Elemental Gas Arrow Poison Pathfinder [Tanky / Bossing / Simu / Mapping / All Content Viable] 0.1.1c
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Path of Exile 2 Build Guide: Gas Arrow Plaguefingers Build
Showcases:
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T4 Simulacrum Showcase:
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obX1Rbj63Lw
note: this is with my clear bow on set 2 in the POB T4 Xesht Showcase:
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https://youtu.be/4UkpdZldI7o
note: this is with my bossing bow on set 1 in the POB T16 Breach Mapping / T18 Map Boss Showcase:
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoNEjC1JZrY
POB:
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https://pobb.in/7oE1Ed41VwIm - new setup, megalomaniac, 153 rarity, 43% ms, -60% despair the gear is copy pasted straight from my character ingame, but if you read notes, you'll see there's quite a bit of improvements that can still be made even to my own gear. Index: 1. overview 2. gear 3. gems 4. weapon swap 5. FAQ overview this build leverages the unique plaguefingers gloves to transform gas arrow into a potent damage dealer. while most poison builds focus on snakebite's gloves and physical damage, plaguefingers actually allows for much higher scaling and versatility for gas arrow. there are simply so many more ways to scale gas arrow using elemental damage in the game right now. pros - lazy one button mapping - solid defensive layers - great clear speed - strong boss damage - flexible scaling from low budget to high investment - capable of clearing all game content on all difficulties - comfortable movement and passive damage - off-meta and relatively safe from nerfs or changes - absolutely immortal during mapping - insane for breaches, delirium, expedition, ritual, generally all league and mapping content - insanely good for T4 simulacrum - easy T4 olroth, king in the mists, xesht cons - relies heavily on specific gear pieces - takes a while to fully come online - difficult to level with or spec into - has quite a high attribute requirement - can get one shot by T4 arbiter - relies heavily on multiple enemies for defensive layers - can't run burning ground maps at all playstyle for mapping and clear, we only ever really use gas arrow. for bossing, we can optionally use vine arrow for some extra dps, it is a high dps chaos dot. for bossing, we use rain of arrows to apply wither. for bossing, we use despair to reduce chaos res with a weapon swap for curse effect. defenses we have insanely high evasion with Wind Dancer and we take Acrobatics. we have very high energy shield, and can generally face tank any mapping content, since we recover our energy shield faster than mobs can damage it with Grim Feast and Ghost Dance. on bosses we are generally pretty safe and i have cleared all game content on all difficulties. but, you can't ignore mechanics unless you have high investment, and you can get one shot by T4 arbiter. arbiter is the only problem you'll face at T4. gear:
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the gear included in the items category is straight copy pasted from my own in-game character, but here is what you are looking for
gloves
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plaguefingers is mandatory and this build will not work without it.
would recommend picking up a pair with two sockets (to fill resists as needed or for rarity). do not overpay for % chance to poison or evasion / es rolls (we dont need chance to poison and the defense rolls are local, basically negligible). getting a max roll attack speed is kinda worth it though bow
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we want a corrupt with 3 sockets, because we can get +90% elemental damage with attack runes
- bow attacks fire # additional arrow(s) we really want +2 arrows, or at the minimum atleast +1 arrow. +3 arrows is crazy and unnecessarily expensive, but really feels great. we need 3 overlapping clouds minimum for optimal ramping, and it also massively improves our clear potential and in general just allows us to shoot less, and therefore move more. we do not want to use scattershot for this because it absolutely destroys our hit damage. - 2x flat damage ideally you want 2 flat anything, but flat lightning and fire is best in slot. cold comes in a close third. - % increased damage with elemental attacks this is global and by far the best prefix, ideally you want atleast a 90% roll. - dexterity we need lots of attributes, probably best suffix here. - level of projectile skills this is the biggest dps increase we can have as a suffix. gem levels are pretty important if you want high dmg output, but not as mandatory as the stuff above, it's just nice to have. quiver
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primed quiver is a good base.
