







2.0.0 footage





2.0.0 guide video



Current 2.0.0







This build is discontinued in 2.1 since it works better as a Ranger now. Head over to the Ranger forum to check it out there.















Prefix



This is a burn build.



You're still reading? Cool - because it's not a burn prolif build! Yes, it relies on massive upfront damage but rather than applying it to the weakest target and to proliferate it to the whole screen it actually works by carefully positioning your hit to create a burning cone of death behind the impact zone. Because we have one shot and only one projectile we use burn not as main damage source but as welcome support to our massive upfront damage. The goal is to kill with one hit. If targets survive, they can burn down and we don't have to waste mana on a second shot.



I don't claim ownership of this build, it has been done many times before and the earliest mention of this idea goes back at least seven months since I found this



Anyway credits go out to ADDTasty, JuergenPotzkoten and Alloy_Gentleman since they came first :) but yet again I didn't know that since my build evolved from a stupid trapper idea that I had into what you are about to read next. Enjoy...







Build Synergies



"Clever use of game mechanics"



In PoE more often then not power comes by combining things that seem weak on it's own.



tl;dr

Ice Shot with Chin Sol (100% more) and Point Blank (50% more) with Pyre (100% conversion of cold to fire) and AoE scaling with Hyrri's Bite and Carcass Jack, as well as crit and shocking and pierce gives you a massive cone of fire which deals ~1350% weapon damage to the the whole screen with just one shot fired. Point Blank takes care of reflect since you have up to 100% less damage when hits land offscreen.





The descrption of the gem



Fires an arrow that converts some physical damage to cold on its target and converts all physical damage to cold in a cone behind that target. Creates a patch of ground ice under the target.



This means two things: First, the initial target hit and all targets in the cone receive damage separately (which means scaling area damage would not affect the target where the arrow lands) and second: there's no physical damage left in the cone whatsoever.



What it also implies is that the cone damage is purely based off physical damage but that is, luckily, not true! I had to search for quite some time but finally found this



This means our Added Fire, Hatred, Heralds, added elemental damage on gear, everything will scale our AoE. Pretty cool.



Now if I built an Ice Shot character in Hardcore I would scale phys, cold and freeze for extra crowd control. But for Softcore I want raw damage, which is why I decided to (again) use



1. Fire damage can ignite, dealing 20% of hit damage over 4 seconds, this means your damage increases from 100% to 180%

2. Pyre gives you up to 35% increased burning damage, raising the total damage to ~200%

3. You can still use lightning damage to shock and don't have to worry about it shattering corpses

4. Fire and Cold are combined into fire damage, making Added Fire, Herald of Ash and Hatred (and potentially Taste of Hate) a really potent fuel for your burn

5. It promotes you to go away from prolif ;) because you won't have corpses around to prolif off of



Next, the cone of Ice Shot is very large and with items like



The only "multiple projectile" option that's beneficial is pierce, especially since mobs that are standing right behind each other will take insane amounts of damage due to overlapping cones, see this beautiful illustration by reddit user /u/zeratos:







To make things more ridiculous we're going melee and use both the keystone



We previously said that burning with Pyre has a damage effectiveness of 200% so we can safely assume that if we hit a mob in the face with a huge cone of AoE and trigger an ignite, we will inflict 600% of our weapon damage to basically the whole screen. Pretty cool, huh? Actually it's hot, since we use Pyre, hue hue ....



Point Blank deals double purpose in this build: it greatly enhances the damage when we shoot mobs in the face but it also saves us from offscreen reflect, which is a common threat to every Ice Shot character. As you see from the following image taken from the wiki (click to enlarge):







We're suffering a 60% less damage penalty when the arrow travelled to the edge of the screen. That being said, I was still able to kill myself to a sneaky reflect rare that was just right to enter the top of the screen (where the damage penalty should be around 40% less) but that was mainly due to him being close to a shrine with twenty other mobs...



