Path of Exile’s 3.22 expansion brings with it another exciting build guide for players to explore, and this time we’re revisiting the explosive arrow build, which has made its return with a bang. In this guide, we will delve into the key aspects of this explosive arrow build, discussing its strengths,  gearing options, gameplay mechanics, and tips to ensure a smooth and powerful experience for both veterans and new players.

The Explosive Arrow Build: A Quick Overview

Explosive Arrow is a skill in Path of Exile that has managed to withstand the test of time, remaining a potent choice for players. Despite the changes and adjustments in different leagues, this build still shines, thanks in part to the Champion ascendancy’s bug fix that grants 10% more damage mitigation. This means Explosive Arrow is not only as good as it used to be but might even be better. So, what makes this build special, and why should you consider playing it? Let’s dive in.

The Explosive Arrow Experience

The Explosive Arrow build offers a gameplay experience with few downsides. While it might not deliver instant damage like some other builds, it offers a smooth and engaging playstyle. The core mechanic revolves around placing totems that ignite and explode, dealing massive damage to your enemies. As you traverse through maps, the process of setting up your totems becomes intuitive, and you’ll soon find yourself enjoying the thrill of causing fiery explosions while witnessing your enemies’ demise.

One of the unique features of this build is its versatility. Explosive Arrow allows you to take on all sorts of content, including endgame bosses like Uber Elder and other formidable challenges. While there are undoubtedly other builds that may excel in particular aspects, Explosive Arrow remains a robust and enjoyable choice for all-around gameplay.

Champion Ascendancy: The Backbone of Strength

The Champion ascendancy offers numerous benefits that make it an ideal choice for Explosive Arrow. It provides both defensive and offensive advantages, giving you the edge you need to face the many dangers of Wraeclast. Here’s how to make the most of the Champion ascendancy:

1. Master of Metal: This notable ascendancy point enhances your impale and offers powerful defensive options. With Master of Metal, your impales last for an extended duration, providing sustained damage increase. Moreover, you gain the ability to generate Adrenaline, which grants increased damage and movement speed, further bolstering your overall effectiveness.
2. Worthy Foe: Worthy Foe enhances your hit damage and the accuracy of your attacks, making you more effective in battle. It also applies an aura that reduces enemy evasion and ensures they cannot evade your hits. This is especially useful when dealing with evasive or high-accuracy foes.
3. First to Strike, Last to Fall: This ascendancy point offers significant bonuses to your damage and defenses. It provides Fortify, which reduces incoming damage, and cannot be overridden, making you sturdier in combat. Additionally, it enhances your Impale effect by 25%, further boosting your damage output.
4. Unstoppable Hero: Unstoppable Hero provides excellent crowd control immunity, a substantial boost to your movement speed, and adrenaline generation on hit. This makes it easier to navigate through challenging encounters while maintaining a consistent damage output.

Skill Tree and Leveling

Leveling the Explosive Arrow build remains largely unchanged in the 3.22 expansion. It is advisable to use Quill Rain as your primary weapon early on, allowing you to leverage its high attack speed to deal damage and ignite enemies. This choice helps you to progress efficiently through the early levels.

As you progress, you can switch to Explosive Arrow at level 28. At this stage, you’ll want to equip a short bow with additional attack speed to ensure smoother gameplay. The build encourages maximum attack speed, and it’s vital to understand that even minor changes in attack speed can significantly impact your damage output.

Explosive Arrow’s damage scales based on the number of fuses you have stored. It’s crucial to optimize your attack speed, skill effect duration, and the number of fuses to maximize your damage potential. Remember to maintain six totems to ensure efficient damage dealing, especially during boss fights. While you don’t need to use Infernal Cry for clearing content, it can be a useful tool when facing endgame bosses, such as Conquerors and Sirus, for igniting the enemy and amplifying your damage.

Passive Skill Tree and Natural Instinct

The passive skill tree for the Explosive Arrow build is a critical component of your character’s strength. It’s essential to focus on various aspects such as attack speed, damage, life, and defensive layers. For players who acquire the unique POE item “Natural Instinct,” a separate passive tree is recommended to address potential dexterity issues that may arise.

Path of Building

Path of Building is an invaluable tool for players looking to optimize their builds. It allows you to plan your skill tree, gear, and gem setup effectively, providing insights into your potential damage output and other character statistics. You can use this tool to fine-tune your Explosive Arrow build and ensure it performs at its best.

Elemental Equilibrium and Elemental Overload

Explosive Arrow relies on Elemental Equilibrium to maximize its damage potential. This means that you should aim to deal damage with cold, lightning, or both elements without any fire damage, as the initial hit from the arrow will trigger Elemental Equilibrium. This setup results in a -25% resistance debuff on the enemy, significantly enhancing your damage. Always ensure your gear and skill gems are configured to adhere to this elemental strategy.

Elemental Overload is another key element of this build. It provides a substantial damage boost when you critically strike an enemy. However, you must not use the “Precise Technique” passive skill node because it prevents you from landing critical strikes. Make sure to choose between Elemental Overload and Precise Technique, depending on your critical strike chance and preference.

