Level 95 Explosive Arrow Totem Ascendant^3.16

Notes

> PLAYSTYLE <
> Clear <
For clear you just place down ballistas and run.
Some potential tech you can use is having a weapon swap 6L Explosive Arrow setup in a Quill Rain. Normally I'd never recommend Quill Rain, but for clear the dps loss shouldn't matter, and it'll make stacking much faster.

> Bossing <
You can start a fight by having all your totems up and ready, then as soon as the boss is targetable use your infernal cry and press focus.
During the fight you want to keep to your totem limit all the time. You also want to use your frenzy setup to keep frenzy charges up.
Only when you have time for it you want to cast your Arcanist Brand, this is the lowest priority since it's a little unreliable on bosses that move anyway.

> LEVELING <
This is pretty smooth leveling with arma brand + cremation. You can switch to Explosive Arrow early, but because of how good this combo is I wouldn't recommend it.

> Level 1-28 <
use Orb of Storms + Stormblast Mine + Frost Bomb. Make sure to use the following recipe to craft weapons:
You can sell a Magic Wand with a Topaz Ring and an Alteration Orb to get a wand with flat lightning damage to spells. This is very nice for damage early on.
The tier of flat damage depends on the rarity of the RING you use:
- Normal Rarity = lvl 8 requirement
- Magic Rarity = lvl 14 requirement
- Rare Rarity = lvl 20 requirement

> Level 28-50 <
Use Arma Brand(linked to prolif, onslaught and combustion) + Cremation(linked to ele focus, gmp(when you can) and fire pen). Use wands made using the recipe above, but use a Ruby ring for fire damage instead.

> Level 50+ <
Switch to Explosive Arrow. Consider swapping out Lesser Multiple Projectiles for Faster Attacks on bosses, so you get more stacks.
Only start using ignite prolif if you have the links for it and your ignite chance is nice, otherwise it's kind of wasted.

> WHY NOT ELEMENTALIST? <
While Elementalist is the highest damage ascendancy for this build, it lacks defenses and starts at a pretty awkward position on the tree to get more defenses.
One of the reasons Elementalist is strong is also because of stuff like Blizzard Crown and the Fire Gained As Chaos craft on a +3 bow which will be relatively hard to get in a SSF environment(it scales much more with gear in general).
Elementalist is definitely a valid option too, and if you want to maximize damage you should look into it, but with new bosses being added that we don't know the mechanics of yet I'd definitely prefer the Champion or Hierophant version to learn those mechanics.

> WHAT IF I DON'T HAVE RAIN OF SPLINTERS? <
Rain of Splinters is really good for clear, but it's not absolutely required.
If you feel like your clear is really bad without it you can consider using Lesser or Greater Multiple Projectiles for clear and swapping it with Swift Affliction or Hypothermia on bosses(replace Inspiration or Ignite Prolif).

> GETTING BOW COLORS <
Ideally we need 5 off-colors on the bow. Bows are dex based so this is pretty hard.
To fix this we use a Short Bow, this only has a dex requirement of 26, which helps a lot. But even then it'll still take well over 300 chromes to hit your desired colors.
Here are some tips to make it easier to hit:
- After getting a decent amount of off-colors, use Harvest's coloring options to hopefully hit the last few colors
- Vorici in Research will turn 1-3 sockets white, this can help if you get lucky
- If you couldn't get a 6L Short Bow, or are having a lot of trouble coloring, you can replace "Inspiration" with Swift Affliction. If really desperate you can replace "Elemental Damage With Attacks" with Faster Attacks or Deadly Ailments, but that's definitely not recommended.

> ELEMENTAL EQUILIBRIUM <
The way Elemental Equilibrium(EE from now on) works with Explosive Arrow is that the arrow part of Explosive Arrow has no fire damage by default.
So if you get any cold or lightning damage to attacks anywhere on your gear, this means the arrows your ballistas shoot will apply EE(reducing fire res), 
then the explosion will apply EE as well(increasing fire res), but shortly after an arrow will hit again(reducing fire res).
Just make very sure the arrow portion of your skill doesn't apply fire damage.

> CRAFTING GEAR <
> BOW <
1. Turn in a set of The Porcupine to get a 6L ilvl 50 Short Bow. If for some reason that Divination Card got nerfed(you never know with GGG): farm a set of Imperial Legacy, but this will make coloring REALLY HARD. Alternatively add high ilvl Short Bows to your filter and link it yourself.
2. Spam Shrieking Essences of Dread until you hit your desired attack speed roll(T1 preferably)
3. Use annulment orbs or whatever other tools you have available to get the bow to 2(or less) prefixes and 2 suffixes, while retaining the +2 to bow gems and attack speed roll
4. Craft "Cannot Roll Attack Mods" on your bow
5. Slam the item with a new mod(Exalted Orb or rank 3 Leo in Research), this always hits +1 to socketed gems
6. Recraft the crafted mod to Minion Attack/Cast Speed
7. Check out the "Getting Bow Colors" section of this guide
8. Done!

