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PoE 2 Patch 0.5 introduced Concussive Runes, bringing new possibilities to melee gameplay. This Concussive Ancestral Cry Titan build is a powerful build specifically designed around this mechanic.

It chains together Heavy Stun, Ancestral Cry, Armor Explosion, and Herald effect, turning a single normal attack into the starting point of a series of explosions.

The biggest feature of this build is its incredibly smooth pacing.

The character doesn't need to stop and wait for skill rotations; by constantly approaching enemies with high-speed movement, the first hit inflicts Heavy Stun, after which Concussive Runes and various explosions automatically take over the battlefield. Clearing maps is essentially a matter of charging straight in, with monsters falling one after another behind you.

Core Mechanics

In PoE 2, this build revolves around a simple loop: Attack enemy - Cause Heavy Stun - Trigger Concussive Runes Shockwaves - Destroy armor and trigger explosions - Herald effect continues to spread damage.

Return of the Ancients's Concussive Runes unleashes Shockwaves on Heavy Stun enemies, and this build has numerous Stun buffs. Through the area-of-effect buffs of Hulking Form, Sine Aequo Grand Manchettes, and Overwhelming Presence, most monsters will enter a Heavy Stun state after the first attack.

This is crucial because much of the build's damage only applies to Heavy Stun enemies.

Effects like Crushing Impacts and Smash provide additional damage after enemies are controlled. Against bosses, these damage spikes activate simultaneously as Stun gauge begins to build, resulting in a very rapid decrease in health.

Concussive Runes themselves also contribute to clearing mobs. Their impact range can grow, and with Runes' shield and area-of-effect buffs, a single heavy attack can cover a large area in front.

Armor Explosion provides an additional layer of damage. Equipped with Wolf Charm, the character continuously damages enemy armor, triggering an explosion upon armor breakage.

Combined with Herald of Thunder and Herald of Ice, multiple explosion effects can be chained together. In actual gameplay, it's common for a single enemy to be stunned, wiping out surrounding enemies as well.

Ancestral Cry

Another unique feature of this build is the triggering method for Ancestral Cry.

In Patch 0.5, normally Glory needs to be accumulated to unleash Ancestral Cry. Here, Animus Exchange is used to quickly acquire Glory.

Animus Exchange itself consumes Mana, so when paired with Lifetap, it becomes a life cost. Combined with Second Wind III, this allows for continuous skill activation. Since Zerphi's Infamy also consumes life, this combination quickly replenishes Glory.

In PoE 2, casting Animus Exchange twice consecutively will activate Ancestral Cry. It's recommended to use instant health potions to avoid health stress affecting gameplay.

Weapon Set 2 is crucial here. It needs to have a skill effect duration bonus and also requires a hammer that provides +5 melee skill level.

Note that Ancestral Cry must be configured in two weapon slots simultaneously. Switching to Weapon Set 2 when casting grants the skill level and duration bonuses from that set; then switching back to Weapon Set 1 raises the skill level to 38.

After casting, using skills like Earthshatter set to Weapon Set 1 and switching back will restore the damage boost from Weapon Set 1.

If your Animus Exchange is only level 20, two casts might not fully fill Glory slot. In this case, you can replace Second Wind III with Uhtred's Constellation to allow the skill to be cast three times consecutively.

This build requires moderate investment to reach its full potential. Core upgrades include a high-level hammer, skill level bonuses, key unique items, and optimized Concussive Runes. While the build can function on a lower budget, additional PoE 2 Currency greatly improves damage, clear speed, and consistency.

Skill Combinations

This build's main damage output revolves around Ancestral Cry.

Ancestral Cry is paired with Voran's Siege, Zerphi's Infamy, Rakiata's Flow, and Concussive Runes.

Since a large portion of the damage in this build in Return of the Ancients comes from elemental bonus damage, Rakiata's Flow effectively supplements the overall output.

Earthshatter primarily serves to switch weapon sets. After casting Ancestral Cry, use Earthshatter to switch back to Weapon Set 1, regaining damage and passive effects.

Of course, it can also be used as a single-target PoE 2 skill, but in actual combat, the enhanced Ancestral Cry is sufficient to handle most targets.

The two Heralds are Herald of Thunder and Herald of Ice. Herald of Thunder provides Lightning damage and status effects, while Herald of Ice helps supplement control. 

Since Cold damage itself doesn't easily cause a stun, Concussive Runes are included here, allowing armor penetration and bonus damage to help trigger control chains. 

Wind Dancer is used as a defensive skill, incorporating Concussive Runes. When enemies attack the character, Runes are triggered, and the character recovers status through Armour Explosion, Life Leech III, and other methods.

Passive Skill Tree

In Patch 0.5, the passive skill choices for this build primarily revolve around Stun, area-of-effect, and Elemental Armament.