attack speed doesn't actually increase our damage at all, but it does feel better to have some, and it feels awful to have none. having it as an implicit here is a great way to get a comfortable amount via increased bonuses to quiver from jewels and tree, without needing to sacrifice any actual important stats for it. optional corrupt: % increased damage as a corrupt here is huge. - 2x flat ele dmg two flat rolls are just the best prefixes we can have here in terms of pure dps. once again, fire and lightning is best in slot, with cold coming in third and phys in a very far fourth. - dex very very important to have dex here, it is going to be our number one source of dex and we can't survive without it. - gain # mana per enemy killed this is going to be your number one source of mana and it is essential to have this here when mapping - increased damage with bow skills this is just a really insane mod, it's pretty mandatory and i would recommend atleast a 45% roll. - level of projectile skills another huge dps suffix. rings
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optional corrupt: % increased damage is huge
breach rings (high budget) - 3x flat dmg rolls absolutely ballistic dps increase, almost mandatory. tier 1: lightning tier 2: fire tier 3: cold tier 4: phys - attributes / resists use suffixes to fill your resists or int/dex requirements as needed mings heart (low budget) good dps rings can be pretty expensive, but you can use ming's heart instead. ming's heart is absolutely best in slot for dps, and it will probably beat any other breach ring. if you are on a low budget, its a great option for huge damage, but you are missing out on attributes or defensive mods. amulet
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lunar amulet is the best base for more ES
anoint we want to anoint Lasting Trauma (suffering, paranoia, envy). this is just the best node i could find, it's enormously impactful. the reason i'm anointing volcanic skin in my PoB is simply because it outscales lasting trauma when you have invested a very high budget into the build, however, for most cases lasting trauma will be better. do this depending on your megalomaniac jewel. 30% increased magnitude and 20% increased duration is huge, and attack speed doesn't impact our dps at all so the reduction is irrelevant. - # to maximum energy shield huge place to scale our es - % increased maximum energy shield again, huge place to scale our es - # to max life / % increased evasion rating increased evasion probs better prefix, but max life works too. - level of projectile skills huge place to get more dmg - attributes / resists good place to get more attributes or resists helmet
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we want to take a pure ES base because we take Subterfuge Mask on tree to turn this into a pseudo-hybrid base (+2 evasion rating per 1 es on helmet).
- max life / resists / max mana / attributes fill rest as needed body armour
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we want huge evasion here because we take Bestial Skin (100% increased evasion from body armour) and we also take Spectral Ward (+1 max es per 12 evasion on body armour)
- max life / resists / max mana / attributes fill rest as needed boots
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depending on where your evasion is at, a pure ES base here can be better if you are still at ~80% evasion without an evasion base on your boots.
- movement speed really want 35% movespeed, if you can get a corrupt for 40% then thats giga. - max life / resists / attributes fill rest as needed belt
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ingenuity
absolutely gigantic dps increase with our breach rings linen belt (low budget) would recommend linen belt since we use our mana flask quite a bit and we almost never use our life flask. pretty nice place to patch up your resists and maybe get some extra defenses, but mana stuff goes a long way here too. jewels
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megalomaniac
i use lasting trauma + spiral into depression here. ideally you want lasting trauma and/or volcanic skin on your amulet or your megalomaniac, your second or third options here are whatever is best for movespeed or ES. i went with spiral into depression because it is both movespeed and ES and was relatively cheap from nothing (chaos innoculation) we want a from nothing for CI, so we can get Pure Chaos, Withering Away, and also some increased wither and curse effect for our weapon swap sets. super high value From Nothing and all of these nodes are enormous for our bossing dps. rares all our jewels should be Emeralds, but if you have Sapphires, consider increased effect of curses and wither (at 20% breakpoints). assuming you are using Emeralds: T1 mods - damaging ailments deal damage 7% faster absolutely best in slot, massive dps. - increased magnitude of damaging ailments + increased magnitude of poisons you want both of these on your jewel. having double magnitude + deals damage faster is a GG jewel. can't get better. T2 mods - increased duration of damaging ailments / poisons indirect dps increase by scaling damaging ailments deal damage faster, and just better because our high rolls stacks last longer. T3 mods - increased damage with bows self explanatory - increased damage with hits against rares or uniques self explanatory - increased bonuses from quiver you need a really good quiver to be good. hitting the 100% breakpoint for gem levels on this isn't really that important, since mana cost can become a bit absurd and you can't really justify going above 29/30. flasks / charm
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mana flask
- % increased mana recovered really want a high roll here with 23% qual. we use our mana flask quite often - % chance to gain charge on enemy killed best sustain for mapping life flask - instant recovery we almost never use our life flask but when we do, it's an oh shit moment. - gain charges per second doesn't really matter that much thawing charm getting frozen is the only thing that you'll actually notice happening to you gems
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gas arrow
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- deadly poison
our biggest dps increase. make sure you look at "main hand damage with poison" from the actual projectile tooltip, and ignore the gas cloud tooltip. deadly poison acts as a multiplier to your total magnitude, it will always be the best dps increase and is mandatory. - primal armament / elemental focus just more hit dmg, again pretty mandatory and best supports for scaling our poison damage. - concentrated effect enormous dps increase, again mandatory. - inspiration pretty mandatory with super high gem levels (27+) because mana cost gets cracked. rain of arrows
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you want to downlevel this a bit so the mana cost is lower. i keep mine at level 12. i corrupt to 23% quality for an additional projectile.
