[3.19] Poisonous Concoction AutoFlaskFinder, detailed guide.

=== Levels 1-12 ===
As soon as I enter the town and until lvl 12 I prefer to level with Caustic Arrow, which later is supported by QoL links - Mirage Archer (lvl 4 Flask Quest) and Pierce or Void Manipulation (lvl 8, entering Lower Prison), choice is yours.

Secondary link for additional single target damage is Puncture (lvl 4, Rhoa Eggs) + Pierce in case you manage to find an additional 2L, otherwise just Puncture would be enough.

Steelskin (lvl 4, Rhoa Eggs) bound to LMB will greatly improve survivability during the campaign, specially its bleed removal during skill effect.

Dash (lvl 4, Rhoa Eggs) - our movement skill until lvl 10.

Vitality (lvl 10, Brutus) - additional Life Regeneration.

Smoke Mine (lvl 10, Brutus) - main movement skill, still better than Dash despite all the nerfs. Also adding Flame Dash as your secondary movement ability is highly advised. You gonna need friends or a guild to get Flame Dash though, because rangers are prohibited to buy gems that are smarter than them.

Final links/colors we'll need during Act 1:
GGG - Caustic Arrow + Mirage Archer + Pierce/Void Manipulation
GG - Puncture + Pierce
G - Dash later being replaced with Smoke Mine
R x2 - Steelskin, Vitality
B - Flame Dash

Try to get a 3L in any other slot but your bow, because we gonna switch to Poisonous Concoction at level 12 and lose the bow while still needing the links.
Also its a good idea to check for some good shields on your way so you can use it from level 12, and pick up some magic items to vendor them unidentified and get couple extra transmutes for further NPC purchases / bench crafts.

=== Levels 12-23 ===
Upon reaching lvl 12 and first Merveil's cave we already begin to use our main skill. Get rid of the bow and everything related to it, equip shield you've found on the way / buy some from vendor and make our new main link:
Poisonous Concoction + Volley + Lesser Multiple Projectiles. If/when you find a 4L you can add Void Manipulation (lvl 8, Brutus), thats enough until lvl 38.

A few words about skill itself and why are we using two supports with less damage multipliers. Poisonous Concoction as you may figure by its name is a poison skill, and our main damage source would be from poison instead of direct hit damage. Because of poison mechanic we do not lose any poison damage from less multipliers on these support gems, as they affect hit damage but not base hit value which the poison scales from. Projectiles however add a bunch of damage to the skill because it is able to shotgun and poison one target multiple times per use. This makes additional projectiles and AoE increases a very potent source of damage, at the same time increasing our area coverage and clear.

Starting from level 12 your Life Flask is your weapon, so make sure you'll always replace it with better versions when possible. Percantage of its life recovery value is applied as base hit damage of Poisonous Concoction and if you forget to upgrade your flask for couple acts you may easily miss 1/4 or even 1/3 or your damage.

At level 16 you should be able to collect couple Alterations to buy certain gems after getting one for free from quest completion:
Herald of Agony (lvl 16, Chamber of Sins) - take it as quest reward
Blood Rage (lvl 16, Chamber of Sins)
Summon Skitterbots (lvl 16, Chamber of Sins)
Don't worry about Blood Rage degen as it should be completely countered by Vitality. Speaking of which, don't overlevel it and make sure you have enough unreserved Mana to use Poisonous Concoction at least 2-3 times.

Act 2 links summary:
GGG - Poisonous Concoction + Volley + Lesser Multiple Projectiles
G x3 - Smoke Mine, Herald of Agony, Blood Rage
R x2 - Steelskin, Vitality
B x2 - Flame Dash, Summon Skitterbots

=== Levels 24-37 ===
We keep all previous stuff, but still have to add couple new sockets onto our gear. Good news is that we're pretty much done with changing links at this point, only few gem swaps to do later (and they'll replace already existing ones).

Right after you tell Piety to leave Crematorium at level 24, we swap Summon Skitterbots for Purity of Elements Ailments immunity and extra resists is amazing thing to get and must be taken asap.