Heavy Stun-related nodes are core, as a significant amount of additional damage is applied simultaneously when the boss enters Stun. Area-of-effect effects increase the coverage of Concussive Runes and Herald Explosion, while Elemental Armament further enhances Herald of Thunder and Herald of Ice.

If your PoE 2 gear allows, you can choose a hammer with Stun accumulation affix for more consistent first-hit control. However, this build does not rely on attack speed; skill level and base damage are always higher priority attributes.

The greatest appeal of this Concussive Ancestral Cry Titan set lies in its combination of the impactful melee combat of PoE 2 Return of the Ancients with explosive map clearing. After a powerful punch lands, the enemy's armor, health, and formation all crumble together.

Players, when you're meticulously planning your map and adjusting affixes in Path of Exile 2 Patch 0.5.0, have you noticed that this time is far longer than the actual time you spend on the map and fighting? The optimal gameplay everyone's chasing in endgames - finding suitable cities, stacking Deliriousness, and combining four tablets - seems to have gradually become repetitive labor.

Frankly, can we really derive enjoyment from PoE 2 endgames now?

The Preparation Phase is Tedious

Compared to the map's inherent appeal, the problems with Path of Exile 2 endgame gameplay seem to lie more in the pre-game preparation phase.

The tablet system, in particular, is incredibly tiring. Players constantly need to spend a significant amount of time managing tablet affixes and searching for suitable tablets to trade with, while also repeatedly searching for suitable city locations and modifiers in Atlas.

Furthermore, the search tools are limited, only allowing searches of visible areas and restricting bookmarks to 20, which falls far short of players' needs.

This results in players spending more time on tablets, trading, searching the map, and planning than actually fighting on it, leading to a significant imbalance in time allocation across PoE 2 content.

Profit Gap

The huge profit gap in endgames further exacerbates the players' predicament.

Based on player experiences, a single currency reward on a normal map is approximately 1 Divine, while a 200% Delirious map can yield a staggering 38 PoE 2 Divine Orbs!

This vast profit disparity forces many players, even those who find the preparation process tedious, to persevere for higher profits or to keep up with the game's economic pace.

While other gameplay options like Expedition exist, their efficiency is significantly lower than Delirious strategy, effectively limiting players' strategic choices.

Poor Map Design

Furthermore, many players have been tolerating the visual effects of PoE 2 endgame maps. Because the maps are so large, players have to spend a significant amount of time aimlessly running around in open areas, leaving very little time for meaningful combat.

Not only is the endgame map layout terrible, but the colors of the monsters and background terrain are also highly similar, making it feel like they are wearing natural camouflage during combat, which greatly affects the player experience, not to mention if Delirious effect is turned on.

Whether it's the clarity of combat or the ease of player control, the visually chaotic map design can, to put it bluntly, lead to player failure, wasting all their hard work and preparation.

Moreover, the core endgame mechanic, Towers, is actually quite disconnected from the overall game flow. If this isn't addressed, it will probably further damage the endgame experience.

Improvement Directions and Suggestions

To address the current issue of gameplay fatigue in PoE 2 endgames, the focus should definitely be on simplifying unnecessary and complex steps.

Many players believe that removing the mandatory requirement of four tablets is crucial for improving endgame gameplay. They argue that city terrain can be improved through other bonuses in Atlas Skill Tree, rather than relying solely on the benefits of four tablets.

Another important suggestion is to include key items like Grand Mirror in the currency exchange market, making them easily tradable like Breachstones or Ritual materials, thus reducing the time players spend trading and searching.

Based on the issues we mentioned earlier, another direction for game improvement is to optimize and modify the search tools and the maximum number of bookmarks, allowing players to truly devote more energy to endgame combat and character building.

Different Player Preferences

We need to recognize that everyone's gaming experience is highly subjective, so naturally, everyone will have different preferences.

Therefore, some players choose to ignore this strategy, continuing to farm at their own pace, or even enjoying the process of meticulous planning and pursuing maximum efficiency, viewing the complex preparation as part of the fun in PoE 2 Patch 0.5.0.

However, the third type of player - those forced to follow - deserves our most attention, because being forced to execute strategies is the biggest source of fatigue in endgame gameplay.

Game design can certainly require players to put in effort for substantial rewards, but this effort itself should be attractive - it could be researching builds, challenging powerful bosses, but not repeatedly searching maps, mechanically placing tablets, or wasting excessive time on trading.

When players find themselves spending far more time planning how to play PoE 2 than actually playing the game, and this planning process is tedious, lacking interaction and a sense of accomplishment, the game essentially becomes just repetitive labor.

Therefore, the core goal of optimizing PoE 2 endgame gameplay should not be to reduce the rewards of high-end farming, but rather to make the preparation and execution of strategies more engaging and enjoyable.

Unnecessary and tedious actions in the endgame should be prioritized for reduction, allowing players more freedom to choose their playstyle based on personal preference. Every step in a high-yield strategy should be enjoyable, not a heavy burden.