Last but one mechanical note to this build is the way we ignite. Since we're starved on links (as you'll see later) we won't use chance to ignite but go crit instead. This is a bit of a struggle actually since Chin Sol has only a 5% base crit chance and even with Assassin's Mark and 4 Power Charges and all the crit chance we can get from the tree we will never ever get over 50% chance to crit (I'm sitting at 42% now at level 70).



This is the sacrifice you make when going budget basically. If I could afford it, I would rock a gg four-twenty-no-scope-kappa-keepo 500 DPS



Just to give you a picture, the Chin Sol I have now deals 85-255 phys and 25-50 fire, if I average that it's a combined average damage of 208, so 415 with the 100% more property. With the 1.43 attacks per second this nets me with 593 DPS with Chin Sol. Screw the low crit chance^^



If you crit however, we have a 96% increased multiplier from the tree, netting us wit 295% crit multi without any items or Assasin's Mark. So we can again multipy our 600% weapon damage by 3 and end up with 1800% weapon damage on crit.



Finally, since we're also shocking targets, they will receive 50% extra damage. Which brings our total output to crazy 2700% weapon damage (this whole block needs critization by the way - it's very likely I got the calculations wrong, please let me know where I made mistakes in my train of thought and I will correct them, thanks







Passives



The passives are that of a standard physical bower I'd say (is bower even a word?). I started shadow because I initially wanted to make a burn prolif trapper (booooring) and shadow has better access to the trap nodes. But it turns out that it is also great for leveling this character because you have early access to fantastic notables like Coordination, Sniper, Blood and Soul Siphon, Trickery as well as Blood and Mind Drinker. Early damage and life/mana sustain are not a problem this way. I leveled with Ice Shot all the way and it was always fun and cool to see how it became stronger and stronger over time.



Leveling Process











32 Points (Normal) - Exit through phys damage and get life and mana early. Go through Sniper and Quickness to Mind Drinker to forever solve mana problems, then leave the Shadow area through Blood Drinker and get Acro and Phase Acro for nice early defenses. 51 Points (Cruel) - Pick up Ondars, get some Strength to level up skill gems, then get Quickstep, Finesse and Ballistic Mastery in the Ranger area. 68 Points (Merciless) - Get the projectile nodes in the Duelist area, as well as Art of the Gladiator and the life, then start picking up damage and crit: King of the Hill, the Shadow Power Charge. Get Coldhearted Calculation if you need int for spells - the additional mana regeneration will be needed when going from a 4-link to a 5-link.



Late Game















79 Points - (Level 62) - Get more damage by picking up Heavy Draw and Piercing Shots. Get Point Blank with level 62 when you can equip Chin Sol. 89 Points - (Level 72) - Moar Crit!!!!! 101 Points (Level 84) - Now focus on more survivability, because maps are hard - pick up the remaining life clusters in the area: Herbalism, Thick Skin and Written in Blood. 107 Points (Level 90) - Get moar attack speed, accuracy and even moar crit :D



Final Tree

Level 90, 107 points spent





Here's a graphical representation of how the leveling process looks like:













Bandit Choices



Normal: Help Oak for the 40 HP

Cruel: Help Oak for 18% increased physical damage

Merc: Help Alira for one additional Power Charge



Gems



Here is where things get tricky. There are too many good gems we can use but we only have four (or if you're rich 5) support slots. Fact is, we're profiting the most off physical damage. Scaling that is our best way. Here are the candidates that I think fit best:



Physical Projetile Attack Damage

Weapon Elemental Damage

Increased Critical Strikes

Increased Critical Damage

Increased Area of Effect

Concentrated Effect

Added Fire Damage



So we actually need an 8-link to get everything we want. Make it a 9-link for Life Leech. Or a 10-link for Faster Attacks for convenience. Well, we won't get it. So we have to cut short.



AOE Main skill progression setup



Preferred link colors: GGRBB(R)



My endgame setup is Ice Shot + Physical Projectile Attack Damage + Weapon Elemental Damage + Increased Critical Strikes + Increased Area of Effect.



