Analyzing The Impact Of New Skill Gems And A Significant Nerf In Path Of Exile 3.24 Necropolis

Besides the new Druid class, Path of Exile 2 0.4.0 update also added a new ascendancy for Sorceress: Disciple of Varashta. This ascendancy quickly exploded in popularity in the early league by bypassing traditional critical strike damage bonuses and minion limitations.

Here, we'll showcase Djinn Disciple of Varashta build, which, based on the high burst damage of Djinn and flexible resource and cooldown management, has almost changed the current endgame meta.

Build Overview

The core idea of this build revolves around Navira's Fracturing and Ruzhan's Reckoning, ultimately using Cold Djinn to explode the entire screen.

Navira's Fracturing

The highlight of Navira's Fracturing is that it causes all Chilled Ground with enemies standing on it to deal high spell damage and have a strong Freeze effect.

However, to fully utilize Navira's Fracturing, we need to create a large amount of Chilled Ground. There are many different ways to do this, but we decided to primarily use a Cold-Infused playstyle with Ice Nova.

Because when it's Cold-Infused, it creates a patch of Chilled Ground. This Chilled Ground has the same radius as the explosion, meaning we can significantly expand the area of effect by continuously using Cold Djinn explosions, even covering the entire screen.

I need to remind you that Chilled Ground effect does not stack, meaning that even if you trigger many different Chilled Ground effects, it will only count as one instance of damage. So, don't continuously cast it.

Furthermore, the way Chilled Ground works is that it needs an enemy on it, so if there are no enemies on it, it won't explode. But if someone is standing on the edge of Chilled Ground, even if the effect extends beyond the screen, it will still explode. So you can use this to your advantage to maximize your attack range.

To obtain these infusion effects, you must use Frost Bomb, and increase the maximum number of uses through Overabundance. Then, use Spell Cascade in your skill links, which will create two additional bombs. Finally, using Short Fuse II, you can increase the detonation speed by 80%, making it explode almost instantly, but at the cost of reduced damage.

If you don't want to take any risks, you can also equip Harmonic Remnants II gem, which allows you to pick up remnants from 35% further away, allowing you to collect all the loot while staying away from the battlefield!

Ruzhan's Reckoning

For Ruzhan's Reckoning, it is mainly used to compensate for single-target damage, because although Navira's Fracturing deals decent damage, its cooldown is not short enough to deal sufficient single-target damage.

Casting Ruzhan's Reckoning skill also adds a large amount of fire damage, and then you gain a 100% Ignite Magnitudes bonus, which is essentially a 100% Ignite damage bonus. Since this is our single-target skill, we simply press the button, and it will jump up to attack the enemy and unleash a powerful shockwave.

Cold Djinn

Finally, Cold Djinn is crucial for Disciple of Varashta build because it perfectly complements the core mechanic of this ascendancy - summoning powerful and invincible Djinn minions.

Especially when used in conjunction with Cold Djinn, through interaction with support gems such as Frost Nexus and Encroaching Ground, and burst damage commands, it can generate powerful screen-clearing capabilities and massive damage to bosses, creating a satisfying and safe monster-clearing engine, and benefiting greatly from cooldown recovery and area of ​​effect.

How To Crit?

In fact, we have Baryanic Leylines and all the minion critical strike bonuses on the skill tree. Don't underestimate them; the minion critical strike bonuses are quite substantial, allowing our critical strike chance to reach approximately 45%. Combined with the high base critical strike chance of Navira's Fracturing skill itself, using Malice aura will bring our critical strike chance very close to the limit.

In addition, we also use Soul Joy, which not only provides a large amount of energy shield but also provides critical strike damage multiplier for summoned creatures, giving us critical strike bonuses that are usually unavailable.

Defense

Now let's talk about defense.

First, Djinn Disciple of Varashta is a hybrid energy shield and life build. If you're willing to invest more PoE 2 currency into your character, you could eventually even transition to a chaos immunity build. However, this is just an early-game league starter character, so we've opted for a hybrid build for now.

We utilize The Fourth Teaching, which increases your energy shield recharge rate by 40%. So now we can recover nearly 2000 energy shield per second, fully recharging in just 2 seconds. This means if we get hit, we only need to move away from enemies and wait 4 seconds to almost instantly recover full health.

