Where are my pathfinders at?

Recently ascended a Ranger and decided to go Pathfinder just to be different from all the Deadeyes. I'm using the Crossbow skills instead of the Bow skills, so I took the Treveller's Wisdom node as my first choice and zoomed down to the Instant Reload notable and its combined 70% increased reload speed. I also went down the movement speed line from the start, which is way more valuable now than it was in PoE1 because of the lower speeds.

All Rangers should note that we're close to the Staunching notable, which grants all Life Flasks passive recharge. Pair with the Reduced Charges Used mod for best results.

Anyway, I don't like the grenades, myself. In the first two tiers, all of the Ammunition skills aside from Fragmentation Rounds were weaksauce. The shotgun wrecks everything so far, but having to individually gun down each mob gets a little tedious. I'm still messing with the Support Gems for the mid-tier elemental Ammunition skills to see if I find anything else I like.

Wind Dancer comes in clutch whenever I do something dumb and get surrounded but I'm considering adding Permafrost Bolts and Herald of Ice into my loadout for pack clear.

I'm running a Lightning Rod + Shock + Electrocute build and it feels amazing through the campaign and into early maps. Decent clear, great against campaign bosses, good defensively because Electrocute is very reliable CC. And that's with a very suboptimal passive tree and some pretty cruddy gear - in early maps I'm wearing the same armor as in Act 4 - so it wouldn't surprise me if something like this becomes a "meta" build when optimized by someone who knows what they're doing.

Primary damage: Lightning Rod

Lightning Rod does a pulse of damage in a small area around where you target it, and leaves a lingering arrow behind. The direct damage with just the single burst is fairly underwhelming.

Chaining "lightning beam" effects from other skills can chain off the lingering arrow, causing the arrow to pulse again. Lightning Rod does not produce chaining effects itself! We need to use another skill to activate it.

As far as I can tell, any chaining non-projectile effect from a lightning skill counts as a "lightning beam", even if it is described as a "lightning bolt".

It's not written in the skill text, but from my experience beams/bolts prioritize chaining off Lightning Rod if possible, which is super important because chains are a limited resource, and any time we chain off a mob, it's a wasted chain. If this is ever changed I'm pretty sure it would break the build because we'd do less damage as pack size increases. Note that, as with mobs, an effect can only chain to each arrow once.

There's no limit to the number of lingering arrows, but each one disappears after being chained to a certain number of times (12 for me right now). This increases with gem level. I'm not sure if there's any other way to increase this number, as it doesn't use the "limit" keyword - if there is, we'll want to take it if possible. There's also a generous maximum duration, which should be irrelevant because we want to exhaust the chain limit way before that.

So we scale damage output in three ways:

1. Do more damage per pulse: improve base attack damage and buff lightning/projectile/area/attack damage, lightning resistance penetration, lightning exposure, and shock chance and magnitude. We link damage output supports like Lightning Infusion, Lightning Penetration and Innervate to Lightning Rod. This is important, but Lightning Rod does fairly low damage per hit no matter how hard we scale damage, so it's not enough.

2. Hit with more pulses: increase Lightning Rod's attack speed, so we have more lingering arrows on the field at once; raise the chain count of the activator skill, so each activation causes more pulses; add split and/or fork to the activator skill (only if its chain count is less than Lightning Rod's maximum pulses).

3. Pulse more often: increase the speed of the activator skill, so it triggers Lightning Rod pulses more often.

If we use a different active skill to trigger Lightning Rod, like Lightning Arrow, the latter two factors work against each other: as we trigger pulses with the activator skill more frequently, the lingering arrows expire more quickly, which means we need to use Lightning Rod to put more out, which means we're not triggering pulses with the activator skill. We can math out the ideal equilibrium, but I suspect the result is poor no matter what the ratios are.

However, if we can activate Lightning Rod with itself, the latter two factors synergize: when we fire Lightning Rod more quickly, we have more lingering arrows out at once and we trigger them more often!

Activator: Orb of Storms

Orb of Storms makes this build work. It fires chaining lightning bolts periodically, and whenever we use a lightning skill nearby. Since Lightning Rod is a lightning skill, it triggers Orb of Storms when we attack, which fires a chaining bolt, which activates Lightning Rod's lingering arrows, which means we can scale with attack speed!