We gonna need one more Green and Blue sockets on our gear, used for Despair and Plague Bearer (also obtained after Crematorium). Curse is used against tough bosses while Plague Bearer is great for both clearing trash and add more damage on bosses.

Act 3 and onward links summary:
GGGG - Poisonous Concoction + Volley + Lesser Multiple Projectiles + Void Manipulation
G x4 - Smoke Mine, Herald of Agony, Blood Rage, Plague Bearer
R x2 - Steelskin, Vitality
B x3 - Flame Dash, Purity of Elements, Despair

=== Levels 38+ ===
There is only one yet very important change to make - after beating Kaom with Daresso and drill your way into the Beast, take one and buy another gem in town: Greater Volley and Greater Multiple Projectiles, which we will use instead lesser versions in main link now.

=== Act 5 and Lily ===
After doing Twillight Strand clear quest you can buy any gems, this is a good time to get few for leveling in weapon swap. There is some useful ones you'll need later in maps anyway:
Withering Step - you'll use it soon after finishing acts
Unbound Ailments - our 5th link
Vicious Projectiles - our 6th link
Spell Totem - can be used in acts for bosses as well, but then you'll need an additional 3L: Spell Totem + Multiple Totems + Wither (everything except Spell Totem can be left at gem level 1)
Grace - for later respec
Determination - same as above
Molten Shell - for when we'll have enough Armour to justify MS usage
Malevolence - for later respec or experimental Divine Blessing link.

=== 18 points ===
Starting with projectile damage nodes for easier early acts. Heart of Oak for some life and stun avoidance, Primal Spirit in case you need more attributes for Steelskin, Vitality or Despair. Pathing towards the Claw Mastery for that early Life & Mana on hit, which removes the need of Mana Flask and allow us to tank some monster hits easier.

=== 27 points ===
Toxic Strikes and first Poison Mastery for demo-version of your future gameplay, also Freedom of Movement to not stuck in monsters as often and run to the endgame faster:)

=== 35 points ===
Time to get some life via Thick Skin, Herbalism and Intuition before we go in 1st Lab. You may also take one of Life Masteries for Vitality reservation efficiency if needed.

=== 42 points ===
Master Toxicist is an optimal choice for 1st Lab point. Monsters previously survived due not being hit will now die from Poison prolif, and poison itself getting stronger. At this point we also take Druidic Rite and Flask Mastery (Utility Flasks recharge) for better flask uptime. Graceful Assault allow us to have strong Onslaught earlier than we'd get Onslaught from flask in Act 5, also you may take 30 Str/Int nodes on the way if you need more of either.

=== 55 points ===
Swift Venoms and Mastery for more damage. Survivalist to counter Kitava's resist loss a bit. Also taking Jewel Socket and put Survival Instincts (Act 2, Golden Hand Quest) in for even better flask sustain.

=== 66 points ===
Fatal Toxins and Mastery for more more damage, Careful Conservationist to compensate a downside of Survival Instincts we added earlier.

=== 75 points ===
Second Lab is on the way, goot time for some extra life. Blood Drinker and Revenge of the Hunted is what we take, as for 2nd Lab point its up to you: Nature's Reprisal is simply more damage and aoe for better overlap, while Nature's Boon would provide even better flask sustain. Latter is also useful for better Master Toxicist uptime and make you faster indirectly (Quicksilver Flask) so I'd take this one first.

=== 89 points ===
With Lab done we now can get damages, and we will. Wasting, Coordination, Fangs of the Viper and Entropy should greatly improve our main PoB number; Blood Siphon on the way should also add some survivability. Keep in mind that Entropy does not affect Poison duration but still make certain secondary skills longer, namely Steelskin or Despair.

Our 3rd Lab point is whatever we skipped in 2nd one - Nature's Boon or Nature's Reprisal. Nature's Adrenaline is the least important node so we leave it for Uber Lab.

