3.14 Toxic Rain - Leaguestart guide with in depth crafting and gearing section - updated

Hmm so after reviewing videos of others people testing and doing my own reliable test with golden rule and 100% chance to poison and resolute technique it seems that 5 overlap is only possible on targets that have hitbox size larger than humanoid map bosses

I'm going to go and asume that bosses like SHaper, Elder and Sirus also have these same humanoid hitbox sizes unless someone comes up with different info

Therefore 5 overlap will only be possible on certain map bosses but overall you can't expect it against everything

What this means for Concentrated effect is that it's a still good option for single target because of the higher multiplier than other gems, but it doesn't give more than that, its still 15% more damage over Void manipulation in my endgame setup so if you plan on farming some awakeners or invitations it might be wise to get a white gem socket so you can swap it in

https://www.reddit.com/r/PathOfExileBuilds/comments/msmz0o/update_on_the_new_toxic_rain_mechanics_because_i/

Reddit thread with videos and image explanations for new overlap mechanics

Big credit for Remicaster for coming up with a reliable test instead of being an ass like me and trusting visual indicators :P

While this guide is super in depth with lots of tips, detail and advices, it's not made in mind for a completely new to Path of exile player or a complete casual that's going to take several weeks to finish the campaign

I don't teach a whole game here and how basic stuff works nor do i explain every single aspect of everything and micromanage you to the very end


SO therefore i presume that you know/have done the following things:

- Played through the campaign at least few times and know how to finish it
- Have mapped before and know how to complete and "shape" your atlas and "unlock" your endgame options
- Have basic understanding of crafting and item mods, like why item level matters, what are prefixes and suffixes
- Have used most avenues of crafting before, like Essences, Fossils various benchcrafts that come from veiled mods, Annulment orbs etc.
I try to be about as in depth as i can when it comes to crafting but i don't explain that Annulment orb Removes a mod from an item, that you need to socket a fossil into a resonator and other basic things like that
- That you have time to actually play the build into at very least high yellow or lower red maps and to at least level 90, this doesn't have to be fast, i myself don't have more than like 3-4h to play every day on work days, but i expect you to stick to the build for a while to at least experience it enough to be able to judge how good it is once "completed"
- Basically i focus myself on intermediate players with at least few hours a day of playtime that don't drop builds around lvl 80, want good progression and good advice on how to leaguestart for some juicy profit, i think that there's a good fair share of new player guides out there and i think that full on veterans with 5+h of playtime have no issues finding or making builds to play, i think the "intermediate" guy is the key audience for this type of guide and would benefit the most

Why to play this skill:

-Pure chaos damage, you evenutally solve your recovery via flask and gained on hit mods negating every single bad map mod out there like no leech/regen and reflect, you can run maps unidentified if you want to

-Great on low budget gear and pretty easy self found leveling, you can pretty much faceroll early maps and push until red with minimal investment focusing on getting atlas completion and skipping too many meaningless upgrades

-Enemies slow down to a crawl, toxic rain has reduced movement speed on enemies, wither has reduced movement speed on enemies from hinder
and while you're a miner your skitterbots chill enemies, this makes certain bosses insanely easy to outplay and simply outrange, Vaal Blight applies a big slow to enemies from its own hinder effect

Why to follow this guide:

-One of the most balanced builds i came up with and i played around 100 builds in the past 7 years, has good dps, speed, defense, survivability and recovery, the 5 crucial parts of a great build, if you check most Toxic rain builds they severely lack at least one of those if not 2

-I put EXTREME focus on ease of gearing, affordability and self crafting, negating the lack of good items on the market early on and focusing on getting your own through deterministic and as cheap as possible crafting strategies, this is a great build for someone looking to rush the endgame as soon as possible

-I "remove" the need for all "luxury" item mods, and work around not having or needing them, this includes despair on hit rings/glove corruptions, culling strike, etc. that you would see recommended or used by other builds

-I try to alleviate RNG and need for trading as much as possible, focusing my gear crafting guide on stuff you can progressively get yourself in a reasonable amount of tries, like cheap and common harvest crafts and cheap fossils, i remove the need to ever 6L your own item by offering affordable 6L base and working around its low item level when needed to turn it into even an endgame beast

-I utilize other low ilvl items whenever possible to reduce the base cost of items, amount of item mods they can roll, focusing on primary modifier targets and making them multiple times cheaper to adapt and min max with affordable harvest crafts

-I try to offer good progression with sensible price upgrades and multiple "gear stages" so it could be played by both players with a lot and not too much time, even wearing a full set of my "luxury endgame items" doesn't exceed the cost of a single headhunter and is probably half the price of it

-I offer multitude of tips for a fresh league start and a lot of details on early league economy and focus on giving you as clear as picture as i can on what to upgrade and when, what to delay until cheaper, what items to get first so you could craft them as cheap as possible etc.