So our basic gameplay loop is: place Orb of Storms between us and the mobs; fire Lightning Rod at the mobs, making sure to target close enough that OoS can hit the lingering arrows; cast Orb of Storms again to move, or to replace it when it expires. Lather, rinse, repeat.

We need to boost OoS's chain count - ideally its chain count will be equal to Lightning Rod's activation limit, plus one because in practice it'll often hit a mob first, but I haven't gotten it that high yet. Chain support is mandatory.

Other links are flexible. I have Magnified Effect for QoL and Font of Mana for sustain.

Shock

Shock is an important part of our damage output, both for its damage enhancement and to trigger Herald of Thunder. Take shock chance and magnitude on the passive tree.

Electrocution: Electrocute Support or Electrocuting Arrow

Electrocute Support is amazing on Lightning Rod. Mobs spend most of their time having seizures. It's your first defensive layer. Despite the steep 40% damage penalty, clearing is much smoother with this socketed. Against bosses, you may want to swap this out for a generic damage boost like Lightning Penetration, and use Electrocuting Arrow for electrocution instead. Either way, you definitely want electrocution in your build.

Damage boosts: Herald of Thunder and Voltaic Mark

Lightning Rod does great sustained damage. These add burst damage. Herald of Thunder just does its thing passively. Voltaic Mark is active, but is definitely worth using - for its massive AoE damage on kill against mobs, and for its increased shock chance and effect against bosses. I link Execute (more damage against low life enemies) and Overabundance (+1 limit but half duration) to Voltaic Mark for pack-wiping explosions.

Herald of Thunder gets whatever relevant supports are left that don't increase its Spirit reservation.

Debuff for bosses: Conductivity

Very important against bosses, tougher rares, and packs with lightning resist. Shouldn't be needed for clear against ordinary packs. I'm working on getting enough Spirit to use Blasphemy because I think that will really make this build pop. For links, Persistence is basically mandatory so it lasts longer on bosses, Heightened Curse is nice if we can afford the 140% cost multiplier, Arcane Tempo is nice QoL but you may want to use it on OoS instead.

Defenses

It's kinda player's choice, whatever works best for you. Prioritize life on equipment. This isn't a glass cannon build - OoS puts you close to your targets, so you need to be able to take a couple hits. I use a blend of Armor/EV/ES, plus Ghost Dance.

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suchacrisis#2704 wrote:

Does anybody know what the explosion damage from toxic growth comes from?

I had an idea to maybe try and stack attack speed so that using the skill would be a lot more playable, but if you need projectile damage instead of poison for it then it probably wouldn't be worth it.

Afaik the skill does phys dmg and has no innate source of poison. Ive tried taking the node that gives 1% attack speed per x dex and gave it the attack speed support. I think the skill was actually faster but honestly it wasn't worth the investment, considering a poison build doesn't really scale well with attack speed.

I am still using it from time to time (Act3 Cruel) on bosses with exploit weakness and corrosion on gas arrow. It does decent damage and it fills the space i have for an action between keeping withering and poison on max stacks.
The only thing I really don't like about the skill are the absurd mana costs.

A question for everyone using withering presence:
How do you get the stats? I am struggelig to reach the ~100 Int and keep dex up at the same time. Do you have massive amounts of Int on your gear/Amulet?

Which stats should I be looking for to boost poison dot damage? I tried comparing different weapons to see how they change the gas cloud damage in the details section but it doesn't seem to reflect what is actually happening.

My 2 Cents to Pathfinder after having played up to Tier 15 Maps.

The Good:

Poison is strong, I never really had damage problems at any point in time. Gas Arrow + Proliferation make for a smooth clearing experience, while Plague Nova deals a comical amount of Damage at high gem lvls (at 21 it stores 40k).

The itemization is easy enough. Just stack Life/Eva/Res and a high phys Bow and you are good to go (but with caveats, explained later on).

The Skill Tree also offer enough nodes that feel good to spec into and show you an immediate return in gameplay. 7% withered Stacks, more Poison stacks that get doubled by your ascendancy, life on kill being a gamechanger for smoothness, thats all quite nice.

