Since I spent some time yesterday talking about my Righteous Fire Chieftain, I figured I would talk this morning about some improvements I have been making to my high survival magic find mapping character, my Lightning Arrow Champion. I had first played a version of Lightning Arrow at the end of Crucible as a test for a league start and then started a Raider variant for Ancestor league. I just did not like how little survival the character had and wound up retooling it late in the league into a Champion variant. When it came to rolling a second character in our private league I went with the Champion variant again because I knew I could make it work on almost no gear and that it would have quite a bit of survival. Since it only really needed two unique items it would be extremely flexible when it came to whatever gear I happened to find. As soon as we found our first Perseverance and a pair of Shadows and Dust I knew I was good to go and just needed to half-ass my way into a tri-element bow.
The biggest change that I needed to make was getting a better bow and more specifically a bow that fired an additional arrow. Similarly, I wanted to get a quiver that also fired an additional arrow… which would then in turn allow me to drop Greater Multiple Projectiles from the support gems and get a significant damage boost as a result of that alone. I found a reasonable 1200 dps bow from trade that had pretty much everything I wanted on it and given the prevalence of folks doing magic find lightning arrow the price was only 10 Divines. The quiver was significantly cheaper but I specifically needed a couple of resistance hits on it to maintain elemental caps. Essentially dropping GMP I still fire 6 arrows and said arrows pierce 4 targets… making the entire process feel pretty great.
The other major thing that I needed was to swap Artillery Ballista into my chest piece and get an actual six link for that. By the time we were swimming in six-links, my appetite for fiddling with gear on this particular character was at a minimum. Basically, I had been running Artillery Ballista as a four-link in my gloves and had a whole series of nonsense Mana Forged Arrows abilities firing off in a five-link chest. In the final form, I moved the rest of my utility abilities to the gloves and used that opportunity to pick up a good corrupt with some additional attack speed, and then added Culling Strike to my Artillery Ballista link since I was losing access to it via Mana Forged Arrows which now only fires Frenzy.
As far as Magic Find goes…. I am really not going too far off the path to make that happen. During my copious amount of farming, I lucked into two relatively well-rolled Ventor’s Gamble rings. Apart from that I just happened to roll a helmet with +19% rarity on it giving me a total of +15% Quantity and +70% Rarity. It is not a ton and nowhere near as much as the folks who are sacrificing damage and defense to stack every last drop of it… but enough to feel like you are sticking your thumb on the scale from time to time. Since my Lightning Arrow Champion is a mapper and does nothing else, it seemed easy enough to integrate this much into the build. The biggest change I would make to the character would be to drop perseverance and pick up a Headhunter… but I doubt that will happen unless I get a windfall.
As far as the character goes, here is what the stats look like. You can also check out my POB over on POE.Ninja. I am pretty happy with the current state of this character. Last league, I attempted to make the Tornado Shot shift and I just did not like it anywhere near as much. I might try that again given it is mostly just swapping some gem links around, but I am not sure I will like it any better than I did previously. For now, this is the character that I use to burn through maps and get sulfite so that I can feed the delving on my Righteous Fire Chieftain. While I can do juiced T16s… the bosses end up taking longer than I would prefer so I am probably going to keep sticking to the t11 Cemetary and t12 Tropical Island sequence that I have been doing up to this point.
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