How to craft your BOW for Explosive Arrow - CHEAP vs. EXPENSIVE [Crafting Guide] 

So excited, as someone who prefers to try and craft everything I can, I love this.

It's 2.03 APS and then 2.05 to accomidate for projectile travel time right for 20 stacks ? Not 2.3 ?

I'd like to see your reasoning on +2 bow gems versus +2 support gems with empower sometime.

@Zizaran I just dropped a +2 fractured spine bow. Is it worth crafting on as Spine?

hello ziz, is there a path of building link for your EA champ from this league?

Just ID all bows with fractures with 1.4x attack speed or better. There's no 1.35x attack speed bow so we can make a pretty nice cutoff between fast bows, 1.4-1.5x and slow bows, 1.2-1.3x. The slower the bow with the higher the stat requirements, the better the fracture you need on it to be worth it. Because even just a shrieking dread essence provides +2, it's not all that important of a mod to get as a fracture. You probably want elemental attack prefix or attack speed or DoT multi for a suffix.

Hmm wondering about this too. But If you calculate with 1.4 fuse duration you get to 20 fuses. So looks like he ist using malevolence.

Don't get too caught up with fuse breakpoints- this breaks down pretty bad in actual in-game situations and it's best to play around with it to make sure it's working like you think it should. You can make some fire immune buddies in expedition if you want to test things more thoroughly. Set down one totem at various distances and count. If you're doing significant bossing (at least in SC, you definitely have to decide for you in HC), I'd strongly suggest just getting the skill effect duration cluster (by magebane). 3 points to basically guarantee that hitting 20 fuses is what causes the fuses to explode rather than the timer. Very clunky for clear. But lots of leeway is great for bossing. For run of the mill bosses, it doesn't even really matter much. You want 3 volleys and this is fairly easy to get if your bow has attack speed on it if you're hitting a stationary boss point blank from a free setup. Fast and slippery bosses, those with slows and chills, etc, then you need faaaar more attack speed/skill effect duration to get a high fuse count, but these are rare, and you probably don't need a very high fuse count either unless you've made them very scary with additional mods since map bosses overall aren't all that threatening. This is pretty noticeable with dangerous essences where you can often just kill it outright from the standstill release, but if you fail that, then you might need to do significant kiting to kill it off because it's hard to get a high fuse count on them when they're shooting out 1000000 projectiles.

@@redfish337 i also realized the stuff with the moving bosses and the essence mobs. atm I have 2.44 attacks per second without the minion nodes. working fine without malevolence in T16, for pinnacle bosses i just use malevolence and should get the 20 fuses more often thant not. Thx for the advice :)

since you bow only have 4 mobs. 2 prefix 2 sub, Just change your craft to flat fire damage to block that prefix (now you have 3 prefix and 1 sub) and then exalt, and then change the craft back to fire dot multi. . But you are not able to get elemental dmg. Also "fire additional arrow" suffix might brick your bow as well. Not worth to invest it lol. The safest way is to have two craft mods and waste one line, then you can safely craft another weaker mod for your bow to add some minor dmg.

@Doc problem is: I got 3 suffixes -> attack speed (fractured) + dot multi + fire dot multu And 2 affixes I need (+2 bow +1 all) So uncrafted it is a 2-2 bow.... As I do not want to get another suffixes it but a prefix... Well there is no way on locking out fire dmg in the affix slot. But hitting that will brick it. Too bad I can't get another base right now... would use another way and ex-slam it before the +1 craft this time... Much less expensive if bricked

Honestly, you might want to just sell it as is for 20-30+ divines. The price is so high on the base itself that if you don't actually roll it super well they'll just scour and start over anyway so anything you add isn't actually adding value. The ones currently on the market for much higher are tri-elemental, which means attack style bows, not EA. Builds that probably don't mind the extra dex requirement for it over thicket/grove and treat extra arrows as more a requirement rather than convenience. Not really surprising as we're a month into the league. I don't know how to craft these. Deafening essence spam to get tier 3 or better of the other elements is god-awful 1/700 or so- the simulator already counts this as ~13 divine on average to land it, which is probably profit to try on average. But should add that it said the average was 20 divine past 10000 attempts an didn't actually get down to the true long-term average until I let it run over 20000. That's RNG for you. So if there's no fancy way to improve the odds significantly you have to actually land something sellable to profit from it.

