Elemental bow witch

I played a poison arrow/summoner in closed beta. That build is prob still viable.

Since poison arrow already has great base dps via the poison you don't need good gear to have great damage nor do you need to invest in any nodes. Only problem would be the dex requirement to level up your poison arrow gem

bow with +2 to bow gems.

Poison arrow with support gems like gmp,pierce,increased duration, increased area of effect

Vulnerability curse for 40% more degeneration damage

Summons to hold agroo in place.

Going from that poison arrow number in wiki

510(lvl 18) * 1.4 (vulnerability) 714 damage per second [not bad]

"

Galneryus wrote:

the bow builds are very heavily gear dependant, I play bow shadow, and I am having a lot of trouble already, I honestly think bow is ranger thing, if you are going to go elemental, just use hatred, wrath, anger and use lioneye's glare with lightning arrow with (chain+LMP+WED+Mana Leech).

the huge issue with bow witch for me was lack of dex, it's very challenging to get 212 dex for lioneye's glare (and you do need lioneye's glare because you are pretty much bit far away from marauder tree).

I quit my bow witch before level 70s because she just had lots of problem keeping up with dex requirements unlike my EB/Shadow (and how there are just many unnecessary nodes to take).

Come on, going LA is so sheep, it's not even that good.

"

Namenemas wrote:

"

Bada_Bing wrote:

"

Saydv wrote:

Actually. Im using rain of arrows with weapon elemental damage and my gears have +elemental damage so its still hurts a lot. Thats the truth

edit: I forgot to tell that I also use anger and wrath aura so it still have elemental damage.

I really can't see how RoA can benefit from elemental damage. It is a skill that increases your PHYSICAL damage. Weapon elemental damage increases the elemental part you have on your bow.
But hey, i ain't no expert on bow mechanics. Maybe i'm completly wrong. You should make a post in the Ranger forum and ask what a good support for RoA would be (incr elemental or whatever?.

It benefits from it perfectly, since you can use (hatred), wrath and anger. You can also use an ELEMENTAL BOW. It apparently can't miss, so it's very good for a witch ele bow build. I also just quickly made up a CI bow witch build, although you'll want to go for a physical bow with hatred and possibly a 45%+ blackgleam. You'll get enough life leech from blood rage if you use physical bow, so you don't have to worry about that. You'll want to get some str from gear tho, 30 should be enough, and you are gonna need pretty good ES gear, something along the lines of 530ES chest, 250 ES circlet, 55 ES belt, 90 ES gloves and 170 ES boots. With that and disc you should get around 4k ES. Support gems would be faster attacks, weapon ele dmg, increased area, conc effect. It's quite a high end build, but if you're going both CI and bow on a witch, you can expect that. Rain of arrows right now is the skill people are switching to, to be able to do really hard maps. They do it with blood magic gem+life leech+conc effect+faster attacks+WED though, to be able to run as many auras as possible, but that is kinda off topic.

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMBVysHY-aBEVC71jvhwFTi96cri3ptGcHzoqN_xn5ZJ6nBxSy_hq4V19eGVmPsGMNtHNyTJzdmLKam6zeD6rq0DBEPb55D0gPbKk0VICzpytMZtPqx6mLexs2YvqeNfre2bmnEuNX43Q38xVb63Ub8TmOndEGkwi0fj6ZSUz1fEZado_yrDkinNOOEwFFwUvPqFr_rY7b3ES-IaxnXmZqXlZf0j_rb50cGX2q0GuLLJT8XHZstOrM=

Very well said. That's my point on posting my build. Though I'm low on gear so my bow witch still isn't strong enough.

"

monkeywaffles wrote:

put rain of arrows in a ranged totem and use poison arrow as your main attack. you wouldn't need to worry about accuracy and you could even go for the dual totem build and cast two of em (the other one could use explosive arrows since thats good for single target and clusters missing a few shots from explosive arrows from a totem is good because it will let the exlosive arrow trigger before the target mob dies). that frees up a lot of nodes that you can use for survivability.