Toxic rain fires an arrow that splits into 5 total pods/spores that deal damage over time on the ground before they explode and hit enemies

These pods can stack infinitely on the enemy, there is no cap how many can effect one target, therefore duration acts as an almost more modifier to your damage(check duration section for more info)

Since the pods have radius, it is possible for multiple pods from the same attack to be affecting the target

Since patch 3.14 increasing the area of effect on your skill will also increase how much they spread appart, therefore you don't want to take any increased area of effect modifiers that you don't have to, you will probably be able to take a node or 2 and run Dying sun without feeling the impact but besides that NO OTHER sources of Area of effect are recommended anymore

I will need to do some testing once patch hits, there is a possibility that you could improve on your AOE without reducing the overlap by a small margin which would be useful for mapping

I also need to deduct if Concentrated effect might be a viable gem depending on how much it reduces the original spread and how much it impacts the overlap

Leveling:
Act 1

Pierce(large chest)

Quest Rewards:

Caustic arrow(first time you talk to tarkleigh)
Mirage archer(Nesa after tidal island)
Puncture(tarkleigh after you open submerged passage)
Dash(tarkleigh after you open submerged passage)
Void manipulation(go to town and talk to Nessa before brutus)
Smoke mine(after brutus kill exit to character selection, faster and cheaper than tp)
Toxic rain(when you enter merveil caverns take waypoint back to town and talk to Nessa)

DON'T GO TO LOGIN SCREEN OR LOGOUT MACRO ON LEAGUE START, YOU GET PUT IN A PRETTY LARGE QUEUE AND LOSE A TON OF TIME

Tidal island: after killing Hailrake get quicksilver flask from Nessa

I usually go coast - mud flats - submerged passage waypoint - back to coast - clear tidal island and back to town, and i make sure that i'm level 4 after Hailrake kill,

this makes it so you can try and transmute your Quicksilver later and roll Freeze immunity(ilvl 4 requirement)

Gems to purchase:

Blastchain mine - 1 transmute
Swift assembly - 1 wisdom scroll
Withering step - 1 transmute

If you don't get 2 transmutes early Prioritize blastchain mine, withering step later, need at least 1 transmute, eventually 2, pick up ALL blue and yellow gear, make sure to open strongboxes and chests on your way, high chance of droppign transmutes,

don't purchase gear from vendors for transmutes early except movespeed boots or 3l, i like to kill both bosses in the climb,
takes slightly longer but pretty much gurantees enough transmutes as soon as i can purchate the gems and has high likelihood of getting a 3 link

you don't need to buy these gems before you get Toxic rain, but its nice to start leveling them early if you have sockets and currency

Your gem setup is:

Caustic arrow - pierce - mirage archer
Toxic rain - blast chain mine - swift assembly
Puncture to help with bosses early , you can drop it in act 2

Smoke mine as your movement skill, you can drop dash as soon as you get the mine, put detonate mines on left click and it's basically a better flame dash since it gives you movespeed, by far the best movespeed skill in the game

Links to be on the lookout for
1 G-G-G for Caustic setup
1 G-G-B for Toxic mines

Pick up iron rings and serrated quiver as soon as you can, extra phys damage really helps early on, later get a broadhead quiver when you find one, other quivers don't give any benefit and phys dmg at least helps a little

Act 2

Rewards:

Vicious projectiles - maligaro kill
Blood rage - after fidelitas kill

Great white beast quest for second quicksilver

Gems to purchase:

Summon skitterbots(after you kill fidelitas) - 1 alteration

You need 1 alt here so after you get your transmutes pick up as much id scrolls, pick up all blue and yellow gear and identify everything to get 1 alt as soon as possible, if you dropped chance orbs use them on a rustic sash and do phys bow
vendor recipe (at least magic sash + bow + whetstone) use it on a 3l g-g-g bow if possible

a good bit of your damage still comes from a hit still so it will help a lot

don't bother using blood rage yet, it has low duration until leveled and will be annoying for your life degen, just focus on spamming smoke mine and flasks, you don't want your smoke mine to be OFF cooldown unless you can see a terrain you need to
jump over, use it as much as possible


