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Greetings, Exiles! I’m sure you all have received the sad news recently that Path of Exile 2 closed beta, originally scheduled for June 7, 2024, has been postponed, with the developers stating that it will be released “towards the end” in 2024.
However, this also means that we have more time to prepare for a better gaming experience when we enter POE 2. In this guide, we will reveal the gameplay of Witch. So, Witch main players, please don’t miss this guide.
In Path of Exile 2, you can play as Witch, Mistress of Death and Decay, commanding your hordes of the undead and launching attacks on enemies.
Most classes have access to some kind of minions, but if you want to control an army, Witch may be the ideal class choice for you.
In POE 2, most minions do not need to be summoned manually. Celebrant Sceptre gives the player a couple of free warriors, as well as another resource called Spirit, which you can use to acquire any minions you want. You can see this Spirit Bar above the mana.
On the skills screen, you can choose the composition of your army and choose between the various minion variants available. Since this is a level-two area, we can only afford one more minion. However, when minions die, they are automatically resurrected as long as no other minions have died recently. So, before your next battle, all your minions will be resurrected.
You can also command your minions with a dedicated button, telling them to move to a specific location, attack a specific enemy, or even open a chest or portal for you.
We also have temporary minions. Besides this, many minions have command skills that depend on the type of minion you summoned.
Next, let’s talk about the spells available to Witch class.
First up is Unearth, which creates some bone constructs if it kills a monster or hits the corpse of a monster. They can’t take many hits and have a limited lifespan, but you can build a proper army with them.
I also use some debuffs with monsters when my minions attack. The first one we can use here is Contagion. If a monster dies with Contagion, it spreads to nearby enemies. And with each spread, the damage increases. So it’s a good idea to try to keep the infection going.
If any corpse is infected when you summon minions, then the minions will also be infected. Every time they hit an enemy, they will continue to infect the enemy. So it’s great to have an army of infected hordes of the undead.
We can also use another chaos debuff called Essence Drain. This effect has a higher degen on a single target. If the monster is also infected with Contagion, then Essence Drain will spread as well, which can turn into a real disaster.
I can use a channeling skill like Bone Storm, which creates a devastating burst of sharp spikes. Note that the longer you channel this skill, the more damage it will cause.
We also have a skill called Pain Offering. These skills allow you to pierce one of your skeletons with a big spike of bone to buff all of your other minions. It makes all of our other minions faster and do more damage.
After a battle, we usually have some extra corpses that we don’t want to waste. Profane Ritual can generate Power Charge by consuming corpses, which can buff some of my other spells. If we use it to summon Zombies, we can create more powerful super Zombies that don’t even need corpses to summon them.
We can also use Power Charge to channel Bone Storm. If I do this, it adds a devastating AoE.
Finally, it’s time to focus on the types of minions that Witch can summon.
The first one that comes to mind must be Zombies, which are extremely tanky minions. Although they require corpses to summon and won’t resurrect if they die, they are quite tough and can increase the number of your minions.
What’s more, many minions also have command skills. You can command them to deploy Gas Cloud Arrow on the battlefield to deal some sustained damage.
In addition, we can summon Skeletal Arsonists, who can throw small Fire Grenades. Besides this, they have a command skill that can detonate your minions with low health. When you see the red indicator, use this skill and the minion will explode.
These bone constructs are especially good because they expire quickly, anyway. So, you can go and farm this area’s boss, Carrion Crone, with all the tools you find to earn a good amount of POE2 Currency.
That’s the type of minions you can get in the level two area. But let’s see what the higher level minion gameplay is like.
In a level 30 area, besides still having our trusty warriors, there are many types of minions to choose from, such as Brutes for stunning or Ice Mages for freezing, most of which come with their own special abilities or command skills.
You can also stun enemies by using multiple Storm Mages: a Cleric to heal and revive my minions, and Reavers for high damage. You can also enrage them before the fight to slowly kill them, but Cleric should be able to keep enemies alive while my minions attack.