I don't think thats a good idea

Sorry to bring this whole RoA thing up again, but i'm really confused on that thing:
When combining skills you can have three effects:
1) Synergy effect: Improving one skill automatically improves a second skill. (Obviously it's synergy effects you are looking for to make a good build.)
2) The skills don't affect each other.
3) Antagonism: Improving one skill worsens another.
In what category does RoA in an ELEMENTAL build fall?
I suspect 2, if not 3:
RoA gives x% additional physical damage. You get the most if you use a pure physical bow like lionseye. But then the contribution of WED is restricted to the auras. Picking up elemental damage nodes also only improve the auras, not your base damage of the bow. If you switch to a tri-elemental thicket bow, WED and the elemntal dam. nodes work on your basic bow damage. But now RoA's added phys. damage gets diminished. Hardly a synergy effect (that you would get if you pick LA for example. Both WED and ele.dam work on top of LA's lightning portion). At best a case of 2) if not 3).
Now, i'm not posting this a some kind of critical remark on all the above postings, but rather as a statement of my deep confusion over that whole issue. So could someone please lay out the game mechanics to show why RoA is a good idea in an elmental build?

"

Bada_Bing wrote:

Sorry to bring this whole RoA thing up again, but i'm really confused on that thing:
When combining skills you can have three effects:
1) Synergy effect: Improving one skill automatically improves a second skill. (Obviously it's synergy effects you are looking for to make a good build.)
2) The skills don't affect each other.
3) Antagonism: Improving one skill worsens another.
In what category does RoA in an ELEMENTAL build fall?
I suspect 2, if not 3:
RoA gives x% additional physical damage. You get the most if you use a pure physical bow like lionseye. But then the contribution of WED is restricted to the auras. Picking up elemental damage nodes also only improve the auras, not your base damage of the bow. If you switch to a tri-elemental thicket bow, WED and the elemntal dam. nodes work on your basic bow damage. But now RoA's added phys. damage gets diminished. Hardly a synergy effect (that you would get if you pick LA for example. Both WED and ele.dam work on top of LA's lightning portion). At best a case of 2) if not 3).
Now, i'm not posting this a some kind of critical remark on all the above postings, but rather as a statement of my deep confusion over that whole issue. So could someone please lay out the game mechanics to show why RoA is a good idea in an elmental build?

I guess if people want to convert rain of arrow into elemental damage, they are better off using inner force and catalyst passives at templar tree, but honestly, I am not sure why people are not going physical damage (though physical reflect damage sure hurts).

I must say rain of arrows is good skill to an extent (especially in beginning to mid game).

but yes I do agree with what you had to say about physical damage, OP is waaay better off with physical.

"

Now, i'm not posting this a some kind of critical remark on all the above postings, but rather as a statement of my deep confusion over that whole issue. So could someone please lay out the game mechanics to show why RoA is a good idea in an elmental build?

Well tbh it's not that great of a skill and doesn't help elemental damage with levels. But the basic properties make it viable: it's an AoE skill. You can get the AoE Damage Passives from the Witch and Templar Tree and use Catalyst and then make it powerful by using Concentrated Effect, which gives you "More Damage", basically increasing the Damage Effectiveness and therefore increasing every Elemental Damage that you stacked on it, making it very flexible in gear and boosting even your Auras.

Now, physical of course also gets better with Area Passives and with Conc Effect - but on this side of the tree only Iron Grip is anywhere near - so it's harder to increase your physical damage up until the Lategame. Then you don't take adavantage of your Auras enough and also will be very dependant on a bow with good physical rolls, which are harder to get then Elemental Rolls.

So basically the only thing I say is: you can easily get and increase your Elemental Damage and use Conc Effect to get really good damage. There's nothing clever about it and it wastes potential of the skill... but it works for this kind of build. I think you're right, basically the skill should be played physical. Even that the skill hits once, but very hard, makes it good for physical, because it crushes Armor. But it also is dangerous, because of reflect. So the ideal way is to play partly Elemental and partly Physical, to be safe.

I think that the more into maps you get, the better it is to mix your damage with physical and also start using hatred, so a build that gets Iron Grip in the Endgame should be very good... but hard to pull of as a Witch, because you went for EB and are missing out on Life. Templar or Marauder should be good that way.

