Level 91 Herald of Thunder Pathfinder^3.23

Notes

IMPORTANT FOR HARDCORE: Pick "Speaker of the Dead" on the tree and never run "map boss is possessed" on your maps. There's a ghost that disables your flasks and you don't want to meet that on this build, especially if you cap your resists using flasks.

IMPORTANT FOR EVERYONE: For the endgame setup you want BOTH Taste of Hate AND Lightning Coil. If you don't have that yet make sure to swap both your skillset and gearset to the pre-coil versions.

> 3.23 CHANGES <
The biggest change from 3.23 is that the 10% AoE from Toxic Rain quality got replaced by duration. See the "How much area of effect do we want?" section of the FAQ for how to solve this
This means more damage if you ignore alt qualities we might've lost on support gems.

Besides that some small optimizations have been made to the tree and setup, mainly inspired by the build Kunagi killed Ubers on in SSFHC in 3.22, but adjusted to account for the loss of tattoos.

> FAQ <
How much area of effect do we want?
You want EXACTLY 39% area of effect, since Pathfinder doesn't give 30% area of effect anymore and the quality on TR doesn't give 10%, this effectively means you have to get all of the 39% aoe somewhere this patch.
To reach this we grab the Bow mastery for 20%, craft gloves for 9% and then the other options to finish it off are amulet(10-12%), helmet craft(8-10%) and helmet eldritch implicit(10%).

What if I have more arrows?
Short answer: nobody knows! Or the people who do know aren't that public about it at least. The 39% number is specifically for no extra arrows, so just try to not add arrows.
If you figure out what the AoE thresholds are for additional arrows it's probably worth it to get an extra arrow or two. Who knows, someone might post info about it this league.

I have big mana issues, what do I do?
If you have big mana or ES issues there's a couple of choices

1. Use an Enduring mana flask. See the early game gear setup for an example
2. Use lifetap, our life flask should sustain this, but you can pick up Excess Sustenance if you have life sustain issues
3. Get some more -mana cost or % reduced mana cost
4. Early on we can annoint "Dreamer", this is a cheap annoint that also helps you cast your Divine Blessing Malevolence

I can't cast my Malevolence Divine Blessing, why?
You probably don't have enough reduced mana cost. A nice way to solve this early on is rolling an enduring mana flask with the "Reduced Mana Cost of Skills" suffix.
For the rest just try to get it on gear, maybe annoint Dreamer and don't forget to take the mana mastery for reduced mana cost of skills.
Getting quality on Inspiration also gives you 5% additional reduced mana cost.
If you run a Jade flask you can also consider dropping Grace(which you only run early on anyway) and just running Malevolence permanently and not using a blessing setup at all.

I don't have an Empower, but the endgame bow has +2 support gems, what now?
Just keep using a regular +3 if you don't have one.There is technically a step in between, but it's simply not worth the divines you'd need to craft it.

I don't have Empower, what are my options?
The first and easiest options is to use Damage on full Life, and taking the Life mastery that makes your full life threshold 90%.
Another option would be to run lifetap, see the "I have big mana issues" section of this FAQ for how to do that. 

How can I get my costs to almost nothing endgame?
The most important mod here is the mod on your flask that gives you reduced cost of skills. Get the rest on your jewellery and jewel(s).
If you want to switch early it's not too bad to annoint Dreamer, this gives you some nice reduced mana cost which might just bring you to 0 cost everywhere.
You can also use a Militant Faith with reduced cost of skills per Devotion in the Supreme Ego socket, make sure it doesn't replace any notables though.

I see someone use an Eternal Life Flask, and they told me it's better, why do you use a Divine Life Flask?
The duration of Eternal Life Flask is much shorter, which means you have to spam it a lot more, so I didn't want to recommend it. If you want to use it you're free to.

I'm having trouble sustaining my life flask, how do I fix that?
There's a very simple solution for this: just roll "increased amount recovered / reduced recovery rate" instead. You should always be able to sustain this.

My manaforged arrow setup in the endgame setup isn't triggering, how do I fix it?
Manaforged arrows won't trigger if the cost of a skill linked to it is 0, or if the skill triggering it(Toxic Rain) costs 0.
This means you probably have TOO MUCH mana cost reduction, try dropping some -mana cost or reduced mana cost until it works for you.

