Are We Getting Archmage or Mana Buffs In The Incoming POE 3.21?

Since Path of Exile 2's Early Access release, Lightning Arrow Deadeye build has been a popular choice. Not only does it deal massive damage to multiple targets with its chain lightning beams, but it also boasts excellent on-target perks and mobility. Combined with Deadeye Ascendancy's passive buff, it significantly increases damage and clearing speed.

This build excels at shredding dense enemy teams, and its gear and passive tree offer strong leveling potential. Whether you're looking to challenge pinnacle bosses or quickly farm POE 2 currency, Lightning Arrow Deadeye is an excellent build choice.

But after the balancing challenges of POE 2's The Third Edict update, can Lightning Arrow Deadeye maintain its dominance as it did in Patch 0.2.0? Let's find out!

0.2.0 + 0.3.0 Changes

First, I think the changes to this build starting with Patch 0.2.0 are significant.

If you haven't played POE 2 since Patch 0.2.0, then, like many others, you might not notice a noticeable difference in the first few weeks. But the developers actually made a lot of changes to bow in Patch 0.2.0.

In the middle of Patch 0.2.0, about a month in, they increased the damage of Lightning Rod by 30%, which is a huge single-target buff.

In addition, they added a +1 Arrow Rune, which you can insert into your Bow to gain more +1 arrows. And since Lightning Rod can scale arrows, it's very effective for both clearing and single-target attacks.

They also increased Lightning Arrow Chaining range from 2.4 meters to 3.2 meters, which is a significant improvement. Now it has even greater clearing power.

It's worth noting that the developers also buffed this build's single-target damage, so after all the buffs in patch 0.2.0, it's overall quite impressive.

Lightning Arrow itself wasn't significantly affected in Path of Exile 2 Patch 0.3.0. However, Lightning Rod was rebalanced so that upgrading its gem quality now increases the chance of additional lightning bursts rather than increasing its range. While this change might feel like a nerf to its AOE power, the increased lightning burst rate does benefit the build's damage.

Thus, Lightning Arrow Deadeye build is a solid performer in Patch 0.3.0, and with all these buffs and improvements, it still has the potential to be one of the best builds in Path of Exile 2, or at least a top contender.

Lightning Arrow (LA) & Lightning Rod (LR)

In PoE 2, Lightning Arrow is a projectile skill that creates an initial arrow and then unleashes arcing lightning beams that can chain onto multiple enemies, making it particularly effective at clearing large groups of enemies.

In contrast, Lightning Rod is a stationary skill that creates a stationary lightning burst on the ground as a secondary damage source. This can be chained with the beams of Lightning Arrow and other Lightning skills to deal high damage to a single target, making it ideal for boss fights.

LA/LR build in Path of Exile 2 is a powerful bow build, leveraging Deadeye Ascendancy's projectiles and damage bonus to efficiently clear the area and kill bosses.

This build works by locking Lightning Arrow onto an enemy and using Lightning Rod to create a stationary target for subsequent Lightning Arrows, creating a massive area-of-effect damage source. As a result, this synergy is considered one of the most powerful and fastest-scaling skill synergies in POE 2.

Tornado Shot And Lightning Arrow Synergy

Next, let's review Tornado Shot, which was a key reason why Deadeye's Lightning Arrow was so popular until the middle of patch 0.2.0.

In PoE 2, pairing Tornado Shot with Lightning Arrow Deadeye can boost single-target damage and create powerful combos. This is because when a Lightning Arrow projectile hits a placed Tornado Shot, it triggers a chain attack, allowing the arrow to hit the target multiple times.

This setup is particularly useful against bosses and rare monsters, as by strategically placing Tornado Shot on the boss, you can maximize your damage output with subsequent Lightning Arrow combos.

This synergy significantly boosts overall damage and provides additional projectiles, making it an easy endgame powerhouse. This is why many players transition from Lightning Arrow to Tornado Shot once they have the necessary gear, such as a high-quality Tornado Shot gem and powerful +1 arrow gear.

