[3.4] The Plague Archer - Assassin Crit/Poison based Toxic Rain!

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DSeL написал:

I'm having trouble surviving.. obviously a gear problem but this is my first char in this game really and I have no clue. Any tips on gear would be appreciated.

Welcome to Path of Exile. It is merciless :)

- Max out your elemental resistances AND have a reasonable amount of life on each rare item you wear. You can buy an item for each of the slots for 1-2c. These take huge precedence before anything else on rare items, outside of your weapon. Look at poeaffix to figure out what value ranges you can expect on individual items.
- Pick a lot of life nodes on the passive tree, basically all in sight. At level 85, you should have at least 160% increased life from the tree, ideally more.
- Have some defensive flasks, like Stibnite, Jade, Quartz, Basalt etc. Practice keeping these up at all times when in combat, even if you don't see any particularly threatening monster. Early/during act progression, I generally run 2 life flasks (one instant, one not), 1 defensive flask (I prefer stibnite on evasion characters), 1 quicksilver flask and 1 mana flask. Later, when the characters starts getting optimized, I can drop one of the life flasks and ideally the mana flask too for more utility (this is when DPS flasks come in).
- Have two affixes on each of your flasks.
- Have one instant life recovery flask, and a freeze cancelling and a bleeding cancelling flask. Be ready to use these at moment's notice. Do not spam your life flask(s) unnecessarily though.
- Be ready to use your escape ability (Blink Arrow) immediately when you are threatened. I like mapping my first ability slot (outside of mouse) to spacebar and I always put my movement ability into it. This makes instinctive escaping very easy.
- Figure out what you are dying to. Boss attacks? Learn the boss movements. Bursts of damage from huge packs of monsters? Advance a bit more slowly, etc. There is a lot of ways to defend against specific things (eg. the freezing cancelling flask nullifies the threat of getting frozen), but becoming "generally harder to kill" is difficult, and is mainly done by increasing your maximum life (that is literally the only defensive measure that works against everything).

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moon_nmh написал:

What are your thoughts on using the perfect form for a chest piece? It would free up arctic armor and then you could run a 4L herald + grace on top of it.

Sure! there is also the essence worm option.

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CommanderZ написал:

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DSeL написал:

I'm having trouble surviving.. obviously a gear problem but this is my first char in this game really and I have no clue. Any tips on gear would be appreciated.

Welcome to Path of Exile. It is merciless :)

Indeed. Just remember it's a game. Pick what works or experiment and just have fun with random skills and combinations!

Still sane Exile?!?

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DeaconRL написал:

Tl;dr: Build is definitely more than playable! Also in variety of ways, still not sure if Assassin was the best choice, but didnt wanted to make yet another Pathfinder.

Depends the number of poison applyed recently with toxic rain ? Could you give us an estimate ?

I tryed to manage a pathfinder tree, I reached something like 500k dps during flask usage. ( 194% life from tree )

First of all, thank you for the inspiration. I've created a build that took a lot of ideas from this one, but ended up quite heavily modified.

I'll share it here, in case anyone is interested: https://pastebin.com/rrR9hzCH


"The Noxious Death"

Concept
The idea is that Toxic Rain's pods slow up to 60% and we'll be spamming them all over the place. We have 100% chance to poison on hit and Assassin maims poisoned targets, which is another 30% slow. Things are practically rooted as the poisons turn them to mush. Attack speed is extremely important, as we want to apply as many poisons as fast as possible. (Before you say it, no, Quill Rain is still bad)


Skills
It uses exclusively Toxic Rain to deal its damage, but has various things that compliment it, such as Wither totem to debuff bosses, Despair aura, Herald of Agony to capitalize on the massive amounts of poison stacks, Blood Rage for frenzy charges and attack speed, Vaal Blight for added damage over time and debuff.

Apart from that is uses the usual CWDT/IC and Blink Arrow for movement.


Gear
It uses Dendrobate as a chest for various reasons. One, because it's a 7L and the Lesser Poison is extremely useful to easily cap our chance to poison on hit without needing to invest into the tree. The other is that its damage is unmatched in any other chestpiece as we achieve both 300 dex and 150 int. Downside is no life roll.

