Rapid Shot Ritualist looking for build improvement suggestions
Hey everyone! This league I decided to run a character without looking up build guides. I saw the Ritualist Mind Phylacteries and really wanted to work a build that could break that ascension node.
So far this is what I've come up with: https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/a52ap00t
As a disclaimer, I am running this character as a group self found character - we share items in a guild stash but no trading outside our little group. Some of my items might be sub optimal because I'm not trading.
Currently I do a decent amount of DPS. I've been able to kill T3 King in the mists and T2 Xesht so far. I only made it to round 10 on simulacrum and I can't find Olroth.
How the build works:
We are running a pretty standard rapid shot set up. I've looked around and most other people are running similar things. Flat damage is great on the skill because of how fast we are attacking and the big damage increase from heat. We shock ourselves to constantly trigger our charms to get permanent uptime on charm effects and solve our mana problems with rapid shot. We also get to scale flat damage more because we get three ring slots and increase that damage with our other ascendancy nodes. Additionally, we are trying to find lightning flat damage so that we can freeze tougher enemies like bosses.
Rapid Shot:
Martial Tempo: Attack speed feels really good on rapid shot and buffs the DPS a lot.
Primal Armament: We're doing a lot of fire damage already on rapid shot and I'm adding flat damage from rings and gloves anyway so this is a nice damage boost.
Fresh clip: We reload 100 arrows so this is a 100% damage increase
Nimble Reload: The reload time on rapid shot is pretty slow. This is a nice quality of life upgrade
Overcharge: We take this combined with The Three Dragons to scale our magnitude of shock as well as shock ourselves. I'll talk about why we want to shock ourselves when I talk about the charm set up.
Stun Grenade:
Stun grenade is great. It both blinds tough enemies and 1shots your screen of all white mobs and most magic mobs. It scales off the heat from rapid shot and has a pretty high base damage.
Scattershot: More grenades is more better
Reach: Buffs the area of our grenade and we don't care how accurate they are
Magnified Effect: More AOE is more better
Overpower: Helps with stunning bosses more often. Stunning bosses is pretty important in our build as it triggers unleash fire.
Emergency Reload:
This is nice because you want to be reloading more with fresh clip. It also just provides a damage boost. Premeditation is the only really crazy important support gem. It also makes you do more damage.
Trinity/Attrition+Alchemist's Boon:
With Herald of Thunder+ the fire damage from your shots, this stacks two of the three elements almost immediately. I swap this out for Attrition and Alchemist's boon when fighting bosses because without HoT you only cap fire damage.
Wind Dancer and Ghost Dance:
Pretty self explanatory, ups your ES and evasion so you don't die as much.
Ascendancy:
For our ascendancy we take Unfurled Finger and Mystic Attunement. I spoke about this earlier, we have more rings for more flat damage on our rapid shot. This also gives the nice added bonus of our amulet giving more spirit.
Additionally we take Mind Phylacteries, which lets us consume 25% of our mana instead of charm charges to trigger our charms.
Charms:
With Mind Phylacteries, we will be consuming a lot of our mana from activating charms. The most important charm in this setup is a Grounding Charm with no increased duration and a recover X mana when used prefix. Combining this with Overcharge and The Three Dragons means that we have permanent uptime on our grounding charm. Since we took reduced mana in our ascendancy, as long as your charm recovers more than 25% of your mana on use, you will actually be mana positive every time you trigger it.
Additionally, we have 20% to trigger another charm whenever we trigger our grounding charm. Any utility charms that would be nice to have can be slotted here. I have Arakaali's gift and Nascent Hope, but I have some ideas for upgrades.
I already know some places the build needs to upgrade:
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I'm currently focusing on upgrading my EHP. I'm searching for gear with max life + more ES and evasion to make myself tankier. I'm surviving most hits right now but some bosses will still just 1shot me.
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Cap chaos resistance. I'm sitting at 49% res but my rings are kinda greedy so it's hard.
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Farm for the Rite of Passage Charms. Since we can trigger them often they will be a huge buff in stats. For a less dramatic upgrade I'm chancing silver charms to gain onslaught every so often.
For my passive tree I'm just scaling magnitude of shock, chance to shock, evasion, and projectile, elemental or attack damage. We hit the nodes that reduce movement penalty to make rapid shot less painful, grab piercing shot to make large packs a little more manageable and Lucky Rabbit's foot fore move speed and damage since we have 100% charm uptime.
Let me know if you have any thoughts on how I can improve this build! Thanks!
Comments
My first character this league was also a rapid shot ritualist looking to abuse mind phylactery.
I went for fire flower unique amulets for self damage ignites and nice + to fire gems since it scales rapid shot well and Ngamahu's Chosen unique charm for perma uptime on max rage.
Pathed over to warrior and picked up lots of stun and break 50% armour on stun and 100% increased armour break and with auto reload support I only needed to reload on bosses. Even then I would use emergency reload with life tap to get around mana issues.
Don't have much to say in relation to your build just wanted to chime in since mine was similar. I got bored after a while though as the charms didn't really seem worth the effort, maybe some of the new ones, but ibeasnt bothered keeping up with her till I got one.