Theorycrafting: Burning Bear Trap

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lukeiy a écrit :

and these

then stack % ele damage to the sky

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pneuma a écrit :

Level 20 Fire Trap: 812-1218 fire damage
Level 22 Fire Trap w/ Searing Touch: 1074–1610 fire damage

Level 20 Bear Trap w/ Blackgleam (50% conversion): 1668-2334 fire damage, 1668-2334 phys
Level 20 Bear Trap w/ Blackgleam and Added Fire: 2969-4154 fire damage, 1668-2334 phys

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About double the initial fire damage hit without added fire, nearly four times as much with added fire (level 20).

Not having 100% chance to ignite hurts the build significantly.
Sources of Ignite Chance:
+ Level 20 CtI: 44%
+ Level 20 Flammability: 14%
+ (Blaze Passive: 5%)
+ (Cloak of Flames: 10%)
+ (20 quality Increased Burning: 9%)
= only 82% chance to ignite, and the options in parentheses are a stretch, so 58% baseline.

The build really needs every bear trap to stick, otherwise it's throwing ~2 traps per mob pile and will end up waiting around for traps to recharge. Slotting more 4L Bear Traps would eat up most of your link-space or would require a 5/6L to function (which is a painful place to be in).

No AoE hurts it quite a bit. When you ignite a bunch of people with eleprolif, they end up taking the highest dps burn of all available burns, so the more eleprolif piles you can stack, the much higher your average damage will be.

Also not mentioned is that Searing Touch make Fire Trap absolutely amazing due to the +2 levels, passable offensive stats, and the massive 70% increased burn damage and can't be used with Blackgleam.

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Now the interesting parts. The damage is quite high, and the burns will be just about the highest damage burns in the game (just barely higher than 5stack level20 EA but loses to RemoteMine and/or ConcentratedEffect 5stack level20 EA) once they stick so it should have no problem melting down mobpiles. Getting double curse and running elemental weakness is very important for all burn builds due to the way fire resist counts twice (first the initial hit, then the dot), so getting that resist negative gives an exponential damage increase.

Since a Cloak would be the best body option, since you're getting lots of dex to satisfy Bear Trap's requirements, and since you won't have many mana problems (bear traps are expensive, but not thrown rapidly), Arctic Armour is very attractive. The synergy it has with Cloak of Flames is insane since it guarantees that both the -phys and the -fire of AA apply to all incoming physical damage.

Furthermore, since you're forced into a bow due to Blackgleam anyway, this build is in the peculiar position to use Darkscorn defensively. Take CI and another 25% of incoming physical damage is negated outright. Between this 25% flat reduction, the 25% conversion to fire and -phys/-fire of AA, you'll be amazingly tanky despite having a low ES body and no ES shield. You will need great ES helm, boots, and gloves, but that should be well within budget given that you're using 3 relatively inexpensive uniques with more or less fixed stats.

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Basic outline for the build. CI, lots of ES, will probably need some more mana stuff from the tree, Pyromaniac, Blaze. Avoid cast speed (doesn't help Bear Trap), avoid spell damage (doesn't help Bear Trap).

Expanded to 104 points. ZO is also 1 point away, so might be worth taking and running Vitality. Your mana is going to be stretched pretty thin though, even with 400 int and multiple mana/regen clusters. Clarity, Purity, Grace, and Discipline are probably all you can afford to run, and that would require some good +mana pieces.

It's probably worth slotting a Poison Arrow with Increased Duration just to give yourself something to do during Bear Trap downtime or against highly fire resistant enemies. You can slot it in a 3L with Arctic Armour for maximum link efficiency. :)

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More random thoughts in no particular order:
- Death's Harp gives 100% global crit multi for the really big crits if you do take some critical strike passives (but not spell crit!).
- Silverbranch is excellent for the +bow skills and mana-on-kill for early levels.
- Rainbowstride are pretty amazing for solving mana problems, Shavronne's pace are awesome at early levels.
- Your amulet and/or rings are going to need to provide nearly 100 dexterity and strength. Keep an eye out for good +dex stuff. Atziri's Foible might also be a good pickup for this build due to the mana bonuses and helping with getting dexterity/strength solved.

Final Verdict: Sounds fun as hell. I think this will be my next build.

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pneuma a écrit :

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Incompetent a écrit :

On the subject of having to use a bow, you would be able to use e.g. Burning Arrow or Exploding Arrow (depending on which bow you use) as a backup attack if you run out of traps. Not optimal, but should be decent with all the burning spec. Like all trap-based builds you also have the option of using Ancestral Bond.

You could, but you only really need a backup attack of a different element than the one you're using. Anything that's not fire resistant is going to eat a bag of dicks as soon as that trap hits the ground.