Not only are those colors easy to roll on a Carcass Jack (Dex/Int base), they also offer easy swapping of WED to Life Leech in reflect maps and Inc AoE to Crit Multi for boss fights.



Don't be fooled or tempted to swap in Conc Effect for bosses! You will only increase the damage of the cone and NOT the initial hit. Usually you will hit the boss with your arrow and not with the cone, except the boss is kind enough to spawn a minion right in front of himself (so if you're fighting Na'em it may actually be good).



I also calculated in



For leveling you can go like this:



A1N-A2N Weaver

Use Ice Shot and link it with Weapon Elemental Damage or Added Fire or Added Cold as soon as you have 2 mana flasks.



A2N Weaver until 4L

Ice Shot + LMP + Added Fire/Weapon Elemental Damage (depends on your mana sustain)



4L Setup with Death's Harp (Level 32)

Ice Shot + Physical Projectile Attack Damage + Weapon Elemental Damage + Mana Leech

(Yes, Mana Leech, the mana cost is crazy until you can use curse on hit Assassin's Mark)



4L with Curse on Hit+Assassin's Mark running

Ice Shot + Physical Projectile Attack Damage + Weapon Elemental Damage + Increased Critical Strikes



Preferred link colors: GGRBB(R)My endgame setup is Ice Shot + Physical Projectile Attack Damage + Weapon Elemental Damage + Increased Critical Strikes + Increased Area of Effect.Not only are those colors easy to roll on a Carcass Jack (Dex/Int base), they also offer easy swapping of WED to Life Leech in reflect maps and Inc AoE to Crit Multi for boss fights.Don't be fooled or tempted to swap in Conc Effect for bosses! You will only increase the damage of the cone and NOT the initial hit. Usually you will hit the boss with your arrow and not with the cone, except the boss is kind enough to spawn a minion right in front of himself (so if you're fighting Na'em it may actually be good).I also calculated in this spreadsheet that Weapon Elemental Damage is 50% more damage over Added Fire. This means if you have a 6-link you can use Added Fire in your sixth or use Life Leech - up to you.For leveling you can go like this:Use Ice Shot and link it with Weapon Elemental Damage or Added Fire or Added Cold as soon as you have 2 mana flasks.Ice Shot + LMP + Added Fire/Weapon Elemental Damage (depends on your mana sustain)Ice Shot + Physical Projectile Attack Damage + Weapon Elemental Damage + Mana Leech(Yes, Mana Leech, the mana cost is crazy until you can use curse on hit Assassin's Mark)Ice Shot + Physical Projectile Attack Damage + Weapon Elemental Damage + Increased Critical Strikes



Single Target setup



In general see "AOE Main skill progression setup" above. The beautiful thing about this build is that we're using one projectile to kill them all. For really, really tough bosses you can hot swap Increaed Area of Effect for Increased Critical Damage.



For reflect however or if we really don't want to get close: GGGB(RG)



Vaal Burning Arrow + Trap + Pierce + Increased Critical Strikes (+ Weapon Elemental Damage + Physical Projectile Attack Damage)



This is unreflectable death. It can one shot most lower tier map bosses and takes reliably care of reflect packs. Trap is another "more" multiplier, you can imagine how well that scales with Chin Sol's 100% more damage and Point Blank's 50% more damage at close range ... which is usually true for a monster that steps on the trap and gets hit by its arrow.







Auras and Buffs



Preferred link colors: GRRB



That'll be Hatred + Herald of Ash + Reduced Mana + Herald of Thunder.



Hatred and Herald of Ash scale our damage as a percentage of our physical damage and are thus better than anything else. Herald of Thunder grants us some lightning damage which enable us to reliably shock targets, further increasing our damage.



Since we're not dealing cold damage, Herald of Ice is not recommended. The added damage is nice but we can never shatter a mob and trigger the secondary effect (the explosion) which is why I think Herald of Thunder is way superior in this build.