Storm Mages has a useful skill if a lot of your minions die. He can summon a Lightning Storm to hit the location of each Dead Skeleton in your army.
In POE 2, even non-boss monsters can be very devastating, such as Faridun Impaler. It has a wide variety of abilities and is difficult to defeat. But maybe we can make better use of its corpse.
By using Bind Spectre gems, we can take the corpse of any enemy and capture its spirit so that I can use it as a minion. Any monster can be captured, but the spirit cost depends on how powerful the monster is.
Such a powerful enemy requires a lot of spirit, so I have to summon a lot of other minions, but it does seem worth it. If Spectre dies like other minions, it will respawn after a short time.
All in all, Witch in Path of Exile 2 seems to have received some amazing quality of life updates to cater to her unique play style. Her various minion mechanics and gameplay will bring a lot of fun to the game. Even for those who don’t like minion builds, the diverse gameplay of Witch class will make you shine!
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View MorePath of Exile 2 has been the center of discussion among loyal players of the action role-playing game since its early access release last year. Although the developers have added many new game elements to this sequel that were not in the original game, the player community and players on many social platforms have been negative about it.
Even after POE 2 released its first major update and the first league Dawn of the Hunt some time ago, players’ complaints about the low drop rate and drastic nerfs of in-game loot have not changed at all. According to some relevant information leaks, the developers are taking some actions, such as releasing some hot fixes and additional changes in patch 0.2.0.
But in order to ensure that POE 2 can be in the best state before the official version is released and can provide players with a best exploration experience, it may also need to add an important feature - death review. At this stage, players are very demanding for this feature, so this guide organizes players’ views on it so that developers can create corresponding strategies according to players’ requirements more quickly.
In the production process of POE 2, developers have always wanted players to explore the huge game world in a slow-paced gameplay, and make the best build that suits them best according to the different exploration contents, until they reach the end of all battles.
However, in this game with slow and methodical gameplay, once the player dies in it, the cost invested before drawing, such as currency, gear, and one-way available Waystones will disappear, which is a very sad thing for all players, especially in the extremely challenging endgame stage.
Most importantly, players must learn from the corresponding experience from the failure just now, and then buy POE 2 Currency to upgrade their own builds accordingly, such as enhancing the overall defense ability or elemental resistance of the build to obtain better survivability. Or re-roll the affixes of the potions that can restore health or mana that they carry to obtain higher combat durability.
The developers thought this style might resonate with players, but in fact they didn’t buy it. Because the one-way available Waystones used in POE 2, on the one hand, the cost of drawing in the more difficult maps will also increase. On the other hand, if there is no death review screen in the game, it is difficult for players to find the real reason for death from the failure just now, which will make players more frustrated.
Because in most cases, the death of players in battle is not only caused by the ineffectiveness of the build they used, but also by mistakes in skill rotation or network jams, or even because of the excessive visual effects presented by the game, which makes players use wrong operations.
After these deaths caused by non-game mistakes, players may not need to make large-scale adjustments to their builds, and they want to clearly understand where they made mistakes and modify them in time, but unfortunately there is no such educational function in POE 2.
Although Path of Exile 2 Dawn of the Hunt has made some adjustments to reduce the degree of punishment for players’ death in the endgame, such as being able to create a new instance map after death and use Waystones with the same modifiers to enter it for a new round of exploration. But this cannot solve the genuine dilemma of players.
In fact, there are already many calls for the death review function in the popular action role-playing games in the current game world. Even Diablo 4, a powerful rival of POE 2, has been called by players to add this function, but they are indifferent.
So after Last Epoch, a common rival of POE 2 and D4, released Season 2 Tombs of the Erased, some disappointed players began to enter this more interesting game, because there are many features that players dream of, such as death review.
Even some players who have tried these two games called for POE 2 to learn from these features in Last Epoch in the next version to make themselves more competitive. Although the developers have not explicitly stated that they will consider adding this feature, players are still looking forward to it, because its popularity has become a trend just like couch co-op.