My Problems:

Pathfinder is currently an unanspiring ascendancy. You have to use it for the doubled Stacks of Poison, with the only other option being to play around the huge Poison from Plague Burst and using everything else to stack it as fast as possible.
Every other Ascendancy node is just weak. Getting 6 extra Skillpoints is nothing, being able to walk faster while shooting and not getting slowed gets instantly invalidated by anything where you are not allowed to move where you want. Ritual being the main offender, but Breach and Delirium are also swarming you with mobs that are straight up faster then you and will catch you. Those Nodes should give you atleast 10% Movement Speed and phasing on roll to even be usable. The neverending lifeflask sounds nice on paper, but it being effectivly locked behind Uber Lab, which is some of the hardest content in the Game and being the only surival tool in the Pathfinder Kit is a huge oversight. You also run in the Problem that a high uptime of flasks really isnt that good without utility flasks. I do not gain anything from 50% more flask charges, i never died because of a lack of flask charges, I died because my Class has no inbuild survival tool.

Which brings us to the Main Problem of Pathfinder: you are really fragile. I have 10k evasion with nearly capped res and 2.2k HP, but just 2 mobs hitting me can kill me at any point in time. Evasion in itself is a flawed defence in a World where you lose your Map after the first Death, because you are just rolling dice to see if you survive. You also cant just fancy feet around every projectile or melee attack that comes your way, thanks to Ritual, hasted Mobs or Delirium Fog that takes away your ability to really see things. There needs to be a Keystone node that halves the damage of the first physical hit you take in exchange for setting your Armour and ES on 0, with a 4 second cooldown for example. Just some sort of safety layer for the moments where your evasion does not work and you actually take a hit.

Then there are some miscallenous things.

Dexterity is garbage. You need around 200 Dex for Bows and Skills in the Lategame and all you get is some accuracy, while Strength would give you 400hp, 3 Items worth. Accuracy is not nearly in the ballpark of strength compared to HP, especially because I could just invest into Accuracy nodes in the Tree, while there is no HP node on the right side of the board.

Poison skills need more Support Gems and tooltip clarity, I would like to 6 Link my Gas Arrow, but there is nothing I really could use, or know if it works. Does Longshot work? I linked Deady Poison and it reduced my tooltip Damage, while it obviously increased my damage, that should never happen in a 2024 Game.
Bursting Plague needs more Aoe to be really useful.
Gas Arrow should not detonate from burning ground of opponents. Having a map affix that invalidates your build, without the option to reroll that mod is really uncool.
Current Links: Commordity - Corrosion - Deadly Poison - Bursting Plague

Plague Nova is kinda the same, I can see it stores 40k Poison but does it do more Damage if I link it with concentrated Effect?

Toxic Growth is the worst offender. The actual damage of the skill is really really good but its neigh unusable. In Maps you really cant afford to lock yourself into an Animation for 1.5 Seconds. The Backflip you do is also to unrealiable, I know that aiming to your feet will result in a further flip, but you won't move if you target at medium to long range. That also brings you to the question, do you move 2 Meters to trigger Momentum or not? WOuld it even work if you did or are the projectiles calculated before you move?

Even for a Veteran of Poe that started playing in Open Beta the game has a miriad of missing information, where you currently can only rely on your feeling. Does it feel like it does more damage? Do you feel like you survive more? That was fine in Poe1, after all games in 2012 where different, but today a game really needs to be precise in its information.

"

Current Links: Commordity - Corrosion - Deadly Poison - Bursting Plague

Thank you for the insight!

How do you get to 8 poison stacks without scattershot in the link? Do you really shoot like 4 gas arrows into a mob group?

"

How do you get to 8 poison stacks without scattershot in the link? Do you really shoot like 4 gas arrows into a mob group?

I often times dont, tbh, they just die with 3 to 4 stacks, rare mobs die to Plague Bearer and on bosses I just spam clouds. But there is an argument to be made for scattershot, especially for bosses, guess the real answer is to use an expert Dualstring Bow later on. I would also recommend every pathfinder to buy Snakebite, they give you another poison stack and have some poison on hit, which would come in really handy if you ever find the time to cast toxic growth.

