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

I dropped a bow with added flat fire in act 6 and my tooltip dmg doubled.

have always wanted to try toxic rain league starter, this helps a lot!

thank you for this! been meaning to play / league start toxic rain for ages but feels like 95% of the guides out there are your usual PoB show-off threads so i've just closed them down immediately. sadly i still rely on guides as i'm too lazy / not clever enough to make up a build by myself even after 2k+ hours :P here's hoping they don't gut TR just as i finally found a good guide!

just to note btw, in your leveling poe planner trees you have allocated master toxicist instead of nature's reprisal ;) had me confused there for a second before i continued reading to the ascendancy chapter

Hey, nice guide, I enjoy the level of detail on your explanations. I've added the levelling trees to the early league POB for people who prefer things in one place.

Minimal HP trees: https://pastebin.com/m6XaCSc4

Extra Defense trees: https://pastebin.com/83URVnd9

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etofok написал:

I dropped a bow with added flat fire in act 6 and my tooltip dmg doubled.

https://pathofbuilding.community/

install path of building to be able to judge the dps you do, really the only way to judge damage for Damage over time builds, ingame tooltips don't account for most damage increases you get on Damage over time builds

like they don't know that pods overlap, that mobs have withered stacks, that multiple pods can affext same enemy, that you could have longer duration etc.

the upper tooltip only shows the damage from your hits, which very soon becomes less than 1/10 of your total damage, focusing on that number is wrong

on the tooltip explanation it will show the damage over time of your skill, however for above stated reason that is also innacurate

In general early on you can take following things to be true:

First 2 acts you want a bow with good physical damage, because you use puncture to help on bosses early on throughout act 1 and that scales well with phys damage, your caustic and toxic rain skills will also have low damage over time values first few levels, so taking stuff that scales both the initial hit and the dot like projectile nodes and bow nodes gives much better value than pure damage over time nodes

During act 3 flat physical damage from the initial hit starts becoming a much lesser part of your damage since your skills have gained decent levels and therefore high base damage over time, that's when getting a bow that has either +1 to socketed gems or +1 to socketed bow gems would be the best

after that just follow my gear progression and you'll get good damage without having to even udnerstand the math behind scaling

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LaBBe_ написал:

thank you for this! been meaning to play / league start toxic rain for ages but feels like 95% of the guides out there are your usual PoB show-off threads so i've just closed them down immediately. sadly i still rely on guides as i'm too lazy / not clever enough to make up a build by myself even after 2k+ hours :P here's hoping they don't gut TR just as i finally found a good guide!

just to note btw, in your leveling poe planner trees you have allocated master toxicist instead of nature's reprisal ;) had me confused there for a second before i continued reading to the ascendancy chapter

Exactly the reason i made the guide, even though people told me there's dozens of TR guides, i felt like none of them had what i'd personally be looking in a guide for a league start build

like anyone can make a build good with unlimited budget, but making it with as less as possible is the challenge

like my original plan was to recommend dying sun on a miner version, but i realised some people will get to maps in like 1-2 days, and it's still too expensive at that point so i removed it

i also originally included empower 3 in first transition, but then i realised for someone it's still gonna be very early in the league and it doesn't add as much compared to upgrading your bow first, so i removed it until final version

i redid a lot of my choices, the early draft of my transition POB was probably twice as expensive for about 20-30% more damage, i figured that's not worth it when most of that stuff will drop heavily in price if you can delay it by like 2-3 days

That master toxicist is a real blunder, i'm just gonna leave it there because they announced some node changes for the tree so i'm probably gonna have to redo them anyways, i'll save myself some double work and just leave a note on top to ignore it

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Zewwok написал:

Hey, nice guide, I enjoy the level of detail on your explanations. I've added the levelling trees to the early league POB for people who prefer things in one place.

Minimal HP trees: https://pastebin.com/m6XaCSc4

Extra Defense trees: https://pastebin.com/83URVnd9

amazing mate, thanks a lot, i figured people would prefer the browser option but this is also valuable to have, i will be replacing the pobs in my post with this

is that real about skill effect duration i'm not a pro on Path of building but compare with Remi's Toxic rain build it's kinda weird but don't get me wrong just a question and thanks for the guide i'll try in 3.14

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etofok написал:

I dropped a bow with added flat fire in act 6 and my tooltip dmg doubled.

