So Caustic Arrow... Scale the hit or scale the cloud??

Hmmmm probably a terrible idea, but if we're considering Herald of Agony, what would be pros/cons of doing an Oro's Flicker Strike build with the fire Volkuur gloves? I'm not sure how well the damage would scale but if nothing else you'd be able to spam poison stacks like nobody's business.

The base DoT dps at level 20 is 1715… it's pretty freaking busted IMO. I get that people want to scale the hit and play with poison since it's new toys but I'm definitely doing a DoT based one later in the league when the prices for poison/chaos items isn't redonkulous.

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Abdiel_Kavash a écrit :

I don't get why would you want Herald of Agony at all if you want to focus on the cloud snotpiles. The crawler is most likely going to be useless with no investment in minion modifiers, and the only direct bonuses the herald provides are chance to poison and poison damage. Neither of those affect the snotpiles at all.

Ziggy stated that HoA minion is as strong as "any other minion a summoner could weild without any supports". He specifically states this.

When looking at the video, you see him trying to single target the Tier 2 Map boss and the minion just strolls up and near one-shots it.

There is clearly a reason to have Herald of Agony up imo.

Poison does need some investment as the Pathfinder does not gain any Chance to Poison anymore. So you get 40% from the tree, 20% from the Herald and you'd need Lesser Poison, or some other source to get to 100%. I guess Dendrobate will be rather expensive this league.

Personally I'll try out a Lightbane Raiment to get 100% Chaos conversion, though it may be a too steep a payoff to be feasible.

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ladish a écrit :

If there's a way to scale the hit without gimping the dot then it might be nice for single target. With a skill like ca (at least how it is on live) you need to scale the shit out of the dot with +level and all reachable chaos/projectile/aoe/dot damage or you gimp yourself especially single target.

I will wait to see if the dot damage numbers stay as quoted in the patch notes.. I wasn't planning on ca but if those values don't change I am doing it.

You can. I'm kinda thinking Ascendant. Deadeye/Assassin or Trickster give very nice combo. With Death's Opus, you get +3 arrows for free, +4 with quiver enchant. Probably enough to skip the LMP damage nerf.

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Abdiel_Kavash a écrit :

I find that hard to take that at face value. Poisoning an insane number of enemies is quite easy, with almost no investment. If you can get that, and on top of that also 6L the skill and get all the usual minion bonuses, a build that actually focuses on the crawler would be incredibly broken.

To be fair, people were pretty skeptical about Elemental Hit's conversion mechanic because it "would be incredibly broken" and it lasted for the length of a league :P

I think the idea of making Max Virulence Agony Minion (no minion investment) equal to One Minion with Minion Investment is that the more you invest into minion damage, the less you'll have to invest in Virulence upkeep. If I'm right, then the developers have probably underestimated the ease with which one can keep up Virulence without investment.

If Agony Minion turns out too abusable, I'd guess the solution would be to lower or remove the flat added physical damage bonus per Virulence, and increase the "increased damage" per virulence to compensate. Due to diminishing proportional returns of stacking additive bonuses to one multiplier (increased damage), this should lessen the power of summoner-based Agony while theoretically allowing non-summoners to get one strong Minion as well.

Best Caustic Arrow builds will probably be the ones that find an effective way to scale both. The aforementioned Scion Ascendant Deadeye/Trickster would probably be super solid; get an extra arrow, two free pierces, huge accuracy boost, 15% chance for your Caustic Arrow to get 50% Phys-as-Chaos, Frenzy AND Power generation, and boosted recovery for being a DoT build. Gud schit.

Pure DoT builds miss out on the burst damage from the initial AoE explosions and any on-hit benefits such as poison application or stuns. Pure hit builds don't get the heavy added DPS from the caustic ground and lose a lot of damage that way. You want both, so finding builds/trees/gear that lets you capitalize on both seems the way to go. Whether Herald of Agony is the way to go for Caustic Arrow, I do not know - but Mirage Archer Buddy is always there to help fill out poison application frequency if Caustic Arrow is as slow at poisoning as it seems.

What I know is that CA looks to be coming back in a big way this league, one way or another. Making a great case for being league starter this time, especially if you luck your way into a Silverbranch.

Consider the following dumb build:

If HoA's creep really is as strong as people are speculating, what would be the viability of Abberath's Hooves + Volkuur's gloves? You (like usual) wouldn't care about Abberath's damage so you could just toss Poison Support and Culling Strike in there in order to get a source of culling and Virulence. Then, since you're not using mana (unless you want to maybe use Wither totems or something) you can just stack auras in addition to the high reserve cost of having a 6L Herald.