"

Fnacy#4871 wrote:

My 2 Cents to Pathfinder after having played up to Tier 15 Maps.

The Good:

Poison is strong, I never really had damage problems at any point in time. Gas Arrow + Proliferation make for a smooth clearing experience, while Plague Nova deals a comical amount of Damage at high gem lvls (at 21 it stores 40k).

The itemization is easy enough. Just stack Life/Eva/Res and a high phys Bow and you are good to go (but with caveats, explained later on).

The Skill Tree also offer enough nodes that feel good to spec into and show you an immediate return in gameplay. 7% withered Stacks, more Poison stacks that get doubled by your ascendancy, life on kill being a gamechanger for smoothness, thats all quite nice.

My Problems:

Pathfinder is currently an unanspiring ascendancy. You have to use it for the doubled Stacks of Poison, with the only other option being to play around the huge Poison from Plague Burst and using everything else to stack it as fast as possible.
Every other Ascendancy node is just weak. Getting 6 extra Skillpoints is nothing, being able to walk faster while shooting and not getting slowed gets instantly invalidated by anything where you are not allowed to move where you want. Ritual being the main offender, but Breach and Delirium are also swarming you with mobs that are straight up faster then you and will catch you. Those Nodes should give you atleast 10% Movement Speed and phasing on roll to even be usable. The neverending lifeflask sounds nice on paper, but it being effectivly locked behind Uber Lab, which is some of the hardest content in the Game and being the only surival tool in the Pathfinder Kit is a huge oversight. You also run in the Problem that a high uptime of flasks really isnt that good without utility flasks. I do not gain anything from 50% more flask charges, i never died because of a lack of flask charges, I died because my Class has no inbuild survival tool.

Which brings us to the Main Problem of Pathfinder: you are really fragile. I have 10k evasion with nearly capped res and 2.2k HP, but just 2 mobs hitting me can kill me at any point in time. Evasion in itself is a flawed defence in a World where you lose your Map after the first Death, because you are just rolling dice to see if you survive. You also cant just fancy feet around every projectile or melee attack that comes your way, thanks to Ritual, hasted Mobs or Delirium Fog that takes away your ability to really see things. There needs to be a Keystone node that halves the damage of the first physical hit you take in exchange for setting your Armour and ES on 0, with a 4 second cooldown for example. Just some sort of safety layer for the moments where your evasion does not work and you actually take a hit.

Then there are some miscallenous things.

Dexterity is garbage. You need around 200 Dex for Bows and Skills in the Lategame and all you get is some accuracy, while Strength would give you 400hp, 3 Items worth. Accuracy is not nearly in the ballpark of strength compared to HP, especially because I could just invest into Accuracy nodes in the Tree, while there is no HP node on the right side of the board.

Poison skills need more Support Gems and tooltip clarity, I would like to 6 Link my Gas Arrow, but there is nothing I really could use, or know if it works. Does Longshot work? I linked Deady Poison and it reduced my tooltip Damage, while it obviously increased my damage, that should never happen in a 2024 Game.
Bursting Plague needs more Aoe to be really useful.
Gas Arrow should not detonate from burning ground of opponents. Having a map affix that invalidates your build, without the option to reroll that mod is really uncool.
Current Links: Commordity - Corrosion - Deadly Poison - Bursting Plague

Plague Nova is kinda the same, I can see it stores 40k Poison but does it do more Damage if I link it with concentrated Effect?

Toxic Growth is the worst offender. The actual damage of the skill is really really good but its neigh unusable. In Maps you really cant afford to lock yourself into an Animation for 1.5 Seconds. The Backflip you do is also to unrealiable, I know that aiming to your feet will result in a further flip, but you won't move if you target at medium to long range. That also brings you to the question, do you move 2 Meters to trigger Momentum or not? WOuld it even work if you did or are the projectiles calculated before you move?

Even for a Veteran of Poe that started playing in Open Beta the game has a miriad of missing information, where you currently can only rely on your feeling. Does it feel like it does more damage? Do you feel like you survive more? That was fine in Poe1, after all games in 2012 where different, but today a game really needs to be precise in its information.