A fully optimized character build can deal enough damage to effectively one-shot Xesht pinnacle boss, instantly dealing over 30 million damage, making it one of the highest DPS skills in the game.

Insane Clearing Speed

This is also one of the fastest builds in PoE 2. In Patch 0.3.0, Lightning Arrow Deadeye can actually achieve up to 130% movement speed, and if you stack Hinder debuff, this build can even reach 160% movement speed.

This build is particularly useful in the endgame and leveling stages, as it can trigger chain lightning damage, which, combined with mechanics like Herald of Thunder and Lightning Rods and Voltaic Mark, creates powerful and satisfying screen-clearing effects.

When you kill a shocked or frozen enemy, Herald of Thunder triggers and chains attacks, significantly increasing your damage and screen-clearing speed.

Additionally, placing Lightning Rods at the feet of enemies creates a concentrated damage point, which can create a powerful chain reaction with Lightning Arrow to defeat even stronger enemies. Voltaic Mark skill boosts your damage to a single target and helps amplify the shock status, further increasing the clearing effect.

Notably, Deadeye can gain significant movement speed bonuses through runes, movement modifiers on boots, and other mechanics, making it one of the fastest builds in the game.

Therefore, with Lightning Arrow's powerful chain attacks, Herald of Thunder's explosive effects, and Voltaic Mark's shock, Lightning Arrow Deadeye is an extremely effective and satisfying choice for long-range mob clearing in Patch 0.3.0.

In short, Lightning Arrow Deadeye is a standout in terms of leveling, DPS, and clearing speed in POE 2 Patch 0.3.0. Therefore, I predict this build will be incredibly insane in the early stages of The Third Edict! So give it a try before they nerf it significantly!

Exiles, today we'd like to discuss a unique and niche build that only 0.2% of players used in Path of Exile 2 Patch 0.2.0, making it a truly unique option for those looking to experiment with a different style: the Shattering Palm Witch. This build performed exceptionally well in patch 0.2.0.

In Path of Exile 2 Patch 0.3.0: The Third Edict update, the Shattering Palm build wasn't directly altered, but rather enhanced through extensive improvements to unarmed combat and the new Hollow Palm Technique Keystone. This keystone allows the use of quarterstaffs with unarmed weapons and grants increased speed, critical strike, and damage bonuses to unarmed skills.

Thus, by addressing past gameplay issues, Shattering Palm Witch build's damage and capabilities have been significantly increased.

Here, we'll discuss how Shattering Palm Witch works, including the required skills, equipment, and everything else you need to know. Let's get started!

Skills

First, before diving into the mechanics behind this build, let's take a look at the required skills.

Shattering Palm

As a clear core skill, Shattering Palm can be enhanced with talents, allowing it to cover the entire screen. Shattering Palm applies a layer of Ice Crystals to enemies, and when one of these monsters dies, Ice Crystals trigger a chain explosion.

Furthermore, we can exploit the unique synergy between Shattering Palm and Ice Wall. While Shattering Palm itself has low damage and is cast with bare hands, cleverly paired with Ice Wall, it can deliver significant damage.

Ice Wall

Because Ice Wall can be treated as an enemy and has ice attached to it, we can summon a low-level Ice Wall and then shatter it with Shattering Palm, triggering a chain explosion.

While Shattering Palm isn't as effective as Ice Wall in terms of direct kill potential, this strategy allows us to effectively clear groups of enemies using its explosive effects and harvest a large amount of PoE 2 currency in a short period of time.

By summoning a low-level Ice Wall and shattering it, we can create chain explosions to boost our overall damage output and enhance our clearing damage with our Aura skills.

Freeze

It's worth noting that since we're using Freeze element, we can also combine Cast on Freeze and Freezing Mark Skill Gems to more easily trigger Shattering Palm. This setup allows us to effectively deal with groups of enemies and utilize the freezing mechanic to boost our overall damage output.

Gear

Next, let's discuss gear selection for this Shattering Palm Witch build.