When you do the unveil, you don't really get to choose very often. You're hoping to land one of about 5 different things: (1000) 12-15% w/ blood rage (local) (1000) 25-28 dex and int, 12-15% increased attack speed (local) (1000) 27-30% increased with rare or unique nearby (400) 34-38% increased minions (100) 24-28% DoT fire The local ones block other local attack speed boosts, so if you get one of those you craft in increased nearby, increased minions... or if you want damage, DoT fire or fire to chaos. If you get an increased, then you probably craft in one of the three local attack speed choices (regular, blood rage or dex/int), The minion one is weighted against you to begin with, but probably you just want to take whichever attack speed the unveil gives you. If you roll minions, then it takes 5 points to get over there from where you are, or perhaps 6 to get +10% life if you already got purity of flesh. Since you don't really need it for regular enemies, only for rares and bosses, it's sort of a waste to have to go that far. But if you roll it and that's all it gives you- a rare scenario, you kinda just have to take it and adjust accordingly. If you block charges on the unveil, this is out of 11500. 3 chances at ~3500. So very likely you get something. But I failed first try this league. If your fail is just an attack speed you don't prefer, probably usually better to just sell it and start over rather than try to unveil a different one. But it may be too late in league for it to sell easily. To be clear, there are two numbers involved here. The local speed, which affects the bow (from plain attack speed, blood rage, and dex/int/attack speed), which is basically a multiplier to attack speed, and the increased values, which are additive to all your other attack speed. This makes calculating it out hard- just be aware that the smaller numbers from local attack speed are MORE multipliers so at equal values, in basically all cases will give more than the increased attack speed from minions, etc. These aren't equal numbers- minions is double to triple... the point is the double to triple higher number isn't actually double to triple the effect since it's "increased" while the local attack speeds are "more". In the end, careful calculation only helps from a standstill. Anything tanky needs at least 3 volleys. What that means in-game depends on how easy it is to get 3 volleys on it.

@@redfish337 Thank you okay, so just to check I have understood the local non local bit, my bow currently has attack speed increase on it so I cant craft the attack speed blood rage craft but I could still do the minion attack speed craft if I can unveil it right?

@@bendixon54 You could do minion or rare/unique nearby. Rare/unique nearby is more likely and IMO the one you actually want- nearby in this case (annoyingly differing for every case...) is a workable 70 range which more or less just means "on screen" (it's ~85 to left and right). But since you already have attack speed on the bow, it decreases your odds a lot for a favorable unveil. That's the negative of using attack speed as your fracture, but of course it does let you potentially have a much better attack speed on the extra important local mod slot.

@@redfish337 Ahh okay so if I was considering making a perfect or near perfect endgame bow I would be better off getting the +2 to bow skills fractured on instead of attack speed? Also on a slightly related note last league I farmed essences and expedition, im still getting up to easily clearing t16s currently but whats a simple way of making money currently? Im fine if it needs investment I just spent so much of last league crafting ideas I would rather just play this league aha

@@bendixon54 I don't really know how to make perfect or near perfect. I'm trying to make a great bow with the less RNG, I never have enough currency to throw at making something better than that. There's argument for +2 support if you have a very good empower gem setup- but I feel like you need corrupted awakened empower for it to stand out against other options. But for a normal high end elementalist end game, you usually want dot multi fracture. Other ones work for lower budget. You roll dreads for tier 1-3 lightning, tier 1-3 elemental damage with attacks, or less optimally, good tier cold or chaos. Fire usually recommended to avoid as most of these builds use EE. By fluke, my build this league doesn't, but I'd still probably want to set it if I did significant bossing, which is more what the dot multi bow is for, barring high% delirium or simulacrum, etc. Or you roll wrath essences for +2. Basically, this gives up the best possible bows, increases the odds of an amazing bow and decreases the odds of a great bow. Also, it cuts your selling potential because non-elementalists want elemental damage with attacks not flat lightning, but tier 1 lightning is much higher and rarer than tier 2 lighting, and essence lightning is almost as good as tier 1.. like tier 1.2. But with this you probably need to actually get +2 to roll as the other prefix, whereas rolling dreads gives some other possibilities. Oh, and shrieking dreads still work, but you need to use deafening wrath. But I guess you may as well try to roll both. Which one to buy in bulk to roll is harder to say. So essence one prefix, roll another prefix, and +1 is guaranteed third prefix if you started with open prefix and open suffix. Your fracture is suffix one, your aisling is suffix two, and your craft is suffix three.

DO NOT use +1 arrow fired. Rain of splinters works before there is an even number of arrows added so you are still shooting like this \\|// but with just plus 1 you will be shooting arrows like \\// so dont use + arrows fired unless you have an even amount. L Also rain of splinters is just used to help clear and is not needed. I have 7 days of play time without it and it still feels fine clearing. Its more of a convenience item than a necessity

A reasonably crafted with a few divines crafted bow deals about double the damage of a quill rain. A very high end one starts to approach triple damage. BUT the rest of your gear has to be in good enough shape to cover for the attack speed loss for that to actually be the case. (you can increase skill effect duration to help cover for you, but it will make mapping a bit clunkier). So it's something you should be working toward on the side.

