Hey guys, Poshon here, and today let's talk about how to level a Ranger, specifically if you want to respect to crossbows as well. I will give some instructions for that, for example, for the Explosive Shot build that I put out a day ago.

But just to be clear, this is a tried and true method. Now, obviously there's a lot of leveling guides out there; all of them kind of lead to roam. Um, just to be clear, Ranger is extremely nice to level with, so even if

you make a few mistakes, overall it should be a very safe experience. At least for me, Ranger was by far the easiest leveling experience, uh, and I've rerolled quite a bit. On top of just basic leveling, I'll also talk about leveling items that you can buy, maybe

this isn't your first character and you want to make your leveling a lot easier, and I mean *a lot*. If you just invest like a few exalts, uh, you can, I don't know, strip a lot of hours from how long it would usually take. So I will give some

examples there, and I will talk about the crossbow transition, especially how to get a good weapon. Now, at first I wanted to write my own guide, but I realized that CoffeeBean, fellow Maxroll creator, has already made one, and it is basically exactly, uh, what I would have done.

In fact, I actually reviewed this guide as well. So here we are. In this video I'll go in detail over everything you need to know, give my own spin on a few things, own experiences, etc., but if you just want to read this, I'll link it down in the

description, and you don't even have to watch the video if you want to. You can just, I don't know, listen to it and then have this on your second monitor while you're leveling. Now, your first leveling setup is pretty straightforward: it's going to be Lightning Arrow and

Lightning Rod. Both of these are right up top here. They are very synergistic, they're level one skills, they're no-brainers, they are incredible. And, uh, this is how it looks. You put down these Lightning Rods; I put down three at a time because I have a Scattershot

support, so it makes it faster to apply them. And then if you hit an enemy with Lightning Arrow, and it was right there, all of these would chain to that enemy. So it's basically a single-target ability, although while you're in packs, you can also do stuff like throw down

one of these, and then usually Lightning Arrow, right? Uh, you don't have to go too crazy, but do remember that if the boss is kind of like doing his whole stick, right? He's like talking smack or whatever, you can put down Lightning Rods in the meantime, and whenever he spawns,

he's going to be in for a treatment. Now, the rest of the skills are not as important, but you can also put on a Flame Wall to get extra damage whenever you're shooting through it. You have Escape Shot to kind of get out of nifty

situations, and you have Herald of Thunder. Once you get your first 30 spirit, it is an incredible boost to clear speed. So that's kind of it. As for support gems on the lightning, you'll be using Marshal's Tempo. It will drain your mana a little bit more, but it's just so

Comfy, especially against bosses. It's just way more responsive, and then on top of that, you have lightning infusion for extra damage. Do note that if you have, I don't know, cold or fire damage on your bow, you might want to replace this with something like Lightning Pin, or if it's

your first character, um, then you probably don't have any other choice because Lightning Penetration is too high level. So you should just go with lightning infusion and try to keep your cold and fire damage to a minimum. As for Lightning Rod, you want to support it

with Scatter Shot for extra projectiles and then Magnified Effect. Now, you actually don't want Concentrated Effect, which gives you more damage and less AoE because your overlaps will be worse. Now, this is something you can test out personally. I also prefer Magnified

Effect. Now, if you go step by step here, you will also see that there is a Storm Call Arrow added for huge shocks. You can support this with Concentrated Effect and Lasting Shock for a lot of single-target damage. Uh, and then you can also get something like Freezing Salvo, which

helps you quite a bit with freezing bosses, and uh, you just kind of go there, right? You unlock Electrocuting Arrow. You kind of see the theme: lightning-based. All of them are pretty good, but then we get into Gas Arrow. Now, when I ask 10

people, five people will tell me they prefer Lightning Arrow, five people will tell me they prefer Gas Arrow. So if you really like the lightning theme and you kind of want to wing it, that is fine. It is very strong. It's in fact one of the strongest bow builds right now. You can

even take it all the way to endgame. Forget about crossbows, right? There's a lot of good guys out there, but Gas Arrow swap for me personally also has been quite superior. You can transition to this at level 22 because it's a level

