Learn how to progress your gear, important Milestones, Budget Items, Earlygame, Endgame & Crafting for the Caustic Arrow Poison Ballista Trickster Build.
Milestones
The Item Progression in Path of Exile is not as rigid as in most other games. Unique Items can provide easy upgrades early, but overall your gear mostly consist of Rare Items. This means that flexibility is key. The game won't always give you exactly the item you are looking for, so you need to adapt. Even if small upgrades seem insignificant, the sum of them decides whether your character fails or succeeds.
If you want full context to everything, watch my fully detailed Video Guide on Youtube as well. It is linked at the end of the article! You can also check out my stream on twitch.tv/palsteron and ask me questions or simply hang out!
To make itemization less confusing, there are no Resistances on Rare Items anywhere. You can get them wherever you want and they do not have to be on specific items. Resistances are incredibly important though, DO NOT forget about them when choosing which items to craft or buy! Make sure to check your Reistances in your Character Sheet (C, Defense Tab) whenever you switch your gear around.
Early Game Goal
Our goal in the early game are to establish your skill setups by socketing, linking and colouring your gear appropriately and to start leveling our Gems.
Since you are wearing "Act Gear" at this point, you need to focus on upgrades to get your necessary Attribute Requirements and cap your Resistances.
Milestone 1 - Get decent Rare Gear
After the campaign, you encounter a steep difficulty increase, which becomes a problem unless you upgrade your sub-optimal gear into something more appropriate. This is where random currency you dropped during the campaign comes in. Spend all Chaos Orbs you have on gear upgrades so you can progress through the game.
You are looking for Life on every single gear piece, as well as enough Resistances to cap them at 75%.
A good trick to get some Life on your items is using: Screaming Essence of Greeds on items that are already appropriately linked and coloured.
Look out for Accuracy on Gloves, Rings or on your Quiver and make sure you have 100% chance to hit at all times in the character sheet.
Note: Your Accuracy decreases with levels since enemies get stronger, so going for more Accuracy rather than less pays off later.
Milestone 2 - Get your Sockets, Colours and Links in order!
After you have some starter gear, make sure you can use all your Gems. You need to use your Jeweller's Orbs, Orb of Fusings and Chromatic Orbs to adjust your items appropriately. Use the Skill Gem Section to check if you have the right colours on your items!
Milestone 3 - Mark of Submission
Mark of Submission is simply incredible. It's cheap, easy to use and applies one of your Curses automatically, giving you more time to place Ballistas or dodge enemy attacks. The Curse of choice is Despair, which you socket into the Ring! Other sources of automatic cursing significantly reduce the power of your Curse, because they only triggers a Level 1 version of it. Mark of Submission makes it possible for you to apply a FULLY LEVELED Despair with Quality, making it a must-have to beat highly resistant enemies, even in lategame scenarios!
Milestone 4 - Tabula Rasa
Getting an early six-link can be expensive, but Tabula Rasa provides a cheaper solution. Going from a 4-link to a 6-link almost doubles your damage, and is a complete game changer. It does not have any defensive mods however, so until you replace it you'll be a lot weaker defensively. In order to get the Currency to buy a Tabula Rasa, use the Chaos Orb Recipe or farm some Heists.
Milestone 5 - Flasks
Next up, inspect your flasks and see if they are adequate for the content you are farming. The base flasks you want at this point are:
- Eternal Life Flask
- Divine Life Flask
- Quicksilver Flask
- Quartz Flask
- Jade Flask
Use Orb of Transmutations, Orb of Alterations and Orb of Augmentations to craft some important Suffix mods onto your 3 utility flasks:
- Increased Attack Speed during Flask effect
- Increased Evasion during Flask effect
- Increased Movement Speed during Flask effect
For Life Flasks you want your Life Flask to have extra Amount Recovered, similar to this one: Saturated Divine Life Flask of the Cure. This increases Poisonous Concoctions damage, for more Info on that, check out the Skill Gem Section!
Milestone 6 - The Big Respec
Here is what you need in order to change from Poisonous Concoction to Caustic Arrow:
- A crafted Bow like this: New Item, which is made by applying a Shrieking Essence of Envy on a Bow, preferably a Thicket basetype. Use Essences until you get a good mixture of mods, including any sort of Physical Damage, Attack Speed or Damage over Time Multiplier, then finish it on the Crafting Bench! (depending on what you are missing on the weapon after Crafting).
