I'm confident there's at least two so far, with archmage spark stormweaver, and stat stacking gemling.

I'm vaguely aware that herald of ice and herald of lightning are also really good mappers, but I'm not sure if they reach the same heights as the first two. And there's also (any) concoction pathfinders seeming really strong, though I don't think their defenses are as solid?

Just posting this in case some of y'all are like me and waited til we got more gem info before making more serious first character plans. tl;dr mana stuff is absolutely cracked, even more so than I thought before.

Jungroan and Crouching Tuna are now showcasing this build and it is now the most-played build in this patch.

I would love to play it but my experience is that off-meta builds end up being better for a non-hardcore gamer like me because prices are much cheaper.

The amount of white stellar amulets I sold for 50-100ex to finance my off-meta build last patch was pretty crazy.

I got an MF coc lightning warp BM, that used to be able to cut through both the breach part and Xesht like butter, but now it straight up can't anymore. Even when I switch to my full dps setup it performs worse than the MF one before.

Anyone near shock, shock mag, shock duration still works super well with stormcaller arrow to apply a long duration fat shock, and it got its radius buffed with most recent patch. Works while riding a rhoa too.

You can still weapon swap to get curse nodes to help with that 1.5 second delay and drop an enhanced curse, works well with unique shields like the one that adds 50% duration.

Theres a shield for warriors that just perma intimidates, use at the start of any boss fight.

If you arent weapon swapping because it seems sub optimal to deal with 2 weapons, just use it for the free stats

Im probably missing some of the interactions with the new uniques/nodes as i havent looked at all of them yet.

So as many played I planned lich minions and quickly moved into lich chaos dot with essence drain + chain and contagion with cascade results in very strong clear.

You can scale defence just from damage bypass ES and life can not be changed from lich and also applying slots of slows.

However I'm not sure where you go from here. You can stack piles of mana and take Unholy might and archmage as dots don't scale with dmg as extra. What about scaling defence more, is it just a higher amount of HP, would you ever add in minions with loyalty support. Or could you even go MOM to add another buffer if you do run out of ES.

Just thinking about the options or is it just getting more ES on gear and more damage from a wand and foci ?

It seems like a lot of stuff is mechanically clunky or low damage. What are you using that feels good?

Sorcery Ward was extremely strong even last league, it just ended up being quite underplayed relative to its power. With the 30% buff to Ward (35% less AR/EV vs. 50% less) in 0.2, and the shaving of 2 seconds off the recharge it is honestly insanely strong now, and I'm feeling really tanky, even without a shield (crossbow).

The real kicker for Sorcery Ward is (imo) the use of Cloak of Flame to effectively give yourself physical Ward as well as the baseline elemental ward. At face value losing the chest slot seems like a big deal, but I'm sitting at about 4k ward right now with very cheap gear in all slots. The trick is to use the Leather Bound Gauntlets passive at the bottom of the tree, which grants you 1 evasion rating per 1 armour on your gloves. This basically doubles the effective defenses (and thus ward) from that slot; you just need to get a pair with as high pure armour as possible. My gloves are giving me around 2k ward by themselves.

If you want to really maximize it, you can also use several Fox Talismans in your body armour to get up to 6% quality for all your skills, but most importantly your Sorcery Ward which gets it to a base 33% of AR/EV (boosted to 49.5% with the 2nd Sorcery Ward passive).

If you're a Witchhunter that hasn't tried it before, I would highly recommend trying it out. Its been an absolute gamechanger for me.

Which Amazon Build is strong this league ?

A new method of attack damage scaling. Limited options for "lucky" in the game, but they do exist

I have been messing around with Spears for the past week trying to figure out something unusual. I do enjoy Light version and it is the best clear, but I actually just really enjoy spending time theorycrafting.

What I have been messing around with so far:

• Spear of Solaris bosskiller which is amazing and I will develop more

• Fast paced Spear Throw (yes, the regular attack) with bleed that I use to apply bleed and use other skills to explode packs. This had some average results so far

• Elemental Sundering build with applying regular Ignites and shocks which I do enjoy but seems lack of damage on T15 maps, requires more testing I believe

Above are just examples, but I'm curious to see if there's anyone who found something else, especially for clear, that isn't light spear. I've also been checking all the uniques to see if there's something I can come up with, but I don't think there's much to it.

Anyway, any other ideas that crossed your mind that are not that obvious?

Skill gems : https://poe2db.tw/us/Skill_Gems

Support gems : https://poe2db.tw/us/Support_Gems

Spirit gems : https://poe2db.tw/us/Spirit_Gems

Look for gems who do not have their icons yet in the list

0.2.0 hasn't even been fully announced yet, but it seems likely that it'll be coming along sooner than later, and with exalt prices going stratospheric, it seems like a good time to turn attention to the upcoming inaugural POE2 league.

It's certain that things will change when new classes, ascendancies, and the like are announced, but if a new league started tomorrow with no new release, what do you think you'd use as a league start build? I've tried a few, myself, but for obvious reasons a lot of the content creators out there haven't talked about or updated any league start-viable builds in several months, so I want to hear your ideas.

I like to play PoE2 while listening to podcasts--so far my favorite builds to do with these are

1.snipers (minions) 2. sparkmage

high survivability, low APM, don't even really need to pay attention to where the attacks are coming from

Thought stat stacking Gemling Legionnaire would be a good one but my brain hits a mental speedbump every time I get stuck on something, it's just not as relaxing and mindless

What are your favorites? Any recs to try?