27 gem. That's why we're doing something else in the meantime. Now, if you look at Gas Arrow, we might think, might be mistaken, this is like a poison skill or something, and it is, but we're using it for something else. See, if you ignite this poison cloud, it will actually, uh, go

pretty haywire right here with a fire explosion. I'm pressing alt right now. Okay, there you go. Uh, quite a bit of damage, and these can overlap. You can also pre-fire them against bosses, and I think the video here even shows it, but I'm going to show you as well in a

second. And you already have that Flame Wall from earlier. That is how you're going to be igniting these poison clouds for explosions. Now, okay, I've Gas Arrow with Scattershot for additional projectiles, and this is basically how it's going to look like. You see these

projectiles? Once they explode on the ground, uh, you can see that there's like a poison cloud, and you can flame these, right? So let's just real quickly make a Flame Wall to show you. This is what's going to happen. You have Flame Wall with

Spell Cascade and with Fortress, and what that does is, put on right-click, um, it's going to make these circles, and it's going to make three of them. That's what those two support gems do, and what that basically means is it just gives you

more leeway to kind of shoot wherever you want, and it just ignites because when that flame wall touches an enemy with the gas cloud out, it's going to explode. So basically, this is going to be the way you're going to map, you're going to

shoot, and then you're going to flame wall, shoot, flame wall, and so on. It is quite a lot of damage. Plus, against bosses, what you really want to do is, once again, pre-throw, pre-throw, pre-throw, and just wait until he comes up and then do

the flame wall for a huge explosion. Now, do note that later there is an interaction with Tornado Shot, or at least there used to be, that is quite strong, but you can split those. But I'm not going to talk about this because apparently it's going to get fixed in

one of the next patches. It's also only at level 41, if I remember, yeah, 41. So at that point, you're probably already respeccing to crossbows or whatever else you want to do in terms of the setup that you want to use. Here you want

to use Gas Arrow with Scatter Shot and then also Fire Infusion. Do remember, all your damage is fire. All this explosion is 100% converted to fire. I know it's confusing because it's called Gas Arrow, but that is what it is. Think about it as a

flame wall igniting the Gas Arrow into flames. Poison damage is completely worthless, and your scaling is very, very similar to Lightning Arrow. We're going to talk about that on the passive tree, which means you don't really have to do any massive respecs. Flame Wall, once again,

is supported with Spell Cascade and Fortress. This gives it kind of like a round look, and also three of them. Uh, then we have Still Storm Callers Arrow, Freezing Salvo, Shield Charge. You can use it on offhand, but in that case you would have to know what weapon swapping is.

It's not 100% needed, but if you know, you know, you're also going to use Herald of Ash now instead of Herald of Thunder. Now, if you don't have a second Spirit gem, you can't really swap, you're just going to stick with Herald of Thunder. It's not

great for now, but it is, I guess, better than nothing. You're not really shocking all that much, but once you get a Spirit gem, go to Herald of Ash. However, don't throw it away. Do remember that most endgame builds actually use multiple Heralds right now, so that is quite

strong. So you're going to find a Jeweler's Orb in Act 3 from one of the camps, uh, and there you're going to use Inspiration. Now, this is a little bit of an interesting one. I personally didn't have mana problems, but if you do,

use Inspiration, 40% less cost in general. I've been fine with, um, just mana flasking away, right? But if you're not, then you can definitely go for that. And, uh, otherwise replace it with a damage support. But yeah, otherwise not much changes. And, uh, basically Storm Callers

Arrow, you can put Overcharge on top of everything. This is all included in the guide, but yeah, this is kind of where it ends, and this is where you're going to be at level 60, 45, whatever you want to respec to, whenever you want to respec into.

In terms of the passive tree, let's just start with the Ascendancies. You're going to probably ascend once, maybe twice. Uh, you want Gathering Winds first. Tailwind is incredible: it's movement speed, attack speed, it's a feel-good ascendancy, gives you evasion, all of the above. It's one of

the strongest ascendancy points currently in the game. As a second option, you probably want to go Point Blank. Now, there are people who like going—I like to go Windward—but usually I don't think it's necessary. Now, Point Blank is better because it just has more leeway in

terms of this distance, and most monsters are going to jump on you, so they're going to be in your face anyways. All right, let's talk about the passive tree. This is the most important step and where the most mistakes happen when it comes to leveling. You need to understand

that damage is king. And no, I'm not just saying that because I'm on Softcore. I'm saying that because I see a lot of people go left side, take stuff like evasion or movement speed because it sounds good, and it does, sure. But if you

don't do damage, you're going to run out of life flasks against bosses. Uh, you can't really do anything. Like, if you're defensive, you're just going to sit there, and it takes twice as long, and you're going to die anyways. That is kind of the

thing at the start. Obviously, that completely shifts towards later in maps, and we're going to go over that. But early on, increased damage is incredible. Basically, the first 10% increased damage is just straight up 10% more damage, right? And so on. So, while these nodes get

