Greetings, Exiles! I’m sure you all have received the sad news recently that Path of Exile 2 closed beta, originally scheduled for June 7, 2024, has been postponed, with the developers stating that it will be released “towards the end” in 2024.
However, this also means that we have more time to prepare for a better gaming experience when we enter POE 2. In this guide, we will reveal the gameplay of Witch. So, Witch main players, please don’t miss this guide.
Minion Mechanics
In Path of Exile 2, you can play as Witch, Mistress of Death and Decay, commanding your hordes of the undead and launching attacks on enemies.
Most classes have access to some kind of minions, but if you want to control an army, Witch may be the ideal class choice for you.
In POE 2, most minions do not need to be summoned manually. Celebrant Sceptre gives the player a couple of free warriors, as well as another resource called Spirit, which you can use to acquire any minions you want. You can see this Spirit Bar above the mana.
On the skills screen, you can choose the composition of your army and choose between the various minion variants available. Since this is a level-two area, we can only afford one more minion. However, when minions die, they are automatically resurrected as long as no other minions have died recently. So, before your next battle, all your minions will be resurrected.
You can also command your minions with a dedicated button, telling them to move to a specific location, attack a specific enemy, or even open a chest or portal for you.
We also have temporary minions. Besides this, many minions have command skills that depend on the type of minion you summoned.
Skills
Next, let’s talk about the spells available to Witch class.
Unearth
First up is Unearth, which creates some bone constructs if it kills a monster or hits the corpse of a monster. They can’t take many hits and have a limited lifespan, but you can build a proper army with them.
Contagion
I also use some debuffs with monsters when my minions attack. The first one we can use here is Contagion. If a monster dies with Contagion, it spreads to nearby enemies. And with each spread, the damage increases. So it’s a good idea to try to keep the infection going.
If any corpse is infected when you summon minions, then the minions will also be infected. Every time they hit an enemy, they will continue to infect the enemy. So it’s great to have an army of infected hordes of the undead.
Essence Drain
We can also use another chaos debuff called Essence Drain. This effect has a higher degen on a single target. If the monster is also infected with Contagion, then Essence Drain will spread as well, which can turn into a real disaster.
Bone Storm
I can use a channeling skill like Bone Storm, which creates a devastating burst of sharp spikes. Note that the longer you channel this skill, the more damage it will cause.
Pain Offering
We also have a skill called Pain Offering. These skills allow you to pierce one of your skeletons with a big spike of bone to buff all of your other minions. It makes all of our other minions faster and do more damage.
Profane Ritual
After a battle, we usually have some extra corpses that we don’t want to waste. Profane Ritual can generate Power Charge by consuming corpses, which can buff some of my other spells. If we use it to summon Zombies, we can create more powerful super Zombies that don’t even need corpses to summon them.
We can also use Power Charge to channel Bone Storm. If I do this, it adds a devastating AoE.
Minion Types
Finally, it’s time to focus on the types of minions that Witch can summon.
Zombies
The first one that comes to mind must be Zombies, which are extremely tanky minions. Although they require corpses to summon and won’t resurrect if they die, they are quite tough and can increase the number of your minions.
What’s more, many minions also have command skills. You can command them to deploy Gas Cloud Arrow on the battlefield to deal some sustained damage.
Skeletal Arsonist
In addition, we can summon Skeletal Arsonists, who can throw small Fire Grenades. Besides this, they have a command skill that can detonate your minions with low health. When you see the red indicator, use this skill and the minion will explode.
These bone constructs are especially good because they expire quickly, anyway. So, you can go and farm this area’s boss, Carrion Crone, with all the tools you find to earn a good amount of POE Currency.
Storm Mages
That’s the type of minions you can get in the level two area. But let’s see what the higher level minion gameplay is like.
In a level 30 area, besides still having our trusty warriors, there are many types of minions to choose from, such as Brutes for stunning or Ice Mages for freezing, most of which come with their own special abilities or command skills.
You can also stun enemies by using multiple Storm Mages: a Cleric to heal and revive my minions, and Reavers for high damage. You can also enrage them before the fight to slowly kill them, but Cleric should be able to keep enemies alive while my minions attack.
Storm Mages has a useful skill if a lot of your minions die. He can summon a Lightning Storm to hit the location of each Dead Skeleton in your army.
Monster Corpse
In POE 2, even non-boss monsters can be very devastating, such as Faridun Impaler. It has a wide variety of abilities and is difficult to defeat. But maybe we can make better use of its corpse.
By using Bind Spectre gems, we can take the corpse of any enemy and capture its spirit so that I can use it as a minion. Any monster can be captured, but the spirit cost depends on how powerful the monster is.