Gem Setup and Utility Skills

The gem setup for Explosive Arrow is crucial to achieving optimal performance. Here are the key gems and links you should utilize:

1. Explosive Arrow: This is your primary skill gem, and you should prioritize obtaining a level 21/20 quality Explosive Arrow for maximum damage. Leveling up this gem and enhancing its quality are essential for increasing your overall damage output.
2. Frenzy: Linked with Life Tap, Blink Arrow, and Culling Strike, Frenzy serves as your primary mobility and life leech skill. Life Tap allows you to reserve life instead of mana for your Explosive Arrow, reducing the stress on your mana pool.
3. Infernal Cry: While not mandatory for clearing content, Infernal Cry can be valuable for difficult encounters, as it covers enemies in Ash, providing an additional damage boost.
4. Arcanist Brand (Flame Surge, Flammability): This setup allows you to apply the Flammability curse efficiently while automatically triggering Flame Surge, which deals additional damage to ignited enemies.
5. Cast When Damage Taken (Molten Shell, Vaal Molten Shell, Increased Duration, Life Tap): This utility setup provides a layer of defense and temporary protection when you take damage. Ensure that Flame Dash has a higher required level than level 38 to prevent it from being automatically cast by your Cast When Damage Taken setup.
6. Determination, Grace, Skitterbots, Malevolence: These auras are a significant part of your build, providing defense, offense, and utility. Determination and Grace offer additional armor and evasion, respectively. Skitterbots apply shocks and chills, while Malevolence boosts your damage output.

It’s essential to prioritize quality for your gems, and when using Malevolence, try to obtain a white socket, which is highly beneficial for this build.

Gearing Options and Corruptions

When it comes to gearing up your Explosive Arrow Champion, there are several key items and considerations:

1. Quill Rain: Early on, using Quill Rain is highly recommended. Its high attack speed will significantly improve your leveling experience.
2. Weapons: For your endgame setup, you’ll need a set of two weapons with Attack Speed and other relevant mods. These should be rare or magic, and you can craft them using a Rustic Sash and a Whetstone.
3. White Sockets: White sockets are crucial for this build, as they allow you to remove the mana requirement from your auras, particularly Malevolence. You can obtain white sockets by using the “Vorichi” bench option in your Syndicate Research safehouse. Keep Vorichi in Research to take advantage of this feature.
4. Jewels: Jewels play a significant role in your build’s customization. You can obtain various jewels with modifiers such as attack speed, burning damage, area damage, and more. The “Abyss” jewel, Embers, can be used to ignite nearby enemies, spreading your damage further.
5. Coralito’s Signature: Coralito’s Signature is a powerful flask for this build, as it boosts both damage and attack speed. This flask enhances your performance significantly and is highly recommended.
6. Watcher’s Eye: While not mandatory, having a Watcher’s Eye with useful modifiers like “Penetrates X% Fire Resistance while affected by Anger” can provide a substantial damage boost.
7. Crimson Jewels: For your late-game setup, you may need to utilize a rare Crimson Jewel with the modifier “10% increased Damage Over Time” to ensure the build’s maximum potential.
8. Dying Sun and Bottled Faith: These unique flasks can be beneficial to boost your build’s performance further. Dying Sun increases your arrow count and provides additional fire damage, while Bottled Faith increases the size of the explosion and offers bonus damage.
9. Daresso’s Salute: This unique amulet is useful for obtaining the Onslaught buff, which increases your attack speed and movement speed when you kill enemies.
10. Daddy in Dawn Belt: This unique belt provides a significant boost to your damage, making it a valuable addition to your build. While it can be challenging to obtain, it’s a worthy investment for maximum damage potential.
11. Catalyst Quality: Always aim to have Catalyst quality on your gear, focusing on either Elemental or Attack quality. This increases your damage and is a crucial part of the build’s effectiveness.
12. White Sockets: Make use of white sockets where possible, especially for Malevolence, to free up your mana pool and reserve life instead.

Awakened Gems

Path of Exile’s 3.22 expansion introduces a range of powerful awakened gems that can further enhance your Explosive Arrow build. While it’s not mandatory to use them, you can consider adding awakened gems to your setup for even more damage and effectiveness.

Some awakened gems to consider for your Explosive Arrow build include:

1. Awakened Elemental Damage with Attacks: This gem provides a significant damage boost to your Explosive Arrow.
2. Awakened Burning Damage: An excellent option for replacing Ignite Proliferation, this gem increases your damage output with burning damage and boosts the duration of your Ignites.
3. Awakened Hextouch Support: If you’re using a curse setup, this gem enhances the curse’s effectiveness by applying additional curses on hit.
4. Awakened Swift Affliction: Boosting damage over time effects, this gem can be valuable if you focus on the burn aspect of your build.
5. Awakened Swiftbrand Support: If you’re using the Arcanist Brand setup, this gem further enhances its power and duration.

Pantheon Choices

Choosing the right Pantheon gods can provide essential defensive benefits. For this Explosive Arrow build, consider the following Pantheon choices:

1. Brine King: This choice offers protection against stuns and allows you to avoid being stunned while you have been stunned recently, ensuring you maintain control in combat.
2. Arakaali: Arakaali’s Pantheon provides increased recovery of life and energy shield when you stop taking damage over time, which can be useful for regaining health between fights.

It’s also beneficial to upgrade your Pantheon gods to access their major and minor bonuses, which can further enhance your build’s effectiveness in various situations.

Conclusion

The Explosive Arrow Champion build is a powerful and enjoyable option for Path of Exile’s 3.22 expansion. Whether you’re a new player or a seasoned veteran, this build offers an engaging and versatile gameplay experience. The Champion ascendancy, skill tree, gem setup, and gear choices all come together to create a potent character that can take on a wide range of content, including the most challenging endgame bosses.

Keep in mind that there’s always room for customization and experimentation in Path of Exile, so feel free to adapt this guide to your playstyle and preferences. With the right knowledge, gear, and tactics, you can unleash the full explosive potential of this Champion build, fair use of Path Of Exile Currency, POE Orbs and items purchased at MMOexp and conquer the perils of Wraeclast. Enjoy your journey through the 3.22 expansion, and remember: in the ever-evolving world of Path of Exile, the path to power is yours to forge.