Worse the more you take them, they are just so goddamn premium. So you go all of these clean-shot vile wounds. Right after that, you want to go to the left side though, because blur is incredible: 4% movement speed, Dex, evasion attributes. At least at the start are pretty hard to do,

and in between, you have Combat Alchemy, which helps you a lot with Mana flask uptime. Now guess what we're going to get next? More increased damage, all the way down here. Now, when it comes to attributes, important to know you can change this at any point at the hooded

one, and you can, just for, for even half the cost, you can change Dexterity into Int, into Strength. This will always fluctuate, so don't be hesitant to change it around as you go. And always check if your gems are actually working. That is just what is, um, you go Harness the

Elements, increased type, uh, damage for each type of elemental ailment. That's usually around about 30, 15 to 30% increased damage. And here you also have a little bit of chance to shock. After that, you will go straight into Escape Velocity. Usually defense is not that big

because your, um, base types are all over the place. You need resistances, you need life, right? You can just only pick evasion bases, but this one also gives 3% movement speed, which is quite premium. So it's just a very efficient node. And after that, we're going to continue with

increased damage right here, and then we go down here to Maiming Strike. The small node also has 2% movement speed. Now, after that, you want to go down. If you don't have a jewel yet, that's fine, you can buy one with, like, elemental damage.

Projectile damage, attack speed, whatever you want. Maybe you found a random one, just chug it in. Um, otherwise, leave it open for later. Can be quite strong, especially if you have some exalts from last character, but whatever. Acceleration, increased attack speed, movement speed, just all around really

good. And round about at this point, you might, you will have swapped from Lightning Arrow into Caustic Arrow, or not. It doesn't really matter; both have quite the same scaling. There's nothing really that only works for lightning or only works for fire. It's kind of set up in a

way where you can do whatever the hell you want, kind of. Okay, so after that we move on to the left, we grab Exploit, and now we're kind of setting up for our bow cluster next. Now this could be first, this could be first, it really depends. If

you have some projectile speed on gear, then this gets a lot better, but usually you won't have that much, so keep that in mind. If you're playing something else, maybe the Pierce is helpful for Caustic Arrow. It doesn't really do anything. After that, we're going to go up top to

the Herald nodes. Now, at this point you should have a Herald of Ash, and, uh, maybe also some of the other ones. If you already transitioned into crossbow, it is important that you have both Herald of Ash and also Herald of Lightning, so you get both the lightning damage part and

the fire damage part. Coming Calamity is not just for Heralds, it's for everything while the Heralds are active. Now, since this build is about Explosive Arrow, you can see wherever this tree goes afterwards, right? It gets you right through the campaign.

Um, and that's all fair and dandy, but I will talk now about the crossbow transition. Now, when can you transition to crossbows? Three things have to be true. You have to have a good weapon; more on that in a second, what that means.

A three dragon mask, which is the unique that everything is based around. If you don't know what this is about, uh, check out my build guide. I will link it down below in the description. And then the third thing is a decent amount of gold because you need to respec out of those

bow nodes and into crossbow nodes. Now, currently, the, uh, amount of gold you need is a little bit steep. If it's your first playthrough and you didn't really respec much, you're probably going to have it, but do note that there is an upcoming patch

where they halve the gold cost, so I hope it's out in the next few days, but that is going to make the transition a lot easier, just so you know. Now, at this point, I am level 83, and I have two crossbows. I'm doing a weapon swap setup,

complicated, don't need to know right now. This is my main crossbow. It has a ton of flat physical damage and a little bit of lightning damage sprinkled in there. Optimally, it would also have added flat physical damage instead of the lightning damage, but I'm not made of money

unfortunately right now. So this is what I have. Now, this one is level requirement 67. Before that, I had one with level requirement 45 and one with 55 that I kind of transitioned into to make the leveling experience easier. However, if this is...

Your first character, and you probably got a few EXs from your campaign. That is not something you can do. So, I'll show you how to find a good weapon, but you should adhere to this level requirement. Don't say, "Oh, I can go with this build at

level 45. I'm just going to throw a shitty crossbow on." You're going to have a bad time, and you're not going to experience what I'm going to experience, and a lot of other people are going to experience. Wait for whenever you can use

your good weapon. And sure, I would say get one that's lower level requirement and then later transition to a higher one, but that's just not how it works. You have to sometimes just go for what you get now. In order to find a good crossbow,

you have to understand how weapons work. Basically, all your damage comes from your crossbow. All of it, everything. Even the Heralds scale off of your weapon damage. This is what gets multiplied by everything, right? Your attack speed, everything gets multiplied from the number up top, from this physical damage.

Physical damage is premium because we're using two different skills that have conversion. It is very important to have a lot of physical damage. And then, if you have a little bit of lightning damage, cold damage, fire damage, it's better than nothing, but physical damage is preferable.

Now, first, what you do is go to poe.trade, crossbow right here, item category. Now, there are equipment filters that have damage, physical damage, crit chance. You don't really have to think about this all that much. This number right here is what we're interested in.

I'll give you a few tricks on how to get good ones. Now, what would I regard as good physical damage for a starting crossbow? Probably around 300, right? And if you look at 300, you can see one exalt. What very often happens is you can

see that these have, like, still mods open, so you can still slam with an exalt. Now, uh, if I'm really being honest, 350 would be quite nice, and it doesn't usually cost you that much, but you will see it kind of creeping up to two, three exalts. These

are quite easy to roll. Uh, if we go up to 400, you can see the price increasing accordingly. Uh, now here we are at 10 exalts. This will really help you. Like, the higher you can go, the more investment you have, you should put everything into

your weapon at first because that means you clear faster, and that means you're going to have a good time. Now, you can get quite a few steals here, though, because people don't know how to price their stuff. So, let's, for example, go to 300 DPS

back there. All right, we're searching this first guy right here, 319 PDPS. So you might be thinking, "Oh, that's not that good." But if you know how weapons work, you know that runes are a big deal. Right here, runes give you 20% increased

physical damage that is base to the weapon that everything gets multiplied off of. Very strong. And also, a weapon can have quality, which gives you 20% more damage. So if you look at this, he has no quality and no runes. So if you bought this one, uh, put on runes, and then also

Put on quality. I'm not going to, I'm not going to flip here, but you would get to around about 400 DPS. So for this one exalt, you would get something that would usually cost you 10. These are things you have to look out for. If you see no runes,

and it still has around about 300-ish, go for it. Now, let's say you acquired that crossbow. Put in these iron runes, you should have found some of them. Don't just put garbage in, only go for iron runes. Once again, if you find some with

physical damage and a little bit of lightning damage, that's also nice on top. It's not like bad, it adds on top. It's just not as good as physical damage. Now, for quality, what you need is blacksmith whetstones. You might not have enough to actually

level it up to full, but these are the ones you can go over to Alva, or whatever you're at right now, and go to currency exchange. You can also do this in Act 4, Cruel, uh, from, I don't know how he's called, but whatever, one of the dudes. You

can basically go to, what is it called again? Currency exchange. Yep, then you type in here blacksmith whetstones. Boom! You go to exalts, and you can get, for one exalt, you can get nine of these. And that's probably going to get you full on

quality, or close to it. So it's usually worth investing one exalt. So that's your biggest thing out of the way, the crossbow. In terms of free dragons, you can get whatever you want, but do remember that the higher ilvl risk you get, the easier it is going to be to cap.

later, and even earlier, just getting up to 20%, because the roll starts at 10 and goes up to 20. That is actually quite a big deal. Uh, in terms of runes, you can put in whatever, but just remember you can't take it out anymore. Um, this one

was corrupted. I already bought it like this one, but yeah, there's not much more to it. Uh, don't forget to quality, like this guy, whoever corrupted this. Now, that's cool and all, but pal, how can I get from my bow skill to your crossbow

setup? Well, I'll show you right here. So this is what you roundabout will have on the bow skill. It depends on when you're trying to transition, whenever you get your crossbow, but here is how it would look like on crossbow. You can see that

this right section is fully respecced, and a few nodes in between, and I basically invest everything into reload speed. Honestly, this will make your build feel a ton better, and it's just great. You will see that now in your pane, you have a lot more jewels, and we're going to

talk about that in a second, how to fill these. Also give you a little bit of trading advice there, but yeah, you want full Salvo, you want reusable ammunition, and you want instant reload. On the way there, you're also going to get the penetration, and you're going to get Emboldened

Avatar. A little bit of exploit, but that is basically how it's going to look like. Now, I will not link this down in the description simply because this is a little bit of a weird process that completely depends on what you have. So I can just give you this advice, right?