In general, because the difficulty of building and endgame in Path of Exile 2 is very high compared to similar games, the learning difficulty of players will also become higher. Therefore, if a death review screen is added, it may make it easier for them to learn from the experience of this battle and complete subsequent challenges faster.
Because the addition of this feature will improve the accessibility of the entire game, it is very useful for both novice exiles and high-level exiles. This will also indirectly lead to more new players pouring into POE 2, thereby expanding their influence. Like the players, I will also wait and see whether the developers can implement this new feature that can greatly improve the player's experience in the official version.
Path of Exile 2 was well received after its early access release in December last year, because it added a lot of new game content and mechanics compared to the original game. This positive momentum continued until early April this year, when the first major patch 0.2.0, and a new league Dawn of the Hunt were released.
Although the developers also spent a lot of time in this major update to bring players a variety of new content, such as new classes, new enemies and new maps, players did not buy it. Even though the developers subsequently launched nearly 5 patches to make up for the losses of players, players still complained about it.
Since Path of Exile 2 is still in the early access stage, there is still a lot of room for developers to modify. In view of this, this guide will summarize some of the key changes that POE 2 needs to make in the next update that are currently discussed the most in the player community and social platforms, and they may all make the player’s gaming experience better.
Although the quality and drop rate of Path of Exile 2 loot have been greatly improved compared to the original game, only a small number of gear and currency have enjoyed this preferential treatment, while the drop rate of other POE 2 Regal Orbs, Orb of Annulment, and Chaos Orbs that can greatly improve production efficiency is still very low in the game.
This makes it a very long and tedious process for players to make a high-rarity and high-quality affixed gear in the game. More importantly, in order to obtain those rarer Uniques directly through the campaign, players need to complete the running tasks of those more challenging maps.
In this case, the shortage of currency and the lack of gear effectiveness will make this challenge full of great risks. Therefore, players are very much hoping that the drop rate of these key items will become a little higher, making some high-tier maps more profitable, so that the entire game can be more explorable.
The gem cutting system in POE 2 is recognized by players as a great addition to this sequel, because it allows players to customize their skills according to the needs of the current exploration. And when you enter a higher-level explorable area, you will get more Uncut Gems, which means you can use them to upgrade your current skills or unlock new skills.
But when you over-upgrade a skill and change an exploration style, you will find that your build urgently needs to be modified in terms of skills. But when you remove this skill gem, you need to use a lower-level Uncut Gem to fill this gap.
In order to obtain this Uncut Gem, you need to return to the low-level map to do boring farming again, and expect these randomly dropped items to be picked up by you as soon as possible, which will consume a lot of time and energy.
Most importantly, you also need to buy POE 2 Currency to make corresponding modifications to your already nearly perfect and powerful build, which is a completely avoidable consumption.
So if developers add a gem vendor to the game, whether it’s skill gems, support gems, or spirit gems, it will greatly save players the cost of searching for the gems they want, thereby greatly improving the quality of life of players.
Path of Exile 2 has several very large maps, and many players have complained about having to circle the map many times to find the corresponding exit. And because of the unique map refresh mechanism in the sequel, the location of the exit will change when you enter the map at different times.
In addition, there are very few checkpoints on each map, which makes it impossible for players to respawn nearby and challenge an enemy or boss again after failing. All these factors make it difficult for players to quickly draw maps and get more loot from them.
The improvement that developers can make is to set more checkpoints and reduce the scope of each map so that players can better backtrack and farm effectively.
Not only that, many players who want to complete all campaigns quickly suggest that the exit of each map should be permanently marked. However, from the perspective of some players who want to explore in detail, this may have some negative effects, because after completing the main battles and quests, they will be very eager to leave the map instead of looking for some optional quests or bosses.
Of course, in addition to the changes in the game mechanism, players also hope that developers can optimize the performance of the game. Because in many actual explorations, the player’s configuration is far beyond the recommended configuration, but the game’s frame rate is still not stable, so developers may need to put this type of optimization on the agenda.