Additionally, we need some chaos resistance and ailment immunity. You can use Amanamu's Gaze on your helmet, which removes a damaging ailment when you use a command skill. This way, every time you use Navira's Fracturing and Ruzhan's Reckoning, you can remove harmful ailments, providing us with decent defensive capabilities.

Equipment

Finally, let's talk about some key equipment for this build.

Throughout the game, we need to prioritize increasing our life and resistances, and look for Wands, Scepters, and Staffs with high Cold Spell skill level bonuses or all spell skill level bonuses to maximize the effectiveness of Cold Djinn.

For other equipment, prioritize boots with movement speed bonuses, and try to get some cast speed bonuses on rings and amulets. Focus on increasing maximum life on your equipment, but also try to get some energy shield if possible.

The equipment we chose is as follows:

• Scepter: Cataclysm Star
• Helmet: Fate Guardian
• Focus: Dread Spell Tasalian Focus
• Rings: Soul Knuckle & Demon Hold
• Amulet: Entropy Clasp
• Armor: Vis Mortis
• Gloves: Carrion Touch
• Belt: Mind Thread
• Boots: Bramble Sole

Essentially, Djinn Disciple of Varashta is not just a powerful summoner build; it transforms Disciple of Varashta into a powerful minion-centric destroyer through high interaction and a series of carefully crafted mechanics. Djinn can create constantly spreading ground effects, triggering powerful chain reactions across the screen for efficient and safe clearing of enemies.

If a new class or skill appears in a new Path of Exile 2 patch, then builds centered around them will be popular for at least half of the league's duration. For example, the recent Druid builds with three forms have been very popular.

However, this doesn't mean that other styles or builds exclusive to older classes are not viable. On the contrary, you can delve into other updates brought by the new patch to strengthen your familiar builds from different angles.

Based on this, we will introduce the applicability of minion builds in Patch 0.4.0 and recommend two minion builds in particular.

What Are Minion Builds?

In PoE 2, minion builds are a type of build based on spirit resources, allowing you to summon different types of minions to assist in combat depending on your class and skills.

Spirit resources can be obtained from specific bosses in Acts 1 and 3, up to a maximum of 100 points. Additionally, scepters, amulets, and chest armor can provide extra spirit resources.

It's important to note that summoned creatures do not inherit your character's general damage; instead, you need to stack "+ Level of Minion Skills" or other affixes that specifically mention summoned creatures or allies on your available gear to make them effective.

Before Patch 0.4.0, popular minion builds in PoE 2 included Witch Army Infernalist, Lich Arsonist Detonators, and more. Now, Minion Druid Shaman has become a new favorite. However, compared to other Druid builds, it's not yet very popular.

Kripp's Infernal Titan Build

As the first minion build we'll introduce, Kripp's Infernal Titan is a durable armor-stacking build that utilizes Infernal Legion support gem, allowing summoned creatures to deal life-based burning damage in their surrounding area.

This build focuses on survival and positioning, primarily relying on the aura damage of summoned creatures for damage output. It also uses Mind Over Matter and high mana to increase its own survivability against high damage.

Originally, this build might not have stood out in Patch 0.4.0, but the game's enhancement of Xoph's Blood changed everything.

This unique Amber Amulet now reduces the fire resistance of surrounding enemies by 25%, and with perfect affixes and a life catalyst, you can increase its life value from 20% to 24%.

Based on this, Infernal Legion can consume this life value to gain a damage value, which is then amplified by various multipliers through gems, the passive skill tree, and so on.

If your amulet consistently fails to obtain the relevant affixes, or the affix improvements are not significant, you can buy PoE 2 currency to re-roll them. Different currencies have different functions, so be sure to distinguish them clearly when using them.

Titan is very suitable for this playstyle because you can unlock many small passive points that increase minion damage and minion life. Since life can be used as base damage, they actually stack multiplicatively.

For example, if you have 100% minion damage and 100% life, you can double your minions' life and double the damage dealt, resulting in four times the original damage output.

Therefore, when you can significantly increase these attributes, the overall damage output of Kripp's Infernal Titan Build will be enormous. Although the initial Titan Ascendancy passive skills are not that powerful, they truly shine in the endgame.

Minion Army Infernalist Build

As a premier Witch build in PoE 2, Minion Army Infernalist is known for its high survivability and efficient boss fight capabilities, with Infernalist's Ascendancy passive skills playing a crucial role.

