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

hmmm i think i play this Season Shield skills Shield skills very well buffed . :)

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My opinion on balance changes:
I'm all for the changes, especially the one that reduce the damage. However i feel they're incomplete and don't really fit current version of PoE. Flask immunities again ailments / curses are supposed to be reactive now from the looks of it. However right now that's just not possible at current pace of the game. There's rarely a time for reactive gameplay, especially with abominations such as Ultimatum and Maven content. Not to mention flasks will run out quickly if you try actually reactively remove ailments.

I think everyone knows by now that shock and chill/freeze can easily be a death sentence. I also died to ignite on my bleed Gladiator couple of times. Map curses are also very deadly and mitigating them still ain't easy. I'm all for making game harder, but this is a little bit too much without addressing core issue. Hopefully next patch will tackle it.

I pretty much agree, except I'm not as worried about the flask thing with ailments. It might be really bad but we won't know for sure until we see all the different effects we can put on flasks now. My perspective is softcore though, and these changes are definitely a lot more extreme when considering HC.

Some of the "automatic triggers" that they have showcased so far are things like "used when shocked" on a topaz flask with shock immunity. So it all depends on what kind of trigger options we get on different flasks. For example imagine a staunching life flask that is automatically used whenever you get a bleed/corrupted blood on you. Some of those triggers might only be available on their relevant flasks though, but with how flasks are changing and how I usually sort out my evasion without jade or stibnite pretty early I can see myself having room for some utility flasks I wouldn't normally use.

The poison change is probably the one I'm the most worried about for this build since I could easily see GGG fuck it up :)

In SSF for this build I definitely see a period in white/early yellow maps where you will have to stall before progressing so you can get some gear.

Dread banner vs (new) defiance banner, what do you guys think?

How will this build handle on SC after the changes?

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Viktranka 님이 작성:

Dread banner vs (new) defiance banner, what do you guys think?

It's a lot of evasion you need to make up by not using Dread Banner and Defiance Banner is increased evasion additive with the already 250+ percent we already get. The accuracy decrease on mobs from Dread banner with generosity is quite substantial and reduces the evasion requirement by a lot. I haven't done the math but I would expect it to require a fairly large investment and the tradeoff seems non existent when you consider our main risk of dying.

It's not like reduced crit chance is a bad stat for the build, but evasion based characters already mitigate the risk significantly so it's mostly used for spells.

At evasion cap you get hit rarely, that hit has to both crit, and succeed on a full random evasion check which is 5% chance at evasion cap to see if it crits or hits. After that you roll your dodge check. It's a wall of compounding effects.

Crits will eventually get through especially for spells where evasion isn't in play, but they will go through sometimes regardless of you giving mobs reduced crit chance. Dodge + evasion already does the job of spreading out the crits to not take 2 in quick succession. With our defensive layers we just want to mitigate hits that eventually go through to not one shot us, this does not accomplish that.

For that reason I find the reduced crit chance to be pretty useless considering the tradeoff. If it was "reduced extra damage from critical strikes" it would've been different but probably still not worth the trade off. I really can't understate just how strong debuffing monster accuracy is. Dread banner is multiplicative with Avatar of the veil and both combined reduce monster accuracy by roughly 55% at gem level 20.

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Suchy021 님이 작성:

How will this build handle on SC after the changes?

Slow and steady like previous leagues. Comparing to my previous characters in Ultimatum and Ritual and taking into account the cluster changes, support gem changes and the elemental ailment nerf I'm sitting at about a 35% dps loss in my single target setup and 25% in my arrow nova map clearing setup. That's definitely a large chunk, but it's on the lower end of the spectrum of what a lot of other builds have to deal with.

It will make mapping early feel a bit worse, but there's nothing preventing the build from still doing all content bosses might just take a bit longer than they did previously. I tried doing some T16 mapping on a 5 link which was a larger damage hit than the patch and it honestly still felt fine for speed clearing T16 sextanted maps.

That's the softcore version though. If it was on hardcore the damage loss would probably be bigger. And there are still a few other things to look at, like the mana cost suddenly being 80ish instead of 40, but I suspect that it's a QoL thing and won't affect dps much.

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For example imagine a staunching life flask that is automatically used whenever you get a bleed/corrupted blood on you.

I believe GGG specified that the new flask currencies will only work on utility flasks

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Asamo 님이 작성:

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For example imagine a staunching life flask that is automatically used whenever you get a bleed/corrupted blood on you.

I believe GGG specified that the new flask currencies will only work on utility flasks

Yeah you're right, oh well that's boring. The life flask on the expedition page threw me off, but mousing over the 2 new currencies does indeed specifically mention utility flasks.

Probably going with life + mana + quartz + jade + quicksilver. So that leaves 3 utility flasks to play with, but won't know what to do with them until we see more enchantment effects.

