EDIT: Many people have pointed out my definition of budget is wack. I apologize, I put together the tree quickly and did it without much thought because this is mainly for my own benefit, and to get comments on how to improve it. Please don't copy this build unless you know what you're doing and can understand exactly what unrealistic simplifications I made on the tree. I don't want anyone to have a disappointing league start because they took these numbers at face value.

Hey! You might remember me from the scourge implicit inquisitor video that drove up the prices of scourge fire damage on hit armor, or last league's HoT autobomber guide.

To be fair, in case you're thinking I'm a good source of information for how to build a character, I also came up with this horribleness that was dead on arrival and whatever the hell this was, so please exercise caution and do your own research: I'm nowhere near as knowledgeable as some people around here and some of my ideas crash and burn.

Still, I find it very helpful to share what I'm planning to leaguestart with if nothing else to get people to suggest improvements and converge on a good build, so I'm going to do just that. I'm going to be leaguestarting Galvanic Arrow Deadeye, focusing on several of the new mechanics unveiled in the 3.17 patch notes, as I believe it will be a powerful clear and bossing build for relatively little investment.

In a separate thread I claimed 5m sirus DPS on budget gear. I've since revised what exactly constitutes "budget" and gone down to about 3.5m, which I still think is pretty fair for a total investment of probably less than 5 exalts.

I'm going to share a budget tree and a high investment tree. They're both high level, and I won't be providing any intermediate trees or leveling guides since I'm honestly not great at leveling quickly; I prefer to level at my own pace and enjoy the league mechanic as I go, so I'm not a good source of information when it comes to optimizing leveling speed. Use your own judgement on the exact path to take there, and leave for last what you consider least pressing at any given time. In doubt, leave the cluster jewels for last as they're only contributing damage and nothing of great mechanical importance (you can use Wave of Conviction to trigger exposure on bosses before you can rely on the cluster jewel).

Without further ado...

• Budget PoB: https://pastebin.com/iWGLVUpy - 3.5m Sirus DPS, 7.5m Clear DPS with Flasks and Innervation.
• High investment PoB (still not GG or unrealistic gear though, think mid league): https://pastebin.com/dTRT8tuK - 8m Sirus DPS, 18m Clear DPS with Flasks and Innervation
• EDIT: Updated budget PoB with the new tree (you'll have to select the beta branch in the PoB options). I dropped Blood Rage due to the good feedback that it would cause trouble for the ES recovery, which lowers our damage a bit, but nothing massive as we're guaranteeing frenzy charges with the mark mastery anyway: https://pastebin.com/iNhs2De3

EDIT: People have rightfully pointed out that I suck at budgeting and the rings are way more expensive than I thought. I'm not a perfect source of economy information, so please use your own judgement and make your own damage calculations based on your budget.

Note that the clearing DPS numbers above refer to rares marked with Sniper's Mark, but this is the number you care about because everything else will just be mowed down anyway (in fact, for clear you'll likely want to use the Lightning Arrow secondary setup as it will be great at offscreening)

Breakdown of budget

• The bow and quiver tend to be the most expensive pieces of a bow build. In this case Quill Rain is our BiS for reasons I'll explain later, so that part is pretty much solved. There's a lot of room to grow in the quiver, and for late in the league you'll want one with +1 arrow (which is now a normal suffix) but for the budget version I've just added one with relevant mods with decent weights.
• Other gear pieces that you'll have to spend some cash one are Presence of Chayula + anoint (which is just a stand-in for Replica Soul Tether, which is there strictly to enable Ghost Dance), the cluster jewels, which don't have any crazy weighted notables (the mark effect one might be expensive this league, in which case just replace it with a decent rare jewel) and the Conductivity on Hit ring, which is mostly a clear aid.
• Rares are mostly just life, evasion, suppression chance and resists. No need to get anything fancier to begin with.
• The budget PoB only has Sniper's Mark and Galvanic Arrow at level 21, and no awakened gems, naturally.

Missing bits and pieces from the new 3.17 tree

If you go into the Configuration setting, you'll see there's a ~310% increased damage modifier and a 40% more damage/noncrit modifier. These correspond to the league's new Precise Technique keystone and arrow mastery. You'll also notice that our accuracy is not quite enough to match our life, but I calculated it based on the new accuracy nodes that we'll get around master fletcher. Also you'll notice we have frenzy charges with 100% uptime, and that comes from the combination of the new mark mastery (frenzy charges on hit against marked) and blood rage.

PoB config tab choices

No smoke and mirrors here, I think everything is pretty sensible. Perfect frenzy charge uptime for the reasons explained above, permanent tailwind for obvious reasons, always on full life because it's an EV build with a ton of health regain on hit, projectile travel distance of 68 for reasons I'll explain later in the offense section, a modest shock value of 15 from having shocked with lightning arrow (you'll weave these in every 3 seconds to refresh shock), guaranteed exposure to lightning from the cluster jewel, and no innervation (since you don't get kills at pinnacle bosses easily).

You might be wondering whether the build is sustainable with the sheer amount of mana it spends. This build hits a shit ton, and generates 6 mana per hit. Against a single target, one barrage is 8 arrows * 2 hits per arrow * 6 mana per hit, so 96 mana per ability cast; more than double its cost. Provided you actually land your shots, you should have no problem with sustain.