- Snakebite Gloves. Be sure that you can make up for the stats you lose from replacing your current gloves! (Accuracy, Resistances)
- A Rain of Splinters Jewel
- Respec your Passive Skill Tree accordingly (Passive Tree Section)
- Redo the Gems & Colours of your Gear accordingly (Skill Gem Section)
After this, try out your new setup in an easy environment (for example A9 Blood Aqueducts), to check for mistakes before you get back to mapping!
Milestone 7 - Doedre's Damning
Your default Curse limit on enemies is 1. This first Curse was Despair, which you apply with the Mark of Submission you bought earlier. However, in order for us to use Temporal Chains, which almost doubles our damage against bosses, you need to get your Curse limit to 2.
This is where Doedre's Damning comes in. Its stats are not great, but it gets the job done for now! In case this Unique is for some reason expensive, your alterative is Windscream.
Mid Game Goal
This is where you try to get your gear ready to reach Red Maps and tackle some of the harder content Path of Exile has to offer.
You are focusing on defences like Spell Suppression and try to further increase your damage with Uniques and clever gearing choices.
Milestone 1 - Replacing Withering Touch Support
The Wither Debuff has very few origin sources. One of the necessary evils to get it is sacrificing a Support Gem for Withering Touch Support. However, one of the biggest strengths of Caustic Arrow is that it has 2 alternative ways of getting Wither, opening up a Support Gem Slot for Unbound Ailments Support.
Either one of these will do:
- The Caustic Arrow Helmet Enchant granting % chance to inflict withered for 2 seconds on hit. You can buy this enchant here
- The Quality of the Anomalous Caustic Arrow, which grants % chance to inflict withered for 2 seconds on hit. You can buy this Gem here
Depending on when you are starting this build and how the economy turns out, either of these could be cheap or expensive. Later on, you'd prefer the Anomalous Gem Quality so you can use your Helm Enchant for increased Caustic Arrow Damage, but for now... beggars can't be choosers!
Milestone 2 - Reevaluate your Accuracy
You now face harder enemies than before. Look at your Caustic Arrow in the character tab (C, Offense) and figure out whether your Accuracy still holds up.
If you don't see 100% "Main Hand Chance to Hit", that is something you need to fix (ignore the "Chance to Hit Evasive Monsters", you don't need 100% there).
Things that can help you with Accuracy problems are:
- The Precision aura, if you have free Mana for it (it increases Mana Reservation with levels).
- On your gear, look for + to Accuracy Rating on Rings, Amulet and Quiver . You won't need all of these to have enough Accuracy, just 2-3 of them.
- You can apply Abrasive Catalysts to your Jewelry to increase Attack Modifiers by up to 20%, which includes + to Accuracy Rating. This can give you a small edge if you are only missing 2-3% chance to hit.
Milestone 3 - Spell Suppression Gear
Once you progress your Atlas far enough, enemies become more dangerous, especially everything that deals Spell Damage. This is where Spell Suppression comes in. Whenever you Suppress Spell Damage, you take 50% less damage from that source. This means at 100% chance to Suppress Spell Damage, you only take half damage from all spell sources. You can get Spell Suppression from:
- Gear, notably Gloves, Boots and Body Armour.
- On the Passive Skill Tree, by taking Magebane, Reflexes and Quickstep.
- Eldritch Implicit on Gloves.
You can delay this step if you feel comfortable as is, just make sure to come back to this milestone once the difficulty curve catches up to you!
Milestone 4 - Decent Rare Amulet with Anoint
At this point, you want to invest into a decent amulet, so you can anoint it without wasting currency.
The stats you are looking for are (in order of importance):
- % Damage over Time Multiplier
- + to maximum Life
- + to Accuracy
After that, it's mostly about getting extra useful stats that you might be lacking like Strength, Intelligence or various Resistances. Try to get an Agate Amulet to help with your Attribute needs!
Next, go to Cassia in your hideout and anoint Corruption which increases your damage massively! To do this, you need 2 Black Oils and 1 Crimson Oil.
Milestone 5 - Check your Gear for Weaknesses
At this point, you are moving into big and expensive endgame upgrades, so make sure you don't have any gear pieces that could be easily upgraded. Resistance , Spell Suppression and Accuracy should be capped at this point and should be checked after you shuffle your gear around!
If you need help evaluating what stats are important, check out the example items outlined above!
