[3.16][HC][ON BREAK] Caustic Arrow Raider, DoT Focused | Tanky | 6k+ Health | All Content | In-depth

I've been crafting myself a new bow over the last couple of days and finally finished it:



Really wanted to check how well the buffed decay-mods fits into my setup, and how much it can help with bossing. Will give some feedback as soon as i played it for a while.

I am not too sure about the enchant though. If i should just take the local attack speed for quality from harvest or trying to get inc. chaos modifiers from tempering orbs.

"

XenJerec escreveu:

at what level should i start using cluster jewels?

I don't think it's a level issue rather currency / crafting issue, when you have prepped proper 1 large + 2 mediums then it's worth it. Otherwise no. You might think this is weird advice but I've seen a lot of players gimp their builds by putting crappy clusters like "12 point large no notables / 1 notable" etc.

You need to have 1 large 8 points 2 or 3 notables, and 2 mediums 4-5 points 2 useful notables (no ailment crap or other useless notables) and preferably 2 decent rare jewels to put in sockets in mediums (%life + damage mods).

Efficient cluster setup is worth cutting points from your tree, inefficient one is not worth putting at all.

I actually picked up a decent 8 pt cluster jewel for 80c last night. I just need to pick up some mediums. I’m not sure if I’m able to pick up some decent medium cluster jewels but I’ll be searching tonight

Also, in the pob where you select a tree, one of the cluster jewel options it’ll say something like “68/98” what do those two numbers mean

"

XenJerec escreveu:

Also, in the pob where you select a tree, one of the cluster jewel options it’ll say something like “68/98” what do those two numbers mean

Not sure, but probably how many points go into the tree without cluster / how many there are with the cluster.

"

Viktranka escreveu:

"

XenJerec escreveu:

at what level should i start using cluster jewels?

I don't think it's a level issue rather currency / crafting issue, when you have prepped proper 1 large + 2 mediums then it's worth it. Otherwise no. You might think this is weird advice but I've seen a lot of players gimp their builds by putting crappy clusters like "12 point large no notables / 1 notable" etc.

You need to have 1 large 8 points 2 or 3 notables, and 2 mediums 4-5 points 2 useful notables (no ailment crap or other useless notables) and preferably 2 decent rare jewels to put in sockets in mediums (%life + damage mods).

Efficient cluster setup is worth cutting points from your tree, inefficient one is not worth putting at all.

Sorry for derailing even further, but do you have an advice what to do with those 'useless' cluster jewels? Vendor? Vendor 5 : 1? is there a guide out there? Thanks in advance.

"

Trinidad_Scorpion escreveu:

do you have an advice what to do with those 'useless' cluster jewels? Vendor? Vendor 5 : 1?

If you're in SSF, that are your only 2 options. If you are on trade, some bigger ones can be worth something early in the league, for example I did sell bigger minion damage ones.

On mediums, some builds did favour 6-pointers for example aura effectiveness and curse effectiveness (and hey, GGG nerfed these 3 times over already). Some really high value ones will still sell as 6, for example this season it's fire damage over time, but that depends on league meta in a specific season.

If you're doing 5:1 vendor you'd also have to be wary if the outcome won't be too low level (I think the lowest of 5 is what you get). But it's hard to guess because some notables roll all the way from lvl 1 and not every build needs the high level ones. For example this build wants a chaos large preferably lower than lvl 68, but above 50, if you self-craft the cluster. That's because higher than 68 adds new notables to the pool that are not very useful to the build.

On small clusters I think the higher ilvl the better because often the small passives add more value than the notable itself and the best buffs for small passives like 35% increased effectiveness don't happen until very high ilvl (84+ or so).

Well I believe these are some good points. Thank you very much!

I have a lvl 81 maraketh bow, but it is hunter influenced. Am I still able to craft on this or do I need it non-influenced. I know the guide says non-influenced but I see a lot of synthesized bows?

I've been experimenting a bit this league because while playing the build again is a lot of fun, it's boring to feel "done". And while I have plenty of improvements left, upgrades are starting to feel preeety expensive(ult SC)

Last league I invested heavily into life regen to try and fix the rather lacking recovery in the build, but it's a lot of investment for not a lot of return. With veiled mods being as powerful as they are I decided to try out some ED gloves:


The idea is that a lot of what scales CA also scales ED. ED adds a lot of regen and because of our increased skill effect duration it gets to a pretty good duration and feels low maintenance. We also don't lose out on a lot of stats on gloves anyway so the opportunity cost is low. It's not like the build needs massive recovery, but the degens in endgame boss fights can feel pretty harsh.

Now the the setup actually does mostly nothing during mapping, I only bother with it for the map boss. It might as well just be backup gloves that you swap in for endgame bosses. However the difference it makes on boss fights... wow. a single application for me without any wither or anything is 1300 hp/s which is equal to the recovery a lot of leech based builds get and on maven invitations you can often keep a few stacks up which means you'll often be sitting at 3-6k+ hp/s. at 15 wither stacks 1 instance is 2500 hp/s for me.

I went for a tour of endgame content with it and it felt like it completely trivialized the endgame. I did each of the maven invitations rolled to 60%+ quant, maven and A8 Sirus. by the time I got to the feared I was so cocky that I did end up dying once, but it was mostly because I was limit testing and 2 ED stacks ran out while I was trying to tank shaper beam. The feared normally feels somewhat iffy for me on this build because the degens from shaper combined with the synthesis boss means most of the ground is "lava", however sitting on this much regen made moving around the fight feel so much safer.

On top of that it's another 300-600k DPS which isn't really much at all, but considering I only got it for the regen, it feels free. Assuming 100% uptime on both ED and CA then adding ED is adding roughly 15% more dps.

Overall I feel like the investment is fairly low, you spend 4 gem slots and make your gloves somewhat more expensive (but they're not as hard to craft as they might seem). But you don't really end up sacrificing any performance on your main skill. If you're using your chest as a 5link curse on hit setup then I don't really think it fits in though (lvl 21 despair applied with Bane comes out at roughly 10% more damage compared to ring despair on hit effect).

I'm not sure how much I'll continue playing this league, but if I do it'll be to try and hit +2+2 aisling unveil on these gloves.

"

gramz31 escreveu:

I have a lvl 81 maraketh bow, but it is hunter influenced. Am I still able to craft on this or do I need it non-influenced. I know the guide says non-influenced but I see a lot of synthesized bows?

Uninfluenced is best because it has a smaller mod pool. When we use "cannot roll attack mods" and slam on +1 to socketed gems it's guaranteed. If you do it on a hunter bow you can roll %increased chaos damage over time, which might seem like a strong mod for us, but it's worse than the alternatives.

Synthesized bows have the same mod pool as regular bows, but just changes the implicit on the bow. Our best bow base is thicket because of the base attack speed, but it comes without an implicit so synthesized bows are the obvious next step.