Another option that I have tested briefly is to use Herald of Thunder for auto-cursing. It increases the clearspeed a little bit since we have to run close to mobs anyway and we wouldn't have to use Split Arrow so often but it also means it's harder for us to get that first crit+shock+kill. After playing auto-curse for a bit I went back to Split Arrow because SA is also a good alternative attack if you encounter reflect packs and are out of traps.







Curse setup



Preferred link colors: GGBB or BBBR



Split Arrow + Pierce + Curse on Hit + Assassin's Mark or

Herald of Thunder + Curse on Hit + Assassin's Mark + Reduced Mana or

Rain of Arrows + Blind + Curse on Hit + Assassin's Mark



I'm using the Split Arrow option atm and I feel comfortable with it. I must say it's very convenient and easy to get Power Charges and Crits rolling with Split arrow. The damage is also considerably high and it's a good fallback attack when encountering elemental reflect.



Another option which also frees up a gem slot is using Rain of Arrows for Curse on Hit. It removes the necessity to use Pierce but it comes with the drawback of the delay between shoot and hit. More times than not the RoA salvo lands when my Ice Shot has already obliterated the pack. The attack animation for RoA is also slower than Split Arrow so it locks me in place more which caused a death or twice.







Cast when damage taken setup



I actually prepare myself for Enduring Cry being a Warcry and not working with Cwdt so I cast Enduring Cry myself. I'm not running Immortal Call at all since the cast time is just too slow. It's a major drawback of this build and shield charger/rhoas are a frequent doom if I can't get the obliterating shot out in time...







Missing Links (additional gems)



There's actually a lot of room for additional gems when not using a trigger gem setup:

Chest: main attack 5L or 6L

Bow: Vaal Burning Arrow 4L or more

Head: Aura+Buffs 4L

Gloves: Curse on Hit Setup 4L

Boots: empty



We need at least 2 empty slots for:

Enduring Cry

Blink Arrow



Which leaves room for Vaal Haste + Increased Duration (which can also be linked to Blink Arrow for a longer distraction).











Quality Gems



If you are starting fresh then you won't have the option to use quality gems. If you have some spare currency or if you find a gemcutters box with quality, here's a list of gems for this build where quality is really good, medium good or not worth it. The order is from most to least important in my opinion:



Very usefull

Curse on Hit

10% increased effect of cureses at q20, this improves additional crit chance, crit multi, life and mana gain as well as power charge chance of Assasin's Mark so this is a pretty huge buff!



Increased Area of Effect

10% inc AoE at q20, that's 43% at 20/20 versus 33% at 20/0 - huge improvement



Physical Projectile Attack Damage

10% increased physical damage at q20, this is on par with a notable



Weapon Elemental Damage

10% increased elemental damage at q20, this is on par with a notable



Increased Critical Strikes

20% increased critical strike chance at q20, this is on par with a notable



Assassin's Mark

10% increased chance to get a power charge at q20, that's 39% at 20/20 versus 29% at 20/0 - huge boost!



Increased Critical Damage

10% increased critical strike multiplier at q20, that's 79% at 20/20 versus 69% at 20/0, pretty good. If we can get crit multi, we take it!



Immortal Call

0.2s increased duration per endurance charge (0.01 per 1% quality) (8q0 = 0.59s - this is 2,9s with 0q opposed to 3,9s with 20q using 3 charges and a lvl20 increased duration) - this is a massive qol improvment and survivability boost



Life Leech

20% increased life leech rate at q20, this boosts survivability substantially since life is back faster and the next leech can apply earlier.



Rain of Arrows

10% increased attack speed at q20, helps with getting the curse down earlier.



Faster Attacks

10% increased attack speed at q20, same here: helps with getting the curse down earlier.



Usefull but not mindblowing

Herald of Ash

15% increased fire damage at q20, but only of the added fire that comes from Herald of Ash



Herald of Thunder

15% increased lightning damage at q20, but only of the added lightning that comes from Herald of Thunder



Pierce

15% additional chance of projectiles piercing at q20, this is usefull if we only have a level 6 pierce gem but since we already have 40% chance from the tree and 59% from the gem alone this is hardly necessary.