Also not sure what to do with the whole curse thing. Not really worried about temp chains because of the general speed of the build, but ele weakness, vulnerability, enfeeble etc. are pretty annoying and was mostly a non-issue with a curse flask.

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Posid 님이 작성:

I really can't understate just how strong debuffing monster accuracy is. Dread banner is multiplicative with Avatar of the veil and both combined reduce monster accuracy by roughly 55% at gem level 20.

That's a damn shame, I hoped we'd at least get something out of the new gems...

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Posid 님이 작성:

Also not sure what to do with the whole curse thing. Not really worried about temp chains because of the general speed of the build, but ele weakness, vulnerability, enfeeble etc. are pretty annoying and was mostly a non-issue with a curse flask.

Enfeeble just lowers your damage, so it's like any other damage lowering mod - extra chaos res, hexproof, monster life, etc. Just don't combine too many together (I once had a no regen map with too many damage reduction rolls and found a metamorph I couldn't kill within all mana flask charges... sad).

Ele weakness I guess either overcap resists or run a bismuth flask to overcap them on those maps?

Vulnerability no idea, it's actually my biggest worry especially early on without access to crab big phys hit if it goes through can 1 shot you.

You can also put staunching on a different flask than life one to connect it to the auto-trigger orb.

Also what you said about increased evasion vs more reminds me stibnite flask got changed from 100% increased evasion to 20% more, is that better for us? I used to run Witchfire in the past but with it losing increased dot damage I think it's crap but what about normal stibnite?

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Viktranka 님이 작성:

Enfeeble just lowers your damage, so it's like any other damage lowering mod - extra chaos res, hexproof, monster life, etc. Just don't combine too many together (I once had a no regen map with too many damage reduction rolls and found a metamorph I couldn't kill within all mana flask charges... sad).

Ele weakness I guess either overcap resists or run a bismuth flask to overcap them on those maps?

Vulnerability no idea, it's actually my biggest worry especially early on without access to crab big phys hit if it goes through can 1 shot you.

With our damage decrease being somewhere between 25-45% I feel like single affixes that make mobs tankier is going to have a bigger effect, at least until you are decked out. when you got to a certain point you could mostly ignore additional life, chaos res, enfeeble etc. on maps. But you're going to feel it now and mobs living longer does tend to make things more rippy. I went on my raider from Ritual and removed void manipulation to simulate a bigger damage nerf than what we are getting here and it still plays really smooth at the very high end. low end is also pretty much fine for mapping, but it's the bossing that I'm somewhat worried about. We'll still do all content and I managed the feared with 2m DPS deathless just fine, but it was rough. relied heavily on regen from ED so I'll probably be going that route again and swapping ED gloves in for bosses.

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Viktranka 님이 작성:

You can also put staunching on a different flask than life one to connect it to the auto-trigger orb.

I Expect to still be using Seething divine life flask of staunching most likely. It's what I've always done so I guess I'll just keep on doing it and eventually get corrupted blood immunity on a jewel. it was mostly an example but still kind of sadge that we don't get these new buffs on life/mana flasks.

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Viktranka 님이 작성:

Also what you said about increased evasion vs more reminds me stibnite flask got changed from 100% increased evasion to 20% more, is that better for us? I used to run Witchfire in the past but with it losing increased dot damage I think it's crap but what about normal stibnite?

The math is fairly simple. The effectiveness of the old and new stibnite intersect at 400% increased evasion rating(from tree, global modifiers and dex). Anything more than 400% and the new stibnite is better, anything below 400% and the old stibnite was better. My builds have been hovering between 250-400% depending on setup so this seems like a slight nerf for a build like this that aims for evasion cap. The bigger nerf to Stibnite was the change to charges making it 40 out of 60 instead of 10 out of 30. But yeah I didn't like witchfire before, but now it's pretty much a wasted flask slot.

early league I can still see jade + stibnite being perfectly good choices. I prefer to sort out my evades without being reliant on flasks though, but it does cost elsewhere. I ran banner/grace/malevolence/crab last league with minimal investment, but with the increased mana costs I'm not sure it's viable, however skipping grace means you have to pick up a lot of crap if you don't want to rely on a jade flask which ultimately ends up dropping damage which I'm not sure I want to be dropping... So yeah I'm going to have to try things out, for early league it'll probably be ditching aspect of the crab because softcore.

Hmm, actually saw someone mention it in the scourge arrow thread and I thought that could be a good idea...

What about Iron Flask?

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new Utility Flask - Iron Flask: Grants additional Ward and restores Ward on use.

Since this build rarely gets hit, this could be an "oh shit" flask especially if there's one of these orbs that could make it trigger "when you take damage" or something. I don't know all the conditions these orbs can roll, I imagine we'll get it datamined when patch data is available.