I always liked Explosive Arrow Ballista. But honestly, old builds bored me and I wanted to make something totally new, especially after I saw the unique helmet Wilma’s Requital. I also wanted to make something really fast that could farm content easily.

As a result, I chose Raider with Wilma’s Requital. I also decided to make a non-ignite version because I always was curious about what it could do. So, if you like Explosive Arrow but you’re done with Elementalist or Champion, then maybe my build is exactly what you were looking for.

Build Overview

I will start my overview with the most important thing, which is DPS in my build. I managed to get 26 million, which is quite good. Also, this is not a super optimized build. So, in theory, you can increase the DPS even more.

As for defense, we have 26,000 Evasion rating and 13,000 Armour and that’s without flasks. On top of that, we have over 4,000 Life and 500 Energy Shield with Ghost Dance and of course 100% chance to Suppress Spell Damage. So, my build is a pretty good defense on top of good DPS and the cherry on the cake is our speed. We are very fast, which makes the game comfortable dynamic and allows you to farm content very quickly.

Also, I would like to say a few words about my choice of ascendancy because many of you may be surprised that I chose Raider. Personally, I love Raider especially as a league starter choice because it gives us a quality of life that makes starting a league very comfortable.

We get a plus 40% chance to Suppress Spell Damage, permanent phasing and Onslaught with increased effect. Also, we have Elemental Exposure and we can easily get 100% chance to avoid Elemental Ailments. All ascendancy have their pros and cons and if you haven’t played Raider before, I highly recommend it. Maybe you will like it like me and change your negative opinion about it.

Build Showcase

A lot of people think that non-ignite Explosive Arrow has a very bad mapping speed because we don’t have Ignite Proliferation. But frankly, that’s not entirely true.

As for single target damage, this build won’t have much trouble with bosses.

Next, I want to tell you why I’m using Blast Rain in this build. We need this skill to cover enemies and ash on hit because Anomalous Blast Rain gives us a chance to do it. Polaric Devastation is usually used to get this effect.

But I decided to test a budget tech because at the beginning of the league, Polaric Devastation will cost a few Divine Orbs and Anomalous Blast Rain can be bought for a couple dozen Chaos Orbs. So, this might be a good option at the beginning of the league until we’ve farmed some POE Currencies for a unique ring.

Although we can keep Blast Rain in endgame gear because it will allow us to use a very good rare ring in our build, which will be much better than Polaric Devastation.

Gear And Items

First of all, you need to purchase Wilma’s Requital because it is a key item in the build. We use Haste and we also have permanent Onslaught with 100% increased effect, which gives us a lot of extra attack speed, which is exactly what we need for an Explosive Arrow to maximize our damage.

Skin of the Lord with Elemental Overload and 6-Link Bow with +1 to Level of Socketed Gems and +2 to Level of Socketed Bow Gems should be your top priority because these are our main sources of damage. We need the Skin of the Lord to get the important Keystone Elemental Overload and to increase our defense. Also, in the future, it will allow us to turn level 3 Enlighten into level 5, which will allow us to use a lot of our auras.

In POE 3.21, a new Mastery was added to the game: 15% increased maximum Life if there are no Life Modifiers on Equipped Body Armour, which is perfect for us and makes Skin of the Lord the ideal choice for us.

Rain of Splinters is a must-have item for us, so I recommend saving up POE Currency to purchase this Unique Jewel. In POE 3.21, the developers slightly redesigned the skill tree and now we have access to additional projectile, so Master Fletcher and Multishot will be a good option until you purchase a Rain of Splinters.

Next, we’ll need to purchase clusters: two large (Rapture Hope), two mediums (Eagle Spark & Bramble Star) and one small (Ghoul Bliss).

And finally, let’s add Forbidden Flesh and Forbidden Flame with Avatar of the Chase. Thread of Hope with a large radius gives us access to good options and it can be a great addition to this build. You’ll need some really good items to compensate for the minus to all Elemental Resistances and, of course, the price. I have a strong feeling that Thread of Hope is going to cost a lot of Divine Orbs in Path of Exile Crucible.

Many of you are looking at all these items and thinking how to start the league on this build when you need so many expensive items for it.