Blink Arrow

30% increased arrow speed at q20, this is indeed helpful to get from point A to B quicker so it helps getting out of sketchy situations.



Vaal Burning Arrow

60% increased burn duration at q20, this creates a 6 second burn which is quite potent but in all honesty - in that time we can also fire again and just kill them with a second shot...



Split Arrow

10% increased attack speed at q20, this is nothing fancy but helps a bit since the wind-up animation runs faster and we safe some time while cursing.



Enduring Cry

10% increased area radius (0.5 per 1% quality)



Increased Duration

10% increased duration (0.5 per 1% quality) (20q0 = 64% - this is 3.9s with 0q opposed to 4.1s with 20q using 3 charges and a lvl8q20 immortal call)







Not usefull at all

Ice Shot (increased chilled ground duration) - not really something we need since we one shot everything

Trap (increased trap laying speed) - we're not relying on the traps so screw it

Hatred - only increases the radius

Reduced Mana - quality does not affect auras and buff reservation costs

Cast when damage taken - increases the damage of supported skills, doesn't gain us anything

Vaal Haste - only increases the radius

10% increased effect of cureses at q20, this improves additional crit chance, crit multi, life and mana gain as well as power charge chance of Assasin's Mark so this is a pretty huge buff!10% inc AoE at q20, that's 43% at 20/20 versus 33% at 20/0 - huge improvement10% increased physical damage at q20, this is on par with a notable10% increased elemental damage at q20, this is on par with a notable20% increased critical strike chance at q20, this is on par with a notable10% increased chance to get a power charge at q20, that's 39% at 20/20 versus 29% at 20/0 - huge boost!10% increased critical strike multiplier at q20, that's 79% at 20/20 versus 69% at 20/0, pretty good. If we can get crit multi, we take it!0.2s increased duration per endurance charge (0.01 per 1% quality) (8q0 = 0.59s - this is 2,9s with 0q opposed to 3,9s with 20q using 3 charges and a lvl20 increased duration) - this is a massive qol improvment and survivability boost20% increased life leech rate at q20, this boosts survivability substantially since life is back faster and the next leech can apply earlier.10% increased attack speed at q20, helps with getting the curse down earlier.10% increased attack speed at q20, same here: helps with getting the curse down earlier.









Quest Rewards - Gem picking



Is this a good build to start it fresh with a new legue? No. The shadow starting gem rewards are awful for this build. This might change with the next patch, but until we know more, here's my recommendation of what to pick when. If you want to start Ranger you will have an easier time with the gems, you will have 8% increased attack speed and a little more accuracy but you will suffer from 53% reduced physical damage versus the Shadow variant. You gain 30% increased projectile damage in exchange but your overall impact damage will be lower.







Quest Reward Gems



Norm A1 Hillock - Fire Trap (for leveling)

Norm A1 Hailrake - Lightning Tendrils (for leveling)

Norm A1 Breaking Eggs - any

Norm A1 Brutus - any

Norm A1 Merveil - Increased Critical Damage

Norm A2 Fidelitas - Assassin's Mark

Norm A2 Weaver - Lesser Multiple Projectiles

Norm A3 Tolman - Herald of Thunder

Norm A3 General - any

Norm A3 Library - Curse on Hit

Cruel A1 Hillock - any

Cruel A1 Hailrake - Pierce

Cruel A1 Brutus - any

Cruel A1 Merveil - Physical Projectile Attack Damage

Cruel A2 Weaver - Increased Critical Strikes

Cruel A3 Tolman - any

Cruel A3 General - Reduced Mana

Cruel A3 Library - any

Merc A1 Hailrake - Added Fire

Merc A1 Brutus - any

Merc A1 Merveil - Faster Attacks

Merc A3 Library - Cast when damage Taken



Gems to look for in gemcutters boxes, to buy from poe.trade, trade chat or your masters:



[spoiler="Gems to purchase"]

also coming soon, but basically all that you read above for the setup but that aren't available as quest rewards

[/spoiler]



[hr]



Gear



coming soon, but Chin Sol, Pyre, Hyrri's Bite is mandatory, the rest can be good, rare stuff with a lot of evasion, life, resists, flat phys and crit chance/multi.