It uses Lioneye's Glare for a bow, because 100% hit chance is great for applying those precious poison stacks and the bow just has excellent physical damage stats. This damage makes it far superior to Quill Rain, as poison stacks from this bow's hits actually hurt a lot, despite being slower and having no crit stats. Corrupt it as the implicit is useless.

Maloney's Nightfall for a quiver. This is done because Assassin needs to survive and has very little tools to do so. Smoke on hit means blind, means your dodge and evasion becomes that much more powerful and you deal more damage to blinded enemies to boot. This is also the reason for our 6L Agony Crawler as the Blind support. Defence and still some offence. Corrupt it for +1 Arrow.

Impresence is to be able to use Despair without ripping your mana pool, on top of it being an excellent piece of gear already.

Embalmer gloves are just good, not necessary at all. Neither is Atziri's Step, I just like the dodge personally. Corrupt them for +1 Frenzy and something like Life or Dodge, respectively.

Flasks should be self explanatory and so should the Jewels be.


Notes
I've set the configuration to show Shaper DPS and passives that would be active realistically on Shaper, as I find that DPS on map packs doesn't really matter. Things blow up regardless, but feel free to turn on "Enemy is on Full Life" to see how much damage you do initially on packs. It's glorious.

The reason I run life regen in my build is to counteract Blood Rage. The lost damage from better nodes is easily compensated by the gain of Frenzy charges and attack speed from Rage itself.

Alternatively, you could drop some regen nodes, take more crit nodes (there's a few in range) and then use a Stone Golem to fill the degen gap, but here's why I don't: Golems die. A lot. But more importantly as an Assassin, they roll to and hit packs before you do sometimes, which means all your "Full Life" crit chance and multipliers don't apply because your golem tickled the mobs. If Golems had "Passive stance" I would do this.

I've tried Death's Opus as a bow. It's decent, but Glare comes out on top, despite the lack of crit. Note that any additional arrows are not calculated by PoB currently, so it's closer than PoB would have you believe, but Glare still wins.


Please let me know what you think. I might post an official guide to this build in my own thread if it's good enough, as it's too different from this thread's build.

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Xavathos написал:

First of all, thank you for the inspiration. I've created a build that took a lot of ideas from this one, but ended up quite heavily modified.
...

Interesting, what is your argument for Ambush and Assasinate + Opportunistic vs. Deadly Infusion in the Assasin tree?

Otherwise, all the Assasin Toxic Rain trees I've seen from here and from reddit seem to be mostly the same, with the main differences being whether they take the Scion life wheel and the Duelist leech cluster. Another difference being what they use as their second 6L (HoA vs. another attack skill).

How is the mana working out for you? The only concession to mana I can see in the entire build seems to be the one leech node, not even a flask. I am having some serious issues with mana in my build (lvl 82), to the point where I only use Toxic Rain as a secondary right now.
Also, the crit chance seems low for an Assasin build, I generally see those at 80% crit chance. Not sure what exactly that indicates though (you are not using power charges at all, right?).

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CommanderZ написал:

Interesting, what is your argument for Ambush and Assasinate + Opportunistic vs. Deadly Infusion in the Assasin tree?

Otherwise, all the Assasin Toxic Rain trees I've seen from here and from reddit seem to be mostly the same, with the main differences being whether they take the Scion life wheel and the Duelist leech cluster. Another difference being what they use as their second 6L (HoA vs. another attack skill).

How is the mana working out for you? The only concession to mana I can see in the entire build seems to be the one leech node, not even a flask. I am having some serious issues with mana in my build (lvl 82), to the point where I only use Toxic Rain as a secondary right now.
Also, the crit chance seems low for an Assasin build, I generally see those at 80% crit chance. Not sure what exactly that indicates though (you are not using power charges at all, right?).

Mana
I haven't been able to play much yet so I'm not in maps with this build. It's in the theory stage, but in the multiple hundreds of builds I've made and played in the past, I've never had any mana issues even with just that 0.4% leech node. Leech only works on hits though, so you do have to consistently HIT with the arrows, not letting the DoT do all the work as it won't leech anything.

All in all, Leech is the part of the build I'm still on the fence about and I'll have to address it when I get to maps, see how it goes.

Deadly Infusion
This build doesn't really profit all that much from power charges. We'd be able to get 4 charges max, as we're nowhere near the passives on the tree. Ambush and Assassinate adds more crit chance and multi on Full Life targets. It blows up packs more than 4 charges would do. Remember crit poisons do more damage as Assassin so the more initial crits, the harder the poison hits, the faster packs just drop dead. Free culling strike too.