End Game Goal
Now that your character is properly geared for endgame, there's still the big and expensive upgrades left. These take you from an "ok endgame build" to a "monster slaying machine". (no NPCs were harmed during the testing of this build)
To be able to follow Endgame Milestones, definitely check out the Meta Section to be up to date about currency-making in the current league, you are going to need it!
Milestone 1 - The Covenant
The Covenant is the single most important upgrade in this build. It straight up almost TRIPLES your damage, with little to no downside. However, it's ridiculous power comes with a corresponding price tag, making this a hard item to afford for newer players. You can't skip it though, so check out our guides on how to make currency here.
The Covenant completely transforms this build into a monster. Make sure you remove the Added Chaos Damage Support and replace it with Deadly Ailments Support! This is because multiple instances of Added Chaos Damage Support do not stack!
Milestone 2 - The Covenant AGAIN
Yes, The Covenant is important enough to make another Milestone about it. Looks goofy but it's my guide, try and stop me!
Milestone 3 - Darkscorn
Darkscorn is your best in slot endgame Bow. It's pretty simple why, it has a ton of damage, Accuracy and on top of everything, it even makes you tankier with the 25% of Physical Damage taken as Extra Chaos Damage. This mod, paired with increased Chaos Resistance, makes it so you take less Physical Damage. However, if your Chaos Resistance is negative, this is actually be a downside. So make sure that you have at least 40% Chaos Resistance and try to go even higher as your Gear progresses!
Milestone 4 - Awakened Support Gems
Awakened Gems are strictly better versions of their normal counterparts, but also more expensive since they can't be bought from a vendor.
First, Awakened Deadly Ailments Support replaces Deadly Ailments Support.
Secondly, Awakened Unbound Ailments Support replaces Unbound Ailments Support.
Note: Make sure that your Gems have quality by applying Gemcutter's Prism to them. This is especially important on your Caustic Arrow setup!
Milestone 5 - Snakebite with Temporal Chains Corruption
So far, you've been casting Temporal Chains normally, which is inefficient but effective. With enough Currency however, that inefficiency can go away. You can get a corruption on your Snakebite that gives you automatic application of the Curse. This gives you an extra Gem Slot to play around with, as well as having Temporal Chains always up automatically, even while mapping. Your Ballistas count for this Curse application.
Milestone 6 - Cluster Jewel Setup
In order to get more out of our Passive Skill Tree, we expand it with Cluster Jewels.
We need: 1xLarge Cluster Jewel with % increased Chaos Damage and 1xMedium Cluster Jewel with % increased Totem Damage.
The Large Cluster Jewel should have 8 Passives and exactly the following mods:
- 2 Prefixes: Unwaveringly Evil and Unholy Grace
- 1 Suffix: Dark Ideation
The Medium Cluster Jewel should have Sleepless Sentries on it. This gives you permanent Onslaught, which increases both your Movement and Attack Speed. Try to get one of the following mods on top if you can, listen in order of strength: Snaring Spirits, Ancestral Echo or Ancestral Reach.
Milestone 7 - Start Filling out your Jewels
Jewels are strong endgame items that are slotted into your Passive Tree. On this build in particular, you have extremely strong Passive Tree Nodes, so you don't need to rush Jewels early. But the time has come, here are the mods you are looking for, in order of importance:
- Increased Maximum Life
- Increased Attack Speed with Bows
- Increased Damage with Poison
- Increased Chaos Damage over Time Multiplier / Damage over Time Multiplier
- Increased Damage over Time/Attack Speed
Milestone 8 - Last Upgrades
You have now reached a point where most of the obvious upgrades are done, so it's time to look at the smaller things you might have missed along the way and bring them in order. However, since Path of Exiles gearing system is complex and most questions are answered with: "it depends", the following points should only serve as guidance:
- Check all the Rare Example Gear in the endgame section and try to get the stats outlined or as close as possible.
- Get a Taste of Hate to take less Physical Damage.
- Spell Suppression has to be at 100%, always.
- Upgrade your Life Values on gear.
- Increase the Quality on your Rings and Amulet by applying Catalysts to them (depending on your needs).
- Have 20% quality on all your Gems.
You've reached the end of our Milestones, congratulations!
Every upgrade beyond this point is not simple enough to serve you in a static format like this. This is because most of your upgrades going forward heavily depends on the choices you made. However, that doesn't mean that your journey ends here. If you want to go further, check out other people's versions of the build on poe.ninja. They give great insights and new creative ideas! Wish you good luck on the rest of your journey!