Quirks/features of Exploding Arrow (bows)

[Crystalion]

so i'm leaning towards your suggestion of a fire rogue merc.  If you instead used a cold rogue, would her freezing effect work through the explosion cloud? 

I couldn't find any information on merc. skill level in 1.1s, so please enlighten me with a link if you have more info!

When the Rogue hireling, using a Kuko, decides to fire a *regular* arrow, she gets an explosive arrow instead. When she decides to use her power of FA she gets an FA (albeit one with additional +fire from the Kuko). Ditto on the CA Rogue. So no, the CA chilling effect is not transmitted at all when a regular arrow (converted to EA) is fired.

The information on percentages of attack use by mercs was posted either here or on the AB recently--perhaps someone who remembers will link to it (as I didn't find it just now). However Spirea's pages have hireling info (some of which is out of date for v1.10 of course) and are linked from the main LL D2 page.

Raziel wrote:

Will the FULL damage - including the Enchant adder - of the explosive damage be enhanced by 96%, or simply the slvl 7 Kuko explosive damage?

and the answer from v1.10s pvp testing was no--the numbers I saw are consistant with the EA from Kuko damage being enhanced, not also the enchant adder (or, for that matter, the +fire damage from the Kuko).

I did notice that some of the new high level uniques in v1.10 have +% fire damage as an attribute, but those are hard to find and have a high clvl req.

On a more practical note, since an Enchantress blesser is "just add salt", it would typically be a huge win to sacrifice weapon/attack damage for max effective ias (i.e. fastest/mostest/surest attack methods, to carry lots of the fire enchantment damage). Getting the minimum times for the Multishot, Strafe, Jab, Fend, Fury, Zeal, WW, Dragon Talon (and possibly Fire Fist and Dragon Tail, if enchant carries into them) directly multiplies the Enchant fire damage output. (afaik you can't speed up Blade Fury or Blade Sentry, and Blade Shield v1.10s is bugged 3/128 instead of 32/128 damage).

Naturally *hitting* the monsters is helpful also (ITD, -DR%, auto-hit, +AR etc.) to up the effectiveness. These are things people try to do anyway. The key thought would be--if you have a Blessing Enchantress to bestow you with hefty +fire damage--to prioritize making that effective when you can get more mileage out of it than alternatives (which is almost certainly true until your character is high level with high level gear).