Such a powerful enemy requires a lot of spirit, so I have to summon a lot of other minions, but it does seem worth it. If Spectre dies like other minions, it will respawn after a short time.
All in all, Witch in Path of Exile 2 seems to have received some amazing quality of life updates to cater to her unique play style. Her various minion mechanics and gameplay will bring a lot of fun to the game. Even for those who don’t like minion builds, the diverse gameplay of Witch class will make you shine!
Here we’ll talk about a unique item that wasn’t used often in POE 3.24, Yaomac’s Accord. We’ll take a look at its unique mechanics and how it will interact with other aspects of the game, perhaps giving you some new ideas for creating your builds.
Yaomac’s Accord
Yaomac’s Accord is the first weapon to appear in the series so far. This unique sceptre was added as part of Ultimatum mechanic in Ultimatum league, but it wasn’t until POE 3.19, five leagues later, when Trialmaster’s fight entered the core through Tower of Ordeals Map that it became available again.
Then in Affliction League, Ultimatum mechanic finally entered the core, and Trialmaster and all his exclusive loot were reunited with Ultimatum. With the retirement of Tower of Ordeals Map, Yaomac’s Accord dropped exclusively from Trialmaster’s fight itself. According to crowdsourced data, it has a drop rate of about 10%.
Vaal Skill Mechanics Explained
Now, before we discuss the modifiers of this item, we want to note that this POE item has a high synergy with Vaal Skill. So let’s first quickly go over what Vaal Skill consists of. For example, Vaal Arc is Vaal version of Arc spell, accessible through Corrupted Arc Skill, which will grant both the normal Arc spell and its Vaal version without having to consume mana or health.
Using a Vaal Skill requires Souls, and the number of Souls is specific to each different Vaal Skill. By default, we can gain Souls by killing enemies or damaging rare and unique enemies. You can gain one Soul after killing a normal enemy. Then, when damaging a rare or unique enemy, you gain one or six Souls (one for rare enemies, six for unique enemies) for every 2% of health lost.
But this Soul gain has an internal cooldown of 1 second per monster, and Soul will be randomly added to Vaal Skill counter on the character.
For example, if you only have one Vaal Skill, Soul will always recharge that Skill, but if you have two or more Vaal Skills, Soul will randomly select a Vaal Skill to recharge.
Once you have enough Souls, your Vaal Skill will glow red to indicate that it can be used. When you use a Vaal Skill, the character will enter Soul and gain Prevention effect, which prevents the character from gaining Souls for a period.
The duration of Prevention varies for different Vaal Skills, but if the character has multiple Vaal Skills equipped, the duration of Prevention gained by Soul will always be based on Vaal Skill used to trigger Prevention effect of that Soul.
Modifiers
Next, let’s look at the modifiers on Yaomac’s Accord.
Increase Critical Strike Chance
Vaal Skills increase your Critical Strike Chance by 80%-120% for the duration of the effect being applied. So this item is all about getting the most out of your Vaal Skills.
Even though using 80% to 120% damage increase isn’t as much as the damage increase you get on a crafted weapon, it’s still a big part of this stat, and it’s also universal, so it can be used with any Vaal skill that deals damage.
Soul Gain Prevention
Next, we also have: 6%-8% reduced Soul Gain Prevention Duration.
To be honest, modifiers about Soul Gain Prevention are extremely rare. Since there’s good reason to think Soul Gain Prevention is a barrier that prevents Vaal Skills from being used more often, a modifier specifically reducing Soul Gain Prevention could be very useful for this.
This is because a Vaal Skill with a modifiable duration also has a Skill Gem. The fact states that modifiers to Skill Effect Duration also apply to Soul Gain Prevention for this Skill. This means that when you combine a reduced Soul Gain Prevention Duration with a reduced Skill Effect Duration, you can significantly reduce the duration of Soul Gain Prevention, or even potentially remove it entirely.
Soul Catcher unique Flask provides a 10% reduction in Soul Gain Prevention Duration for a Vaal Skill. This also scales with Flask effect while it’s active.
Also available is Triumvirate Authority, a unique Unset Ring that greatly boosts Vaal Skill in the socket. This ring rolls three or four random modifiers from a unique pool depending on whether the item was obtained from a normal Atziri or Uber Atziri encounter. These modifiers include 150% more damage from Socketed Vaal Skill, which is great for Lightning damage.
There’s also Hits from Socketed Vaal Skills ignore Enemy Monster Resistances, which is a powerful modifier. In the list of modifiers it can roll, Socketed Vaal Skill reduces Soul Gain Prevention Duration by 30% by combining it with Soul Catcher, with a maximum roll of 8%.
