TbXie's Explosive Arrow Ballista Champion Build Guide (PoE Settlers of Kalguur 3.25)

July 23rd, 2024, 12:00

Introduction & Expectations

I expected this skill to perform a lot better than it is in your guide. Why is this?

Because it is impossible to cater to everyone, I choose to not overcomplicate things. As a rule of thumb, this means you get to be confident you can obtain your two first Voidstones, an otherwise full Atlas completion & have a great mapping experience in T16 maps with moderates amounts of juice.
This implies you will most likely be looking for some help, or further investments to obtain your last two Voidstones. This is due to the fact that fighting these bosses on acceptable amounts of gear requires an enormous amount of game knowledge, fight practice & mechanical skill. Trying to compare your playing experience to those who’ve done nothing but play for years, tends to lead to dissapointment.

Therefore, take your time & appreciate the fact that some content can be harder for you, and the characters powerlevels you’ve managed to acquire, than for others. There’s no shame in this.

Disclaimer

I am currently playing the new Challenge League and a lot of things have been added of which no mention can be found in this guide?

While I would very much like to give you all the ins and outs of the new powercreep in the new Challenge League, it saddens me to let you know that no Early access is given out and we thus have no more information than anyone else when updating our build guides before the new patches. We try our utmost to make sure everything is as close to perfect as we can, but cannot forecast which special mechanics / interactions might exist in new Leagues. If something of tremendous power is teased or announced beforehand, you can find specific League specific remarks in the section on the Explosive Arrow

What to Expect

🔸 T16 Maps ✔️
🔸 T16 Maps w/ a few Atlas Mechanics or some scarabs ✔️
🔸 Pinnacle bosses when playing well ✔️
🔸 T17 Maps ✔️
🔸 Uber Content ❗
🔸 Uber Content when investing well beyond the guide ❗

Explosive Arrow – Ballista

Explosive Arrow is a Bow skill which shoots out arrows which explode. The damage of the Explosions is dependent on how many arrows stuck into the target whenever they exploded. This mechanic is called “Fuses” which are left by Arrows hitting the target. Getting Fuses is generally pretty hard but since you’re playing Totems, you get multiple Totems shooting multiple arrows meaning it’s actually possible with enough Attack Speed to get to maximum amount of Fuses and therefore scale your damage through the roof.

Playstyle

The build plays like a Totem build, obviously, which is kind of a set & forget gameplay. Totems will shoot out a ton of arrows, which apply fuses to the target and then explode for a gigantic amount of Damage. This Damage then applies a really high Ignite which keeps on rolling for a long duration where you just get to run around and dodge.

Build Assessment

Pro’s & Con’s

➕ Really Tanky
➕ Can go from Cheap to High Investment
➕ Capable of scaling to Ubers

➖ Rough early levels
➖ Totem playstyle isn’t for everyone
➖ Damage over time playstyle also isn’t for everyone

Viability in Numbers

🔸 Ease of Transitioning: ★☆☆☆☆
🔸 New Player Friendliness: ★★★★★
🔸 Playstyle: ★★★★★
🔸 Ease of Gearing: ★★★☆☆
🔸 Easily Executable: ★★★★★

Map Modifiers to Avoid

While certain combinations of modifiers are generally just bad, such as for example a couple of damage modifiers combined with Critical Strike Multiplier, these are things you are supposed to get a feel for yourself and test out. Just make sure not to combine too much crazy things together. Modifiers the build cannot run are listed here.

❗No Life Regeneration
❗Elemental Damage Reflect

Damage & Defenses

Mechanics

It is important you figure out how to sustain maximum fuses. This is because it gains more “explosion damage”, which is what causes our damage to ignite and then for the ignite to start rolling on the enemy, per “Fuse” (read, arrow) in an enemy at the time of the explosion. Therefore, we need to check the time between starting to attack a target & the duration of the “initial stage” (before the explosion) to check if we are attacking fast enough to get the maximum amount of fuses in a target before the explosion occurs. Given that the maximum amount of fuses is twenty, we can calculate this for our character using the following steps:

1️⃣ Figure out your duration (usually 1.35 seconds because 1 second base and 15% increased from Damage over time mastery and 20% Malevolence aura and later on 1.45 seconds with another 10% from Tempered Arrowheads on our large cluster jewel)
2️⃣ Figure out what that means for fuses. If you want to apply 22 stacks (you only need to count 21, because you have one from the initial hit), you divide 21 by 1.35 (1.45 with Tempered Arrowheads) to figure out how many fuses you need to be applying per second.
3️⃣ In this case, you’d need 15.55 fuses per second. You have 6 totems hitting the enemy meaning you divide that number by 6.
4️⃣ You therefore need 2.59 attacks per second to cap.
5️⃣ You now take some margin, because you don’t always have your 6 totems down instantly, and you’re at capped damage.

Scaling & Layers

This build layers a lot of conditional mitigation to mostly avoid getting hit for relevant damage. These layers are combinations of following attempts to avoid taking relevant hits:

🔸Capped Suppression
🔸High Physical Damage Reduction
🔸Fortify
🔸Reasonable Armour & Evasion

Build Resources

Leveling the Build

Leaguestarter or Transitioning

This build has the League Starter tag. This means we will be holding your hand right from the get go until you reach the pinnacle of your power and finish the guide. In order to maximize your experience, please make sure to follow the Path of Building leveling sections accordingly. We will be providing multiple skill trees & gem sets to ease your progress to endgame maps.

*You can find the Path of Building link on the Passive Tree Page