Your setup is

Toxic rain - blastchain mine - swift assembly - vicious proj(when you get 4l)
Caustic arrow - mirrage archer - pierce - void manipulation(when you get 4l)
Remember to use withering step on bosses as much as possible, don't use smoke mine while doing bosses, just manually dodge

my setup is usually

Left click - detonate mines for running through zones, i use move only for bosses, if you detonate repeatedly with your left click, you lose a ton of damage from your blastchain, you can get like 50%+ more damage
if you keep your detonation sequence going
I put detonate mines bind key in my input tab in options on spacebar, that is my natural tumb resting point and it just feels easy to use

Right click - toxic rain

q - withering step

w - caustic arrow

e- smoke mine(this is a key i use for movement skills since i started playing, put this on a key you feel the most comfortable using for a movement skill)

on bosses: place your maximum amount of mines, just keep spamming them until boss appears or you trigger him, when he's ready detonate mines and press withering step, attack once with caustic arrow,
mirage archer will keep refreshing it, keep throwing your mines to keep the detonation sequence going, pay attention to your mine counter on top left of the screen, if you notice that it's going up that means detonation sequence stopped
because you don't have enough mine throwing speed to keep it longer yet, it lasts about 1,5 seconds and then you can maybe prolong it for another half a second to a second

this should be enough for any boss but if you notice it stopped and you're stacking mines press your spacebar again, after you detonated your second sequence refresh your withering step, make sure you dont use smoke mine because
it will put withering step on cooldown and you will lose a lot of damage

If you haven't played mines before it's very easy to fuck up so you can go to your hideout and practice some to get the muscle memory, i will provide a short video of how this looks in practice so you can see it and hopefully understand better

Act 3:

Rewards:

After getting Tolmans bracelet in Crematorium - Despair, just self cast it on start of the fight until you get your hextouch setup in later acts

Gems to purchase:

Malevolence (1 alteration) - Ranger doesn't get it, so try to get a shadow, templar, scion or a witch to buy one for you if you can but it's fine to go all the way to act 6 without it, i've done it on my practice runs

Skip killing Gravicius, don't need any gems from his quest, takes long to kill him

Skip the Siosa quest, unless you're a racer you will get lost in those zones and they're incredibly rippy, skeleton monsters can oneshot you and boss there is super annoying, if you die you'll lose more time than you'd get by doing it
chances are that you can't even afford the gems you need yet or have sockets to slot them in

Your setup should still be the same as in act 3 with added 4th gem i mention earlier when you get 4 links

Links to be on the lookout since 4L items can start to drop here

G-G-G-B for your Toxic mines
G-G-G-G for your caustic arrow

Keep picking up smaller blue tiems to vendor for transmutes so you can buy 4 links from the vendors if you don't find them naturally, identify all rare gear because you need 3 augmentation orbs for movement speed recipe
rare gear can vendor for augment orb if it has 6 mods, this is incase you find a really good pair of boots with no movespeed but open prefix to craft it

Act 4 gems are fairly irrelevant now but you still pick up cast when damage taken to save an alch, don't level it yet, just keep for later

Act 5

nothing of note really happens in this act


Act 6

Gems to buy

Wither - spell totem - multiple totems - multiple totems is 1 alch so just buy it when you can

Orb of storms - Hextouch - Despair - hextouch is 1 alch so get it when you can, priority is on multiple totems first since you can selfcast despair

During act 5 i like to keep a lokout for B-R-R and BBB items so i can have this as soon as possible, if i don't get them i do full vendor run from act 2-6 and hopefully i get them, if not just pick the hextouch despair setup later and manually cast,

wither totems are much more useful for bosses due to slow and boss targeting them instead of you

Gems to pick up for later to level:

Trap and mine damage from act 2 - 1 alteration (already leveled some)

Optional gems to pick up for now, can do it much later when you have sockets:

Efficacy
Lifetap
Swift affliction
Immortal call - not a priority, don't need high level of this, just level it when you get to maps