For unique items, you should consider Collapsing Horizon, Ingenuity, and Morior Invictus.

While our Shattering Palm doesn't gain damage bonuses from weapons, weapon modifiers can still increase our damage. Therefore, Collapsing Horizon is a good choice, as it not only increases skill levels but also provides critical strike chance and skill regeneration.

Ingenuity is a unique Heavy Belt in Path of Exile 2 that increases the bonuses of equipped rings by 40-80%.

Morior Invictus is a unique body armor that increases the player's armor, evasion, and energy shield, and increases the rarity of each Socketed Rune or Soul Core, granting additional Spirit.

In addition, when looking at item stat bonuses, focus on single stat increases, energy shield, resistances, melee skill level, and flat damage modifiers. These stats will help improve the overall performance of the build.

Skill Tree

In the skill tree, prioritize allocating points to Flurry and Authority passive nodes. Additionally, invest in From Nothing and Iron Reflexes nodes to remove all evasion ratings and convert them to armor. Finally, the remaining points can be used to increase critical damage, energy shield, and elemental damage.

Ascendancy 

Please note that this build has no specific Ascendancy requirements; you can choose based on your personal preference.

However, if you're looking for improved clearing capabilities, I'd recommend prioritizing Lich Ascendancy. This is because Lich in PoE 2 provides powerful offensive and defensive benefits for both spellcasters and summoners, including bonus chaos damage that scales with mana from Unholy Might, additional curse effects, the ability to cause cursed enemies to explode, and the powerful defensive power provided by Soulless Form and Eternal Life.

In addition, Lich Ascendancy can utilize Crystalline Phylactery to gain an additional jewel socket, which can be combined with other nodes to further enhance your defense.

Overall Evaluation

Firstly, the total equipment cost to complete this build is less than 20 PoE 2 Divine Orbs. While it's not the lowest-cost build, it's actually a good deal considering the impressive results.

As for the practicality of this build, I believe this is a subjective and judgmental issue, so individual opinions may vary. Objectively speaking, this build boasts excellent clearing speed, though its boss-killing abilities are a bit lackluster. However, its relatively low cost makes it suitable for casual players, and more importantly, its simple controls make it incredibly easy to master!

In short, Shattering Palm Witch build in Path of Exile 2 Patch 0.3.0 offers excellent clearing speed and strong survivability, thanks to its core mechanic: applying Freeze debuff to enemies while dashing, and triggering a massive Freezing Explosion when struck hard enough.

While effective, players must prioritize high-level Shattering Palm and the Freezing Mark Skill Gem to maximize the blast's damage. Furthermore, this build can be a bit cumbersome, requiring careful aiming and positioning to avoid damage.

Deflection is a new defensive stat added to Path of Exile 2 Patch 0.3.0. It's a new mechanic for Dexterity-based builds, designed to reduce all incoming damage by at least 40%, with the potential for increased effectiveness as it's rolled and stacked.

Frankly, this is a boon for pure evasion builds, as evasion previously lacked effective mitigation, leaving them vulnerable to one-hit kills when taking significant damage.

Now, evasion builds have Deflection stat as a defensive complement, which makes most builds on the right side of the skill tree tend to be hybrid setups, combined with energy shields to be able to deal with some larger incoming damage.

How Does It Work?

Simply put, think of Deflection as a modifier that reduces incoming damage. If rolled successfully, it applies the reduction to any damage, not just the default evadable damage.

This means you'll be able to use Deflection to counter a wide range of hits, slams, and even boss skills.

Deflection's effectiveness typically depends on modifiers that convert a percentage of your Evasion Rating into Deflection Rating. Deflection Rating provides an additional chance to deflect incoming damage, blocking not only 40% of the incoming damage but also any damaging ailments caused by that hit.

Note that the chance to deflect incoming attacks here is determined by the ratio of your Deflection Rating to your opponent's Accuracy Rating. However, unlike evasion, the chance to deflect isn't capped at 95%; it can even reach 100% if you're willing to invest in more PoE 2 Divine Orbs to continuously stack the effect.