First of all, these items are not expensive and some of them you can easily purchase on the first days. Secondly, it’s endgame gear, which you will purchase step by step.

And considering the fact that Explosive Arrow Ballista is a good league starter, even with cheap gear, you will have about two to three million DPS. That’s enough damage for Atlas completion, getting your Voidstones and farming POE Currency to improve your build further. That’s probably all the important information about the items.

Leveling

As for leveling for this character, I recommend the following tips:

From level 1, start with Caustic Arrow.

At level 12, change Caustic Arrow to Rain of Arrows and add Shrapnel Ballista for single target damage.

At level 28, we get access to Explosive Arrow and, in theory, we can already use it. But I’d recommend waiting till you find the right 4-Link and also it would be good to level up your gems a bit.

At the same time, we still use Rain of Arrows because it’s a very good skill to use until the end of the campaign. After you go to the white maps, you can only use Explosive Arrow Ballista as your main damage skill.

This is a top tier league starter for POE 3.21 Crucible League. It is speedy. It is tanky, and it has proven itself in the last Gauntlet Spark Tricksters. I’ve heard about all the players to discover it’s pretty bad now right turns out it isn’t and here’s why.

Changes In POE 3.21

First, Spark lost one early-on projectile on paper. This looks bad, but if you understand that, this build shreds through bosses even while leveling in the Gauntlet. You know that losing one projectile doesn’t make a real difference in the regular game.

Second, the skilled space projectile speed was also lowered and while you were probably noticing the nerf with other Ascendancies, Trickster has access to so much projectile and action speed that you will barely notice this.

But we don’t have access to a 25% increased Mana Reservation Efficiency for Grace. This makes the build unplayable, right? It doesn’t. Because we now have access to 12% global reservation efficiency on the new Mana Mastery, which is a net gain of one percent unreserved Mana in this build.

But doesn’t the nerved Molten Shell will let you die all the time? Good catch, but no. While other builds reach shiny defensive numbers and PoB only by abusing Molten Shell, this build already has a very decent defensive baseline and only relies on Molten Shell for emergencies.

How Does It Work?

Let’s look at how the build works and what it’s good for. It’s pretty simple, even a bit dull. You can’t spark maybe even precasted in boss encounters. Fill the area with Sparks and everything dies.

Tornado and Sniper’s Mark are your best buddies here because they let you produce much more projectiles easily with a lot of clear speed, projectile speed and skill duration you produce as many projectiles as possible while also keeping them alive as long as possible.

Why is this important? Because when a Spark projectile bounces off an obstacle, for example, a wall, you can hit your target again, producing something like a Shotgun effect. Other than that, you also slap on a bunch of auras.

What Is The Build Good At?

Now, you got yourself a pretty decent league starter, but what type of content is it good for?

Obviously, you want to have a good build for the type of content you want to engage with. Spark Trickster is an extremely good mapper and a decent buzzer.

Also Read: Path Of Exile: The Clearance Tutorial Of The Maven's Questline

However, it really shines in mapping and narrow map layouts. If you plan to play content that synergize with these layouts, for example Abyss, Harbinger, Ritual, Blight or Expedition, start with this build. Me and my friend are planning to abuse a party variation of it as we’ve cooked up a very spicy Delirium Abyss and Breach strategy.

The only thing I don’t recommend this build for is if you want to farm Legion as you want to be farming Legions in very open layouts, which both characters usually clear much better.

Leveling

There’s not much to say about leveling except that you want to be using Stormblast Mine in the very beginning and swap to Spark as soon as you get it in Act 1.

The leveling skills and also step-by-step leveling trees can be found in the PoB. And if you want to level up faster, using your POE Currency will be a good choice. Once you’ve reached maps, there are a couple of Unique items that you can abuse to boost your experience early on.

There are two items that are particularly powerful: the Singularity Sceptre and the Karui Ward Amulet. The first one grants a ridiculous amount of damage and the second one makes you and your Spark projectiles even faster.

If you feel like you need more sustenance, you might also be giving the Immortal Flesh belt a try. And me and my friend will abuse the Soul through spells early on for our strategy.