"Tooltip" damage doesn't matter because vast majority of people look at wrong tooltip anyway (like on character sheet or the one in top corner of the skill) instead of damage over time part in tooltip. That "tooltip" people talk about is usually only hit damage ignoring what toxic rain is actually played for (the dot damage from the pods).

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LaBBe_ написал:

thank you for this! been meaning to play / league start toxic rain for ages but feels like 95% of the guides out there are your usual PoB show-off threads so i've just closed them down immediately.

I'd swear Remi's guide is extremely detailed with breakdown between gear levels and levelling trees and idk what you on about because when another guy made TR levelling thread people whined it doesn't have end game setup. This guide btw: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2998087 Tested myself this levelling setup and was pretty nice.

It's a different setup because it has totems not mines, so ofc if you prefer mines stick to them and the guide for it. :)

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Dassort написал:

is that real about skill effect duration

What he said about duration is true. Duration will increase your damage per cast of TR, assuming the target doesn't move out of it or die before duration is up, but duration will not increase your damage per second unless you're already attacking continuously on the same spot for as long as duration is (i.e. your early pods would start expiring, but they're already there, let's say changing duration from 3 seconds to 4 would start seeing difference after 3 seconds assuming target is still there, didn't move or die, and you keep piling the pods).

Also whether you play self-cast or mines keep in mind stacking pods to the max requires you to stand still, either shooting or throwing mines has an animation that locks you in place and you can't do it while moving. So while attack speed for self-cast and mine throwing speed for mines helps to shorten that lock-down period, every time you move to dodge a boss ability you'll lose some dps from what you'd shoot / throw in that movement time. So don't count pob dps / tr calculator dps as something you'd have up 100% of the time (and that applies to any other build that can't do stuff on the move, like self-caster spells, or melee builds that have to chase boss around esp. bosses like Sirus).

While the author says that TR is unlike poison and this is true, poison builds suffer the same problem with fake pob damage because if you have poison duration of 10 seconds it would count you continuously attacked for 10 seconds to apply all the poisons, and this isn't a realistic scenario because often in those 10 seconds you'd have gaps where you couldn't attack (you have to move, boss moved, boss went immune, etc.)

The only skills where you can have "realistic" damage per second are things you can cast once and cover the gaps, like storm brand or vortex, but even with those skills you'll have tons of temporary buffs you can tick in pob but they won't be there all the time on a boss (esp. flasks).

TL:DR about duration:
It's good for stationary targets like Drox or Baran. It won't help you much for mobile targets like Sirus, or targets that die quickly (like plain map mobs).

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Viktranka написал:

I'd swear Remi's guide is extremely detailed with breakdown between gear levels and levelling trees and idk what you on about because when another guy made TR levelling thread people whined it doesn't have end game setup

i didn't claim that all of them are like that, did i? i'm sure both of them are good. i was just basing that number on my gut feeling based on the guides for the first year or two from when toxic rain first was released, so i stopped actively searching for a guide for it and played something else. seems like both remi's and the other guide you linked were first posted after that so i haven't seen them.

this time around i decided i'd finally change things up and start with TR and this guide happened to be the topmost of such when i checked the ranger forums. if it'd been either one of the other two i'm sure i'd sent the exact same comment in those threads.

Yeah, Remi's guide is a pretty good one, and it existing almost dettered me from making one, however i felt that it's lacking some stuff that i could have offered

example is progressive step by step crafting on stuff that is almost always severely overpriced by the market

for example in Ritual league, i made an absolute bank buying 2 ex medium clusters with Vast power+Towering threat and using non x-to x i talk about in my crafting section to give them double resistances and i resold such jewels for 4-5 ex

Bows are also trivial to craft, even the best in slot ones, but market usually sells them at a 5-10 ex higher margin than what you'd spend yourself

I figured people would like to know just how much money you can save by crafting

I also disagreed with some of his choices or focuses and i figured that this version is different enough and that it can offer something else

I won't go further because i don't really care about this guide's better or that guide's better, just pick the one you like more, or even better, if you have some knowledge just use both and decide which options are better at what stage