Somewhere during Acts 5-6 you can pick up Primal Spirit mana nodes in ranger starting area(mana + flask charges gained) and you're able to run without mana flask, check your POB for what your mana regen would be and if its at or higher than what your Mine per second cost is

For example at a around 0,28 mine throwing time you need 11 mana regen to sustain on your mana regen alone(3,5 mines per second x 3 mana cost per mine)

There's no need to rush this since you most likely won't have good utility flasks at that point so just wait until you get good utility flasks that could replace your mana flask

After you hit maps and switch to the skill gem setup i use in this POB these are the gems you want to level in your offhand slots for your transition to attack based:

Lifetap
Efficacy
Mirage archer
Flesh and stone
Swift affliction
1 extra toxic rain gems for flipping to 20% quality then corrupting later on

Don't bother leveling empower, just buy a corrupted lvl 3 one when you can afford it

On miner I run without flesh and stone and use skitterbots instead, it's more dangerous but i think that early on you need damage far more than you need surviability, since deaths don't impact your exp gains as much as at late levels

My keybind setup example after i got all the gems and sockets and started mapping is

Left click - detonate mines(not on bosses because you don't want to break your sequence and lose ton of damage from your blastchain mine bonus)
Right click - toxic rain mine
q - withering step
w-vaal blight
e-smoke mine
r-despair hextouch setup
t-blood rage
middle mouse - wither totems

Detonate mines keybind - Spacebar or another button that you're very comfortable using


https://www.twitch.tv/videos/976836643

this is a run of one of the best POE racers which contains most early leveling info you need, do note that this is a race, so he doesn't do certain stuff like get passive points, lab trials, but you can use this to see how to get better at leveling this build
he stops at act3 Piety but the first 3 acts are where most gem buying and gear shuffling happens, this is also where people lose the most time, cause good inventory management is crucial in leveling fast and you don't have much damage yet

run starts around 58 minutes

don't follow his passive points, he's doing a short race so he's going to prioritize only things that give speed in short term, just follow my leveling trees instead

16 points

28 points

39 points

57 points

74 points


97 points

after this point switch to my starting POB for remainder of the points

10 points
18 points
26 points
39 points
52 points
70 points

87 points

after this point switch to my POB setup and see the rest of the tree there

Gem links on miner:

Main 6L in bow:

Toxic rain - Blast chain mine - Swift Assembly - Vicious Projectiles -Void Manipulation - Concentrated effect

4L Wither - Spell totem - Multiple totems - Faster casting
4L Storm brand - Hextouch - Despair - Culling strike
4L Cast when damage taken - Immortal call - Increased duration - Smoke mine
2L withering step - increased area of effect

Other gems don't need to be linked:
Summon skitterbots, Malevolence, Blood Rage, Vaal Blight


Gem setup on attack based:

Main 6l socketed in bow for extra gem levels:
Toxic Rain - Vicious Projectiles - Mirage archer - Void Manipulation - Swift Affliction - Efficacy

INRODUCED NEW GEM IN 3.14: Lifetap support(reworked blood magic)

Spend life instead of mana for supported skills, gain Lifetap for 4 seconds, you deal 29% more damage while you have Lifetap

Use this gem after you get good amount of Life gained on hit per second instead of Swift affliction

so setup after you gained Life on hit rings/feast of flesh is

Toxic rain - mirage archer - vicious projectiles - void manipulation - Lifetap - efficacy(replace with empower 3 later)

4L Wither - Spell totem - Multiple totems - Faster casting
4L Storm brand - Hextouch - Despair - Culling strike
4L Cast when damage taken - Immortal call - Increased duration - Smoke mine
2L Withering step - increased area of effect

Gems that don't need to be linked:
Malevolence, Flesh and stone, , Blood rage, Vaal Blight

once again you can either opt for a Vaal skills i mentioned earlier if you think it's still useful for mapping and your damage/defense is not good yet or you can link Withering step for increased area of effect

Once you can afford Watchers eye with Vitality mod that gives up to 30 life gained on hit you can replace Faster casting in your totem setup for Vitality, just make sure that Vitality is NOT LINKED TO SPELL TOTEM

Keep that Vitality at level 1 to not increase the mana reservation because it's just not needed for the recovery anymore

Level cast when damage taken and immortal call to the point where you have enough strength, i like to keep my immortal call around level 13 but if you don't have strength on gear for it don't sweat about it, my pob plans for low strength so just copy the gem levels from there