=== 98 points ===
This tree is partially related to early mapping setup, so I'll mention changes we're making here after acts.
First of all we change class start area because projectile damage does little to nothing for us even in early maps, not to mention further upgrades focussing on Poison damage.
Claw Mastery - changing it to crit immunity for higher survivability, also allows us to ignore crit modifiers we roll on our maps.
Inveterate - this cluster alone cover 1/3 or our Spell Suppress cap, the rest we will get on gear later.
Clever Thief - to replace Claw Mastery.
Charisma - must be enough to return Summon Skitterbots and level up Vitality.
Replenishing Remedies - better flask sustain.

Main Skill.
Our main link should look as following (add 5th and 6th gems when you have 5/6L available):
Poisonous Concoction + Greater Volley + Greater Multiple Projectiles + Void Manipulation + Unbound Ailments + Vicious Projectiles

Auras.
As I mentioned in leveling section, taking Charisma wheel and Reservation Efficiency Mastery should be enough for that aura setup:
Herald of Agony, Purity of Elements, Vitality, Summon Skitterbots

Utility.
Withering Step - replacing Steelskin on LMB, additional Wither stacks are nice for ramping up damage on single target, and Elusive is great for extra speed/avoidance while moving. We then link Steelskin with Cast when Damage Taken to not use it manually.

We also need another source of Wither as just Withering Step is not enough yet, and there is two options:
Default one - Spell Totem + Multiple Totems + Wither
Fancy - Ancestral Protector + Withering Touch + Culling Strike
Second option provides worse Wither sustain but better dps buffs for your character. Might be more effective if you manage to get a Divergent version of Poisonous Concoction.

Other links are remain unchanged.

=== ~100 points ===
Taking Acuity to fix our Accuracy problems.

=== 113 points ===
At this moment we'll put all our points into cluster jewels. If you didn't get required clusters yet you can use temporary replacement without some notables or with higher amount of passives, its still better than trying to get something from the tree.

Most interesting part for us Exiles:) We won't need any expensive upgrades to reach red maps, just a couple cheap uniques. The only "expensive" part here is flasks, no wonder when you play a Pathfinder :D I'll only mention important gear pieces to avoid "there is a generic rare chest with life and resist" kind of descriptions.

Main Skill.
Main setup is unchanged*, just try to catch cheap awakened gems on the trade if possible.
*look for Devouring Diadem in gear section to see a potential gem swap.

Due to gear upgrades we change aura setup:
Purity of Elements, Herald of Agony, Vaal Grace, Determination
For same reason we get a CwDT setup:
Cast when Damage Taken [Lvl 14] + Vaal Molten Shell [Lvl 18] + Increased Duration + Withering Step
Try to get an Anomalous version of Withering Step for better Wither uptime on bosses.

Misc:
Flame Dash somewhere

Enhance + Plague Bearer + Ancestral Protector [Phantasmal if possible]

Few words about Blood Rage: at the moment when we change aura setup and removing Vitality I prefer to drop it completely because I don't really like trading attack speed for huge degen, especially on bosses with dot damage like Baran, Shaper or Searing Exarch.

Secondary Wither link no longer needed after getting Divergent quality on your Poisonous Concoction. Alternate quality on Withering Step helping us to maximise Wither stacks on bosses.

Annoying but useful DPS button.

Divine Blessing + Malevolence
Use it when you have a Devouring Diadem because Eldrich Battery from helmet turn mana cost in Energy Shiled cost.

=== 119 points ===
Alot of changes, especially after getting Devouring Diadem

To be more comfortable with Divine Blessing we dropping Primal Spirit and Druidic Rite.

To manage perma auto sustain Dying Sun we need some extra Flask Duration, small passive near Natural Remedies & small node on Flask Duration Cluster should help with that.


For Dying Sun sustain we also take Replenishing Remedies, this one will help with life flask sustain aswell.

Rest of the points we put into small life clusters.

And thats probably a good time to get truly core uniques that will make this build solid for clearing serious content.

