Path of Exile 2 – Starter Witch Guide

Starter Guide to Witch

By Scriblet

Foreword

For my Witch Start, I’m going to follow Ruse’s suggestions of going Shadow DoT early, as early minions kind of suck until higher gem levels. Ruse’s didn’t mention much in the skill tree, as he didn’t have a finalized datamined tree available. This is what I’m doing in the Skill tree while mostly following his gem guide:

I’m going to go live in Templar Land while running a chaos damge build.

• +150% spell damage for my chaos spells
• 40% duration (Forvever Pain Offerings)
• 48% more aura effect (BIG Pain Offerings)
• 28% more AoE (hard to find in other builds)

Random buff to my unleash gem… Might use it on flamewall to get 10 raging spirits per 1 button press

Some Tank/mana issues will also be solved along the way, with 100% more armor/energy shield. The Started nodes in the Sorc Area won’t give witches Energy shield, so leaving the starter area to find tank is nice.

• Link to Early Game Tree

Early Game

We will be using three primary weapons, Wand, Scepter, and Shield. Path of Exile has a seemless “Weapon swap” mechanic, so when we press a button, it automatically swap to the weapon needed to use that ability.

Wands provide a good, high damage, early game spell, Scepters give us spirit to run more minions. The only reason we have a shield, is so that we can press the skill “Raise Shield” to make use of the game’s new “Active Block” mechanic. Basically, when we’re overwhelmed and need breathing room, we raise our shield to not die. As soon as we push any other skill, it will swap back to our Wand + Scepter. alternatively, we could leave our shield out and put away our wand when not actively using it’s built in spell.

Energy shield will not recharge while we’re taking damage, so we’re going to use a Shield to negate damage while waiting for our energy shield to recharge.

While “Raise Shield” is active, we block 100% of attacks coming from a cone in front of our character. When an attack is blocked, it will not interrupt our energy shield recharge.

There is a limit to how often we can active block, it may only be 1-2 hits from a boss, but those 1-2 hits may be all we need to get value of of energy shield recharging.

By using Energy Shield as infinitely recoverable form of “Health” we should be able to take our time with most bosses, not limited by health flask charges for “healing.” This should allow us to not need to skip most optional bosses, even if our ability to dodge mechanics isn’t perfect.

We just have to be careful about enemy mechanics that are on the floor, as shield block won’t help us if we’re standing in a fire.

After our first damage nodes in the witch area, we branch out left for the spiral nodes. This Adds Chaos damage, Cast speed, and solves our tankiness. We would have gone into the sorceress nodes, but they provide the Witch Minion Health instead of energy shield, so we have to seek our tankiness elsewhere. The Spiral Nodes Provide that and plop us out in Templar land, which gives us a bunch of highly valuable nodes for buffing our minions, solving our mana, and giving us better AoE.

From here, Witch builds branch. Minion builds will start to go West/North on the tree.

Elemental Builds will go North. And my quirky Bonestorm Build will start pathing towards Ranger stuff.

Spell Synergies

There are a lot of spells synergies I’m excited for, but nobody knows what’s best yet.

For example…

Summon Raging Spirit + Fire Spells

This combo of Raging Spirt + Essence Harvest + Cast on Minion Death + Rolling Magma is looking to be VERY strong. It’s basically my Diablo 4 “Spirit Wave” build, but made with fire, and in PoE 2

A single cast of Rolling Magma will spawn 5 Raging Spirits (when combined with Chain or Multiple Projectiles).

When those 5 raging spirits die, we get back 250 mana. That’s a net gain of 238 mana.

Also when those Raging Spirits die, they contribute towards “Cast on minion Death” triggers. It’ll take a lot of them dying before the cast on death trigger goes off, but it’s a novel way to create a recursive circle of infinite mana/infinite cast triggers.

Raging Spirits may also provide cannon fodder for skeletal arsonists and many other effects. I won’t know until I get to play with them on December 6th.

Later, when we get extra spirit, we could even use them for “Cast on Ignite” triggers.

GGG could have thought of this and prevented Raging spirits from working with On-death triggers. Cast on Minion Death also scales with Minion defensive power and we have no idea if Raging Spirits will even have a defensive power. We’ll see.

Click to enlarge…

Bone Storm + Flame Wall

Bone Storm + Flame wall has the potential to be a lot of damage early. Bone Storm shoots several projectiles, and if they each get Flame wall’s damage bonus, it adds up quickly.

If Bone storm ends up being a bread-and-butter spamm’d ability, it may be worth comboing with Mobility + Momentum. If we can move 2 meters in the time it takes to wind up Bone Storm, Momentum cancels out the penalty of Mobility.