Also Read: Path Of Exile 2 The Third Edict Of Patch 0.3.0 Brings Improvements To Enhance The Player Experience - Act IV, Sprint, Rise Of The Abyssals And More

How To Achieve 100% Chance To Deflect?

But how much investment do we need to achieve a 100% chance to deflect attacks? To answer this question, we first need to understand Deflection calculation formula.

Deflection Calculation Formula

The developers didn't actually add any additional information about deflection in the 0.3.0 patch notes, but the trailer gives us the information we need. We see a character chart listing their level, evasion rating, estimated chance to evade, and their deflection rating and estimated chance to deflect.

Since a character's estimated chance to evade in PoE 2 is calculated by comparing their evasion rating with the average accuracy rating of monsters of the same level, we can also guess how the estimated chance to deflect is calculated.

For example, let's assume the character is level 82 and the average accuracy rating of monsters of the same level is 1.75. Substituting these numbers into the chance to evade formula yields 62.84, while the character's estimated chance to evade is actually 63%. Therefore, this calculation method is generally correct.

We can then do the same for deflection rating, substituting the same formula for evasion rating, which yields 39.7. Therefore, we're guessing that the character's estimated chance to deflect is 39%. This may be slightly off because of rounding, but it's likely close enough.

How Much To Invest?

With this information, we can calculate how much deflection rating is needed to reach the upper limit of chance to evade in the late game, and thus how much investment we need to make.

If you're well-equipped, you can probably convert around 60% of your evasion rating into deflection rating.

Now, we've seen this stat on body armor and helmets, but it also appears on gloves, boots, and possibly even bucklers. If the stat also appears on your equipped bucklers, your chance to evade will only be higher.

Additionally, we've seen a new deflection rating wheel in the passive tree. It has six nodes, four of which grant 6% chance to evade, while a significant node grants a 10% increase.

We're not sure what the remaining two nodes do, but it's possible that more wheels like this will appear in the updated passive tree. We're just not sure where they'll be located or how much PoE 2 currency you'll need to reach them. But trust me, it's a good idea to prepare gear with a higher evasion rating stat!

With excellent evasion gear and factoring in the life prefix, your base evasion rating could be 4,500 to 5,000, and even higher if you're also using a buckler.

So, assuming a base evasion rating of 5,000, this means that if your evasion rating increases by 100%, you'll gain 5,000 deflection rating. With more similar stats, your chance to deflect could increase by a total of 40%. In short, chance to deflect can be capped out if you invest enough.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Deflection looks like it will be a great addition to boost the defense of pure evasion builds, but we're not sure yet whether these improvements will make their way to hybrid builds.

Even if they do, you might not be able to achieve very high chance to deflect, as your base evasion rating is significantly lower than your deflection rating. Furthermore, achieving a high chance to deflect might require significant effort and currency, including the use of numerous external mechanics. So, is the addition of Deflection stat a successful defensive enhancement or simply a drawback that further complicates the defense layer? We'll have to wait and see!

Today, we'd like to discuss the changes to armor modifiers in Path of Exile 2 Patch 0.3.0.

As we all know, armor modifiers are important affixes that supplement defensive abilities, primarily by increasing armor value over time, thereby mitigating physical damage taken. These modifiers scale based on the percentage of the global armor modifier and have different categories, affecting their placement and value on items.

However, armor modifiers have a weakness: by default, they only affect physical damage, not other types of damage. Excitingly, the scope of these modifiers has been revised in Patch 0.3.0. Now, we can finally apply a percentage of armor to elemental damage taken.

Nerfs To The Maximum Elemental Resistance Modifier

This begs the question: just how significant will the armor changes actually be? The first thing to note is that a large number of nodes granting maximum elemental resistance appear to be being removed or replaced with armor that applies to elemental damage.

