TbXie's Poison Tornado Shot Pathfinder Build Guide (PoE Necropolis 3.24)
Due to the latest balancing changes, we do not recommend playing this build anymore, as it does not meet the high standards we apply to our guides in terms of fun and performance. We are leaving it up as a reference and it might be revived in a later patch.
Introduction
With bows being one of the most popular Archetypes in recent PoE history, I felt like I wanted to have something out there that gave you a way into bow builds, on an acceptable level, for new and veteran players alike. After Poison Tornado Shot rose to popularity, with people trying to Magic Find with it, I decided to write this guide, which focuses less on optimal farming, but more so on being accessible to everyone through capping the budget of the build & still making it delete high end maps in matters of seconds. This guide aims to leave you with an extremely agile mapper that will grant you the power to feel as if you’re mapping on an insanely expensive character while keeping it fairly low on the budget.
Build Summary
Short video showcase
Pros and Cons
Pros
+ Clears thousands of monsters per minute
+ Moves at the speed of light to create an oldschool zoomy feeling
+ Keeps your budget in check. No expensive items required
+ One of the most enjoyable build archetypes in the game
Cons
– It will remain fairly squishy so it is not HC-Viable
– It relies on Darkscorn to get going, so can’t be played before level 70
– Getting the gearpieces to solve your attributes & resistances can be really annoying
– Unless very good gear, will use Flask to cap resistances (but on Pathfinder, this is okay)
Map Modifiers to be Avoided
I played all map modifiers, unless I deemed a combination of them too hard. No regen for example is fine. However, combined with Burning Ground, monsters always Poison and Reduced Recovery Rate it would be absolutely Abysmal.
Playstyle, Mechanics & Strengths
This buid uses (or abuses?) the unique item 
Zerphi's Heart. This item grants you Soul Eater stacks for a short duration after using a Vaal Aura skill. Soul Eater is a buff that grants you a stack per monster you’ve killed, each of those stacks giving 5% Increased Attack Speed. This is one of the buffs that makes the infamous 
Headhunter so sought-after and you’re getting it for “free”. Well, not entirely for free because the amulet comes with a minuscule downside. It will make you require 50% more attributes to equip gear pieces than mentioned on their tooltip. This makes gearing for this build significantly more annoying, or well, harder. The upside is though, that none of the things you are looking for on gear are very sought after which usually means you can still get optimal sources of attributes way less expensive than you should be getting them normally.
The reason why this item is so vital & mandatory for the build is because the build is a Poison abuser. Poison is the only ailment in the game which stacks infintely on monsters, meaning that you can have as many poisons as you want and are only gated by the poisons duration & the amount of poisons you can apply in that window. Now, since you’re getting absurd amounts of attack speed from Zerphi’s / Soul Eater you’re attacking at ludicrous speeds. On top of that, because of the way Tornado Shot works, you can apply multiple poisons per attack. There’s quite a complicated mechanic gated behind this but for now all you need to know is that Projectile Speed, Projectiles & your Flask make it so you’re probably inflicting about 10-15 poisons per attack. Without Soul Eater stacks, you’d be applying those 4 times per second. With a very big Soul Eater buff, you’re going to be applying them over 20 times a second. This means that for this build, you’re multiplying your damage by fivefold. As you can imagine, that’s absolutely insane.
Now, you’ll be wondering, why is it not every build in the game would use an item so powerful as this. Well, first and foremost, it requires you to be able to play with a specific set of items / gems because you can’t fulfil the attribute requirement on most builds. If you were, let’s say an intelligence build, and you needed to run a high-dexterity-requirement gem, there’s no way you could ever obtain those attributes to be able to do so, given the requirement boost by Zerphi’s. Next up, Zerphi’s is not a permanent buff. You can’t overlap buffs so you need to let your Soul Eater stacks time out, then use a new Vaal Skill to reactive the buff meaning you will go from God Mode to restacking your buffs. Luckily, if you play some dense maps, you’ll be back to 30-40 stacks after a single attack and you’ll be happily moving forward. This is one of the main reasons why we’re going for a
Asenath's Gentle Touch. This allows you to attack once and rely on the explosion to clear the rest of the pack, meaning you don’t have to hit all of your attacks on a pack to make sure you’re getting like 40 stacks again. Once you’re stacked, this doesn’t matter as you’ll be attacking so fast you’ll be hitting everything anyhow.
Now, because of the way all of that works, damage while mapping is not a problem, when we have stacks. Therefore, the build tries to focus on getting that done as fast as possible. This is why it runs sources of Onslaught, Flasks that are tailored around movement & attack speed and so forth. All of that to make sure you can exploit your power as much as possible, when you have it. However, this also means you will have to make decisions. Let’s say you’re mapping and you have a ton of stacks & you encounter a Metamorph. I can guarantee you that if you hit that, with 30 stacks, for 4 seconds, it will die but it might be better to go grab maximum stacks first and then fight the tanky monster.
Passive Skill Tree, PoB, and Gem Links
You can find an optimized Path of Building here. Every build I release will use the community fork of Path of Building. You can find PoB’s Fork, by LocalIdentity, here.
If you are not comfortable with Path of Building, PoePlanner’s website offers you a non-PoB alternative to import the code from the above link. it is highly recommended you install Path of Building to follow builds most optimally.
More information about the Passive Skill Tree, as well as all the Gem Links can be found on our dedicated page.
Passive Skill Tree, PoB & Gem Links
Ascendancy, Bandits, and Pantheons
Our Ascendancy, Bandit, and Pantheon Power page goes into detail about all the choices you need to make in these regards.
Ascendancy, Bandit & Pantheon Power Page
Gear Summary / TL;DR
A lot of this is explained more in depth in the Gear Page, however we will provide you with a basic idea of what gear you’re looking for in this short summary.
Gear PageOur recommendation:
| Item Slot | Item Name |
| Head | Rare Helmet with Attributes, Life, Chaos Resistance |
| Amulet | Zerphi's Heart |
| Chest |  Daresso's Defiance |
| Gloves | Asenath's Gentle Touch |
| Boots | Rare boots with Resistances, Movement Speed & Life |
| Belt |  Bisco's Leash |
| Rings |  Ming's Heart & Rare Ring to top off attributes/resistances |
| Weapon |  Darkscorn |
| Quiver | Rare Quiver with Proj Speed, Phys Damage & Damage over Time |
Questions & Support
If you enjoy my content to such an extent that you’d like to support me and my work, or you have a specific question you request my private time for, you can buy me a coffee over at Patreon. At no point should you feel pressured to contribute, but if you do, your support means more to me than you will ever imagine.
Even though we try to make our guides as complete as possible, obvioulsy it’s possible you still have questions. We have an entire mod-team readily available to support you & your questions on Discord. You can find us on the ARPG Vault Discord. Make sure to open a Guide Help thread so things stay clear in the main channels.
Leveling
Even though we are very adamant about trying to give you a leveling experience that lies as close to your endgame playstyle as possible, we will be forwarding you a to a 
Poisonous Concoction guide because this build just doesn’t feel well until you get at least a Darkscorn. If you are looking for the most optimal way to level a character to maps, we refer you to the following guides.
- Our step-by-step leveling walkthrough, which allows even more experienced players to save time and speed through the leveling process.
- Our guide to Unique Items for leveling, which helps you gear up your characters for the leveling process.
- Our beginner guide to Path of Exile, which answers many of the questions new players might have and will set you on the right path.