Opportunist is really good for bosses in a dodge build. One shots are usually crits and we won't take any more damage than a regular hit with this node. The 100% increased damage is always welcome and 20% movement speed helps while mapping.

No, I don't use power charges at all, as I have no way to generate them effectively.

In short
I'm not saying Deadly Infusion is bad. It does add damage still, but this is just not a dual wield Void Battery 10-12 power charge build that makes super use of them, so it just adds moderate damage with no survivability. The counter argument is that the damage from Ambush is situational (once per pack and practically non-existent on bosses) where as the power charges would always be up. That's true, but Opportunist fills the gap a bit on bosses and it's still just damage. We have tons of that already and dead men have 0 DPS.

Also
I know this sounds strange for an Assassin build, but it's not really a crit build. I crit enough to make use of the added poison damage, but the majority of my damage comes from stacking poisons and straight up physical/chaos damage. A 5% base crit bow would be heresy to any self respecting crit Assassin, but don't take my word for it, check PoB. The damage is there, despite the relatively low crit for an Assassin. Sometimes less is more.

What about scourge arrow as main source of damage? i think is a good skill, with good damage output and AOE

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NevermindJD написал:

What about scourge arrow as main source of damage? i think is a good skill, with good damage output and AOE

A friend of mine has made a very successful build with Scourge Arrow.

He made it stacking as much damage as possible on a Pathfinder with flasks up (as is tradition) using Lioneye's Glare and using the Pathfinder node that grants Poison proliferation to kill things.

The idea is that you charge a fully powered Scourge shot into a pack, which then applies extremely powerful poison stacks which then prolif and kill everything. Seems to work really well for him so far into T6+ maps. You could see it as a Flameblast Ignite prolif build on an Elementalist, works much the same.

It's just the opposite of what poison builds usually do, which is stacking as many poisons as possible. This build cares more about high damage per stack than number of stacks. Ignite doesn't stack, so there builds have no choice, and when poison does stack, the logical thing to do is to stack it, haha. I'm glad this works too though, goes to show in how many ways you can play this game effectively.

It's a concept that only works for Pathfinder specifically though, as only they get the 40% chance to deal 100% more damage with poisons and the poison prolif node.

Hi, i want to start with this build but leveling is pretty good or not? and end game?

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Xavathos написал:

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NevermindJD написал:

What about scourge arrow as main source of damage? i think is a good skill, with good damage output and AOE

A friend of mine has made a very successful build with Scourge Arrow.

He made it stacking as much damage as possible on a Pathfinder with flasks up (as is tradition) using Lioneye's Glare and using the Pathfinder node that grants Poison proliferation to kill things.

The idea is that you charge a fully powered Scourge shot into a pack, which then applies extremely powerful poison stacks which then prolif and kill everything. Seems to work really well for him so far into T6+ maps. You could see it as a Flameblast Ignite prolif build on an Elementalist, works much the same.

It's just the opposite of what poison builds usually do, which is stacking as many poisons as possible. This build cares more about high damage per stack than number of stacks. Ignite doesn't stack, so there builds have no choice, and when poison does stack, the logical thing to do is to stack it, haha. I'm glad this works too though, goes to show in how many ways you can play this game effectively.

It's a concept that only works for Pathfinder specifically though, as only they get the 40% chance to deal 100% more damage with poisons and the poison prolif node.

Interesting build. Actually I may spec into this and try it as I created a Shadow yesterday to level up an Assassin Toxic Arrow build. I think another very important stat since Crit matters less than it seems is attack speed, including frenzy charges. If you can get frenzy charges thru a fairly easy means other than blood rage, then it can add even more poisons on bosses since it does boost the overall attack speed in applying more poisons per sec and the base damage for the attack by a bit.

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prodiosounds написал:

Hi, i want to start with this build but leveling is pretty good or not? and end game?

Very easy, get a 4L quill rain and you're set all the way up to white maps. Shouldn't cost anymore than 2-3c worth of currency (1c for quill rain, maybe 2c to 4L with jewellers and fusings). As for endgame, I don't know. I really would like to see someone post a video killing red map tier bosses with it. But I figure it shouldn't have too many issues with white-yellow tier maps even with a 4L.