In general, this build utilizes the characteristics of the support gem Muster to increase minion damage based on the duration and type of summoned minions, such as summoned skeleton warriors, brutes, or storm mages.

In Patch 0.4.0, the new highlight of this build is the adjustment to passive skills, which effectively provides an overall minion buff.

Previously, you could stack life and use the unique Intricate Crest Shield Prism Guardian to gain energy shield based on your life. However, the developers have changed this function, and you can no longer obtain shields using this method.

Fortunately, on the other hand, the new patch adds more passive skills for summoned creatures, mostly focused on Witch class. This means you can directly allocate points to the energy shield nodes, making the entire build an energy shield-based build.

Now, for this build, you only need to efficiently allocate skill points, such as energy shield minor nodes and minion damage minor nodes, to quickly improve the build's damage output and survivability.

On this basis, if you can obtain Abyss-only modifier +2 minions, you can use Focus as your weapon, but this is quite difficult, so we recommend Rattling Sceptre instead. This weapon grants you Skeletal Warrior skill, giving you more minions.

Regarding the composition of the minions, two warriors and two priests are usually a reasonable combination. If conditions permit, you might also consider bringing three priests.

Among all the minions, Frost Mage's slowing effect is wonderful, but if you want to improve the effect of the support gem Muster to allow minions to provide extra damage, it's better to directly equip Skeletal Reaver skill.

In addition, you can add Skeletal Storm Mage to apply the shock effect, or fully utilize cooldowns with Skeletal Sniper.

That's all for this guide. Whether to use these two minion builds ultimately depends on your actual needs and skill level, but they are indeed good options in Patch 0.4.0 besides Druid-centric builds.

Path of Exile 3.27 has been out for over a month, and major content updates have ceased. Most players have likely switched to PoE 2, and those still playing PoE 1 are likely casual players.

Therefore, Cold DoT Elementalist build recommended today is perfect for casual players. It requires minimal investment, involves few actions, and is incredibly versatile.

Cold DoT Elementalist Advantages And Disadvantages

Cold DoT Elementalist is a very versatile build, with no weaknesses in farming or boss battles. This build primarily relies on DoT damage, so even if the weapon's damage is low, the impact is minimal.

This build can apply slowing and other negative effects to monsters, and although its health is relatively low, you can compensate by stacking energy shields, making it actually quite tanky. Additionally, this build can generate pulses periodically, enabling automatic farming.

However, as a DoT build, DoT damage has a cap, so even if you invest heavily in PoE Currency to acquire top-tier gear, your burst damage won't surpass that of burst builds. When facing bosses, you need to cast spells to stack DoTs, and fights against bosses with high Cold resistance can be lengthy.

Core Gameplay

This build's damage doesn't come from any single skill, but rather from multiple layers of Cold Damage over Time and large-area Chill crowd control. You simply need to keep moving, and mobs will die around you.

Therefore, your damage primarily comes from these skills:

• Creeping Frost
• Vortex
• Vaal Cold Snap

Once the ice field is established, players hardly need to cast spells frequently; simply keep moving, and monsters will be slowed, frozen, and naturally fall under the CTD damage. The key to achieving this is Vaal Cold Snap, which inflicts Cold DoTs and Chills on enemies within a certain area.

Building upon this, since enemies are almost constantly chilled or severely slowed, and DoT skills can be applied from a distance, you rarely need to engage in close-range combat. This means that even if your armor and elemental resistances aren't at their maximum, you can achieve high safety through control, distance, and timing.

However, when facing elite monsters or bosses, relying solely on Vaal Cold Snap is insufficient. You need to actively apply curses like Frostbite and sequentially apply Vortex, Creeping Frost, and Cold Snap to keep the target constantly in multiple frost zones. You need to amplify existing damage over time, not change your damage output.

Cold DoT Elementalist Gear

This build is playable regardless of your currency investment, and approximately 20 POE Divine Orbs are needed to make it run smoothly.

This build doesn't rely on specific gear, so you need to understand which affixes you need. Once you understand your damage and defense sources, you can then apply affixes to your gear yourself.

