yes, this is mitigated by having multiple gems equipped, but it's not all that effective on bosses. Most don't need to be in melee to punish you with some sort of ranged skill, and bear trap root duration isn't as long on them, meaning they can easily run into melee while you're setting down more]

There are trapper builds out there, nonetheless, that use Bear Trap and Fire Trap exclusively (Fire being for AoE/mobs, Bear for single target boss burns) and it is easily doable. You'd probably want 3-4 Bears for bosses (You don't really need more than a 4/5l item since Added Fire Damage + Bear Trap = Already disgusting). If you -really- don't want to run any other sort of active skill, I'd at least invest in something like Weakness or Temporal Chains to help mitigate/kite while you traps are on cooldown.

From my experience, bear trap is my most powerful burst DPS at level 74. You have to learn how to apply it to different enemies, and be kinda tanky, but it's a very nice way to quickly shave a lot of life off the opponent.

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ShadyC wrote:

There's no wya you can make a Bear Trap character when it takes like 10 seconds for each charge to come up.

Op said he will use several Bear Trap gem, aka they each have their own charging/coldown time.

Also I have great success with Cold Snap +Trap Gem.
That + Bear Trap = Nothing moves. I even throw in some dual Ice Spear Totems and Dual Curse Frostbite/Temporal Chain to make sure that nothing on the screen is moving properly.

Pretty good and fun Character :)

Personally, I'd use this sort of skill set-up for traps:

Bear Trap x3 + Added Fire Damage
Fire Trap + Temporal Chains + Increased AOE + Faster Casting
Conversion Trap + Increased Duration - Hatred + Reduced Mana
Ice Spear + Spell Totem + Faster Cast + L/GMP (+ Crit Damage + Cold Pen)
Raise Spectre + L/GMP + Faster Attack/Cast + Minion Damage

This set-up would let you slow down mobs with Ice Spears while you set-up traps for massive damage.

Fire Trap and Ice Spears would be your main AOEs. Spectres would act as sustained DPS.

Conversion Trap, Temporal Chains, IS Totem, and Spectres act as 4 defensive walls.

If against a single tough enemy, unslot L/GMP from the spell totem once the mobs are dead and use the traps and totems to nuke everything.

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-forum/201

The Beta Skill Feedback thread is great.

As has already been stated, Bear Trap scales absurdly well. I use Added Fire Damage and Increased Critical Damage while using Critical Weakness as my curse. Paper DPS for it shows 10.5 k, so needless to say it is arguably the best single-target burst damage.

Level 72 character using the Shavronnes wrappings + Pain attunement + righeous fire.
I also run Hatred.


I use EK as main attack and it does 12.5k dps
EK + Life leech + mana leech + added fire damage + faster casting


Bear trap does 47k dps
Bear trap + added fire damage + culling strike

I dont use culling strike beacuse of "effect" but for flat damage bonus, making it the best one after added fire damage.


You cant really judge and compare dps value from Bear trap with other skills though, since its on timed cooldown.

To judge how good it is look at the damage it does, min does around 10k damage (not dps)

This makes it a very good burst skill, and also my only way to handle phys damage reflect monsters.

Added EK info as refrence to show that Bear trap indeed is very viable even with very lategame gear.