How does petrified blood work in the endgame version of this build?
Petrified blood means you won't regen life above 50%, but you can still recover it with flasks. We recover a lot of life per second from our life flask so we'll still be at full life all the time.
Petrified blood's upside is that when you're below 50% of your maximum life a portion of your damage taken is lost over time instead, if you assume we can mitigate this damage over time(which we can) it's essentially raw damage reduction.
TL;DR: it makes us tankier, especially vs 1 shots.

> LEVELING <
Starting out in act 1 you'll use Caustic Arrow and Puncture.
Use puncture on bosses(pretty much just Brutus) and Caustic Arrow to clear, try to hit level 12 before Merveil as this will make that fight much easier

After we hit 12 level with Toxic Rain + Caustic Arrow, make sure to press Withering Step on bosses.
Use your Caustic Arrow every few seconds on bosses and spam your Toxic Rain.
Blink Arrow doesn't share a cooldown with Withering Step, try to abuse this by holding off using dashes on bosses as much as you can. 

For twink leveling gear there's not that much outside of the usual suspects: +1/+2 tabula, goldrim, Wanderlust and Thrillsteel.
Another notable option is Hyrri's Bite, which actually has a recipe, vendor the following things together:
- a NORMAL rarity Sharktooth Arrow Quiver
- a rare onyx amulet
- a Rain of Arrows gem with at least 1% quality(it's definitely worth to use an early GCP you might find on this!)
- an Orb of Chance 

> CRAFTING <
Steelmage has a great video on how he crafted his gear last league, much of this still applies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kaj0pZxNrIo

Farming Porcupine
Early on you'll want to farm a set of The Porcupine divination card. You can do this in the following maps:
- Courtyard
- Orchard
- Plaza
- Gardens

Farming Taste of Hate
Taste of Hate is rare, but also really powerful for this build. The best way to farm one is using the div card "The Hunger".
This drops in maps like "Core" and "Carcass".
A full set divination card can easily take a couple of days to farm, you want to invest a lot into the maps you run this on, and maybe run them on low tier with some quant gear.
Some "juice" that's SSF-viable you can add:
- Picking Speaker of the Dead and other Torment nodes on the atlas tree, monsters touched by ghosts have a lot more quantity
- Roll sextants, and if you get the "strongbox monsters are enraged" one
- Try getting scarabs from any sources you can and swap them into the divination card one using Harvest

Another strategy could be to take all Rogue Exile and all Torment nodes on the altas passive tree.
This is definitely not recommended for Hardcore though as it can be extremely deadly. Ghosted exiles tend to drop a lot of uniques though.

An untested method is taking "Worthy of the Past" and a bunch of other Ultimatum nodes on the atlas passive tree, and hope you get your Taste of Hate like that.

Best endgame bow(+1, +2 support gems, chaos damage over time, attack speed, chaos dot mult)
1. Alteration roll a Hunter Thicket Bow(ilvl 78+) for T1 attack speed
2. Regal
3. Annul until you have only the attack speed left, if you miss start over
4. Craft "Can have up to 3 Crafted Modifiers"(2 divines) and "Cannot roll Attack Modifiers"(1 divine)
5. Slam 2 exalts(closing eyes is optional), this will guarantee +1 socketed gems and chaos damage over time
6. Remove crafted mods
7. Craft "Can have up to 3 Crafted Modifiers"(2 divines), "Chaos Damage Over Time Multiplier" and "+2 to Level of Socketed Support Gems"(2 exalts)
8. Done!

