Ranged Warfare: Leaving my comfort zone

[Son of Donald]

[This post has been edited do to accidentally posting before it was completed]

 

Most of the time when I play an Rpg I just try to get a balance of Attack and Defense. This normally means I play as rogues, barbarians, fighters, and any other close range fighter.

As of late though I’ve felt yearning to do something different, so I’m going to do a ranged build.
 

Ranger, of course, is my first choice. And I would like to multiclass. But if there is any other ideas I want to hear them.

 

Edited January 1, 2023 by Son of Donald
Accidentally posted before finishing.

[Not So Clever Hound]

7 hours ago, Son of Donald said:

Most of the time when I play an Rpg I just try to get a balance of Attack and Defense. This normally means I play as rogues, barbarians, fighters, and any other close range fighter.

As of late though I’ve felt yearning to do something something different, 

Hey, in case you didn't see, the buggy forum might have eaten most of your post buddy  

[Son of Donald]

15 hours ago, Not So Clever Hound said:

Hey, in case you didn't see, the buggy forum might have eaten most of your post buddy  

Thank you, it’s fixed now.

[Boeroer]

Just a few experiences:

Ghost Heart/Ascendant can be very good - also bc. of the highest accuracy a class combo can get on its own. It is very good with Frostseeker for example. Builds focus very quickly and procs the AoE of Frostseeker all the time bc. of high ACC and Driving Flight. The AoE also generates focus. No fuss with the Animal Companion but can summon it behind enemies and then use it with stuff like Ect. Echo for example.

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Arcane Archer/Troubadour is also very good, especially an Arcane Archer with high Arcana using Spearcaster (unique arbalest). Sure-Handed Ila applies to reloading weapons such as Arbalests twice (so 2* -20% reloading time) which combined with Gunner and some reloading gear (like Acina's Tricorn and Sharpshooter's Garb + penelty-reducing pet such as Abraham) leads to awesome shooting speed with very high accuracy. You can actually use the arbalest modal to chain-prone even the tough singular enemies which takes them basically out of the fight. On top of that you have lots of useful invocations, Aefyllath adds damage to your shots and the Imbued Shots Pull of Eora and Binding Web are very useful with Driving Flight, delivering double CC fields with high speed and a ton of accuracy.

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Arcane Archer/Paladin - a very versatile character with high accuracy (epecially with Accurate Wounding Shot and Flames of Devotion in combo with the Ring of Focused Flame). Flames of Devotion counts as elemental attack so it doesn'r get the -5 ACC an Arcane Archer gets with "normal", non-elemental and non-imbued shots. Can heal, support, deal damage, do great CC, is sturdier than the usual ranged char. Can heal and revive his animal companion. Spearcaster is good, but any reloading weapon is good.

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Troubadour/Streetfighter with the Red Hand is a devastating shooter once you pick up the upgrades Whisp summons. With them you can distract yourself which stacks Sure-Handed Ila (2* -20% reloading) + Aefyllath (+15% burning lash) + Heating up (-50% reloading, extra Sneak Attack dmg). Also the summons help with crowd control of course. They last long enough that you can use another invocation in between most of times. With the Red Hand you can already shoot twice before reloading - and with the combined reloading bonuses the reloading action is incredibly short. As close as one can get to a machine gun imo. Great char for hunting enemy casters for example. No ranger here of course.

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Single Class Helwalker or Nalpasca with dual mortars from Serafen (Fire in the Hole, Hand Mortar). It's great early on bc. of Stunning Shots/Surge but literally explodes once you get Resonant Touch and Whispers of the Wind. Makes most late game encounters with lots of enemies trivial. Also nice with Watershaper's Focus (+Blast) instead of mortars.