The above are some suggestions from many players on the recent major update of POE 2 and what they want to see in the next update. Although there is no guarantee that POE 2 will return to its peak state after revising these problems, it is worth affirming that will undoubtedly be a relief to those exiles who criticized patch 0.2.0 and are loyal to the original. I wish you a happy game!
Since the early access release of Path of Exile 2, players have been very surprised by the performance of Mercenary class. This character, which seems to be out of tune with the game style, has become the first choice for many players who love strategic battles with its super damage output and super practicality.
In the latest Dawn of the Hunt league, the developer added a new Ascendancy class called Tactician, which is a class with vigorous support, survivability and damage capabilities. And some of the passive skills and effect gains it provides have significantly improved the practicality of Mercenary.
For Tactician, you can make it a purely auxiliary support class, or you can make it a part-time auxiliary class. If you have just unlocked this Ascendancy class, but don’t know how to use it correctly, this guide will provide you with the most commonly used and most powerful build tips for Tactician.
It should be noted that the builds provided here are all available for single-player exploration, which will focus more on self-leveling, and we will continue to pay attention to those builds that can benefit your allies in cooperation.
Before using Tactician, a class with multiple builds, you need to select Mercenary as your standard class before the exploration begins, and be familiar with some subsequent commonly used active skills, such as Fragmentation Rounds, High Velocity Rounds, Explosive Grenade and Gas Grenade.
Because being familiar with the rotation between these skills will make your early game and the campaign process in Cruel Mode very smooth. When you reach the endgame, you can modify your build according to your needs, because at this time you already have a lot of Uncut Spirit Gems to unlock some new spells, thereby enhancing the damageability of the entire build.
But it is worth mentioning that although the damage ability of Mercenary (or Tactician) is strong, its survivability is also very weak. In a boss encounter, the most powerful build of this character will be in serious danger of death after three consecutive attacks from the enemy.
Therefore, many players who use Tactician build often stun the enemy in combat, which will open up a window for them to deal super high damage and successfully complete all challenges. So here are some strategies and tips for using Tactician build during your exploration, including the leveling stage and the endgame stage.
Since the skills you have in Act 1 are only some basic skills that can help you get through the early game, such as Fragmentation Rounds, which can effectively defend you from monsters. When you unlock Tier 2 and above Uncut Skills Gems, you can cut them into Velocity Rounds and Flash Grenade, two very effective damage skill gems, to have higher clearing and combat capabilities.
Although you don’t have a lot of support gems in Act 1, you still need to place Scattershot and Double Barrel in the support slot of High Velocity Rounds, and Overpower and Second Wind behind Flash Grenade.
In addition, your defensive gear is also very important in the early stages of the game, so you need to try to find some armor or helmets with high dodge ratings and elemental resistance, and then buy POE 2 Currency to upgrade their rarity or re-roll their affixes.
When you level up a little, you can unlock Galvanic Shards and add Lightning Infusion and Martial Tempo to it to expand the effectiveness of this powerful elemental damage skill. Finally, after you successfully defeat King of the Mists boss, you can cut the first Uncut Spirit Gem you get into Herald of Thunder to increase the lightning damage you can apply.
In Act 2, you will need to upgrade your existing skills as much as possible and unlock some new skills. The first new skill you need to unlock is Gas Grenade, and place Scattershot and Magnified Effect support gems on it.
In the case of a group of enemies attacking you, you can use Explosive Grenade and equip it with Second Wind and Inspiration support gems. The other most needed new skill in this act is Explosive Shot, because it will work perfectly with Explosive Grenade skill, further increasing the explosion damage you inflict on the enemy, especially if you choose Martial Tempo as its support gem.
At this time, the support gem of Galvanic Shards should be changed from Martial Tempo to Conduction. With this powerful build, the exploration process of this act will be very smooth until you enter Trial of Sekhemas, which can provide you with a tough challenge with a strong Tactician Ascendancy class.