Offensive mechanics

The build uses several of the 3.17 mechanics to squeeze a lot of damage out of galvanic arrow. In particular, here are some of the choices that make this build different from previous galvanic arrow setups:

First, there's zero crit investment. Instead, the build leverages a combination of the "Lucky lightning damage with non-crits" lightning mastery, and the new Precise Technique keystone. This grants a bunch of damage in exchange for two sacrifices:

• Having to travel to the top of the tree to grab the closest lightning mastery. In exchange, we get the very powerful Arcing Blows and Whispers of Doom nodes, as well as pathing past Ghost Dance which is a significant part of the build's defense.
• Having to be mindful of clearing the accuracy threshold for precise technique. This can be done pretty reliably by grabbing a single accuracy cluster, so it's not too bad. No need to use precision aura.

Second, the build takes Far Shot, which may be seen as a questionable idea considering most GA builds go Point Blank. The reason is that the build relies on a significant investment in projectile speed, which not only increases the area of GA, but now also directly contributes to damage. This means we reach a GA radius of 69 on the budget build, allowing us to leverage far shot at the tip range. If you're having trouble maintaining that distance, you may want to use Divergent Galvanic Arrow instead, which reduces your projectile speed slightly but causes the GA cone to be offset significantly from your position, giving you another ~10-15 units of range.

Third, this build makes a gigantic investment in Mark Effect. This is because Sniper's Mark is, well, insane. It will tremendously help with clear and damage, and Deadeye's new mark transfer effect will likely help offscreening even further when clearing.

Tornado (the spell) is there for some extra damage during boss downtime phases. Just cast it as the boss is about to finish roleplaying, and it will deal some extra damage for you. It's probably not a lot so I didn't factor it into the calculations.

Lightning Arrow takes care of clearing. There's no need for GMP, the natural +2 arrows plus a healthy amount of chain, combined with 10 shots a second will be more than enough to reach all nooks and crannies. Note Lightning Arrow is capable of shocking (and much better at it than Galvanic) so you'll want to shoot Lightning Arrow every now and then against bosses too; just a single tap every 3-4 seconds will suffice.

Defensive layers

This build uses some of the typical defensive layers from the right side of the tree (high evasion, high suppression, wind dancer) and also some oddballs that I'll get to in a second. Note that if you feel the defenses aren't enough, you can very easily replace Endless Munitions with Wind Ward, which is a very simple transfer of a sizeable amount of offense into a sizeable amount of defense.

You might be wondering about Presence of Chayula. This is a crutch item. It exists solely to do a cheaper version of what Replica Soul Tether would do: Grant you a sizeable amount of ES without any gear investment. The reason why this is important is that we'll be speccing into Ghost Dance, since:

• We have exactly enough evasion after being hit to recover the ~1k of ES that we'll have.
• We tend to avoid many hits which means GD has time to accumulate and isn't wasted on small hits.
• We have to path upwards so it's a comfortable pick.

Chayula also does other small things for us while we transition to our late game gear:

• It reduces our life total which makes it easy to clear the accuracy threshold, without sacrificing EHP since it gives us ES in return.
• It prevents stuns and reduces chaos damage when our gear isn't sophisticated enough to prevent chaos damage.

Wind Dancer and Focal Point help us avoid lethal damage while clearing. In general though, the build should be pretty nimble and long range, so as long as we're not asleep at the wheel it shouldn't be too rippy (though definitely not HC viable).

Questions and Answers

Q: I see no red or blue flasks. What about the sustain?.

This is a quill rain build. Hitting things will give you more life and mana that you know what to do with. As long as you're shooting and you're not getting one-shot yourself, you're living.

Q: Is Quill Rain really our BIS?

Yeah, I'm pretty certain it is, unless you want to get into really unrealistic bows. The biggest change is the 100% proj speed on Quill Rain being converted to 100% increased damage. It is a huge boost.

Q: 4k HP is way too little, even for a budget build.

The EHP is higher since there's a big chunk of ES from Presence of Chayula, plus the build has several "hard" mitigation layers besides evasion to prevent one-hits. If this is still scary you can sacrifice some damage by speccing into Wind Ward instead of Endless Munitions. Gale Force will be trivial to keep up with a quill rain build.

Q: I'm still scared.

Here, here, it'll be alright. You can grab rearguard, it's actually not a bad fit for the build considering in 3.17 it will come with built-in arrow speed.

Q: Why not grab Ricochet instead of Far Shot and spec into Point Blank?

You can certainly go that way. I think ricochet is not very useful though, and Far Shot has better synergy with Lightning Arrow for clearing anyway. Against bosses, I prefer the safety from working at Far Shot distance, even if it means having to be more precise with my positioning. Getting close is scary.

Q: Why not Acrobatics?

This is a good question, actually. For the very high investment variant, if you can afford good enough gear to get to 150% spell suppression without investing further in the tree, this would be a good idea, because it would protect our Ghost Dance charges better. I plan to do this later in the league, but it will require significant investment to really pay off.

Q: Why no Mirage Archer on LA?

Please go ahead. I just despise having a big green dude shooting above me. I can't take it.

Q: Any fun sauce or ideas to mix things up?

I've considered a few janky things, which I may try if I get bored:

• Voltaxic Rift on the swap with a LA setup optimized for a massive shock, so I can tag bosses and proceed to swap back to Quill Rain and facemelt them.
• Replica Quill Rain on the swap for an "orbital bombardment" alternative playstyle. It's less overall damage, but much safer distance-wise.

Anyway, this is all I've got for now. Let me know what you think and any possible points of improvement, I'll be looking forward to it!