A word on Hyrri's Bite versus Drillneck: We don't have much pierce chance except the 40% from the tree and the 10% implicit on the Drillneck if you don't corrupt it. So unless you're rocking a 6-link and also using the Pierce gem, Drillneck won't be super powerful. Yes, it is a DPS increase (about 1k tooltip) but it's not mandatory. With Drillneck you will average out about 150.000 damage on a crit (the burn included). With Hyrri's Bite it will still be over 100.000 (still have to calculate the exact numbers, I will update this section when I have them) but with the benefit of having a larger Area of Effect. By just running around in mid 70 maps swapping both Quivers for comparison reasons I didn't notice a huge difference!



[hr]



Flasks



This is a separate section from gear since flasks are incredibly important and need to have their own spot in this guide. Without the correct flasks this build is only half as good. The passive skill point choices make flasks even more powerfull so make constant use of them.



The flasks I'm using for leveling (meaning until I can equip my endgame flasks) are:



a) any Life Flask of Heat: to dispell freeze

b) any Life Flask of Staunching: to remove bleed

c) any Quicksilver of Warding: to dispell and be immune to curses

d) any Jade of Reflexes: to have evasion rating up as high as possible

e) any Bubbling Life Flask of Grounding: as instant heal and to dispell shocks



In the endgame setup I try to have 20% quality of the following:



a) Surgeons Ruby Flask of Heat: reflect reduction, dispells freeze

b) Surgeons Hallowed Life Flask of Staunching: high, long duration heal, removes bleed

c) Surgeons Ruby Flask of Warding: reflect reduction, situational curse removal

d) Atziri's Promise: moar damage :D

e) Bubbling Hallowed Life Flask of Grounding: as instant heal and to dispell shocks



I'm not using Divine or Eternal life flasks in this setup because my HP pool is fairly low (3,5k) and the Hallowed Flasks fill up quick enough to use them constantly.



[hr]



Reflect





You die. No matter what.





[hr]



Map Mods



coming soon...



[hr]



Map Bosses



coming soon...



[hr]



Video URLs



Initial Build Video

Gorge Speed Run Attempt

End of Torment League Highlights



[hr]



The End?



If you read this far: congratulations! This was a lot of ground to cover. It was certainly as fun to put this guide together as it was playing it. I will continue to work on this guide whenever new patches hit that will affect the build in any way.



If you want to see similar budget builds and PoE content, please check out my youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/r4wb1rdGaming/videos



If you want to see me playing live, head over to http://www.twitch.tv/r4wb1rd and hit the follow button to get notify when I'm going live. I'm a casual player, so don't expect me playing 8h a day, although I wish to do so ;)



Stay safe, exiles!

r4wb1rd



[hr]



Frequently Asked Questions



[spoiler="Is this build HC viable"]

No, just no. This is a fun spec and it's not by any means meant to be played in HC. The risk of dying to reflect is simply to great. Having reflect protection would probably require a 6L with quality Life Leech + Vaal Pact + quality Purity of Fire + Inner Force + max fire res from tree + 100% Ruby uptime and it would probably still be too dangerous...

[/spoiler]



[spoiler="Can you show your gear?"]