In this more difficult challenge, focus on upgrading your skills as much as possible and unlock Oil Grenade and Ripwire Ballista, both of which make some high-health enemies more vulnerable to high projectile damage and provide you with some defensive capabilities.
For the support gems of these two skill gems, Encumbrance increases the enemy movement speed caused by Oil Grenade by 15%, while Lockdown and Persistence make the damage inflicted by Ripwire Ballista stronger and more persistent.
If you miss the opportunity to gain Tactician Ascendancy in Trial of Sekhemas, you can also unlock it by completing Trial of Chaos in this act. However, if you have already unlocked Ascendancy class, you can also gain more Ascendancy points by completing this trial.
Finally, once you defeat Ignagduk, Bog Witch, you can use Uncut Spirit Gem it rewards you with unlocking Ghost Dance, which can be used with the support gem Clarity, which increases mana regeneration in this build by 30%.
In Cruel Mode, your overall build doesn’t actually need to be changed much, because most of the skill damage capabilities have been maximized. You can unlock Wind Dancer to enhance your defense capabilities according to your play style.
In addition, at this stage, the support gem slots of Gas Grenades and Galvanic Shards are no longer enough. You need to use two POE 2 Lesser Jeweler’s Orbs to increase this slot and place Primal Armament and Pierce in it.
When you complete all the main campaigns provided by POE 2, you enter the more challenging endgame content. Although your overall build is complete at this stage, you still need to modify it for subsequent game content.
For some key passive skills and active skill gems, you don’t need to modify them because their maximum effectiveness has been demonstrated. But the weapons and gear you use may need a major change.
In the early game exploration, your farming effectiveness and clearing ability may not be so important, so most of them are weapons that can inflict a lot of physical damage. In the endgame, you not only need to pay attention to the physical damage you cast, but also need to add some lightning damage to make you more profitable in some group enemy encounters.
Although your defensive gear such as armor and helmets are of a higher level before, and can allow you to complete some exploration tasks safely, the challenges of the enemies and monsters you face in the endgame are more difficult, so you also need amulets that can increase your maximum health and mana to escort you.
In fact, the operation and gameplay of Tactician build are very simple. You only need to use the correct skill rotation (from Oil Grenade to Explosive Shot to Gas Grenades) to have super high damage output. But it has to be admitted that the cooldown time of these skills is very long. After you use a set of rotations, all skills may enter the cooldown time.
But this does not mean that you can only dodge to ensure your safety during this time. You can also throw Explosive Grenades at the enemy to cause more explosive damage until all skills are restored. Or, during the skill rotation, throw Ripwire Ballista at the enemy, which will stop the enemy from moving forward under the damage of the powerful crossbow, so that it can withstand more damage.
Exiles, the arrival of Dawn Of The Hunt League has brought us some new classes and Ascendancies, which also gives us more options for endgame builds. And here, an excellent league starter build we want to recommend is the new Lich Ascendancy based on Witch class, which is Essence Drain Contagion Lich.
Lich is a very interesting Ascendancy class. It not only brings a new gameplay, but also is extremely powerful, causing a lot of damage in both the early and late game.
And Lich has perfect synergy with Essence Drain, because it has powerful defense nodes like Soulless Form and Eternal Life. And Lich class is also one of the few Ascendancy skills that Essence Drain will have a strong damage multiplier when using Eldritch Empowerment.
Essence Drain deals damage on top of regular hits, as well as secondary damage over time debuff that lasts for a set amount of time. When combined with Contagion skill, the damage over time spreads between groups of monsters, turning our primary damage into a large-scale clearing skill, and you can see groups of monsters on the screen exploding in an instant!
So, as the name suggests, this build revolves around two core mechanics, Essence Drain and Contagion. Now, let’s break down its mechanics.
As we said before, the core damage skills of this build are Essence Drain and Contagion, a combination that has actually been widely used since the early days of Path of Exile 1.