Weapons

• Recommended: Tulborn (Foulborn Version with +4 Cold Spell Skills)

For weapons, focus on the affixes Cold Damage over Time Multiplier and +Cold Skill Gems. The weapon type itself is irrelevant; as long as it contains these affixes, it's usable for a long time until you find something better.

Armor

• Recommended: Daresso's Courage, Rime Gaze

You don't need to deliberately stack resistances. What you need is health or energy shields to provide stable support for sustained combat and map movement. If your support gems require you to maintain low health, then stack more energy shields.

Resistances, status ailment immunity, and movement speed take priority over armor or evasion stats. Since enemies are often in a chilled state, you rarely suffer concentrated melee attacks, so gear should prioritize increasing survivability rather than tanking enemy damage.

Jewelry

• Recommended: Ashes of the Stars, The Hungry Loop, Triumvirate Authority.

For necklaces, rings, and belts, their primary function is to supplement resistances, provide attribute requirements, and further enhance Cold DoTs. If they can further increase DoT damage or skill level, it will significantly enhance overall output, but these are not necessary conditions for building a full set.

Cold DoT Elementalist Skills

• Chest Armor: Creeping Frost, Cruelty, Hypothermia, Swift Affliction, Elemental Focus, Controlled Destruction
• Helmet: Vortex, Cruelty, Controlled Destruction, Bonechill
• Gloves: Arctic Armour, Tempest Shield, Summon Stone Golem of Hordes, Malevolence
• Boots: Summon Lightning Golem, Summon Flame Golem, Summon Stone Golem, Summon Chaos Golem
• Ring 1: Animate Guardian, Elemental Weakness
• Ring 2: Vaal Cold Snap
• Main Hand Weapon: Shield Charge, Vaal Righteous Fire, Frostbite
• Off-Hand Weapon: Vitality, Arrogance, Flesh and Stone

Your DoT output primarily consists of Creeping Frost, Cold Snap, and Vortex. Creeping Frost creates a frozen path, while Cold Snap rapidly generates a Cold DoT area around you. Vortex unleashes a burst of energy, primarily used when enemies approach.

These three skills are sufficient for clearing maps and farming bosses. Other skills are mainly for triggering passive skill buffs, further enhancing your DoT.

Skills like Golem and Animate Guardian aren't direct sources of damage; they provide damage reduction, auras, or additional debuffs, making Frost DoTs last longer and have more consistent coverage. Especially in long boss fights, the indirect benefits of this type of gear are often more significant than simply stacking damage.

Passive Skill Tree Keystones

• Pain Attunement: Increases spell damage at low life.
• Hex Master: Reduces Curses damage, but grants unlimited damage over time.
• Eternal Youth: Reduces life regeneration efficiency and leech, allowing life to regenerate like an Eternal Youth.
• Zealot's Oath: Life regeneration effect can be applied to ES.

Masteries

• Cold Mastery (2)
• Elemental Mastery (1)
• Energy Shield Mastery (1)
• Damage Over Time Mastery (1)
• Reservation Mastery (1)
• Minion Offence Mastery (1)

Cold DoT Elementalist is very easy to play and can satisfy almost all endgame content. The process of clearing out mobs is also very smooth. You can try to optimize this build yourself.

If you're used to playing Ranger base class in Path of Exile 2, then the better Ascendancy class after patch 0.4.0 is Pathfinder, because the other one, Deadeye, has been nerfed in the new league.

As a long-standing popular Ascendancy class in PoE 2, Pathfinder's mainstream combat style focuses on poison mechanics and potion usage, allowing you to deal massive damage to enemies by utilizing thrown potions.

But if you want to try a different way to play Pathfinder, then try Lightning Crossbow Pathfinder Build! It combines the class's inherent advantages with specific spirit gems to deal massive lightning damage.

Next, we will introduce the crafting method and practical effects of this build.

Lightning Crossbow Pathfinder Build Overview

In addition to abilities related to poison and potions, Pathfinder's passive talents also include important buffs such as stun immunity and speed increases, providing more reliable mobility than most other classes.

Based on this, suitable weapons for you are lightweight and agile weapons such as bows or crossbows. Crossbows, besides being agile, also have good strength attributes, allowing for high-damage, high-precision shots at long range to penetrate enemies.

Lightning Crossbow Pathfinder Build combines these advantages and further adds the crossbow skill Galvanic Shards for damage output. During combat, you can also switch to other skills to quickly clear areas or perform effective single-target attacks.