- withering touch applies wither. mandatory support. - persistence increases wither duration from 4s to 6s, which aligns well with our despair. - acceleration increases the ramping time for max wither stacks - martial tempo feels better but optional - chaos infusion (conditional) if you don't have a from nothing to take Pure Chaos, or you don't use Ming's Heart, you need to add chaos infusion for wither to apply. if you do take pure chaos, or have chaos dmg on your hit otherwise, you don't need this. despair
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- heightened curse
mandatory support for curse effect - focused curse / arcane tempo optional supports, just feels and plays better and more consistent vine arrow (optional)
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we only really use this for the chaos dot, which is pretty huge dps increase - magnified effect vines grab bosses from further away - momentum supposedly more dmg, not sure if this works tho. definitely doesn't work on gas arrow. - encumbrance optional, if you want to slow too wind dancer
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- energy barrier
provides an extra defensive layer if a melee hit breaks stun threshold on you while dropping stacks fast (gale force has 1s use time, and this can proc while getting shotgunned) - blind / maim if you are getting hit, you generally want to buy yourself some time to recover remnants with grim feast, these are useful. - culling strike procs surprisingly often ghost dance
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- fast forward
recover ghost shrouds faster grim feast
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- clarity / precision
clarity is the most useful way to spend your last 10 spirit since we are never really dipping below max life and dont need vitality. if you don't have 100% accuracy, consider using precision... not really sure how this affects our poison stacks, but "poisons as though hitting" implies this matters. weapon swap
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leave Wind Dancer, Ghost Dance, Grim Feast active on both sets.
your weapon set 2 bow / quiver does not matter at all, as long as they have attributes to equip it and swap between. use any items with attributes. set 1 we want to put Gas Arrow, Rain of Arrows, Vine Arrow on weapon set 1. this is where the majority of our damage nodes are, and we have no dmg on set 2. set 2 we want to put Despair on set 2 alone, since we sacrifice all our dmg to get massive curse effect. you do NOT want to sacrifice defensives for the curse effect, since none of our actual dmg is on set two, sacrificing those nodes doesn't matter at all. FAQ
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Q: Does Original Sin work for this instead of Plaguefingers? A: potentially, but all our attack damage and proj damage wouldn't convert so you'd need to restructure the entire tree around chaos damage. Q: Have you tried phys with Snakebites? A: yes, it is worse, and not by a small margin, by a bottomless abyss. Q: is Comorbidity bad? A: yes and no. you can absolutely scale a 0.9s base duration just fine, but you'd need to drop Fast Acting Toxins and all the ailments deal damage % faster nodes, which is our highest dps stat. it's not really worth it, but if you're on a low budget, it might be. Q: Does Longshot work on Gas Arrow? A: no Q: Does Momentum work on Gas Arrow? A: no, and i'm not sure if it does on Vine Arrow either. Q: Does Exploit Weakness work on Gas Arrow? A: yes! if you want to try armor break and consume tech, this is viable too. Q: No Olroths? A: chaos dmg deals 50% more to our energy shield bro Q: Can I use Scattershot instead of a bow with additional arrows? A: no, it destroys your poison dmg, it's terrible. Q: Does Duration actually matter? A: yes, but this is difficult to explain or calculate the impact of, and to explain this with an extreme example: if you have a 50k dps Poison with 5s duration, that’s 350k damage over the total stack. deals damage faster at 100%, means that 350k dps is dealt over 2.5seconds. now let’s say you have that same 50k dps poison over 50 seconds, that’s 2.5m damage over the total stack, which is then condensed into 25 seconds. it doesn’t look like it’s a dps loss or