Uniques:

Devouring Diadem - a helmet that I'm tempted to put into every build after trying it once :D In this particular build it is however a BiS option, combining tons of very important and useful properties:
- Eldritch Battery - built-in keystone allow us to reserve all of our mana and spend ES to use skills.
- additional reservation efficiency for socketed skills that perfectly complements previous mod.
- built-in ability that triggers every 5 seconds, eat corpses nearby and recover tons of Life, Mana and Energy Shield. Sometimes may save your life by eating Porcupine corpses with their on-death effects being removed before they reach your face:)
- like the other Betrayal items it comes with a Veiled mod, which makes it perfect... est? Yes, perfectest item for us because we gain all the good stuff while still having our Focus mod - increased Duration of Ailments you inflict while Focussed.
There is another thing you can change after obtaining this helmet - swapping Vicious Projectiles in main link for Deadly Ailments. At this point we don't rely on hit damage or leech anyway and this support provide more damage for Poison.

Circle of Nostalgia - also very good upgrade, this time in a ring slot.

1st stat on ring:

Increased Chaos Damage while affected by Herald of Agony - biggest direct damage increase.

Second modifier might be one of the following:

Herald of Agony has increased Buff Effect - less damage than 1st one but provide more global chance to Poison, which might be nice later (lategame gear section, Asenath's Gentle Touch).

to Chaos Resistance while affected by Herald of Agony - not the best option but thats a lot of Chaos resist so why not.

Herald of Agony increased Mana Reservation Efficiency To fit all auras we want it should have the modifier with at least 35% roll.
This one do not allow to use Defiance Banner, but free place to another Life Cluster Jewel.


There is a wide variety of possible Synthesised implicits on these rings, just check for anything that might be useful for you like increased damage or extra attributes. Also don't forget to catalyst something on your ring:)

Rares:

First in our list of important rare upgrades is a ring with Curse Enemies with Despair on Hit mod - big QoL as it frees up a gem socket, hotkey and the need to cast curse manually. Can be found on Chaos nodes in Delve or rolled on Hunter-influenced rings. Latter can be rolled with Harvest reforges (Caster) to get it relatively easy as there is not much caster mods on the ring.

Next important slot to upgrade is a shield, we can use Leper's Alms but ideally we want a hybrid EV/ES base with life, spell suppress and as much ES as possible. With Eldritch Battery our ES is our manapool pretty much, and the more ES you have the more you recharge per second, allow you to spam more concoctions. Its up to you if you want to craft or buy this slot.
ES from helmet and shield should be enough to use concoction without running out of energy shield, but if you still have some troubles with ES pool benchcraft Regenerate 150 Energy Shield per second while a Rare or Unique Enemy is Nearby in suffix on your chest or belt.

Belt upgrade consists of % reduced Flask Charges used mod we should already have and another flask one: increased Flask Effect Duration with maximum possible roll, gonna need it for Dying Sun automation (details in flask section).

Try to not be greedy and use new Ember & Ichor currency on you gear.
We have plenty of mods that can be useful for us:

Searing Exarch.

Gloves:

8-13% increased Attack Speed
Adds 5–10 to 10–18 Chaos Damage to Attacks
5–20% to Chaos Damage over Time Multiplier
1-2% to maximum Cold Resistance

Boots:

5-10% increased Movement Speed
4-6% increased Action Speed
15–32% chance to Avoid being Stunned
13–24% to Fire/Cold/Lightning Resistance
6–17% to Chaos Resistance
1-2% to maximum Fire Resistance

Body Armour:

Flasks gain 1-2 Charges every 3 seconds
9–10% increased effect of Non-Curse Auras from your Skills
8–19% of Damage taken Recouped as Life
Flasks applied to you have 6–17% increased Effect
15–30% increased Chaos Damage
+1-2% to all maximum Resistances
+1-3% to maximum Fire/Cold/Lightning Resistance
Gain a Frenzy/Endurance Charge every 15-10 seconds


Eater of Worlds.