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If you have a Chanter in the party who wants to use the Invocation "Many Lives Pass By" and also uses the skeleton summons a lot and/or if you have a party with lots of summons use in general:

Single Class Kind Wayfarer with dual pistols (Eccea's Arcane Blaster + Scordeo's Trophy). Ring of Focused Flame, all the shooting gear, Two Weapon Style and so on. Fast shooting in general with good accuracy. Take all the exhortations and upgrades (in a manner so that there is no overlap with the inspirations),  Shared Flames, Lay on Hands... it will be a nice character for roleplaying purposes and will deliver nice healing, support and single target damage - and truly unlocks its great potential once you pick "Devine Retribution": it will give you +2 Zeal every time an ally goes down - and even summons count. So every time a summon in your party gets killes you get +2 Zeal. If you have an endless supply of summons (see Chanter or Monk) this will turn your Paladin from a limited-resource class into a class with refreshing (overflowing) resources. You will drown on Zeal which you can spend to spam FoD (+Whit Flames), constantly healing your party while damaging foes, cast all the exortations in seconds (they are instacasts and expensive - doesn't matter if your Zeal comes back all the time), revive your party's Animal Companions endlessly without drawback, put Brand Enemy on every enemy in seconds and whatnot. It's very useful in the later game but of course it's real trick only comes online very late. I still found it very enjoyable because it doesn't suck before and it was its own fun to work towards that goal to unlock Devine Retribution. 

 

 

   

[noto]

On 1/2/2023 at 2:58 PM, Boeroer said:

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Arcane Archer/Paladin - a very versatile character with high accuracy (epecially with Accurate Wounding Shot and Flames of Devotion in combo with the Ring of Focused Flame). Flames of Devotion counts as elemental attack so it doesn'r get the -5 ACC an Arcane Archer gets with "normal", non-elemental and non-imbued shots. Can heal, support, deal damage, do great CC, is sturdier than the usual ranged char. Can heal and revive his animal companion. Spearcaster is good, but any reloading weapon is good.

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Hey Boeroer,

Love all the work you have done on the forums regarding the POE 1 and POE 2 content. I was finally able to stick with one build and beat POE 1 when I came across your Barbarian "The Cauterizer" Build.

I have been searching for so long (the search options on this forum are not the best) and I still cannot find the post/thread that people keep referring to which is the "Arcane Archer/Paladin Build" by Boeroer!

all my advanced search results (even when I include you as the author) brings me to posts made by you referring to your experience with the build.

I was wondering if you by any chance could provide me to the direct link to the build so I can follow along on my first POE 2 play-through. If its anything like your "The Cauterizer" build I know there will be so much information I will never feet lost.

Right now I'm just seeing a bunch of generic responses that seem more geared to people that have already beat the game, have mods, have all the blessings, and/or just way more in-game knowledge then myself.

 

P.S. I installed the Community Patch with all the options that does include the buffs for the Arcane Archer, so if that is a requirement for the build I got that covered!

[Boeroer]

Hi,

unfortunately I can't remember the exact post in which I talked about Arcane Archer/Paladin for the first time, but here I have two posts hat outline the build well enough I think:

 

 

Since then I also played an Arcane Archer/Troubadour with Spearcaster and found that even better that the Paladin variant, especially if you use multiple reloading weapons in the party - but the roles are slightly different (Troubadour is obviously less sturdy than a paladin but more versatile. Paladin has better healing and higher accuracy, Troubadour has better shooting speed and so on...

If you have further questions then please ask.

Edited January 21, 2023 by Boeroer

[Shai Hulud]

Anybody like Essence Interrupter? 

The hunting bow you can buy from Henric in Maje. It is stupid good, does pierce/shock, has damage scaling with metaphysics and on crit makes enemies spawn various allied summons (with upgrade).

I toyed around with using it with black jacket multiclass builds. With quick switch black jacket has zero recovery on weapon switch so you can use a more damaging alpha strike weapon like Red Hand then switch to Essence Interrupter when the target enemy is near death (this is easily scriptable actually). I didn't follow through with a complete run but it is pretty powerful combined with a lot of classes (cipher, chanter, blood mage). With chanter (troubadour probably best with black jacket) you can summon things and attack from behind enemy lines to summon even more things. I think even your own crappy summons (like skeletons) can be turned into better ones if you kill them but I could be wrong on that.

With cipher you get huge defense and accuracy buffs from borrowed instinct and psychovampiric shield, and can cast pain link on summons so it also works well. Not sure about subclass, I'm most familiar with soul blade but that wouldn't work well with ranged build. Ascendant might be good but I dont know much about it. Vanilla cipher is fine too.

And blood mage is good with anything, give you a ton of defensive buffs plus all the blood mage cheese with black jacket and essence interrupter providing summons and adding even more survivability with unbending.

