Explosive Arrow Balistas

Yesterday I talked about one of the two games that I spent most of my extended weekend playing, and this morning I am going to talk about the other. Of all of the things that you could have predicted about 2022… I did not think that it would be the year that I got into Path of Exile. This game is exceptionally daunting, but also as you start to ease into it… it becomes more and more engaging. Once I got over the hurdle that was the passive tree, I’ve been engaging with the almost overwhelming number of systems. At this point, I am sitting in Act Seven of Ten and it feels like many of the league mechanics are scattered through the second half of the game, specifically starting up when you revisit Lioneye’s Watch in Act Six. I’ve attempted to play this game numerous times, and I absolutely remember a season when Gwennen the Gambler factored into the league mechanic heavily for example.

I’ve switched from using Splitting Steel to the final configuration of this build which focuses on Explosive Arrow and turning it into a Balista Totem ability. My main spell link looks a little something like this:

  • Explosive Arrow
  • Balista Totem Support
  • Elemental Damage with Attacks Support
  • Lesser Multiple Projectiles Support

Balista Totem turns Explosive Arrow into an attack that drops something akin to the Demon Hunter Sentinel on the ground that fires Explosive Arrows for a period of time. Elemental Damage support makes it so that the Arrows that they fire utilize any elemental effects that I have on my gear, and Lesser Projectiles just makes them shoot more arrows at once, which is helpful for wave clear.

What took me so long to switch over to the final configuration is that I did not realize a key truth that I am going to share with you now. Guides will refer to items in shorthand as needing a GGRR or a GRR item meaning that you need those colors with linked slots. However, I was taking this as a completely literal statement, where I needed a Green gem linked to another Green gem which is linked to a Red and then linked to another Red. As a result, I had filled up a stash tab full of items that I thought would not work, but might be able to reroll the color order on at a later date. Essentially links work in both directions, and you can have support gems on either side of your main attack. Meaning that GGRR, GRRG, RGGR, or GRGR would have all worked for my purposes. Essentially as a result I had waited for some 20 levels before swapping over to the build I should have been running.

The gameplay feels much different, and admittedly nowhere near as cool as being Magneto all the time… but still enjoyable. Essentially I run around the battlefield making sure I have all four balistas up and running and bathing my enemies in explosive arrows. The build works off a specific interaction where I keep up 3 stacks of frenzy, curse the incoming packs to take more fire damage with Flammability… then each current triggers Elemental Equilibrium. Essentially EE is a keystone in the Passive Tree that makes it so that when you deal damage with one element, it debuffs the target to take more damage from the other two. Between my Skitterbots and Balistas they are applying Cold and Lightning damage, which causes them to take more fire damage… so when the secondary effect of Explosive Arrow fires… aka the explosion… it nukes everything. This can be improved when I find some six link items, but for now it is pretty badass to watch it all work.

Lastly, I am far from an expert in Path of Exile and quite honestly I am way deep in novice territory still. However, I have added a new page for Path of Exile to my Game Tools menu. Right now as I find things that I consider to be beneficial, I am going to be placing them on this page. If you are also taking this journey with me, I will be adding links to everything that I am actively using like the Loot Filter I run, build sites that I am reading, and miscellaneous tools like Path of Building. I am slowly in the process of converting all of my link lists over to individual static pages like this because I personally find it a bit more usable. It allows me to give some explanation for each tool rather than just a disconnected list of links.

1 thought on “Explosive Arrow Balistas”

  1. Well, you also have me jumping down this rabbit hole, so I’m prepared to see where it ends up. I’m only in Act 2, so I have a long way to go.

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