If you think some other levels/thresholds work better for you by all means use those, this is simply personal preference based on my experience

Why Deadeye now?

because it's the best way to scale single target and aoe now, you don't want AOE increases on your gear so to get good AOE you want extra projectiles, Deadeye gives you 2 and he gives you 3 mirage archers so you're essentially getting 3 free pseudototems that you don't even have to summon yourself, they summon automatically and they will actually end up doing more damage than you yourself do

Is Deadeye the only choice? No, Raider is a fine option, it's a more defensive Ascendancy though, you would get ailment immunity, perma onslaught and phasing that means in general more reliable and you would gain a lot of avoidance making you very hard to hit, however you would lose a lot of damage potential and it's now much harder to scale your single target damage than before

Raider would be a recommendation for HC players or players who are solely going to use this build to level until like lvl 85 and then move on, if you want to at least attempt some higher tier content i think you'll lack DPS more than you lack defence and Deadeye has some nice defence itself

Ascendancy nodes order on Deadeye:

Gathering winds - Wind Ward - Occupying force - Endless munitions

Last 2 nodes don't do anything for your mines really so you can delay merciless and uber lab until you are willing to switch if you want to

Ascendancy nodes order on Raider:

Rapid Asault - Avatar of the Chase - Quartz infusion - Avatar of the Veil

Bandits: Kill All, 2 passive points are incredibly valuable on the build because of earlier possibility of slotting in cluster jewels and so many good nones on the tree you can't even take them all

Pantheons: Soul of Lunaris for mapping, Soul of Solaris for bossing

Minor pantheons:

Either get rid of burning ground(Soul of Abberath) or reduce the desecrated ground damage, whichever one annoys you more, at lower chaos resist values Soul of Shakari will probably be better, but i find burning ground more common and annoying

Before you get unwaweringly evil notable on one of your cluster jewels you might want to run SOul of brine king for large pantheon since stuns can be annoying

First thing to note is that this is a league start, so no twink gear, barely any currency to get stuff during acts and trash gear overall by the time you hit maps

Miner offers a huge chunk of burst dps on stationary or bosses with phases or spawn animations, this is nearly every campaign boss, a lot of map bosses,
early Maven invitations(normal ones with map bosses), merciless Izaro and Uber Izaro

They also trivialize the mana sustain, you can level with no mana flask, no -mana cost gear from around lvl 50 all the way until you get your lethal pride allowing you to run extra utility flask early on which is invaluable for defense while you have low hp

with no item equipped whatsoever, no cluster jewels, just your tree at around lvl 80 and lvl 18 gems, you will be able to do over 2 million burst damage from your initial mines and then after that around 600-700k sustained dps

Doesn't need to worry about attack speed on bow/gear, you get 3,5-4 mines per second from the tree alone, getting that level of attack speed on attack based version is not trivial

this for example is enough to insta burst or nearly instaburst uber lab izaro on phases, and is enough to burst almost all white map bosses in few seconds at most

your attack speed will be pitiful without a high APS bow so attack based at that point will MAYBE deal slightly more sustained damage but will loose on that initial 2 million dps burst almost instantly

Also if you utilize and you REALLY SHOULD the trick i talk about in my leveling section which is to put detonate mines on your left click, your mines detonate instantly in the air, so the playstyle is effectively the same as attack based with a bit difference on bosses where you want to keep your detonation sequence going(refer to my leveling section for more info)

that's why my recommendation for switch is after you can get at least 1,5 million sustained dps in your POB on your attack version so you don't need to
"cheat" with your initial mine setup

Also i'm no racer but i did a couple of A5 kitava practice runs, and my miner runs have significantly faster times than attack based even while having objectively worse gears, exactly thanks to this burst boss dps early on since leveling bosses give you all the time in the world to set up your mines

Respec from a miner to attack based with my proposed tree takes only about 20-25 respec points or less depending how deep you leveled with miner,
and you get 10 points while you're leveling from quests that allready give skill points

so you either need to spend only 10-15 regrets or go back and do a couple of simple quests which is a trivial cost and you'll have this in no time

There needs to be no gear switched, i propose that even if you get lucky and get some good currency very early you invest it into gear that would be good
for attack based version instead of miner because you should look to switch as soon as possible to get that juicy recovery and be able to tank stuff better

TLDR;