Here, and you kind of have to go off of that, unfortunately, right? Um, there's not like, "Get this exactly at 45" or something, so you kind of have to adapt a little bit. Just really quick, something I forgot to mention: uh, attribute pressure is real with most builds, but especially this one

because you have to have both Dexterity and Strength for crossbows, and you're coming from this area right here where you really only get Dex. So, um, down here, once you're at the first crossbow cluster, you can also grab Polymathy, and the small nodes before have +3 to

all attributes. So it's five points. It's a big investment, but if it alleviates a lot of your gear pressure, it's definitely worth it. Do note, though, that for endgame, this is not a good solution. It is not worth five points. It's just

something that you might have to do. So, uh, try and get that back from gear later. All right, so I was talking about jewels, so let's see what we can do now. There's an interesting thing here you can do: stat filter. But up top, you click here, and you

go to "Count." Now, what this does is you can, for example, put minimum two, and then whatever mods you put in here, if an item has at least two of those mods—doesn't matter what combination—it will search for it. I just realized I was searching on P1 trade, so I'm just going to quickly

go here: any jewel. All right, let's get this out of here. Now, what are we searching for? Number one: shock duration, right? Pretty damn good with a shock build. Chance to shock. All right. Then, multiple different "increase damage" thingies, like, for example: elemental damage, uh, projectile damage, attack damage. I don't

even know if there is attack damage on uh jewels, but we're just going to throw it in there, attack speed, right, all the good stuff. Now take the bottom one. I think the top one is the uh local one. You go for attack speed with

crossbows, and uh that's going to be four. So these have roll ranges, right? So you probably want to put something in, like I don't know, 20, maybe. Uh I think this one was like 13, uh maybe like 10 here, 10 here, 10 here. Okay, and that's about it.

There's a few more mods, right? Everything you can think of on the passive tree, just type it in there. Count two, let's say, let's search for it, let's see what comes up. One exalt, one exalt, one exalt. These all have two relevant mods now.

Obviously, you would want more. You can also experiment and put in three, but it gets a little bit more expensive than probably 10 plus, yeah, 5 to 10, right? So yeah, whatever you can afford and stick them in there. It's going to make quite a

bit of a difference because if you look at this tree once again, you will see, even at level 50 to 60, you you have one, two, three, four jewels that can be the difference of getting another 100% increased damage, which is obviously ridiculous. One mod

that I actually forgot here is the crossbow reload speed and damage with crossbows. These also count because both, both of you are crossbows, especially crossbow reload speed early, before you get to the clusters, will give you a ton of quality of life. Now, as for leveling gear, my

favorite right now for bow is actually using Widow's Hill. So what Widow's Hill does is, it is a level one bow, you can put it on immediately, and it has very bad damage and whatever attack speed, right? Crit doesn't matter. But it gives you one stat here, up to 250, I mean corrupted,

even more, but up to 250% increased bonuses gained from your equipped quiver. Not only that, there's also nodes on the passive tree that go even further. Here you have quiver effect, up here you can grab all of these if you're doing this

setup. Now this gets pretty crazy, but you have to realize, so all right, you're going to have a lot of damage and everything, but what do you multiply off of? This is amazingly physical damage. Well, good thing that quivers have a ton of flat added damage. So for

example, if I make a search with quiver, once again I use the count up top here, go count, I type in cold damage, attacks, fire damage, lightning damage, physical damage. Those are all the ones that can appear. Uh, it can get up to three, which would be a really good one, and you can

Explosive Shot Transition & Leveling Tips | How to Level a Ranger/Deadeye in Path of Exile 2

Explosive Shot Transition & Leveling Tips | How to Level a Ranger/Deadeye in Path of Exile 2

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