First, let’s understand the mechanics of Contagion, which is to apply a debuff to a single enemy and deal chaos damage over time. When an enemy affected by Contagion dies, it spreads all debuffs, including Contagion, to nearby enemies, and increases damage by +100% per jump, stacking up to 300%. This is really crazy!
For Essence Drain, after you fire a projectile, it can apply a powerful Chaos Damage over Time debuff to enemies. Currently, in POE 2, Essence Drain is the only skill besides Contagion that can apply a high Chaos Damage over Time debuff. So when an enemy affected by Contagion is killed by Essence Drain, its powerful Chaos Damage over Time will also spread to nearby enemies along with Contagion debuff.
In Path of Exile 2, this playstyle was initially adopted by a few Acolyte of Chayula Ascendancy players, making this class, which was not doing well in the early Early Access period, competitive.
However, after the release of Dawn Of The Hunt, Eternal Life mechanic of Lich class clearly proved that it was a better choice for this playstyle. Eternal Life Ascendancy node of Lich stipulates that life cannot be modified while having Energy Shield. At first glance, this seems to have two benefits, one is that as long as you have Energy Shield, you can prevent being killed instantly, and the other is that you are immune to chaos damage when Energy Shield is activated.
But the key is that when used in conjunction with Soulless Form passive skill, 10% of the damage will penetrate the energy shield. And after having Eternal Life, these penetration damage cannot modify life, which actually means that the penetration rate is converted into damage reduction.
The core equipment of this build includes Atziri’s Disdain Gold Circlet, which makes 10% of the damage penetrate energy shield, and it also increases energy shield based on maximum life. In addition to this, you can also get Heavy Buffer, which increases maximum energy shield by 40% and makes 5% of the damage penetrate energy shield.
The combination of Soulless Form, Atziri’s Disdain and Heavy Buffer can get a total of 25% of the damage bypassing energy shield, which is equivalent to 25% flat damage reduction, which is extremely powerful.
Considering that the key equipment of this build is Atziri’s Disdain, we adjust its modifier priority to: Chaos Skill Gem Level > Chaos Damage > Spell Damage.
Currently, the price of Atziri’s Disdain on the market is very affordable, usually 1 Exalted Orb can be obtained, but the price of wands that provide chaos damage is relatively high, so if you want to get a continuous chaos damage debuff, then you may have to buy POE 2 Currency to get them.
In addition, thanks to the unique mechanism of Lich’s Eternal Life, defensive equipment can use life and energy shield at the same time, avoiding dependence on a single attribute, which greatly reduces the difficulty of obtaining defensive equipment. Therefore, except for expensive weapons, other equipment is still affordable.
In the character panel statistics, we can see that the damage per second (DPS) of Essence Drain Contagion Lich is 52,000, and the effective health value is 28,000 under normal circumstances.
As a Contagion Lich build with Eternal Life, you can apply various curse debuffs, chaos resistance, or take advantage of low life bonuses to get additional damage bonuses. Therefore, you can use it to clear all non-chaos immune content.
For the advantages of this build, we will consider that Contagion’s spread mechanism makes it extremely fast to clear the field, and the continuous damage gameplay allows you to clear all enemies in just a few seconds!
Of course, the disadvantages are also obvious. First, Essence Drain and Contagion are both single-target skills, so you can only trigger the spread effect when attacking the same enemy, and missing this combo will make you vulnerable. Secondly, running this build requires at least 2 active skills, which greatly increases the complexity of the buttons.
According to the current statistics for the new league, Lich has a usage rate of 13% in the ladder class, ranking second. Atziri’s Disdain maintains a usage rate of about 6% in the entire ladder ranking, making it the seventh most used unique item. The combination of Essence Drain and Contagion currently has a usage rate of about 7%, ranking 15th among all active skills.
There is no doubt that the build is relatively popular, probably because Lich is currently too powerful, but you have to consider that if Lich is nerfed, the effectiveness of this build may be severely affected.