• Smith of Katava's maximum fire resistance node will be replaced with an armor node that applies to elemental damage.
• Prism Guard Passive in the passive tree, which previously granted maximum elemental resistance, now also applies armor proportional to elemental damage.
• The smaller nodes leading to this cluster that previously granted maximum resistance have likely been modified and no longer grant it.
• Infernoclasp Plate Belt, which grants base physical damage and fire resistance, will no longer be obtainable in patch 0.3.0.

Overall, the path to maximum elemental resistance appears to be significantly weakened in favor of more armor that applies to elemental damage. This will have a significant impact on builds on the left side of the passive tree: sustained elemental damage will become more dangerous, as armor can't be applied to it for as long.

Order Of Applying Armor

So, how does armor stack with maximum resistance? It's worth noting that armor calculations for mitigating elemental or chaos damage are applied before resistances. This is inherently worse than the calculations in PoE 1, where the calculations were reversed, allowing armor to better mitigate smaller hits.

Thus, the armor calculation for hits mitigated by resistances first is significantly reduced, allowing armor to provide a higher mitigation effect than it would otherwise.

In PoE 2, however, armor is calculated before resistances, which often results in large amounts of damage overwhelming your armor, rendering its mitigation effect negligible.

How Is Armor Calculated?

Now, let's estimate the amount of armor you can reasonably expect to gain, and how much armor you can gain from elemental properties.

First, the developers did say that this modifier applies to all armor types, so we can estimate that you can expect to gain a 20% bonus from body armor and a 15% bonus from gloves, helmets, and boots, for a total of 65% from your gear. If shields also roll modifiers and you can use one, the bonus is even higher.

Additionally, there are Soul Cores, which provide a 30% bonus to each elemental type. Then we know that there's at least one notable in the passive tree that provides a 15% bonus to a specific stat, as well as several notables that apply to each elemental damage type.

However, please note that because they may be so far apart in the passive tree, obtaining them all requires a large investment of POE 2 currency, so we can make appropriate trade-offs so that in the endgame we can get about 110% armor value bonus with very good equipment alone.

It's worth noting that monster elemental damage is now balanced based on a minimum expected resistance of 75%, so monster hits typically deal much more elemental damage than physical damage.

Suppose our armor is 25,000 and our character takes approximately 8,000 fire damage. If we apply the 110% armor bonus to elemental damage, we achieve a mitigation of approximately 25%, or 5,953 damage, before elemental resistance takes effect.

Then, if the character has 75% elemental resistance, after two stacks of mitigation, they will take 1488 fire damage.

So, in this case, the armor value is equivalent to six additional stacks of maximum fire resistance mitigation.

What if we take 5,000 elemental damage? This time, the armor will mitigate approximately 35% of the damage, reducing it to 3,226. Then, the 75% elemental resistance kicks in, mitigating 807 damage.

In this example, the armor provides mitigation equivalent to an additional 9% of maximum resistance. You can see that the effect of this modifier increases significantly as elemental damage is reduced.

How To Make The Most Of The Armor Modifier?

This modifier works well with monster skills that convert some physical damage into elemental damage, because the armor formula is applied separately to each damage type.

For example, suppose a monster has an attack skill that converts 30% of physical damage into fire damage. When we encounter this monster on a map, the map's modifiers will cause it to gain a percentage of additional lightning damage.

Since the armor formula isn't applied all at once to reduce the damage of a hit, but rather to each damage type separately, the full armor calculation is naturally applied to the physical portion of the hit, and separately to the fire and lightning damage, for a total of three calculations.

This means that this armor modifier is generally more effective in this scenario, as the damage is broken down into multiple different types, and armor is more effective against the resulting smaller damage components.

Summary

In general, elemental armor can provide a significant degree of mitigation against small to medium-sized hits, but it essentially just makes the armor perform better in its natural area, and it doesn't mean these hits won't still be lethal.

More importantly, for large-scale hits, maximum elemental resistance is clearly more advantageous because it provides a continuous damage reduction effect, not to mention that armor has no effect on continuous elemental damage.