Sure, it's nothing special, some might even say "No t1 rolls, vendor trash" but this gear carried me all the way. I got super, super lucky finding a Drillneck in a Labyrinth map but this build totally works fine with Hyrri's Bite:



[/spoiler] Welcome Wraeclast Wanderers, it's r4wb1rd again...Current 2.0.0 Skill Tree This build is discontinued in 2.1 since it works better as a Ranger now. Head over to the Ranger forum to check it out there.This is a burn build.You're still reading? Cool - because it's not a burn prolif build! Yes, it relies on massive upfront damage but rather than applying it to the weakest target and to proliferate it to the whole screen it actually works by carefully positioning your hit to create a burning cone of death behind the impact zone. Because we have one shot and only one projectile we use burn not as main damage source but as welcome support to our massive upfront damage. The goal is to kill with one hit. If targets survive, they can burn down and we don't have to waste mana on a second shot.I don't claim ownership of this build, it has been done many times before and the earliest mention of this idea goes back at least seven months since I found this thread but I'm sure it was done even earlier. There's also a guide here but it never got any real attention because noone thought this is close to useful. Bigger attention got ADDTasty for Malibu's Infernal Ice Shot which specced into Chin Sol rather late and is to my best knowledge a Blood Magic + Resolute Technique + Avatar of Fire approach and skill tree wise quite different from mine, and also skillwise it's a huge difference since he uses LMP in his spec.Anyway credits go out to ADDTasty, JuergenPotzkoten and Alloy_Gentleman since they came first :) but yet again I didn't know that since my build evolved from a stupid trapper idea that I had into what you are about to read next. Enjoy..."Clever use of game mechanics"In PoE more often then not power comes by combining things that seem weak on it's own.The descrption of the gem Ice Shot readsFires an arrow that converts some physical damage to cold on its target and converts all physical damage to cold in a cone behind that target. Creates a patch of ground ice under the target.This means two things: First, the initial target hit and all targets in the cone receive damage separately (which means scaling area damage would not affect the target where the arrow lands) and second: there's no physical damage left in the cone whatsoever.What it also implies is that the cone damage is purely based off physical damage but that is, luckily, not true! I had to search for quite some time but finally found this post by Mark_GGG, stating that the cone damage is calculated off the total weapon damage, just that 100% of physical damage from your weapon damage is converted to cold.This means our Added Fire, Hatred, Heralds, added elemental damage on gear, everything will scale our AoE. Pretty cool.Now if I built an Ice Shot character in Hardcore I would scale phys, cold and freeze for extra crowd control. But for Softcore I want raw damage, which is why I decided to (again) use Pyre to convert all cold damage into fire damage. Pyre has several advantages over The Three Dragons or using Ice Shot with cold damage:1. Fire damage can ignite, dealing 20% of hit damage over 4 seconds, this means your damage increases from 100% to 180%2. Pyre gives you up to 35% increased burning damage, raising the total damage to ~200%3. You can still use lightning damage to shock and don't have to worry about it shattering corpses4. Fire and Cold are combined into fire damage, making Added Fire, Herald of Ash and Hatred (and potentially Taste of Hate) a really potent fuel for your burn5. It promotes you to go away from prolif ;) because you won't have corpses around to prolif off ofNext, the cone of Ice Shot is very large and with items like Hyrri's Bite and Carcass Jack , as well as a quality Increased Area of Effect support gem, you can hit an entire screen with just one, single arrow. This means we don't have to use Lesser or Greater Multiple Projectiles or Chain to increase our clearspeed. LMP, GMP and or chain are commonly used in projectile based builds and they are great by design but also lower the damage of a single projectile. Not using it means a more potent initial hit and thus a stronger burn.The only "multiple projectile" option that's beneficial is pierce, especially since mobs that are standing right behind each other will take insane amounts of damage due to overlapping cones, see this beautiful illustration by reddit user /u/zeratos:To make things more ridiculous we're going melee and use both the keystone Point Blank and the unique bow Chin Sol which in combination multiplies the damage of our Ice Shot by three if we're hitting a mob in melee range (100% weapon damage * 100% from chin sol * 50% Point blank = 1 * 2 * 1.5 = 3).We previously said that burning with Pyre has a damage effectiveness of 200% so we can safely assume that if we hit a mob in the face with a huge cone of AoE and trigger an ignite, we will inflict 600% of our weapon damage to basically the whole screen. Pretty cool, huh? Actually it's hot, since we use Pyre, hue hue ....Point Blank deals double purpose in this build: it greatly enhances the damage when we shoot mobs in the face but it also saves us from offscreen reflect, which is a common threat to every Ice Shot character. As you see from the following image taken from the wiki (click to enlarge):We're suffering a 60% less damage penalty when the arrow travelled to the edge of the screen. That being said, I was still able to kill myself to a sneaky reflect rare that was just right to enter the top of the screen (where the damage penalty should be around 40% less) but that was mainly due to him being close to a shrine with twenty other mobs...Last but one mechanical note to this build is the way we ignite. Since we're starved on links (as you'll see later) we won't use chance to ignite but go crit instead. This is a bit of a struggle actually since Chin Sol has only a 5% base crit chance and even with Assassin's Mark and 4 Power Charges and all the crit chance we can get from the tree we will never ever get over 50% chance to crit (I'm sitting at 42% now at level 70).This is the sacrifice you make when going budget basically. If I could afford it, I would rock a gg four-twenty-no-scope-kappa-keepo 500 DPS Harbinger Bow with 9.4% chance to crit. But unfortunately I don't have the Mirror or the 200 exalted orbs to buy that and rather fall back to Chin Sol which cost me 1 single Chaos Orb to acquire ;)Just to give you a picture, the Chin Sol I have now deals 85-255 phys and 25-50 fire, if I average that it's a combined average damage of 208, so 415 with the 100% more property. With the 1.43 attacks per second this nets me with 593 DPS with Chin Sol. Screw the low crit chance^^If you crit however, we have a 96% increased multiplier from the tree, netting us wit 295% crit multi without any items or Assasin's Mark. So we can again multipy our 600% weapon damage by 3 and end up with 1800% weapon damage on crit.Finally, since we're also shocking targets, they will receive 50% extra damage. Which brings our total output to crazy 2700% weapon damage (this whole block needs critization by the way - it's very likely I got the calculations wrong, please let me know where I made mistakes in my train of thought and I will correct them, thanks Almornik for the 1st correction).The passives are that of a standard physical bower I'd say (is bower even a word?). I started shadow because I initially wanted to make a burn prolif trapper (booooring) and shadow has better access to the trap nodes. But it turns out that it is also great for leveling this character because you have early access to fantastic notables like Coordination, Sniper, Blood and Soul Siphon, Trickery as well as Blood and Mind Drinker. Early damage and life/mana sustain are not a problem this way. I leveled with Ice Shot all the way and it was always fun and cool to see how it became stronger and stronger over time.Here's a graphical representation of how the leveling process looks like:Normal: Help Oak for the 40 HPCruel: Help Oak for 18% increased physical damageMerc: Help Alira for one additional Power ChargeHere is where things get tricky. There are too many good gems we can use but we only have four (or if you're rich 5) support slots. Fact is, we're profiting the most off physical damage. Scaling that is our best way. Here are the candidates that I think fit best:So we actually need an 8-link to get everything we want. Make it a 9-link for Life Leech. Or a 10-link for Faster Attacks for convenience. Well, we won't get it. So we have to cut short.If you are starting fresh then you won't have the option to use quality gems. If you have some spare currency or if you find a gemcutters box with quality, here's a list of gems for this build where quality is really good, medium good or not worth it. The order is from most to least important in my opinion:Is this a good build to start it fresh with a new legue? No. The shadow starting gem rewards are awful for this build. This might change with the next patch, but until we know more, here's my recommendation of what to pick when. If you want to start Ranger you will have an easier time with the gems, you will have 8% increased attack speed and a little more accuracy but you will suffer from 53% reduced physical damage versus the Shadow variant. You gain 30% increased projectile damage in exchange but your overall impact damage will be lower. ### r4wb1rd ###

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Babel PoE: https://github.com/rowolff/babel-poe/releases Last edited by r4wb1rd on Jan 2, 2016, 10:49:04 AM