> JEWEL <
1. Pick up some Viridian Jewels
2. Use Harvest "Reforge Speed" and "Reforge Life" on it
3. Pray you hit life and attack speed
4. Done

> SPECULATION: new influenced implicits <
As of writing this guide the influenced implicits aren't known yet, if you have an opportunity to get them try to focus on regeneration and fire damage over time multiplier though.

> ENCHANTS <
The boot enchants you can use are:
- 2% regen if hit recently
- 10% movespeed if not hit recently
- 10% pen if you didn't kill recently(this sounds weird since pen doesn't apply to your ignite, but it does apply to your hit which does help a bit, while clearing you do kill stuff though)

The helmet enchants you can use are:
- 40% Explosive Arrow damage
- 15% Explosive Arrow attack speed
- 24% Explosive Arrow AoE
- Molten Shell Duration
- Defiance Banner Aura Effect

> ATTACK RATE BREAKPOINTS(TL;DR at bottom) <

First of all: don't try to focus on breakpoints too much, they usually assume an ideal situation which won't happen in the real game

We want to reach 20 stacks on Explosive Arrow to get as big an ignite as possible, there's 3 ways to achieve this:
- Attack rate
- Totem count
- Fuse duration

Getting more fuse duration will mean your clear will feel worse, so I would recommend this only as your last resort. For the following calculations I'll assume you keep to the default 20% quality: 1.2s fuse duration.
Now let's sketch an ideal situation where you have 6 totems all firing at once, with an attack rate of 2:
1. 0.0s: All totems fire one arrow, enemy has 6 fuses in it, 1.2s of fuse time remaining
2. 0.5s: All totems fire one arrow, enemy has 12 fuses in it, 0.7s fuse time remaining
3. 1.0s: All totems fire one arrow, enemy has 18 fuses in it, 0.2s fuse time remaining
4: 1.2s: Your 18 fuses explode

What if you had 7 totems?
1. 0.0s: All totems fire one arrow, enemy has 7 fuses in it, 1.2s of fuse time remaining
2. 0.5s: All totems fire one arrow, enemy has 14 fuses in it, 0.7s fuse time remaining
3. 1.0s: All totems fire one arrow, enemy has 21 fuses in it, so 20 of them explode
4. 1.5s: All totems fire one arrow, enemy has 8 fuses in it(1 leftover from step 3), 1.2s of fuse time remaining
5. etc. etc.

Since totems die though and you'll resummon them all the time anyway, some will also miss, so this situation almost never happens exactly like that.
Above does show though that going from 6 to 7 totems could make a big difference. If we assume this situation the minimum attack rate would be:
With 5-6 totems: at least 2.50 attack rate
With 7-8 totems: at least 1.67 attack rate

In testing I found it much more realistic to assume totems never fire arrows all at once, this means that to reach 20 stacks you can use the following formula:
attack rate = round_up(20 / duration / totem count)

So, assuming our 1.2s duration:
> TL;DR ATTACK RATE BREAKPOINTS <
With 5 totems(pre-annoint) you need 3.33 attack rate to reach 20 stacks semi-reliably, and 2.50 attack rate in an ideal situation
With 6 totems you need 2.78 attack rate to reach 20 stacks semi-reliably, and 2.50 attack rate in an ideal situation
With 7 totems(Skirmish or Hierophant) you need 2.39 attack rate to reach 20 stacks semi-reliably, and 1.67 attack rate in an ideal situation
With 8 totems(Hierophant + Skirmish) you need 2.08 attack rate to reach 20 stacks semi-reliably, and 1.67 attack rate in an ideal situation

To be clear: these are minimums, having more is never actively bad.

> BLOOD RAGE OR NO? <
Blood Rage is an option to make mapping more smooth and to reach the attack rate requirement more easily, but you'll degen constantly on the Champion and Elementalist version.
I'd just try it out and if you like it keep it and if you don't just drop it. It's not worth being annoyed over.

> COMMON MISTAKES <
- Make sure you have no flat fire damage anyway, this breaks your Elemental Equilibrium
- If it looks like all your arrows are missing and you see no explosions: make sure you have no pierce anywhere
- Make sure you have 100% chance to ignite. If you don't have this yet you might have to pickup Holy Dominion or get it on a jewel
- Make sure you have enough accuracy, EA feels really bad without accuracy