Solves mana issues while leveling/early mapping
Huge burst dps for phased/animation spawn bosses - effectively 4-5 times more dps on most bosses
Cheaper/easier gear for good dps early
Detonate mines on left click make the playstyle exactly the same as attack based while mapping/leveling

POB update doesn't have the new gems, i use slower projectiles to simulate the more multiplier on the new Lifetap gem, it will be the same

The new POB update also behaves weirdly with Mirage archers, sometimes it sets them to 0, make sure to manually set them to 3 to see the combined dps numbers cause they are quite powerful

Leveling flasks:

2 life flasks of highest tier you can run + silver flask + quartz flask + adrenaline flasks

Early mapping flasks while you're a miner:

don't bother spending your alts on them to get the best possible rolls/prefixes, i'm simply offering the best possible combo, but honestly any flask of that type will do early on:

ALchemist's Jade flask of Staunching
Alchemists Quartz Flask of Heat
Chemist's Basalt flask of Warding(use beastiary to craft staunching on any chemist basalt)
Enduring Hallowed Hybrid flask of Grounding
Any quicksilver flask of adrenaline(best in slot obviously alchemists prefix but expensive)

Suffixes that remove ailments/curser are interchangeable and you can switch them between flasks, no need no run exactly Jade with Staunching, for example of staunching could be on quartz and of heat can be on jade etc.

With a 6l mine skill you'll need to run a a hybrid flask for mana sustain, no need to have a pure mana flask

you could switch your basalt for another life flask, if you do so, i would put staunching on that flask, warding and heat should always bee on flasks that have good duration because it's more important to be immune to curses and prevent freezes in advance

Flasks for your attack based version:

Dying Sun
Alchemist's Quartz flask of Heat
Alchemists Jade flask of Warding
Panicked Divine life flask of staunching(after you get corrupting blood jewel
use Grounding suffix here to get rid of shocks)
Alchemist's Quicksilver flask of Adrenaline

For harder boss fights replace Quicksilver for Silver flask, i'd probably still use adrenaline suffix on it to not lose too much movement speed

Low life is now below 50% life, i think Panicked flask is honestly the new go to flask instead of seething, instant 2000+ life recovery is quite nice to have compared to just 1000 from a seething flask, since your primary recovery is going to be life gained on hit, i believe this is better option

For yolo softcore players you can run without life flask and use Sulphur flask for a bit more damage however i wouldn't recommend

Jade flask vs Basalt is a tradeoff that you can pick, but with this much defense that relies on not getting hit a lot i personally would value Jade flask more

Swap in Basalt for Sirus, he is spell based entirely and Jade flask is useless there

When you have around 1,5 million dps in your pob and when you got some sources of recovery like life gained on hit rings and Vitality watchers eye

that means 15 withered stacks checked in pob with swapped in Silver flask for quicksilver for onslaught on hard bosses(shaper/elder/guradians), frenzy charge on hit quiver for ticked frenzy charges on bosses if you got one

Gear i wouldn't recommend switching to attack based without:

frenzy charge on hit quiver or at least some dps on your quiver like damage over time multiplier or chaos damage over time multiplier, frenzy charges on bosses are worth almost as much as a quiver with t1 chaos dot multi and damage over time multi, and those
are hella expensive, this 1 mod almost beats 2 other tier 1 mods, and later once you get more chaos damage over time multiplier sources it's just straight up better

Elder quivers can also roll with increased area off effect so its a nice boost for your map clear if it takes you to 1 radius higher than before

At very minimum 2 rings with life gained on hit of at least tier 2 with 1 Feast of flesh small cluster jewels to have good recovery, it will make bossing with low dps infinitely easier and just make your life easier in general

1 set of cluster jewels : 1 Large chaso and 2 Medium chaos damage over time

Bow with at least +2 to bow gems, some attack speed and crafted chaos dot multi

Total cost you'd expect to invest based on previous leagues before it's comfortable to switch is around 4-5 exalts, possibly less if you manage to farm some of the stuff yourself
like base uncrafted cluster jewels, essences, annuls, fossils and other stuff from my gear crafting section

This would be about 3 hours early league farming for slower players and around 2 hours for efficient and experienced and around lvl 85 or so since a lot of things sell early league and making currency is much easier and exalts are cheaper