Gloves:

7-12% chance to Suppress Spell Damage
6–17% increased Blind Effect
9–20% increased Global Accuracy Rating

Boots:

7-12% increased Life Regeneration rate
Poisons you inflict deal Damage 5-10% faster
15–32% increased Cooldown Recovery Rate of Travel Skills
33–50% chance to Avoid being Poisoned
33–50% chance to Avoid Bleeding

Body Armour:

<one Aura> has 19–36% increased Aura Effect
17–28% increased Armour/Evasion
+5–16% to all Elemental Resistances
7-12% increased Life Recovery rate



Jewels:

Important info to remember, Harvest jewel implicit crafts can help with Stun Immunity.

Jewel with corrupted blood implicit - nice QoL. As for stats, just look for whatever seems useful and affordable at the moment:)

Medium, Flask Effect Duration, 5-6 Passives - Fasting with Spiked Concoction, an option for better flask sustain.

Brutal Restraint - Timeless jewel with bunch of possible good stats. Optimal placement is jewel socket at Ranger start, next to the Acrobatics keystone.
Useful stats you may check for:
Increased Flask Charges Gained - very helpful for flask sustain, we need atleast one in pob provided at the start of chapter.
Chance to Blind on Hit - Blind is both defensive and offensive debuff now as it increases your chance to Evade attacks and reduce enemy chance to Evade, increasing your Hit chance. Highly reccoment to get this aswel on you 1st Brutal.
Damage with Poison - all sources of damage increase are very valuable as build doesn't have too many of them
Poisons you inflict Deal Damage faster - doesn't change total damage dealt per poison but increases DPS
Effect of non-curse Auras - extra defences / resists
Attack and Cast Speed - additional dps
Maximum Life - life (what did you expect huh)
Onslaught on Kill - nice yet rare mod, guaranteed 8s Onslaught on kill is cool to have
Chance to Avoid being Stunned - might be useful to reach stun avoidance cap
5% increased Dexterity - just some extra Accuracy
+20 to Dexterity - and this one too


Watcher's Eye - No mandatory stats for this build, the most useful imo are:


Determination - Additional Armour
Determination - Additional Phys Damage Reduction
Purity of Elements - Chaos Resistance
Purity of Elements - Physical Taken as Fire/Cold/Lightning
Grace - Spell Suppress
Grace - Chance to Evade
Grace - Movement Speed
Malevolence - Damage Over Time Multiplier

Flasks:
Dying Sun - flask that makes us investing so much into flask sustain. Insanely good when you can fully utilize it - with 50% increased Flask Effect it provide +3 additional Projectiles and bunch of extra AoE for better overlaps. Due to nerfs of unique flasks it is pretty hard to reach 100% uptime on this one, but Pathfindes still can do that.

Now PoB can calculate flask uptime without problems, but I'm still leaving my Dying Sun calc there because this tool have all flask mods in one place.
Few days prior 3.17 launch I've asked my friend to make a quik maffs device for stats required to automate Dying Sun. It should be accurate enough to not be completely useless, and you can try it yourself by making a copy of it here. PoB link for this section contains items that should be enough for automation, but its far from being guaranteed that you find exactly the same stuff so feel free to calc it for your setup:)

Keep replacing regular gems with awakened / alt quality.

=== 118+ points ===
Points past lvl 94-95 required to Take one extra Large Cluster to fit Forbidden Flame & Flesh in to this 2 sockets.
If you dont want to level above 95, points to drop is 2 small life nodes near Herbalism & Revenge of the Hunted and 4 points by dropping Fatal Toxins or Toxic Strikes

Only two but very important two changes here.

First is crafting a double-influenced chest with Redeemer and Hunter mods chance to gain a Frenzy Charge on Hit and You can apply an additional Curse. Hopefully you know what the Awakener's Orb is, if not you might check it here.
Open prefix or suffix for ES crafts is must have, also Spell Suppress will help to get cap much easier.