gain at all right? just a longer duration? so if we have 100% uptime anyway, it shouldn't matter. however, there’s one factor we’re missing here in our equation: the actual roll of your ailment. let’s assume your ailment can roll between 30k and 80k dps. if you have a high roll ailment, the stack falls off quicker, and while you might be keeping consistent uptime, the highest rolling stacks are not going to be up for as long. additionally, if you roll a higher damaging stack, it will replace the current stack. so, if you have that same deals damage faster over 25s duration, it’s very likely you’ll have a near max roll stack ticking for that entire duration, as opposed to a bunch of mid roll stacks that are applied when your high rolls fall off. so yes, duration is still a DPS increase, albeit quite a confusing one that is not explained anywhere ingame and is difficult to truly calculate the impact of. additional credits big shoutout to @grobbs69 on youtube, who's initial build i started this from. he quit playing it not very far into the league, but i still learned a lot from him initially. @subtractem on youtube for giving me the idea for curse effect weapon swap Last edited by cricrusic#5718 on Feb 7, 2025, 2:45:04 AM Last bumped on Feb 10, 2025, 1:38:36 PM
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Greetings! I'm running a poison deadeye with a snipe mode for bosses, utilizing Contagion to spread poison stacks easily among large groups. As such I tested Despair on my side, especially since with Decaying Hex you can get it to spread on death as well as the Poison stacks. For what it's worth I do think that Contagion would add a lot to this build but that's neither here nor there.
The point being, when I tested Despair with Heightened Curse (-41% resists at my level), it had no impact whatsoever on the damage from poison stacks generally and thus gas arrow specifically. I applied despair to half a group, then poisoned them all with gas arrow, and kept up the poison with just one stack until they died, and the entire group died at the same time. I tested repeatedly to ensure I wasn't off base. Now on my end that was the end of it - if it wasn't going to be useful vs trash mobs, it's not useful to me at all, given I'm sniping down bosses rather than relying on poison. But your build clearly indicates I'm missing something - so how exactly does Chaos resist interact with poison, and how does Despair work? Obviously Chaos resistant enemies are far harder to burn down with Poison, so is it that most monsters (at least in Act 1 Cruel) don't have resistance values, and Despair can't bring values negative? Will it only make a difference vs Bosses and Chaos Resistant enemies? If so, is there a cap value you're looking at where it stops being effective? Any insights you can provide are certainly appreciated. Thanks! |
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" Hi, I'm not sure what went wrong with your testing, however, Despair is most certainly working fine for poisons. If you watch my recent T4 Xesht video, you can see the moment it falls off and how substantially my damage drops. My despair is at -63% reduced Chaos res currently. As for Contagion, we are already proliferating with our Pathfinder ascendancy regardless, and any non-pinnacle mobs (T18 bosses included) generally fall over in less than a second, with packs of magic or rare mobs proliferating entirely offscreen, so I don't think it would add much particular value. However, if you did want to extend the proliferation radius, I would recommend Herald of Plague over Contagion. Chaos Resistance should most definitely go negative, Xesht does not have any passive Chaos resist and he has 33million HP so you can visualize it: You can see that I'm doing roughly 1.5 - 2.5m DPS with both my Wither and Despair up. However, when my Despair falls off near the end, the damage he is taking slows to a halt. It's at roughly 0:51 Last edited by cricrusic#5718 on Feb 3, 2025, 9:36:16 AM
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You really stuck it out for the long haul. Once I went the elemental tech and got frustrated with GA damage I just moved to tri-elemental/ga explosions at that point and never looked back. The curse tech is a good addition too.