If it fills all the suffixes and doesn't hit nice mods. Then you'll have to risk anulling off a prefix. The ashling way you are guaranteed a free suffix for prefixes cannot be changed.

@@max.lindgren Oh, I'm an idiot, I in my head I heard fill up prefixes, not suffixes, which is why I was confused, my bad.

You should upgrade when you need a 6-link so you don't waste effort 6-linking a quill rain when the 6-link short bow and imperial bows are basically free. If you already bought the 6-link quill rain, then you're already heavily invested in it and it'll still work long after most people move on- because the reason to move on was upgrading 5-link to 6-link. So you pretty much have to PoB it to see when it turns over. And then you have to check your new item out to make sure it's hitting the fuse count you think it should in practice, as the fuse count is the thing that makes quill rain good. If you hit 20 fuses without it, there's little point to be using it. The projectile speed is somewhat underrated as the amount it gives is potentially huge and this is pseudo attack speed while clearing, but there's really just not much on this bow besides attack speed.

@@redfish337 thanks for the well explained answer, i'm on a SSF journey and wasn't too lucky with Porcupine not to mention Imperial Legacy drops as of yet, so sadly just a 5 link body armour complemented by a quill rain.

Play the game when the active patch version doesn't make it so hard to get stuff over level 85 to drop. =P Oh, and make sure your filter can actually show them. I'm not sure if the issue is that people hide them on their filters so even if rare no one knows they're dropping in order to pick them up, or if they just don't drop (or hardly ever). Now, or because of what they did to the drop rates in the last few leagues, it might be even worse as they said they were trying to lower the number of "bad" equip drops, and this is of course the case that proves "bad" is subjective. So telling people to go get a level 86 short bow doesn't seem to be very good advice as they don't really exist. Groves barely exist. Highborns are probably common enough to be farmable. Thickets can be forced relatively easily. Maybe there's one to be made on trade from bricking enough level 86 replica quill rains. But it's not like there are a billion of these for sale and it'd probably cost several divines to even buy up the ~20 or so you need to brick into a rare short bow.

Get a grove bow. He says this an an aside. It's functionally the same for the build, unless you want to quibble insignificant details.

If you're level 87, can't you run dunes? t15? You need a 22 stack of imperial legacy cards for a 6-link imperial bow. Dunes is one of the best maps to be running all the time anyway, and you should get like 1 card on average. If you actually stack mods to get cards to drop you can get the stack of 22 cards in 10 dunes or so. This league they made it a little harder to mass run dunes by not putting anything good next to it, but it's still a better map by faaaaar than the other desert maps where it drops (they changed it to require a fairly high base tier of map for it to drop) Nevertheless, I still have 117 cards... having spent 22. Imperial bow is 1.45 versus 1.50 on short bow, and requires 212 dex, which is a huge bother. But the imperial legacy card gives a level 100 imperial bow, so it can roll everything, including tier 1 elemental damage with attacks, while the porcupine only gives a level 50 short bow, which can only roll tier 4. Also, imperial bow has an implicit of 24% increased elemental damage with attacks. The main advantage though is that this card just drops much more readily than porcupine, so even if you need more than three times as many, you just get loads of the card and it's very incremental progress. Once you get that you can start rolling a better bow from a fractured bow with a lower dex requirement. If you can't actually run dunes yet... well, then you might want to do vaal areas and such to try to get a crappy 6-link that way. Since tainted currency is a thing now there's a little more leeway- if it doesn't roll with a red socket you can reasonably re-roll the coloring.

Good q. I played until level 83 until (of all places) in a Terrace map I got two 6L body armor (one corrupted, one a non-corrupted tabula rasa), both within 3 minutes. It took me another 100 hours to get enough porcupine cards (mainly on Terrace, wouldn't drop on the other maps at all).. finally got the last one a few minutes back. But now I'm missing useful essences and basically everything else. It's hurting to finally have a 6L bow, only to not being able to use it :-)

Once you have "cannot roll attacks" it's the only prefix that can roll on it. Every other bow prefix has "attack" as a modifier. I guess this is a good time to note that this only works for bows that aren't influenced (or are crusader), as everything else adds other non-attacks to the pool. That said, elder, warlord and hunter only have 1 other option (though warlord and hunter are tiered and can roll bad tiers), so if you have 2 open prefixes when doing this you can guarantee you'll get +1 and then this other mod. For elder it's "socketed gems are supported by level 10 onslaught" which could have niche use.

Can you explain why I always see 3 variants essence or t1 lightning ele dmg with attacks or fire as extra chaos and on poe ninja seen the top players use lightning so im curious.

​@@incarnationx903 Lightning has a huge dmg range and since all dmg can ignite (witch ascendancy) and only the highest dmg ignite will stay on the target flat lightning dmg is a good choice overall. Id say %Elementaldmg < lightning = fire as extra chaoslightning for elementalist at least.

