Scaling gas cloud snipers damage ?
So I started over and currently really enjoy the snipers. Fairly cheap so you can have many and with scatter shot it applies to both the basic attack and command.
So just focusing on snipers I can have basically perma uptime on the gas cloud for bosses. However in terms of scaling it assume you just go full fire damage and focus on the explosions.
I assume exploding a gas cloud basically just deals all it's damage over time in one big shot.
Just a little unsure about scaling it, since there is a cooldown but we also need to cast quickly to ramp damage and also can scale either poision based or the fire explosion side.
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I scale it with minion damage , + to minion gems, aoe damage support, flammability curse and fire exposure. Also there is shotgunning with scatter shot and you can stack poison clouds on bosses. In game gem description says that explosion converts 100% of physical damage to fire but I don't know where that physical part coming from
Pathfinder + all magnitude nodes = 8 stacks of poison.
Gas cloud is good at ticking poison stacks. I run it with no explosion and am level 89, huge dps, good clear and good bossing.
In terms of scaling poison, chaos damage does nothing nor do any hit enemy effects since Gas Arrow primarily hits ground or walls. Poison is calculated by phys and chaos before any on hit or post hit changes.
In terms of scaling it, you really want Plaguefinger gloves to because these gloves mean you can actually scale your poisons with ele dmg too.
Get a dual string bow with high ele dps (triple rolls + two arrows, implicit and explicit additional arrow, we need this because scattershot murders your dps and a double arrow bow replaces scattershot).
You also want high ele dmg on your quiver because there are nodes on the tree and also jewels that allow us to scale our quiver bonuses.
For my gas arrow I run deadly poison + comorbidity + ele focus + primal armament + conc effect. I have 8 stacks of poison up constantly.
In terms of what scales the dmg here:
Tier 1: Magnitude of Poisons / Magnitude of damaging ailments / Level of gems
Tier 2: Global Attack damage / Area damage / Gain % extra dmg (ming’s heart ring is bis) / Damage
Tier 3: Global ele damage (can be T2 if high ele) / Projectile damage
Tier 4 (pretty bad or useless): Physical damage / chaos damage / on hits enemy damage.
For bossing we can improve our single target poison damage with two things:
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Dark Effigy or Rain of Arrows with withering touch. We just want to apply stacks of Wither with this ability since it scales our poison dmg. Doesn’t matter how much you do it but Persistence supp is good for Wither.
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Despair (curse) will also directly scale our poison damage and for bossing % effect of curses becomes T2 dps increase.
There’s a lot to go over in terms of defenses but primarily you want a ton of evasion and move speed since you can take acrobatics, run away, and only ever attack to lay down a new cloud. Accuracy and % chance to poison is bad because we don’t actually do any damage from hitting enemies and gas cloud applies poison each tick. Pathfinder ascendancy kind of is mandatory to get +8 stacks of poison.
I also run Ghost Dance and Wind Dancer as my two persistent buffs. Herald of Plague is next to useless since Pathfinder gets proliferation anyway and Plague Bearer is lower dps since it messes up our prolif and stacks too.
With these two evasion based buffs I can get 82% evasion WITH acrobatics (allows you to evade aoe, spells, boss slams, everything) and I very rarely ever die even in juiced T15 maps and boss fights.
For end end-game tech, we use weapon swap for our gas arrow focused on scaling poison and then we use wands weapon swap with + level chaos gem and wither effect / curse effect for Dark Effigy and Despair.
Also if you need more CC, vine arrow is good with Blind supp (since we are evasion based and take Acrobatics, blind directly increases our survivability. Wouldn’t recommend acrobatics til 15k base evade tho)