Toxic rain doesn't have a limit on how many pods can affect a target, default duration of the pods before they explode and stop dealing damage over time is 1 second

Therefore increasing the duration acts as a more multiplier to your damage after that first second, therefore the longer the fight continues the more your duration gives you damage

I used to think when i was originally designing this build that taking too much duration and focusing on it wasn't the best move, because you as a player aren't really in position to stand and attack for long, ideally you would want to move around a lot to avoid hits from hard bosses, and those are the bosses where duration actually matters

HOWEVER, everything changes with Deadeye

Occupying force notable gives you 3 mirage archers, not 1, but 3, and they will be doing about the same damage as you if not more

And the reason for that is duration, your mirage archers don't move around, don't stop, don't care, they are always attacking so duration is quite literally a multiplier for them

However, that said, Increased Duration gem is still not as good as it looks, even though you won't move, bosses will move, and it would replace another pretty big multiplier gem that would give you more immediate damage

I also don't believe that spending 6 points just to reach duration nodes below Scion is worth it, there are so many strong and good points to take in Shadow area that give you more instant damage, my POB tells me that you'd probably lose as much as you'd gain, but you'd replace immediate damage with damage over extended periods of time, and this is unwise because even though your Mirage archers don't move, Bosses can move, and harder bosses actually move quite a bit

SO the conclusion is, get duration everywhere you can, as long as you don't use Increased Duration gem or stretch for Skill duration nodes because dps increase is minimal compared to taking other nodes in shadow area

For example i will be recommending to Annoint one of the 25% duration notables as your amulet annoint, but i wouldn't path towards there via tree

Even though Wicked Pall is nerfed a bit, it's still gonna be the best notable to get on medium cluster jewels, and Efficacy is the best 6th gem until you get empower

Misery Everlasting is a valuable notable to get on your Large cluster jewel

Swift affliction is just a crutch you can use before you get enough recovery to use Lifetap support(reworked blood magic) and after that shouldn't be used since it reduces your duration

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Almost every piece of gear has multiple "stages" based on cost and attainability, i based this around my prediction on league economy and past league prices, however they are subject to change based on prices of certain things so take my economic values of expected cost of each piece with a grain of salt, i try to explain which things i feel like might increase in price with next league but i'm not a wizzard, it usually takes few days for the league economy to shape and diverge from past leagues


Bow crafting

Rings, Amulet, belt

Gloves, helmet, boots

Cluster jewels

Body armor and quiver

How to prioritize which pieces of gear to aquire first:

I'm gonna asume you went the miner route for leveling/early maps, because you really should

So there are couple of things here that work in synergy but don't give much bonuses by itself, i talk about in the Threshholds section

First item you should get is your 6l ilvl 50 bow from Porcupine cards, it's usually around 30c for the whole set, you should have this currency withing first hour or 2 of mapping by simply doing the chaos recipe or just selling some life and res gear you wouldn't use

use 1 shrieking essence of dread on it for now, it's probably still day 1-2 and people don't even have the basic syndicate crafts yet, don't worry about open slots for putting a bench mod, a +2 6L is more than enough for white maps

Next thing to go for is capping your res

Next item on your shopping list should be the Base cluster jewels you plan to use later on the build, because those should be ilvl 68-78, that means that

ANY TIER of harvest will work on these jewels since tier 1 harvest(68) can apply up to 10 level higher items(78) and harvest happens to be one of the best and easiest ways to craft these, refer to my jewel crafting section to see how

the sooner you get these the less fossills you will need to use to get optimal rolls and therefore saving the cost of crafting

Base cluster jewels you need :


1 Large Chaos damage cluster with 8 passive points
2 Medium chaos damage over time multiplier cluster with 4 or 5 passive points(no difference you simply don't take the remainign node)

I don't want to speculate on prices of these in the first week because i never needed to rush for them before, but later on they're about 10c, i can't imagine that they would be more than like 20-30c early on so not a huge investment


Items you should be on the lookout before you transition to attack based because they give the biggest damage and clear speed boost:

Elder Quiver with frenzy charge on hit for frenzy charge sustain on bosses

a quiver like this isn't usually more than an exalt during the first week

Maloney's mechanism can drop anywhere starting with 3.14 patch, this item can allow you to automate your curse application and give you frenzy charges on bosses

You would socket following links in it: Frenzy - Hextouch - Despair

How often it will drop and how much this change will impact it's price remains to be seen, by all logic it should become much cheaper, so it's a good intermediate quiver with fairly good stats