Are you the kind of player who would go to great lengths to achieve the optimal economic strategy in Path of Exile 2 Patch 0.5.0 endgame?

If you took a break from Path of Exile 2 Patch 0.5.0 over the last few weeks due to shader loading issues and the device removed bug, congratulations, these annoyances have been eliminated. It's time to jump back into Runes of Aldur league!

While these fixes might not seem like massive overhauls, PoE 2 team prioritized player experience enough to release a dedicated video explaining them. We've summarized the details here to give you a deeper understanding of these bug fixes.

What impact did the device removed bug have?

Before July 30th, you might have experienced moments where Path of Exile 2 suddenly froze. While such issues aren't uncommon, the freeze lasted an exceptionally long time on some players' systems.

To make matters worse, even after the freeze ended, you might have continued to experience poor performance for a short while. This was because shaders were still loading in the background, consuming significant CPU resources.

This bug tended to occur most frequently during mapping, and the frequency had increased over the last few weeks.

Undoubtedly, this had a major negative impact on your PoE 2 experience. It wasn't just the panic and frustration of having combat interrupted; it also meant potentially missing out on rare rewards, losses that couldn't be fully compensated for later.

The tricky part was that this bug had actually existed since Path of Exile 2 first launched. You might have encountered it before without realizing it, as it happened less frequently back then. However, it had recently escalated to the point of causing game crashes.

The root cause of the bug

Given the worsening impact, PoE 2 developers intensified their troubleshooting efforts. They discovered that the bug originated solely from the graphics card and affected only players using specific graphics cards or updated driver versions.

Typically, resolving such issues involves collaborating with the graphics card manufacturer. However, the challenge here was that such collaboration requires providing exact steps to reproduce the bug, something this particular issue didn't allow for.

How was the bug fixed?

Since the bug did not appear to be linked to any specific in-game state, Path of Exile 2 technical team had to invest significant time making random adjustments to the engine and manually playing the game to check if the specific stuttering bug recurred.

During this process, technicians also used the replay system to review lengthy gameplay sessions in an attempt to reproduce the device removed bug.

Fortunately, they eventually pinpointed the specific gameplay conditions that triggered the issue. PoE 2 team then handed the affected hardware over to the graphics card manufacturer, ultimately identifying the root cause as an internal parameter known as shader heap size.

Increasing this parameter eliminated the stuttering bug found in Path of Exile 2 Patch 0.5.0. Once a new driver incorporating this fix was released, crash rates dropped back to normal levels.

Shader loading bug

While graphics card issues were the primary culprit behind the recent frequent stuttering in PoE 2, excessively long shader compilation times pose a potential risk for future problems.

Simply put, most large-scale games involving frequent scene transitions do not compile shaders in real-time as you progress; instead, they spend a considerable amount of time compiling all shaders when you first launch the game.

These shaders subsequently occupy a large portion of your driver's cache. However, the older driver versions, the ones causing PoE 2 stuttering, failed to clear out old shaders.

Consequently, as you progressed through PoE 2, the relevant folders on your system would frequently fill up, requiring manual cleanup. Failure to do so resulted in excessively long loading times and potential display issues in new scenes.

Due to certain unchangeable limitations, the only solution available to PoE 2 team was to reduce the size of the shaders, thereby minimizing the likelihood of the cache filling up and causing issues.

What can you do now?

Generally, once the bug is fixed, you simply need to install the patch to resume normal gameplay. However, please be patient: because the old shaders are being cleared, the game will need to recompile them, resulting in longer-than-usual loading times.

With Path of Exile 2 Patch 0.5.0, you can engage in mapping with greater peace of mind; even when rapidly switching maps or facing scenarios packed with enemies and loot, you no longer need to worry about losses caused by prolonged stuttering or lag.

Of course, this doesn't mean you'll never experience a crash again, but the frequency will certainly drop to an acceptable level, and issues won't linger unresolved for long, as the root cause has been eliminated.

What does the bug fix signify?

Bugs are a common occurrence in any game, but the difference lies in how quickly they are addressed. The speed of the response regarding Path of Exile 2 and the effort put into fixing these bugs have been evident to everyone.

Consequently, while short-term bugs might have caused some players to temporarily step away from PoE 2, the developers' serious commitment is likely to foster greater appreciation and anticipation for the game, a positive sign for the potential 1.0 launch at the end of the year.

More importantly, the fixes addressing the shader and device removed errors brought to light potential core issues within Path of Exile 2. Had these surfaced after the official launch rather than during Early Access, the impact would undoubtedly have been far more severe.

You might sometimes complain when bugs aren't fixed immediately, but PoE 2's actions demonstrate that the developers are constantly attentive to the player experience. If a problem persists, it is likely because it is exceptionally tricky to solve, not because of inaction.

In short, now is the time to return to, or invest more time in Return of the Ancients! Whether you are diving deep into the endgame or experimenting with new builds, the experience is sure to be better than ever!