Just curious, why do you say momentum doesn't work? You can hear the audio cue when it activates. |
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" From my testing, I'm fairly confident that the support only works with Channeling skills that have a "Use Time". I see the buff, but I'm not convinced it is doing anything for non-channeling skills. |
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I’m not sure what went wrong my testing either. I got my DPS low enough for a 20 second kill time so there would be no doubt, disabled all spirit gems, removed all support gems that might impact it, and refunded passives which gave more than 1 stack to ensure full accuracy. Then I got a pack of drowned isolated outside clearfell, put 41% despair on half and kept them poisoned until death, ensuring 100% uptime on despair and poison. Identical kill times. Repeated multiple times. I also put despair on half a group and did just one poison, let it expire, and compared the health. Identical.
Then you post that and I test it again, totally different results. Obvious differences in DPS, damage per poison, and kill times. So it must have been a bug which was impacting my game at the time or something. Frustrating but hey far from the only bug I’ve encountered so far. So weird. Either way glad I asked and glad you prompted me to test again, as I’ll likely incorporate that into my own build then. As to contagion, the advantages of it would be the ability to spread despair with decaying hex and spreading all poison stacks instead of just one. So your proliferations are no joke nearly 10x more powerful on enemies adjacent to one enemy dying than they are now (6 stacks instead of 1, x1.63 thanks to despair, plus a small amount of DPS from decaying hex itself). Right now for you that’s overkill, sure. But put another way, it allows someone to achieve the same damage proliferation as you are with gear that’s 1/9th the DPS, which helps a ton as far as making it powerful before someone gets the belt or great rings or a top tier bow for example. So not recommending you use it in particular but definitely something I see as potentially significantly adding to the build in general :-) I use contagion on my poison ranger and while it’s not the same build nor at the same point (only 53 right now) contagion is the reason I absolutely roll through areas with no difficulty; I set up stacks and contagion then just pull the enemies with me as I run, seeing how far they can spread it and only stopping at all to toss more stacks or contagion in the mix if the spread is at risk of breaking. Such a fun play style. Last edited by GiantOctopodes#2562 on Feb 4, 2025, 11:56:04 AM
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" Ahh, yes. For leveling I would initially assume that going Lightning and respeccing would be optimal, but the early-mid endgame is an area that I have not explored at all yet. I made my Pathfinder on day 1, and I started using Gas Arrow as soon as I unlocked it. I still only have one character, and I'm still using Gas Arrow, this is just the ultimate conclusion I have arrived at after all this time. In terms of the early-mid endgame, what you're saying is potentially very valuable indeed and if I decide to flesh out a full guide for that part, perhaps next league, I'll definitely explore and give your suggestions some solid consideration. Last edited by cricrusic#5718 on Feb 4, 2025, 9:24:16 PM
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Excuse me for using the translator. I used your build as a reference to create a somewhat cheaper build using Widow Hale. It works well thanks to your nice invention. So I was thinking, how about cutting the passive a bit for the firepower, getting a nearby mana cost reduction (31%) and replacing the inspiration with complications? It seems worth the cost.
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" Could work pretty well with T1 Damage with Bow skills and T1 flats on Quiver. Main thing you're missing out on is the + additional arrows, which is actually pretty important, and you really don't want to use Scattershot for that. If you did go with Widowhail, I'd recommend getting a 250 roll with a "Bow attacks fire an additional arrow" Corrupted enchant/implicit instead of a 300 roll.  Last edited by cricrusic#5718 on Feb 6, 2025, 3:25:28 AM
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" As you pointed out, I have also chosen to use additional arrows. I guess the advantage of using the Widow Hail is that you can increase the requirement with dexterity and stingy with the mana recovery value on kills. I have not tried it yet, but I am thinking that it would be interesting to make the arrow barrels a type of attribute damage and take the projectile speed to take the feathered arrow feathers. Of course I would love to buy a high end bow if I had the assets, but my budget is not enough so I am farming with a low end version. At any rate, your build has definitely given me great insight into the limitations of physical poison bows. |
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