Learn about the key build info and how to increase damage and defense with your stats and gear for the Caustic Arrow Ballista Trickster Build.
Caustic Arrow Build Scaling
You scale Caustic Arrow's Poison Damage, which originates from its hits. Poison is an infinitely stackable Chaos Damage over Time that has a base duration of 2 seconds.
Your Poison Damage stacks with your Bow's Physical and Chaos damage. If your Bow Damage is too low, you deal abysmal damage, so watch out for that!
You are NOT scaling the Caustic Ground that it leaves behind, because it is not stackable and can't apply Poison.
Ballista Totem Support lets you apply more Poisons than usual, since you get up to 6 Ballistas shooting at once. Ballistas, like any other form of Totems, scale with YOUR stats and are NOT considered "minions".
Here is a list of the damage mods you are looking for:
- High Physical and Chaos Damage on your Bow
- Increases to Chaos/Poison/Totem Damage as well as "Damage over Time" in general.
- Chaos Damage over Time Multiplier/Damage over Time Multiplier
- Increased Attack Speed
- Additional Maximum Totems/Ballistas through Panopticon, Watchtowers and Skirmish.
The Trickster has strong defensive capabilities across the board, here are some highlights for this build:
- Evasion from Grace, Defiance Banner and Jade Flask.
- Strong but random defensive buff through Heartstopper.
- Incredible Life and Energy Shield Recovery with Polymath.
- 100% Spell Suppression with endgame gear.
- Ailment Avoidance through Purity of Elements.
- Slowing Enemies with One Step Ahead and Temporal Chains.
- Capped Elemental Resistances at 75%.
Physical Damage is a weakness until you acquire Darkscorn and Taste of Hate.
Being a Ballista Build in general means that you can deal damage while dodging enemy attacks/spells, resulting in a safer playstyle overall!
Mistakes to Avoid
1) Scaling Caustic Ground and not Poison
Caustic Arrow has 2 separate damage portions:
- Initial hit, which applies Poisons (which you are interested in)
- Caustic Ground, which gets applied afterwards and is a Damage over Time effect, however it is NOT A POISON. (which means you are NOT interested)
This is so important to distinguish, because Poisons scale off your Weapon Physical and Chaos Damage, while the Caustic Ground scales more like a spell. This can be confusing for people when it comes to choosing your weapon, so here's the gist:
- Get as much Physical or Chaos weapon damage and attack speed on your Bow as possible, just like any other Bow Build.
- "+ to level of socketed Gems" is worthless, since it does not increase your Poison Damage at all.
Say it with me: The Caustic Ground does not exist as far as we are concerned. Ok, therapy session over.
2) NOT having 100% Chance to Poison
100% chance to poison is not something to just aspire to, it is mandatory and every % missing costs you a ton of damage. Your biggest source of chance to poison is Snakebite, which means keeping your Frenzy Charges up with Frenzy is a must at all times. Thankfully, having Swift Killer means that you have 200% increased Frenzy Charge Duration, making this incredibly comfortable.
Since your Build changes several times, you have to revisit your chance to poison whenever changing gear and make sure it is at 100%. You can check this by pressing "c" ingame and going to your Caustic Arrow setup!
There's also a ton of "chance to poison" on the Passive Tree, use the search function if needed!
Getting over 100% "chance to poison" has no effect whatsoever and is therefore useless.
3) Ignoring your Accuracy Rating
Caustic Arrow is an attack skill, therefore it adheres to Accuracy Rating. The amount of Accuracy you need to get 100% chance to hit depends on your Level and the enemies level. The only way to find out how much chance to hit you currently have, is on your character sheet by pressing "c" and select your Caustic Arrow setup.
You want to focus on Accuracy on Gear (Rings, Quiver and Helmet). If necessary Acuity and Precision can temporarily help out, but you want to remove them at endgame, since everything over 100% chance to hit is wasted!
4) Not using extra Life Flasks on Bosses
Before big boss fights, don't hesitate to put on extra Life Flasks. This, coupled with the Ryslatha Pantheon, ensures that you never run out of Life Recovery during prolonged fights!
Always keep a Quicksilver Flask though, since it allows you to get out of the way of boss mechanics quickly!