Since the class and weapon characteristics mean your agility is already quite high, when choosing gear you should focus more on increasing fixed lightning or physical damage, and striving for high evasion and elemental resistance to improve survivability.

Which Skills Are Essential?

In this build, the most fundamental skills are some of Pathfinder's passive talents. Although they don't make up a large percentage of all Pathfinder skills, they significantly increase the build's speed potential:

• Passive Points: Generates more available passive points.
• Relentless Pursuit: Your speed is unaffected by slowing effects.
• Running Assault: When using skills while moving, the movement speed penalty is reduced by 50%.
• Skill Speed: Increases your skill speed by 4%.
• Traveller's Wisdom: Gain 5 passive skill points.

Combining these skills will not only provide you with a reliable foundation for mobility, but also make it difficult for enemies to reduce your speed through attacks in combat, allowing you to use your other offensive skills and weapons more consistently and accurately.

The main source of damage for this build is the skill gem Galvanic Shards, one of its features being that it must be used with a crossbow.

When equipped, this gem will load your crossbow with energized bolts, which are then fired in rapid succession, releasing chain lightning beams upon hitting enemies.

Each bolt deals 15-54% of base attack damage, converting 60% of physical damage into lightning damage, with a firing speed of up to 500 units per second.

The lightning beam converts 100% of physical damage into lightning damage, reaching a final value of 75-272%.

Next, we recommend equipping Flash Grenade skill. Each use consumes 10 mana, creating an explosion in a 2.6-meter radius that blinds enemies. The explosion lasts for 0.85 seconds and also increases stun accumulation speed by 400%.

Also, a crossbow-exclusive skill, Flash Grenade is valuable for its ability to deal massive damage and provide various practical functions, such as crowd control or stunning bosses, combining defensive capabilities and offensive burst damage for powerful combos.

If Flash Grenade helps you gain an advantage against groups of enemies, then Rapid Shot is an essential skill for increasing the build's single-target damage output.

It allows each clip to hold 100 bolts, converting your physical damage output into fire damage, and provides significant improvements in both attack speed and damage.

How To Choose Gear?

Undoubtedly, the main weapon must be a crossbow. After that, you can use the various currencies you earn to craft your crossbow, making it more powerful by rolling new affixes or increasing the rarity/affix bonus values.

The crossbow's prefixes mainly focus on increasing different types of elemental damage and accuracy, all of which are suitable for Lightning Crossbow Pathfinder Build. The suffixes are more varied, and you can choose based on your needs.

Below are all the crossbow types currently in the game:

• Advanced Bombard Crossbow
• Advanced Dyad Crossbow
• Advanced Forlorn Crossbow
• Advanced Sturdy Crossbow
• Advanced Tense Crossbow
• Advanced Varnished Crossbow
• Alloy Crossbow
• Blackfire Crossbow
• Bombard Crossbow
• Construct Crossbow
• Cumbrous Crossbow
• Dedalian Crossbow
• Dyad Crossbow
• Esoteric Crossbow
• Expert Bombard Crossbow
• Expert Dyad Crossbow
• Expert Forlorn Crossbow
• Expert Sturdy Crossbow
• Expert Tense Crossbow
• Expert Varnished Crossbow
• Makeshift Crossbow
• Piercing Crossbow
• Sturdy Crossbow
• Tense Crossbow
• Varnished Crossbow

Ideally, increased lightning damage and cold damage would be good prefixes, allowing you to inflict both shock and chill effects. If your crossbow lacks lightning damage, then socket two lightning gems into it.

For other gear, there's nothing particularly special to note about the amulet; just choose a good one from your loot. Boots should ideally increase movement speed, and gloves should provide a fixed damage bonus.

Practical Performance

If you haven't yet found a suitable crossbow at the beginning, using a bow to craft a Lightning Arrow build as a temporary solution is also acceptable. However, once you unlock the crossbow and the skills we mentioned, you must change your strategy promptly.

Lightning Crossbow Pathfinder Build might feel a bit clunky when clearing mobs in the early game, as you might not initially master the technique of throwing and detonating grenades, but you'll get better with practice.

So, If you're tired of Poison Pathfinder build and don't want to create a new character, Lightning Crossbow Pathfinder is a great option!