Watchers eye with Vitality life gained on hit version, this by itself is not too expensive, they are also very common, so they drop rapidly in price, delay this for later as much as you can

Dying Sun to boost your clearspeed, these usually start really expensive, but a lot of people rush farming Shaper so market becomes saturated fast and they're 2-3 times cheaper in only few days

Intermediate Jewellery set i refer to in my Jewellery crafting section:

I like to get my rings first as a survivability boost,

Amulet and Belt are my last upgrades, you can use the starting versions for quite a while, because they're fairly more expensive than rings

After you got all that and you used some pristines/aberrants/reforges to get a decent set of jewellery, depending on how many resists you got on them you can look to replace your Starting Gloves, Helmet and Boots into their Intermediate versions which i refer to in my Gloves/Boots/Helmet section

The order i'd go for on these is again based on affordability which is Gloves -> Helmet -> Boots with both intermediate and upgraded version of the boots not being too necessary

After getting a set of intermediate or mix of intermediate and starting gear, you can look to upgrade your

Toxic Rain to level 21/20 gem(buying this from the market is probably the easiest way, gambing with vaal orbs could take dozens of hours of gameplay)

Empower level 4(this one is in the range of 3,5-4 ex during the first 10 days, might want to stick with just lvl 3 until they drop in price)

These upgrades are straightforward and they don't require any gear switching or crafting, so you should do them first before attempting the luxury upgrades first,

all luxury upgrades besides the amulet will require you to get at least some resists on your jewellery and do the final steps of cluster jewel crafting that i refer in my cluster jewel section(getting resistances as suffixes on your medium cluster jewels)

Outside of the obvious choice of further upgrading your gear, i leave that up to you, there's basically an even amount of untaken life and damage nodes nearby you can grab, simply pick what you think you need more and grab the 3 nodes your path of building tells you are best

What additional thing you can do to speed up your mapping even further?

You can use a bow swap!

Remember from my crafting section how getting at least a decent bow doesn't cost much, well you can craft another version of an intermediate bow for about 3 exalts and it will significantly speed up your overall mapping but at a cost, you won't be able to level gems in offhand, so the speed you gain would be offset by some income loss

This is only for people who care more about EXP than money or they found some insane speedfarming strat

You would use Caustic Arrow - Mirage Archer - Arrow nova - Vicious Projectiles - Void Manipulation - Swift Affliction

You don't need empower here which is a great plus in terms of cost, you don't need a crazy good bow, you don't need a frenzy charge on hit quiver, any quiver will do, just make sure that if you have any resistance on your main quiver, you replicate it on this one

You only need to make sure that the quiver you use is a Penetrating arrow quiver, the extra pierce will make your aoe clear way better

Caustic arrow has overall lower dps than Toxic rain because you CANNOT stack caustic arrow degen effect like you can on Toxic rain, however it has MUCH MUCH higher base damage per second from a single application, especially on trash mobs, it also hits less times so it negates some downside of Chainbreaker

Arrow nova + all the extra projectiles + massive base AOE is literally a full screen wide clear, about twice the coverage you can achieve with Toxic rain

You would simply press x before a boss to your main bow or on some tankier rare mob and that's about it

This is totally optional although definitely recommended if you plan to map till 100 and i will most certainly be using it, Caustic Arrow scales from all the things your Toxic rain scales, so no need for any other gear adjustments here

Disclaimer: I haven't played Heist, i haven't done a single Heist last league, i removed everything Heist related from my lootfilters cause i didn't even wanna bother learnign about it

i don't care about Heist and i don't know anything about Heist, after saying Heist 4 times now i will never mention it again, there are youtube videos and reddit/forum guides if you care about that content, to me it's boring and tedious

There is once again a vast ton of ways to make currency in the next league, in fact if you're doing something and not gaining currency i'm going to question your sanity

Some atlas nodes have been reshuffled, some were a bit nerfed, however most strategies that were strong last league were gonna be strong this league, but some will be slightly less so

100% Delirium map farming has been severely nerfed in how easy to acces them is, that means that sources of all things that Delirium maps offered in abundance will increase in Value, therefore, their respective nodes and content will be more profitable on average than before

So lets begin, these will be in random order but i'll try to keep most profitable strategies higher on top: