Paths Mod Bow Build

This is a guide for a bow build for the popular paths mod.

Introduction

There seems to be very few guides for those who want build ideas for the paths mod. This guide is made to give some ideas on how to build an effective archer type character. We will be focusing on the Sekhemet path and discuss how it can be combined with other paths to different effects.

Sekhmet Core

The core strength of this entire path is raw damage, DA, armor, health and eventually fire immunity. The damage comes from skills while the durability comes mainly from investments in the path itself. Of particular interest to us is the bow focus skill line. We will always begin with this path and invest mainly in the Bow Mastery skill for the huge amount of base damage bonuses. Once about ten to twenty points are placed into bow mastery, we should be able to one shot many of the regular enemies in the normal difficulty. Additional points are organically placed into this skill to ensure that the damage remains high.

Other skills of note are the related bow abilities of "Skill Shot" and "Power Shot". Skill Shot is not always necessary because we will often be using a similar left mouse or right mouse skill from another path. At least one point in Power Shot should always be taken to deal with bosses. Be advised though that it seems to have an animation time and occassionally glitches.

At the top end of the path, we have Lioness Rage for powerful AOE, Dodge for some quick evasion and Blessing of Ra for armor, burn damage and immunity to fire. Lioness Rage is fantastic for clearing regular mobs but suffers from a 24 seconds recharge so if you've no other aoe, it's worth considering having high -% recharge (cdr) to make it more spammable. Dodge is usually not needed because we'll be killing things too fast for them to approach us by the time we have the skill. Blessing of Ra is a fantastic long term buff that we can abuse early on. Once we have the damage (probably about level 15), we can go to epic difficulty and use our huge damage and range to take down the mobs guarding the Helos Shaman. Now usually taking down the Shaman would be hard but he tends to use fire damage so you would be immune to it and killing him would grant you a huge quest experience reward for your level. This idea can be repeated for the legendary difficulty at a later time.

So to summarize, get bow mastery to about ten points and then climb up the path to unlock everything. Get a point in both Lioness Rage and Blessing of Ra. Alternatively if you don't feel like you need those two skills and the durability from the path, you can instead pump additional points into bow mastery or begin another path sooner.

Pet Style

Unlike in the regular Titan Quest, there are no wolves or such pets that directly give you benefits. They serve mainly as distractions and meat shields. To that end, four paths grant pets that can do this namely Khloros, Tartarus, Lichdom and Poseidon.

KHLOROS

Khloros locusts are fantastic for much of normal and epic difficulty except against undead monsters though their damage is too weak for legendary difficulty. However, all the Khloros pets durability scale superbly well into legendary due to their evasive abilities and only suffer against high damage AOE which is mitigated by the Khloros pet buff aura. It's worth considering having some cdr gear to resummon them quicker to have constant meat shields that excel at drawing aggro. For some strange reason, the little spider pets' damage seems to scale but they suffer from having slow movement speed.

Aside from pets, Khloros is good at giving you some physical resistances and damage absorption which together with the durability from Sekhemet and the pets, makes it extremely unlikely that you die. Additional bonuses include having your fire vulnerability negated by Blessing of Ra and passives that grant bonus % damage and bleeding resistance. On the negative side, there's no real AOE except poison so you'll have to rely mostly on cdr gear and lioness rage in legendary. The sword bonuses also are not useful since we're going mainly with our bow.

Something to note for this path combination is that it's possible to start with this mastery by simply going with full investment on locusts. This is possibly the easiest and most efficient way to gain the first fifteen levels or so out of all the character classes. Simply ignore the undead and constructs and after you've maxed out the locusts, put points into Bow Mastery to bring down the Athens Undead Boss. You will mostly be just walking around and picking up items from dead enemies without needing to actually attack.