I should caution you, though, that if your Soul Gain Prevention is reduced by 100% or very close to it, you might consider taking Duration Mastery specifically for the 10% increase in Skill Effect Duration. Since this Mastery barely affects your Soul Gain Prevention when it’s at or near zero, it still increases the duration of Vaal skills.
Shepherd Of Souls
Another notable modifier is Shepherd of Souls. Right now it functions basically like a Keystone, and the effects don’t stack. Even if you dual-wield Yaomac’s Accord Sceptre, you can only benefit from this modifier once.
Shepherd of Souls reduces Soul cost of your Non-Aura Vaal Skills by 80%, but increases their Soul cost by 100% for every Vaal skill you’ve used in the last 8 seconds.
So mastering Shepherd of Souls mechanic allows for the type of top-tier build we dream of, allowing you to somewhat abuse your Vaal skill of choice.
Gain Charges
The last modifier for Yaomac’s Accord is the one we skipped over earlier, Gain an Endurance Charges, Frenzy and Power Charges.
This means you gain one of each charge every time you use a Vaal skill. And since the charge duration refreshes as you gain new charges, as long as you use your Vaal skills regularly, this modifier will allow you to maintain maximum Frenzy and Power Charges until you run into a monster that will remove your charges.
Why Is It So Desolate?
Despite this, Yaomac’s Accord is almost completely unused as a unique item. So far, only four characters have used it in all leagues in Necropolis, throughout the duration of the league.
So why isn’t it used more often? It’s all because Yaomac’s Accord only fits a very niche build archetype that is specialized and tailored to Vaal skills used, and requires a lot of very specific gear.
However, this doesn’t mean that Yaomac’s Accord is a bad unique item. As long as you pair it with the right items or mechanics, it can definitely be the key to a strong build!
Here I’m going to talk about the under-used unique item in Path of Exile, Brine Crown, and talk about how it works and interacts better with other items in the game, especially with the recently added Ascendancies and new unique items.
Brine Crown is a unique item introduced by POE Kalandra League, and synergizes well with both Melding of the Flesh and Aegis Aurora.
To be honest, this unique helmet hasn’t been used very well in a few seasons. While it may not be a particularly interesting item overall, it has a lot of great stats that will definitely make it more frequently used in POE 3.24 and beyond!
Brine Crown
Although it’s only used by less than 25 characters in Necropolis League, many players don’t consider it a forgotten unique, perhaps because the item doesn’t have any super interesting modifiers, but is just a solid unique item.
Brine Crown is a core drop unique item. According to crowdsourced drop data for POE 3.23 Affliction League, this item appears to be a Tier 1 Unique, so you won’t see too many of these outside of high-end Magic Finds.
Modifiers
Let’s take a look at the modifiers on Brine Crown: Increased Armor and Energy Shield by 240% to 300%.
Armor & Energy Shield
You’ll immediately notice that this item has unusually high Armor and Energy Shield for a helmet, especially considering it’s a Hybrid Base with a good modifier roll and 30% quality.
Besides the excellent base, Armor on this helmet can almost go over 1,100, and Energy Shield can go up to about 160, which can greatly increase your survivability.
Additionally, it has quite a bit of defense, which is exactly the theme of Brine Crown. It’s a completely defense-focused unique item, and it has a lot of advantages in defense.
Max Life
Besides the massive Armor and Energy Shield, there is a really nice life roll here, which is an increase of 80 to 100 max life.
In fact, GGG often talks about creating new unique items that are both powerful and interesting. Sometimes they do something new that we haven’t seen before, but usually these items have no life modifiers at all, however Brine Crown is not one of them.
Max Cold Resistance
It then also increases the maximum cold resistance by 3%. This modifier was actually only added to the item in POE 3.19 League patch. It replaces the 5% cold damage reduction modifier that Brine Crown previously had, plus the 3% max cold resistance is a great modifier in itself.
Cannot Be Frozen
Next up is there Cannot be Frozen modifier, which is another very useful stat. Ironically, this modifier may save you from using Soul of the Brine King Pantheon Power, which gives you a 100% chance of avoiding being frozen. Once you upgrade it, you can use a different primary Pantheon Power.
Given the potential use cases for Aegis Aurora mentioned earlier, you might be using Tempest Shield to boost your spell blocking. In this case, you’re already immune to Freeze and Shock, but you can use Betrayal Boost modifier to address Chill issue.
