Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I pushed through the rest of the campaign on my Widow Hail Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Deadeye. I feel like it is very important to preface this build with the statement, that for this experiment I was purposefully trying not to follow a meta guide. Those exist, in abundance for Deadeye characters in 3.25 and I purposefully decided to shun them. I know how to do that build and have done it before many times… though my personal preference in the past was to always build on a Champion so I could add on extreme layers of “tankyness”. This time I purposefully went with Deadeye because I wanted to help this build with as much damage output as I possibly could given that I was stepping outside of the current meta and trying something different.
The other constraint that I placed upon myself is that I have tried not to allow this to be the build that trade chat and an abundance of divine orbs built. I’ve been chucking any decent gear into my vault that I picked up through shipping routes and the Settlers of Kalguur league mechanic. The entire purpose of this was to have a stash of things to draw upon when it came to equipping this character. Everything that my character is wearing came either from the league mechanic or was dropped on my Righteous Fire Chieftain save for two items… the tri-elemental quiver needed to drive Widowhail and a cluster jewel that I picked up last night. This has also led to some of my other decisions like running Purity of Elements instead of attempting to fix elemental ailments in another manner. Essentially the goal is to create a psuedo-SSF character without having to wall my character off from the rest of my stuff.
Having said all of that… I will probably start shopping for some upgrades. Right now I have a T2/T2/T3 Elemental Hit quiver and I would really like to get triple T1 with some attack speed while keeping the additional arrow. I really like that I am firing eight arrows at a time and all of those arrows are igniting, chilling, shocking, and eventually freezing. This would be a way worse experience if I were not actively freezing things when I shotgun them. That said… I am squishy as hell and I do not love that. I basically have no real line of defense… awful armor, awful evasion, and 90 suppression though it is lucky suppression. I have overcapped elemental resistances, but they are only 75% and a very negative chaos resistance at the moment. In a few levels, I am swapping to a body armor that I am going to try and six-link that has almost 3000 armor and evasion on it, so that should help out a little bit.
So immediately after killing Kitava, I did the thing you are probably not supposed to do… and just dropped straight into a yellow tier map. It went fine and honestly… still felt like I was running the campaign. So of course I immediately bumped up to a Tier 11 Red Map, and again… it was pretty much okay. I did struggle a bit with an Expedition rare that I made super freaking tanky… because the only not-toxic atlas strategy that I have is one that includes a single big explosion. I did not read the buffs I was applying to that monster, and I had to bring in Big Brother RF Chieftain to kill it before proceeding. I legitimately think that I could probably be just fine running T16s and I am sure tonight I will experiment with that. Quite honestly, this character already feels much like my other Lighting Arrow/Elemental Hit characters have felt damage output-wise before getting a Headhunter.
I think with some judicious gearing choices to give me some modicum of survivability… this could turn into a pretty effective map blaster. Basically… I am hoping that this does not become a popular strategy because I need a very specific roll combination on a quiver to make it work. I would love to see those not skyrocket to outrageous prices.