@@khayla8592 gotcha thanks for the reply

No it doesnt. That is just for elementalist. Not champion and jugg

@@Zizaran oh I didn't think about that at all thanks for the wisdom boss

It's a standard unveil from Jun. So doing some basic amount of betrayal/safehouse content should get it for you.

The spiritual command node on the skill tree makes your minion attack speed also affect you and YOUR attack speed affects your totems'

From the ground, buy from market or fracture it by yourself

Check the tree node - spiritual command

Totems attack speed scales on your attack speed - there's a node that he has you take in the POB (Spiritual Command) that causes minion attack speed to effect you - so essentially it's just a 20-30% increase attack speed craft.

I even put the node in the video explaining that you need Spiritual Command for it to work! -Skryah

Most appreciated. Sorry I missed that but I do appreciate the follow up!

Because flat fire damage screws up your elemental equilibrium which means you need to get exposure from elsewhere to not do terrible damage against fire resistant monsters, and that exposure will be lower than the 25% EE gives. As EE is a little jank, setting up around getting exposure elsewhere is not impossible. But then you probably want something to really justify that- eg, a unique that you really want that forces you to have flat fire if you want to use the unique, rather than keep throwaway flat fire on the bow that could be any number of better mods.

Honestly when ur crafting bows this expensive colors r the least of ur worries white sockets aren’t hard to get at that level

Yeah, this really doesn't matter. You pick short bow or imperial to start because it has a free 6-link and maybe the coloring is bad, but it's not like you actually chose those for the coloring, it's because they're 6-links (and neither has atrocious attack speed- they're 1st and 2nd respectively) If you're crafting from a fracture and have to link it later, the coloring doesn't matter. Use the bench to get all your colors, socket by socket.

its not really like that

That is assuming you hit the same number of fuses which you almost certainly will not.

Imperial bow is 1.45 versus 1.50 on short bow types. All your mods on the bow being the same, it miiggght affect your fuses. But it frankly, probably usually doesn't. Imperial bow isn't a slow bow. It's the 2nd fastest base type. The issue with Imperial is 212 dex req. And the main point of the imperial is that you can get a 6-link extremely easily, allowing you to fairly easily craft a "good enough for now" +2 or +3 bow. If you're already starting with a fracture, then that loses the main advantage of the imperial... the basically free 6-link starting position...so you should probably use a base with a lower dex requirement, close to, if not lower than the explosive arrow requirement of 159.

Hey, can you tell me what the Dot Cap is and maybe also a build that can reach it?

@@Winnetou0210 35,7 m dps

@@mezmerya5130 Thank you, do you think its possible to hit this with the Elementalist Version with enough Currency?

@@Winnetou0210 no, max dps for ea is half that with perfect gear

Elementalist EA will definitely cap... By that I mean if you set up to cap. It's a bit glass cannon to do so, but if the point is to blast down a boss in a hurry, it can hit the cap. I can do this with my old setup (last league) with about 20 skill points adjusted, a +1 / +1 amulet (I only ever bothered to get a +1, hoping to get a good reflected one but never ended up upgrading), double offensive auras, and double offensive ascendancy. It still has 3800 life with 28K EHP so it'd still be playable for maps, and still has a lot of defensive points that could be stripped away for more offense on a true glass cannon. But it already hits the cap.

Only if you have an empower. Without empower a +2 bow skills is better

Its the same having either , if not using empower +2bowgem is better but with empower it doesnt matter , +2bow will give you the same amount of level as +2 to your empower

That's just wrong. 2 things to mention: +2 Bow will give you +2 on critical support gem anyways (ballista totem support). You need to multimod then Checked this 2 seasons ago with a friend and did some checks in pob. First: +2 support gems is a craft-mod only. This means you need to multimod the bow. You will lose out on the dot-multi. Because that mod will be blocked by multimod. Attack speed is essential, so there is no way to lose out on that. Second: using +2 sup and multimod will only give you an edge if using empower 3 or higher also when u can't use the dot-multi. Third: if you use lifetap (as many builds do), using +2 bow will give you a better result because you can have the added dot multi + it will open up your mana for a third big aura (malevolence). So, in the end, it depends on only 1 key question here: do you plan to use empower If yes -> +2 support. If no -> +2 bow. Btw: best build I could make back then was using devouring diadem and following auras: malevolence, purity of elements, grace, determination, banner and precision. Using a +2 support-bow and empower lvl4. That build was completely broken... Right now my build is using +2 bow, lifetap. I ditched the grace and malevolence because I am missing helm enchant and do not plan using devouring diadem. If I get the helm enchant I may consider using grace but as it is right now.... No need to cap out the damage when already reaching more than 20mil ignite dps

Meh, if u not using +4 empower, that +2 support are trash.

@@neoblackchaos05 poba said +2sapport will give about 16-24% more dmg