[Boeroer]

On 1/21/2023 at 9:36 AM, Shai Hulud said:

Anybody like Essence Interrupter? 

The modal alone makes Hunting Bows very good ranged weapons in terms of damage-dealing. Against enekmies withweak deflection the modal raises the dps considerably - and you can turn it off at any time should you meet enemies that hard hard to hit. 

The alternative damage type of Essence Interrupter makes it very useful and the shoking lash which can be increased up to 10% is nice, too. This all makes it a great choice.
The "summoning" part is superannoying unless you go for Soul Diplomacy though. Summoning an Ogre Pirate in the midst of battle can totally mess up your fight.

Damage-wise Amiina's Legacy is better though, and the CC aspect is nice, especially for a Dwarf with Driving Flight. But of course this one is only obtainably later when you can take on the Uamoru bounty (who is lvl 16). 

It makes the early to mid game a lot easier because the exceptional quality (+8 ACC) combined with the modal (-15 ACC) makes it so, so much better than any other ranged weapon at that stage. You'll suffer from a virtual -7 ACC loss copared to a regulat hunting bow but will fire twice as often (roughly speaking).

I like to keep Essence Interrupter around even if I did get the Legacy - and if it's only for the aternative dmg type.  I also often use it on Wizards and Wizard/something (esp. if they are geared towards using the Blackbow lateron) in combination with the Essential Phantom - because my Wizards tend to have high Metaphysics anyway and two Essence Interrupters (with Soul Diplomacy) on the battlefield can have a huge impact once the enemies start dropping and summoning friendly creatures as decoys. 

[Shai Hulud]

1 hour ago, Boeroer said:

The modal alone makes Hunting Bows very good ranged weapons in terms of damage-dealing. Against enekmies withweak deflection the modal raises the dps considerably - and you can turn it off at any time should you meet enemies that hard hard to hit. 

The alternative damage type of Essence Interrupter makes it very useful and the shoking lash which can be increased up to 10% is nice, too. This all makes it a great choice.
The "summoning" part is superannoying unless you go for Soul Diplomacy though. Summoning an Ogre Pirate in the midst of battle can totally mess up your fight.

Damage-wise Amiina's Legacy is better though, and the CC aspect is nice, especially for a Dwarf with Driving Flight. But of course this one is only obtainably later when you can take on the Uamoru bounty (who is lvl 16). 

It makes the early to mid game a lot easier because the exceptional quality (+8 ACC) combined with the modal (-15 ACC) makes it so, so much better than any other ranged weapon at that stage. You'll suffer from a virtual -7 ACC loss copared to a regulat hunting bow but will fire twice as often (roughly speaking).

I like to keep Essence Interrupter around even if I did get the Legacy - and if it's only for the aternative dmg type.  I also often use it on Wizards and Wizard/something (esp. if they are geared towards using the Blackbow lateron) in combination with the Essential Phantom - because my Wizards tend to have high Metaphysics anyway and two Essence Interrupters (with Soul Diplomacy) on the battlefield can have a huge impact once the enemies start dropping and summoning friendly creatures as decoys. 

Soul diplomacy of course

Another nice thing about the summoning from the bow is it circumvents the normal summon limit. You can have a bunch of cannon fodder as allies. I think it is particularly good for solo. I haven't used Aamina's Legacy much. Never roll dwarfs for some reason...I guess I don't like their stat spread. Boreal dwarf is terrible but Mountain Dwarf seems okay. 

I'm working on a wizard build to try BPM with all the trials, haven't gotten real far yet but I think it will be doable. You seem like the guy to ask this question. If I wear a bunch of "damage on unconscious" stuff like the cape of the falling star, effort, least unstable coil, and that plate from beast of winter, do they all go off when the phantom dies, i.e. do they stack?

[dgray62]

An ascendent/black jacket would be a great choice for a ranged cipher build. You could switch between Red Hand and Essence Interrupter as you note. These two are among the best weapons for a ranged cipher. But don't forget the other weapons with powerful special abilities that are devastating in the hands of a cipher, since their damage is boosted by soul whip and they build focus for you. These include Kitchen Stove, Amira's Wing, and Dragon's Dowry. It's great to be able to switch quickly between these weapons.