The arrival of Path of Exile Crucible is a fresh start in a new economy for all Exilers. There’s an unprecedented opportunity to get rich quick. Among all POE Currencies, Divine Orbs can be said to be very important. With enough Divine Orbs, you can exchange on pieces of gear or any items you are interested in. So, how can we farm lots of Divine Orbs?

1. Harvest Lifeforce Farming

Whether it is late league or early league of POE 3.21, Harvest Lifeforce has several uses. Early on in the league, I just sell them for Divine Orbs to get a start. Later on, I use them to re-roll Essences, Scarabs and Fossils. This depends on the selling price of these items and their respective Lifeforce.

In my opinion, at midleague, 5600 yellow is fair enough price for one Divine Orb. In case of an emergency where I need a Divine Orb to get an item on trade, I just sell my Lifeforce.

In POE 3.21, the value of Essences are at the peak because there is no Essence mod in the map device. I collect all kinds of Essences and then max them.

Then, I re-roll them using Harvest to get the most valuable ones, especially the one which gives men a reservation efficiency on helmets. You have to be careful not to spend too much Juice on this. If you get the attribute Essence, that's a fine one, too.

2. Black Scythe And Knights Expedition

When you are starting a new league, Tujen is the best source of filling up your currency tab with anything you need. Eventually, he could roll a few Divine Orbs in very unlikely a Mirror Shard.

The reason why Burial Medallion is most valuable is because one Denning re-roll can give you multiple other re-rolls of Exotic Coinage and even Expedition Maps. This will always remain the best league mechanic to farm POE Currency.

3. Collecting Stacked Decks

Collect Stacked Decks at high levels. Do not buy them and do not sell them. Get it yourself from level 85 plus Tujen, high level Heist or maps. When you open them, have at least 200, so the chances are very good.

This has always been one of the best guaranteed currency farming strategies for me personally.

4. Eldritch Altar Farming

Make sure to grab all the Eldritch nodes from the Atlas, including the Keystone Passives. This is free Chaos Orbs for an ouch and go strategy. If you are lucky while doing the blue ones, you could even get an Altar, which gives Divine Orbs.

When choosing which one to do, I recommend doing the one which is opposite to your build type. For example, if your build is Fire or Chaos based, do the blue one. If your build is Cold or Lightning, do the red one. In my opinion, both are equally rewarding.

5. Jun And Alva Master Missions

These are the two best Master Missions that can earn you at least for Divine Orbs for every couple of maps you run. Choose one which is good for your build. This requires a basic defense and good clearing speed, too.

I had a good start in this league because Devouring Diadem was selling for three Divine Orbs and I was farming the Syndicate until it lost its value.

A tip to note is that: if you run Jun missions on lower levels, then the Syndicate boss is highly likely to drop this unique helmet, the key things to get from Jun and Aisling and it that fled in research. Provisions in intervention and hillock in either of the other two. The key rooms to get from Alva Temple are the Locus of Corruption and Doryani's Institute. If the selling price is low, just run them yourself.

6. Current League Mechanic

GGG will always set the best rewards at the new league mechanic. This time, the league mechanic is very rewarding if you have a build that can run it completely. It's easy once you get used to it, and this is the best opportunity to make a lot of Divine Orbs.

An honorable mention here is, the Crucible Challenge League. Challenge leagues are a great opportunity for a fresh start in a new economy. Actively participate in the league, you can get enough rewards and collect items and gems with high value. You can sell them later for Divine Orbs.

7. Double Corrupting Medium Value Items And Gems

Yes, this is huge. I mean very huge. You can make from 10 to 80 Divine Orbs easily in one good double corrupted chest piece. So, why is this not gambling? You may ask.

Because our strategy involves double corrupting items that are less than three Divine Orbs, while we have already made at least 10 Divine Orbs.

8. Farming 6-Links - Sextants

So, the key to this strategy is sextants, specifically these two sextants, the “unique monsters drop corrupted items” and the “beyond” sextant. So the way this farm works is that unique monsters will drop corrupted items, which have a chance of being six linked items, that we can vendor. Beyond spawns tons of unique monsters if you do it on double beyond and on a super juiced map. So, the idea here is we're going to try to spawn as many unique beyond monsters as possible, and then get six links off of them.