+2 amulet Method 1(Requires Sacred Lifeforce)
1. Alteration roll an amulet for +1 to all skills(~2000 alterations)
2. Augment + Regal
3. Hope you hit a suffix, if you don't you're gonna want to use a Bestiary beast to move a prefix to suffix, and hope the +1 all skills doesn't get removed
4. Craft "Prefixes Cannot be Changed"(2 divines)
5. You should now have an amulet with 3 suffixes(including the crafted mod) and 1 prefix(+1 all skills)
6. Use the Harvest mod  "Add a new Chaos modifier and remove another random modifier from a non-Influenced item"
7. Now you have an amulet with 2 suffixes, and +2.
8. Craft Prefixes cannot be Changed(2 divines) and scour
9. You could just craft a prefix to block now, exalt slam and then multimod and call the amulet finished. If you want to invest a bit more at a slight risk you can continue with these steps:
10. Craft "Can have up to 3 Crafted Modifiers"(2 divines), "Prefixes cannot be Changed"(2 divines) and any prefix(life for example)
11. Use the Harvest mod "Reforge a Rare item with random modifiers, including a Chaos modifier"
12. This will ALWAYS roll Chaos Res, and USUALLY roll only 1 suffix. If the chaos res is low or you rolled 2 suffixes you can go again from step 8.
13. If you rolled chaos res as the only suffix, you now multimod to finish up the amulet. If you rolled 3 suffixes you just craft life and call it a day.

+2 amulet Method 2(Requires more divines than method 1, no Sacred Lifeforce though)
1. Alteration roll an amulet for +1 to all skills(~2000 alterations)
2. Regal
3. Hope you hit a suffix, if you don't you're gonna want to use a Bestiary beast to move a prefix to suffix, and hope the +1 all skills doesn't get removed. YOU WANT A RARE WITH +1 all gems AND 1 SUFFIX NOW
4. Craft Multimod(2 divines), Prefixes Cannot be Changed(2 divines) and Suffixes Cannot be Changed(2 divines)
5. You should now have an amulet with 3 suffixes and 2 prefixes(including crafted mods)
6. Use the Harvest mod  "Reforge a Rare item with random modifiers, including a Chaos modifier"
7. Now you have an amulet with 1 suffix, and +2 to chaos gems once you remove crafted mods.
8. Craft Prefixes cannot be Changed(2 divines) and scour
9. You could just craft a prefix to block now, exalt slam and then multimod and call the amulet finished. If you want to invest a bit more at a slight risk you can continue with these steps:
10. Craft "Can have up to 3 Crafted Modifiers"(2 divines), "Prefixes cannot be Changed"(2 divines) and any prefix(life for example)
11. Use the Harvest mod "Reforge a Rare item with random modifiers, including a Chaos modifier"
12. This will ALWAYS roll Chaos Res, and USUALLY roll only 1 suffix. If the chaos res is low or you rolled 2 suffixes you can go again from step 8.
13. If you rolled chaos res as the only suffix, you now multimod to finish up the amulet. If you rolled 3 suffixes you just craft life and call it a day.

Best Endgame Quiver(can be really expensive, both in Harvest juice and raw divines)
1. Get an ilvl 86 Hunter Broadhead Quiver(you can use Harvest to swap a Shaper or Elder influenced one to Hunter pretty easily)
2. Spam the Harvest mod "Reforge a Rare item with random modifiers, including a Chaos modifier" until you hit both normal dot mult AND chaos dot mult of a tier you're satisfied with.
3. Make it so the 2 dot mult mods are the only 2 suffixes. You can do this with annuls, if you remove one of the dot mults you have to restart(can you see why this is going to be expensive yet?)
4. Make sure there are no prefixes. The easiest way to do this is to craft suffixes cannot be changed and scour. If no prefixes are attack mods you can also craft cannot roll attack mods and annul(and recraft it if the cannot roll attack mods craft gets removed). Cannot roll attack mods and scour DOES NOT WORK!
5. Craft cannot roll attack mods
6. Slam an exalt, this is guaranteed to hit 1 of 3 mods: life, damage with bow skills or movement speed.
7. If the tier of the mod you just slammed is good enough for you, go back to step 6 again and repeat until prefixes are full. If you don't like the tier you'll have to go back to step 4.
8. Finish the quiver off with an attack speed craft

Endgame Belt
The endgame belt is, together with the quiver, one of the hardest things to craft about this build. It's also one of the only items that's not really deterministic so no step-by-step here.
The easiest way to get it is by getting a fractured base with one of the 3 flask suffixes(reduced flask charges used, increased charges gained and flask duration) and literally just chaos spamming the other suffixes.
After that we use suffixes cannot be changed and veiled chaos orb hoping to hit the flask effect mod, you can now finish it off by crafting life, or if you feel like taking a risk just slam an exalt hoping to hit life.