This is going to be a PITA to ask and answer, but what other links are you using ? I'm seeing a lot of different choices, but as someone struggling with dps in t5 maps, I can only assume that your links are vastly different.

"

This is going to be a PITA to ask and answer, but what other links are you using ? I'm seeing a lot of different choices, but as someone struggling with dps in t5 maps, I can only assume that your links are vastly different.

Well for one its an unreasonable good 300pds bow that I bought when I started mapping, gotta be honest here.

Links are in Order of importance in my opinion.


As I said main dps comes from Gas Arrow.

Gas Arrow - Deadly Poison - Corrosion - Bursting Plague - Comorbidity

It feels like bursting plague gives some reasonable clear on white mobs but it deals phys damage so it pretty much requires corrision. Comorbidity can easiely be linked into Poisonburst Arrow for single target, most things should die with up to 6 stacks already.

Toxic Growth - Concentrated Effect - Heft - Martial Tempo

Its pretty much the most bang for your buck link setup, and makes it somewhat usable, especially if your Bow has Attackspeed.

Plague Bearer - Chaos Mastery - Physical Mastery - Expanse - Magnified Effect

You really want to maximise its lvl and range afterwards.

Rain of Arrows - Withering Touch - Blind - Pin

Just a tool to apply wither stacks fast, Pin ist kinda obsolete because withering touch is halving the damage, so you could link something else. I also did invest nothing into gaining frenzy charges.

Despair - Heigtened Curse - Focused Curse

Just for bosses and maybe chaos resistent rare mobs, its lvl 1 so I dont have to invest into more int then 72.

Withering Presence

Not sure if it is needed tbh, so you could use Ghost Dance instead if you manage to get like 200-300 es for example. Alchemist Boon is also something like an option but I only needed it once and that was for the t4 Sanctum Boss where I had to notice that my mana flask has no passive charge regain and the boss seems to be on pinnacle Boss lvl.

Wind Dancer - Herbalism

Should probably be Cannibalism.

Poisonburst Arrow

Nothing at the moment, I just click it for single mobs that are still alive. It has insane scaling with quality, so there is an argument to be made to actually link it with maybe farshot and comorbidity.

Escape Shot - Holy Descent

Looks cool and sometimes feels like it actually helps.


Vine Arrow would be good, if it would work. When it is fixed I will probably use it over Escape Shot.

What I would recommend for early mapping.
Get a +2 Proj Quiver with some Bow Damage and put 3 points into "Quiver effectiveness" to boost it up to +3.

You want a high phys bow without attackspeed, the raw phys damage is the startpoint of your poison scaling everything else comes from there.
Take as many jewels in the tree as you can reasonably do, I have 5, and buy poison magnitude jewels. They are cheap and they scale Deadly Poison support.
Annoint Heavy Ammunition, its cheap and good.

https://imgur.com/a/G23oaNM thats my current skill tree, you can skip some of the chaos nodes early on, they really only scale your poison damage while bow/phys nodes scale the math behind it and also make toxic growth hit like a truck.

But there are probably quite a few things to optimize especially in the gem setups, I just took what it feels good at the end of the day

I'm doing what a lot of you all are doing (shocker since we share the same limited options) - Gas Arrow + Poison Growth + Vine Arrow (just for the dps? I think it helps?) + Plague Bearer + Winddancer and now I've added Barrage as well, though I didn't have wither on it, I was using it to pin.

I'm still confused by poison. I had a bow, found one with higher phys on it, and the tooltip for my skill says I lost damage. The current bow had some flat lightning so it was slightly high total dps, but the lightning shouldn't even matter for poison...right? I'm assuming the interface is bugged but I just don't know lol. I'm also assuming that investing into %chaos damage on the tree for example doesn't actually do anything anymore. The poison scales off your hit, so unless you had chaos damage in the initial hit, it won't help? Does anything other then poison magnitude scale the poison itself?

Also, I remember getting my first T2 support gem and realizing that literally nothing in the T2 supports would help my active skills lol. I think I've only used supports for my permanents from that section.