TARTARUS

The demons from this path tend to be fickle and the reliable demon bodyguards require heavy investments to work properly as meat shields. Even with their provoke ability, the sheer number of enemies mean that their function is often limited. The strength of this path probably lies in its boon line where you have some defensive bonuses and a damage bonus passive but my personal opinion is that Khloros is overall a better option. The fire damage spells is awkward to use due to attribute point distribution and in terms of path benefits, Tartarus fire resistance overlaps with Blessing of Ra.

LICHDOM

This path works much like how Khloros does in terms of what it offers our Sekhmet bow character. A huge army of minions (skeletons and mages) that tanks for you and some defensive bonuses. Two important differences exist however. The first is that it requires a heavier investment into both skills and the path itself to truly unlock its defensive potential. If you half heartedly invest into the path, you will just be facing a heavy health penalty. If you commit to the path to level 100, however, you will become a walking tank. Secondly, the skeleton minions tend to be more vulnerable against regular monsters due to their lack of evasion so it can become a bit tedious to keep recasting them.

POSEIDON

You will be playing a hybrid kind of character where you will have some elemental damage, a lot of physical damage and a very powerful pet that can help distract bosses. Max out the weapon enchantment and your cyclops. The damage evasion skills/summons in this path is optional but can be very useful. As for the few AOE options in this path, one idea is to max out one or two of them and rotate them with lioness rage so that you always have an AOE every few seconds. Your single target damage against bosses is already taken care of by power shot and the cyclops.

Single Target Focus

MIND

Combining Sekhmet with Mind gives some truly disgusting single target damage. To begin with, the mind path grants massive stats bonuses to your hero. Kyudo gives both flat piercing damage and attack speed while stance of focus is an amazing attack speed increase for just one point. Strengthen Body and Quicken Reflexes grant massive strength and dexterity bonuses respectively and both of these are further enhanced by the Mind and Body which passively grants 45% increase to all three stats at max level (6). As if this is not enough, Mental Strike and its synergy both grant huge % damage bonuses as well and is ideal for a left or right mouse skill. It's not uncommon for weaker bosses to get outright killed by a single power shot.

Where this build suffers is in the aoe department and lack of meat shields. Because the paths mod has triple the number of monsters, it's not uncommon to die to simply being mobbed to death. There's some evasion from the mind path and you'll have good stats, but even with high attack speed, you will suffer without proper use of lioness rage and cdr gear. At the very least, it's really tiring to hold down the attack button to kill enemy mobs one by one. As a bonus however, all that cdr gear means you can spam power shot at possibly one every second which ensures that most bosses die very quickly.

Now I understand that cdr gear is not that common in the beginning so the Helos Shaman trick that I introduce in the beginning is especially useful here. What you do is you keep pumping dexterity so that you can equip a bow that is normally found in legendary. This is how you do it. You select epic difficulty at about level 15 and go to the horse at the beginning of the game. Kill the monsters without aggroing them and pick up any items that they drop even if it's just non magical items. Sell them and pick up a bow from the Helos vendor. Because it's epic, it will have pretty good stats compared to your level. Now after grinding out a few levels in normal, go to legendary and repeat the procedure. The reason why you really need the levels and damage from the bow is precisely because of the lack of AOE. You cannot afford to be hitting enemies twice to ensure their death. By obtaining a high damage bow early on and prioritizing attack speed, you ensure some leeway and time to get those cdr gear and just makes the experience easier overall. You can opt to not do this and go through the difficulties sequentially but it will be much more challenging.

AOE focus

There's two paths that can do good AOE with Sekhmet. I'll briefly discuss Venefici before moving on to focus more on Dokkaebi.

VENEFICI

This is an unusual path in that the path grants intelligence stats but a lot of its skills do physical damage. There is a number of spells that do decent AOE with variable recharge rates. The problem I have with relying on this path for the AOE is that even with cdr, the damage for AOE just doesn't seem enough to one shot many monsters in legendary difficulty. It's certainly worth experimenting with, but I've not found a really good synergy with Sekhmet as of the time of this guide's creation. One possible idea is to use some of the higher tier skills specifically for AOE spamming with cdr gear while having power shot for the bosses.