"

Bada_Bing wrote:

Sorry to bring this whole RoA thing up again, but i'm really confused on that thing:
When combining skills you can have three effects:
1) Synergy effect: Improving one skill automatically improves a second skill. (Obviously it's synergy effects you are looking for to make a good build.)
2) The skills don't affect each other.
3) Antagonism: Improving one skill worsens another.
In what category does RoA in an ELEMENTAL build fall?
I suspect 2, if not 3:
RoA gives x% additional physical damage. You get the most if you use a pure physical bow like lionseye. But then the contribution of WED is restricted to the auras. Picking up elemental damage nodes also only improve the auras, not your base damage of the bow. If you switch to a tri-elemental thicket bow, WED and the elemntal dam. nodes work on your basic bow damage. But now RoA's added phys. damage gets diminished. Hardly a synergy effect (that you would get if you pick LA for example. Both WED and ele.dam work on top of LA's lightning portion). At best a case of 2) if not 3).
Now, i'm not posting this a some kind of critical remark on all the above postings, but rather as a statement of my deep confusion over that whole issue. So could someone please lay out the game mechanics to show why RoA is a good idea in an elmental build?

Blackgleam and rings/gloves/amulet/wakes. You'll want a phys bow ofc, but it's more of an ele build with blackgleam. You go ele with RoA because ele passives and WED (especially WED) are too fucking good. RoA itself is good simply cause you don't have to care about accuracy, it just doesn't seem to miss, so you can achieve huge dmg potential by not having to go all the way to RT. Witch probably won't do too good with it, RoA works the best with blood magic gem and %auras with no mana left.

Summary: Ele bow>Phys bow, RoA>RT => more points => more dmg/survivability, concentrated effect is awesome, can snipe off totems and necros, works great with point blank, even without blackgleam, the effect of Weapon ele nodes and WED gem is good enough to go ele.

Lioneye's kinda ruins some of my points, but once you go RoA, you never go back. If you have any kind of a phys bow but lioneye's, just go RoA, and you should love it. Some of this is experience from closed beta though, haven't played RoA too much in ob.


edit: decided to add a mara RoA build I quickly made up, high lvl but I think you'll figure out in what order to take it if you wanna play it. Should be about the same as gh0un's build somewhere in the marauder forums. The idea is to run 3 40% auras on mana, and use the blood magic supp gem, so the supps would be Blood magic, WED, Faster attacks, Conc effect, and if you get a 6l you can get life leech, it's fine without it though, use health flasks to recover hp, the build even takes nodes for it instead of crit reduction.

"

Bada_Bing wrote:

Sorry to bring this whole RoA thing up again, but i'm really confused on that thing:
When combining skills you can have three effects:
1) Synergy effect: Improving one skill automatically improves a second skill. (Obviously it's synergy effects you are looking for to make a good build.)
2) The skills don't affect each other.
3) Antagonism: Improving one skill worsens another.
In what category does RoA in an ELEMENTAL build fall?
I suspect 2, if not 3:
RoA gives x% additional physical damage. You get the most if you use a pure physical bow like lionseye. But then the contribution of WED is restricted to the auras. Picking up elemental damage nodes also only improve the auras, not your base damage of the bow. If you switch to a tri-elemental thicket bow, WED and the elemntal dam. nodes work on your basic bow damage. But now RoA's added phys. damage gets diminished. Hardly a synergy effect (that you would get if you pick LA for example. Both WED and ele.dam work on top of LA's lightning portion). At best a case of 2) if not 3).
Now, i'm not posting this a some kind of critical remark on all the above postings, but rather as a statement of my deep confusion over that whole issue. So could someone please lay out the game mechanics to show why RoA is a good idea in an elmental build?

My main damage comes from my Elemental hit and RoA for me is only for a huga pack of mobs. So RoA is not my main damage. But auras gives additional elemental damage over physical right? So I think it boost the damage over RoA too cus damage from my RoA is way too huge.

RoA is good. I did use it for a while via imprinting it in my range totem. I've seen a number of high level HC spamming them in game or on twitch. I however switch to lightning arrows on my range totem. Lightning arrows + fork was better IMO.