To that end, we are juicing the map up with some really valuable scarabs, some gilded harbinger scarabs, gilded breech, gilded ambush, and then just a rusted blight. Because blight adds so many mobs, you can get tons of unique beyond bosses off of this and we'll be running a map with beyond already on it other than that, the other two sections for me, I'm running mirror of delirium on my sextant so that I can pick some extra juice to add more monsters to the map on the Atlas device itself.

You could replace this with some juice and then pick the delirium modifier on the Atlas device. And I'm just running this sextant because I had a bunch of them to add some juice. Any juice sextant that'll add monsters to the map is good here.

So, this is something I always do from the mid-league till the end of the Crucible League. If you think the above method of farming Divine Orbs is too time-consuming and labor-intensive, you may wish to get some directly from here.

GGG just announced the name of the POE 3.21, which is also the name of the league – Crucible. Accompanying the reveal was a short teaser video. I want to go over this teaser and speculate a bit about what this league may be like.

My initial thoughts are that this looks to me like a crafting league. A “Crucible” is a tool used in forging and metalsmithing, and we can see some sort of giant anvil in the center of this room. All of this is just screams “crafting”.

However, “Crucible” also has another meaning-a crucible is a type of trial, and is often used by video games to describe arena-style combat. I believe that this double-meaning was 100% intentional by GGG. As such, I expect this to be a crafting league that has some sort of combat component – perhaps directly tied into the crafting of the item.

What Might That Look Like?

Well, I’m imagining a mix between Rog crafting, and Ultimatum. Where you fight ever-increasingly difficult waves, and your reward for clearing that wave is you get to use another craft. If you fail a wave, the craft ends, or perhaps you lose the item entirely – adding a risk/reward element to crafting.

It could, of course, be far simpler than that. Pretty much all crafting mechanics have some sort of combat mechanic to them after all – you might just kill extra monsters in maps to get some sort of metal currency that you use at the forge to craft items, for example.

However, let’s take a closer look at the area shown in this video. There’s no waypoint, and no portal. The lack of a waypoint implies it’s not a zone you can travel to whenever you wish, like the Menagerie or Azurite Mine, and the lack of a Portal means it isn’t a map, either. That could mean that it’s an in-map sub-zone, like an Incursion or a Sanctum room, but… honestly, that doesn’t quite fit.

The room with the anvil doesn’t seem quite big enough to have combat encounters – you would have far less room to maneuver than even a Ritual. My guess is that this is a zone like the Menagerie, and they just deleted the waypoint for the purposes of this trailer. After all, the area the exile starts out looks like the perfect size for a waypoint.

Where Does That Leave Us?

I’m predicting an in-map mechanic that gets you the resources you need for some novel new crafting mechanic. As for predictions about this new mechanic itself, I have two ideas:

*The first is that this could be the return of Recombinators, in a new form. This new crafting mechanic could take the idea of slamming two items together, and have new ways to manipulate the outcome – building an entire crafting mechanic around it.

Recombinators were incredibly popular, and incredibly healthy for the game and its economy. It wouldn’t surprise me if GGG recognized that, and decided to bring back the mechanic in a way that would be a pillar of POE crafting going forwards.

*My second idea, is that this could involve GGG borrowing some crafting ideas from Last Epoch, another ARPG which recently released its multiplayer beta.

For those who aren’t familiar, Last Epoch has a crafting system that allows you to easily use powerful, deterministic crafts – not unlike original Harvest in POE – with the tradeoff that POE Currency have a certain amount of “crafting potential”, that depletes by a random amount with each craft.

It’s a pretty neat system, and could fit into POE nicely as an alternate way to craft items. I can definitely see GGG taking inspiration from it and making a league mechanic built around those ideas.

Related: Latest Thoughts On Crucible Expansion In Path Of Exile 3.21

Regardless of what Crucible turns out to be, I’m really excited that it looks like it’s going to be a crafting league. My all-time favorite leagues are all crafting leagues – Synthesis, Harvest, Sentinel… and I’m hopeful that Crucible may join them as an all-time great.