To that end, two naturally spammable skills exist namely Particle Burst and Dark Sphere which has a second or two cooldown. The former requires cdr and casting speed to be truly effective while Dark Sphere is powerful with the downside of being very short ranged. Evulse is another great AOE skill that has 16 seconds cooldown so it requires cdr to be really effective. So perhaps Evulse and Particle Burst can be combined to take down mobs.


DOKKAEBI

In my opinion, this is simply the best path to pair with a Sekhmet archer in the late game. The true power of the synergy comes from the skill "Phantom Arrows" and its related skill which grants additional projectiles. In short, this left mouse button skill ignores the base damage of your bow, but it always lets your arrows pierce through enemies. The maxed out bow mastery and blessing of Ra from Sekhmet, damage from other items, the bow's prefix and suffix all remain. There's some legendary and epic bows out there that have relatively low base damage but has plenty of special abilities that make phantom arrows' drawback almost negligible. You can supplement your offense with the Set relic which grants piercing damage.

Even when your damage isn't enough to one-shot enemies with Phantom Arrows, the skill has the additional benefit of almost always confusing your enemies so that they become sitting ducks. If they somehow still manage to surround you, your illusion skill summons a few eyes that will provoke all enemies in a wide radius thus ensuring your safety. Chaos Storm is an additional safety net that you can choose.

Furthermore, the path itself grants health, mana and total speed increase... all of which are fantastic things for your archer. It costs some physical resistances but this is acceptable and it disappears if you hit level 100. As a bonus, if you invest 100 points into the path, it grants a -25% recharge and 50% melee dodge which is really nice. Both Sekhmet and Dokkaebi have skills that grant some evasion against both melee and ranged damage which mitigates some of the damage as you're climbing the Dokkaebi path. In terms of resistances, palms of ryeo and teachings of yuin grant huge vitality and poison, slow and entrapment resistances respectively.

Two of the three stances offer additional defensive bonuses, however you will probably need the precision stance from Sekhmet for the piercing damage bonus. Likewise, you will probably need to invest mainly in dexterity for damage with just enough in strength to wear gear. Health and mana will have to come from climbing the paths. This build requires chugging mana potions every now and then, but it does excel at confusing and clearing mobs even with mediocre gear.

Against bosses, I'll admit that the damage isn't as much as many of the other combinations. But you do have the goblin tricks that can function a little bit like study prey in Titan Quest. All those defensive bonuses from the path also lets you hit continuously without being a glass cannon. You can consider having an alternate bow weapon that you switch in specifically for bosses since Phantom Arrows deal less damage unless you're facing a melee boss. In that case, the shotgun effect and your +50% dodge from the path special bonus will mean that your current Phantom Arrows bow is probably the best choice. A good example of this would be a hero wearing some dodge gear facing the Minotaur.

Conclusion

This is my first guide so thank you for your patience. I hope I've conveyed some useful ideas on how to build a Sekhmet archer.

[Alexander]

Hi Limbeck, I'm glad you found it useful. It's been a long time since I wrote this, but if what you said is feasible, then it does make shekhmet + khloros very good.

[Limbeck]

Excellent guide! I would add an important tip if playing one of the pet styles - apply Blessing of Ra to your minions! I'm playing shekhmet+khloros, and this counteracts the poor damage vs. undead, and honestly makes the locusts/crows quite broken...

[socatha4]

I actually wanted to build an archer and i didnt think of dokkaebi.Never used it before.I like poseidon too much.But ur idea is valid and will do it as next char.Guide is great dont worry.Thx for idea

[Alexander]

Thanks socatha4. I was worried that I had included too few details for the paths

[socatha4]

Nice guide Alexander.Its a great mod and the only mastery mod updated for ragnarok.I saw ur post in general and i think many play it.I wish the author would expand it.Anyway, great job.