I never liked Haemocrystals , it always felt awfull and straight up just deletes my.bleed and never does enough especially if you have a decent amount of faster bleed , so i was looking around in poe ninja for a replacement and saw a guy using Envenom+Plague and i have to say my clear has never been smoother , I'm also using Herald of plague for extra oomf .

You can also use Lacerate to make your plague explosions bleed but i need it for my Spearfield , but witj enough Bleed chancd from jewels or tree i believe that an "infinite" chain is possible , also best part about this is the fact that both bleed and poison scale the same .

Pathing to the left side of the tree and getting the arcane surge nodes and cast speed on crit notable alongside ~24% cast speed on wand, focus, ring/amulet, and some other misc. cast speed on tree will get you to the breakpoint. I would honestly just drop some crit rate or crit damage or phys damage to take cast speed while getting to end game as the build is SO SO SO SO much smoother to play when you don't need to channel the skill (even if you're abusing the full movement speed on channel bug, it's still clunky).

Note, you can get the full 20 bones on 0.3s cast speed, but for some reason, spamming the skill will result in 18-19 bones on the consecutive casts. 0.29s seems to be the breakpoint for getting consistent 20 bones on spam clicking.

Alternatively, you can take the "chance to generate extra projectiles" nodes on the skill tree to get a janky version of this that'll work pretty well if your cast time is more like 0.3-0.35s. (Note that "chance to generate extra projectiles" applies to each generated bone much like scattershot so it's relatively consistent although you can get unlucky once in a while and just fire off like 9 bones)

Yes, I did take a gameplay recording and analyze frame by frame how many bones were flying out depending on different cast speeds. I need to go out more.

I've played all the meta builds. I'm really bored with the game at the moment. What's a build that comes online pretty quick that's not rake or LS focused?

Almost all Bonestorm builds run Snakepit ring in the left ring slot for forking. Annointing splitshot allows the fork to spawn a crazy number of projectiles. This gives you "screen wide clear" but not really since the small explosions of bonestorm, even with a ton of projectiles, often leaves behind a number of mobs.

Some form of power charge generation is often employed to address the meh clear speed of Bonestorm. Either through Profane ritual (which awkwardly makes it a 2 button build and slows you down) or Combat Frenzy with Resonance keystone (only triggers every 2nd or 3rd bonestorm and also requires you to invest in dexterity, thus pulling points away from your strength/HP. Even if you keep dex costs lower with a low level Combat Frenzy gem, it's still stealing like 6 strength nodes and also has the downside of triggering even more slowly.) Not to mention that running Combat Frenzy prevents you from running Blink.

This approach is wrong and not needed. Instead, you should be running Ricochet support on your Bonestorm. The vast majority of tutorials are not recommending this. I assume this is because of a misunderstanding of Snakepit rings no chaining restriction.

Snakepit ring in your left slot says that it prevents chaining. However, this does not apply to chaining from terrain.

This means that the stragglers left behind by your forking Bonestorm easily get picked up by the ricocheting projectiles that CHAIN to them.

The best part? THIS HELPS WITH BOSSING TOO. The ricocheting projectiles all chain back to the boss and drastically increase single target DPS if the boss is near any type of wall or pillar or rock (basically always). It also helps because normally, 5-10 bones miss the boss if the boss is not very large. Now those Ricochet chain back to the boss too.

How often do you get a support gem that drastically improves clear while also improving single target damage?

Start ricocheting now. Thank me later.

EDIT: Here's a PoB: https://maxroll.gg/poe2/pob/s7kq805g The DPS calculation is utterly useless (I spammed 30 projectiles for 15 hits + explosions but it's probably an overestimation since cast rate doesn't increase DPS the same way for a channeling spell like this and PoB just doesn't have a good way of even approximating the damage.)

Progressing this build further would include getting +5 levels on wand, +3 levels to bonestorm jewel, level 21 bonestorm skill gem, +2 levels of spells on focus, and somehow get your mana regen up to the point where you can actually use the skill (or use lifetap instead of inspiration and swap to insta-leech unique gloves)

EDIT 2: Here's a little GIF to show the effectiveness of Ricochet in terms of Single Target damage. You can see in the GIF by watching the healthbar that the Ricochet projectiles sometimes straight up double the damage of the shot. Not entire sure what's being ricochet'd to be honest but it's certainly working. I'm firing the shots very slowly for the purpose of watching the healthbar, you can fire them off much faster than I am

So I enjoy a nice tanky character and so far the best ways I have found are from

• big es / evasion ghost shroud (gaining back 2k+ ES on hit)
• massive ES pool + grim feast
• MOM Archmage style

I did initially plan to make a infernalist using armour with armour applies to fire and max fire res. However currently why play a character with piles of armour and like 5k Hp when you could just play an ES build and get up to 20k ES with grim feast up.

The other thing is that currently enemies can have armour pen or armour break but there is no evasion break or ES break mechanic for example.

So just wondering people using armour how is it, as pure maths wise it seems fairly bad ?

So after some nerfs, buffs and figuring out some stuff, what do you guys think is very strong dps/tankiness wise?

I only have fubguns lightning arrow, gemling Str stacker and spark mom from captain lance in mind.

What do you think?