Additional Curse modifier will be utilized via our second upgrade - Asenath's Gentle Touch gloves. Temporal Chains make our Poison and Wither stacks last longer, greatly improving DPS. Explodes are always nice and fun, and also screw you porcupines! They're also able to cause funny chain reactions in out case. Thing is, Asenath's explodes are physical damage, which can poison if you have global chance to Poison, and we happen to have one from Herald of Agony buff. One of the mods on our Circle of Nostalgia could also increase this buff's effect, giving even more chance to Poison. So monster packs may explode, Poison and Curse nearby monsters with explode, these nearby monsters die, explode etc. Also there is a good amount of life and Int on the gloves, always nice to become smarter that way:)

I Lied about two upgrades lol ;D (I didn't it just got updated)

In this setup I decided to include added in 3.17 Forbidden Flame & Forbidden Flesh jewels. We have a lot of passives to choose from, but in my opinion most of them are useless even if they looks cool.
Why? Because of Spell Suppress, this stat was pain in da ass to cap since introducing. Ofc we have Magebane, but build already short of skillponts and can't go for it, even though Ranger is closest to this Keystone (Scion doesn't exist). After some math I concluded that Quartz Infusion from Raider is the most efficent Point to take. 40% Suppress and Phasing allow us to drop some points near Freedom of Movement & Inveterate which can be used to take extra Large Cluster and improve our damage. More Forbidden Jewel variations in next section.

Want to mention one more thing, stacking armour on gear bases and getting alt quality on gems like Determination,Molten Shell allow us to achieve enough armour to drop Granite Flask and swap it with Topaz Flask, completly solving any problems with resistances on gear and giving us missing ~30% less dmg taken from lightning damage, the most dangerous dmg type in game imo.

PoB link of my build from 3.16 League.

3.16 was wild time, Poisonous Concoction just got introduced into the game and everyone including myself were searching for optimal build setups and gear combinations.
Let's begin with some ideas I had at that time.

In 3.17 I went allin into crafting and got some crazy items which raised dps of build to 90kk+, BUT of course it can't be as easy with ancient coding technologies from GGG.
Long time ago in 2019 during Metamorph league, players managed to reach the amount of Damage over Time that caused variable overflow and caused target to stop taking any Damage over Time completely.
Since it was quite game-breaking for certain builds, a temporary band-aid fix was applied and the maximum amount of DoT any target can take was capped by variable size, which is 2^31-1 or roughly 2.14 billions. Sounds good, you may think - who even reached that much damage to cause the overflow? Well, there goes some Ancient technologies. Damage over Time is calculated as value per minute, so the real cap is (2^31-1)/60, or 35.79kk per second. Which also was not easy goal to achieve back then, of course. So "temporary" fix stays in the game still, and everything was mostly fine...
...Until our guild went to farm some Flawless Chaylas for Global Defence Armours to craft & level guildmates.
After some runs we noticed that adding extra support with absurd effect of Despair curse didn't increased our ttk on Boss. We made Reddit Thread and were thinking this is a bug, but apparently its a bug fix. Nothing more permanent than a temporary as being said;)
Long story short, any target cannot take more than ~35.79kk Damage per Second from Damage over Time. So its not by 1 poison instance, 1 skill, 1 character or anything. You can make a full party or different DoT builds and they cannot deal more DoT DpS than 35.79kk combined. Live with that info :D
Therefore most of my investments in gear during 3.17 were useless lol, but I don't care because it still was a lot of fun to craft everything.
PoB link of my build from 3.17 League, which introduced a lot, no, A LOT of new stuff.

I arrived into 3.18 league armed with knowledge of DPS cap existence, and feeling I've tested everything I need about this build.
One thing was bothering me though, I still didn't test Melding of the Flesh in Concoction setup, and decided this should be one of my league goals. Introducing new endgame bosses added another one into the list instantly.

Mid League of 3.18 character.
End of 3.18 character.



With this amount of Elemental damage mitigation ofc I had ideas to convert incoming phys damage to elemental aswell, but got bored after ~3 weeks of playing (grinding 2k altars for 40 challenges was hell), it might be my goal for the next legue I guess.

These three continue of original build verions

Corrupted AsenathPoB: click
Ashes PoB: click me
Asenath+Ashes PoB: click me senpai

Next one is theorycraft and isn't tested in game, just my mid league thoughts.

3.18 Outdated | Upper Tree Concept PoB: click me senpai pls,
3.18 Outdated | 90@ no Mageblood PoB: click me more senpai, yeah

More coming later