Spiral Volley Deadeye (Poison)

Live Update

Overview

Spiral Volley lives! The Skill just needed some time to ripen. Now it has become a fine Poison, ready to kill everything it touches!

This Build uses the Interaction between Resonance and Armour Break II / Armour Break III to generate Frenzy Charges for near-permanent Frenzy Charge Uptime. Bypassing the Delay and Situational Uptime of Frenzy Charge Generators like Combat Frenzy or Sniper's Mark.

This PoE2 Deadeye Bow Build is all content viable. However, due to its nature of being a Damage over Time (DoT) Build, Boss Fights can take a couple of Seconds and you will have to interact with the Boss Mechanics. [Truly as GGG intended].

The Build truly shines during Breaches, Abysses, and Rituals, where the Enemies are overlapping and Spiral Volley goes absolutely insane.

The Gameplay Loop for the Build is very simplistic. Fire Spiral Volley to clear the Screen of Enemies and Poisonburst Arrow for Rares or Bosses.

Adding a couple more Poison Skills, as well as High Evasion and Energy Shield, creates a truly amazing all-rounder.

Why Deadeye and not Pathfinder

To maintain a smooth Frenzy Charge Uptime, we want Avidity from the Deadeye Ascendancy and Gathering Winds is just straight up Broken.

Pathfinder would offer us +6 Passive Points and Free Herald of Plague, which is convenient, but not as good as Tailwind.

If we only focus on Bossing Overwhelming Toxicity is a good Argument for Pathfinder, but this is a Variant focused on Clear.

SSF Viability

This build is semi-SSF Viable. The best iteration of the Build relies on Original Sin however, earlier versions can use Plaguefinger to utilize Elemental Damage Rolls on Bow, Quiver, and Rings. For a pure SSF Start, only use Physical Rolls on Gear.

Level as

I rerolled from Lightning Arrow into this at Level 94. I have not looked into Poison Leveling yet. Let me know if you would prefer Poison Leveling over Lightning Arrow

Ranger Levelling for 0.3

Campaign Bonuses

• Medalion: Whatever
• Venom: Ailment Threshold
• Tattoos: Resistances
• Pillars: Movement Speed

Mapping

1. Use Spiral Volley
2. Hit Enemies
3. Enemies die to Poison and will generate new Frenzy Charges
4. Use Spiral Volley when you see Enemies at the Edge of your Screen
5. Clear Everything!

If anything survives Spiral Volley, like Proximity Enemies or Untargetable ones, use Poisonburst Arrow to kill them.

Bossing

1. Before Boss is Targetable
2. 1. Cast Toxic Domain
   2. Place Vine Arrow
2. As the Boss becomes Targetable
3. 1. Cast Despair
3. Killing Phase
4. 1. Circle the Boss, try to stay in Range for Withering Presence and in your Toxic Domain
   2. Fire Poisonburst Arrow
   3. Recast Vine Arrow and Toxic Domain as needed.

Spiral Volley

Spiral Volley is an absurd skill, which was overshadowed by Lightning Spear in 0.2.

Spiral Volley fires a lot of Projectiles in a Circle and has a decent base Damage Multiplier. To make it absurd, it can be empowered by Frenzy Charges. Whenever you use Spiral Volley, you consume all your Frenzy Charges and Spiral Volley gains 100% More Damage + 30% More Damage per Frenzy Charge consumed, and gains +1 Chain for each Frenzy Charge consumed.

This results in a Skill that on its own gains 4-5 Support Gems' worth of Damage by consuming 5 Frenzy Charges.

The Issue we face now is just how to generate the Frenzy Charges. Dreamy, a great buddy of mine, found a Way to generate close to permanent max Frenzy charges during Mapping.

Spiral Volley is a pure Physical Skill. By linking Armour Break III to Spiral Volley, we can strip enemies of their armour and generate an Endurance Charge when we do. Resonance converts the Endurance charge to a Frenzy Charge when gained. That then gets consumed by Spiral Volley to repeat the Loop. As a Poison Variant, we can add Corrosion to the Setup, which makes sure that the Enemies only Die after their Armour is broken, giving us more Chances for Charge Generation.

Poisonburst Arrow

Poisonburst Arrow is a Skill with 2 Steps. The first Step is a normal Projectile that can hit and crit. It needs Accuracy and poisons based on Poison Chance. The 2nd Step is a Poison Cloud that is guaranteed to Poison but cannot Crit. Modifiers to Bow Damage, Skill Effect Duration and Area Damage all affect the Poison Cloud.

Crit Fishing

To maximize Singel Target Damage, we can add some Crit to our Build, allowing the Hit Portion of Poisonburst Arrow to Crit and apply a Stronger Poison.

The Way poison works in PoE2 is that an infinite Amount of Poison can be applied to an Enemy, but only the X most Potent ones apply. By default, X is 1, but we can increase X in several Ways like Stacking Toxins or Escalating Poison.

If we invest in Critical Hit chance and Crit Damage Bonus, we keep stacking more and more Poisons on the Boss. And eventually, all our strongest Poisons are from Crits and do more damage. This is when our ramping Damage Caps. To make sure we can Crit Fish, we do need at least 3 Seconds of Duration on our Poisons, based on my Experience.

Vine Arrow

Vine Arrow applies a native DoT on nearby Enemies. We can amplify this DoT by poisoning the Vine Bloom with Poison Skills like Poisonburst Arrow.

This kind of allows us to Double Dip on our Poison, applying it to Damage directly and via the Vine Arrow.

Toxic Domain

Recently Added to the Game in 0.3 is Toxic Domain. This Skill increases the Cost of our Skills while on top of the Domain, but allows all our Skills to apply Toxic Postulates on Hit.

These Postule store the Poison we apply via Poisonburst Arrow and explode for up to 300% more Damage. We can link Long Fuse II to Toxic Domain without delaying the Damage of the Postules, as they will explode once storing enough Poison.

The Explosions can Poison again, helping us apply stronger Poisons on the Boss. The Postules of Toxic Domain are ~40% stronger than the ones from Toxic Growth.

Defense Layers

Our Setup uses Life, Evasion, Energy Shield and Deflect as Defense Layers.

• Scaling Flat Life from Gear
• Very High Evasion Rating with a High Eva. Body Armour and Beastial Skin
• • With 0.3 the Evasion we need to evade Hits got slightly increased, but we can now evade everything except Red Marked Attacks/Spells.
  • We further Scale our Evasion Rating with Gathering Winds and Wind Ward
• Deflect, based on our Evasion Rating
• • Deflect is another newly added Mechanic in 0.3, allowing a Chance to take Less Damage based on our Deflect Rating.
  • We gain Deflect Rating as a Secondary Stat from scaling Evasion Rating and the mod: % of Evasion Rating as Deflection Rating.
• Energy Shield from a High ES Helmet and Spectral Ward.
• • A good Secondary hit Pool
  • Which we can recover almost instantly with Ghost Dance, recovering a portion of Energy Shield based on our Evasion Rating

Evasion Rating

Evasion is not a flat Chance to dodge. Whenever a melee attack or projectile hits our character. Their Accuracy Rating is subtracted from our Evasion Rating Pool. When our Evasion Rating hits 0 or below, we will take the Damage from that hit, and our Evasion Rating resets to full.

The more Evasion Rating we have, the more time we have between hits.

03.09.2025 | Initial Write Up