Chilled Ground
The last Brine Crown modifier of note is: 15% chance to create Chilled Ground when Hit with an Attack. This is a fairly unreliable modifier, I have to say, mostly because it’s thematic, but it will provide some defense against melee monsters when triggered, slowing their action speed by at least 10%.
It’s also worth mentioning that Chill inflicted on monsters by Chilled Ground is never considered being inflicted by the character, meaning that even if you use Secrets of Suffering, Leadership’s Price, or other mechanics that prevent you from inflicting Chill, you can technically chill a monster with Chilled Ground created by Brine Crown.
Melding Of The Flesh & Aegis Aurora
Surprisingly, Brine Crown has become much more useful thanks to the presence of Melding of the Flesh. This Unique Jewel makes your elemental resistances capped by your highest elemental resistance, allowing you to scale a single maximum elemental resistance to increase your defense against all incoming elemental damage.
Also, this is a good time to introduce Brine Crown’s best friend, Aegis Aurora. This unique shield pairs perfectly with Brine Crown and Melding of the Flesh, and provides another 5% of maximum cold resistance. When combined with Brine Crown, this gives you 4% of maximum elemental resistance and -4% of maximum resistance.
You can also continue to scale your maximum cold resistance with something like Purity of Ice or Eldritch Gloves Implicit modifier.
But the synergy doesn’t stop there. Because Aegis Aurora also provides a decent amount of Armor and Energy Shield, and it will enable both of these stats through its unique modifier, Recover Energy Shield equal to 2% of Armor when you Block.
Additionally, Brine Crown and Aegis Aurora provide a foundation for armored characters, and their investment in blocking makes your Energy Shield a more powerful defensive layer, especially in the face of incoming blows, where you’ll be blocking more frequently and thus restoring a large amount of Energy Shield.
This combination is especially powerful for Necromancers using Mistress of Sacrifice Ascendancy. Because these setups enable meaningful attack and spell blocking for a fairly negligible investment in POE Currency, and you get a lot of restoration from Aegis Aurora.
You may also consider Glancing Blows, a keystone that lets you take 65% more block damage but doubles your chance to block attacks and spells.
Overall, Glancing Blows will let you take more damage, but it will also make Aegis Aurora’s recovery more consistent, which is especially useful in mapping environments.
One thing that should be noted about the max resistance modifier of Brine Crown and its use with Melding of the Flesh is that Brine Crown does not provide any actual resistance stats. This is a slight drawback that will put more pressure on your other equipment slots.
Why Is It Forgotten?
As I mentioned before, Brine Crown is used by less than 25 characters in Necropolis League. So why isn’t it picked up more often?
Honestly, I really don’t have anything bad to say about this unique item, the real reason it isn’t used too much is that there are modifiers or other unique items that must be used on the helmet, which simply can’t be replaced in certain builds. And the loss of these stats means the loss of an aura or a significant drop in physical damage reduction.
There’s also the fact that this helmet does not have any spell suppression, nor any evasion, so it will also prevent you from using Evasion Mastery to get 15% spell suppression.
But honestly, Brine Crown is still a significant item, especially when paired with Melding of the Flesh and Aegis Aurora, so I will never be surprised to see more builds using this item in the future!
Hello fellow exiles, here I want to show my Crit Arc Totems Hierophant build. What’s really cool is that it’s built entirely with rare gear items! Of course, many of the items in this guide can be used until the mid-game, when better items will be available.
Therefore, maybe this guide is more suitable for players with a higher POE Currency budget. If you are looking for a top-level build with strong crit damage, don’t miss this guide. Without further ado, let’s jump right in!
Why Soul Mantle Doesn’t Work With This Build?
First of all, I have to say that I didn’t use Soul Mantle on this build. You may be wondering why I didn’t use Soul Mantle this time.
While Soul Mantle is a great unique skill that provides pseudo-7-link and powerful corruption, adding a ton of damage, Arc is neither a projectile nor an AoE skill, so Corrupted Implicit Mods like +2 to level of Socketed Projectile or AoE Gems do not benefit Arc.
Additionally, Soul Mantle Unique Body Armour no longer has +1 max Summoned Totems, so this will also nerf the effectiveness of Arc Totems.
Offense
So, this also brings us to the question: how do we deal with enough damage using only rare items?
In addition to stacking crit chance and crit multiplier, we also get a portion of our damage from Arcane Cloak buff. It costs a lot of manas and increases lightning damage based on 15% of mana cost. Therefore, getting mana on most of our gears is very important.
The rest of the damage comes from Wrath Aura, Lightning Penetration Support, Exposure, and Charges. I cleared everything except tier 17 and the uber boss with this build.
During my run, I took on Feared at 70% quantity. Died a few times, but overall, the fight wasn’t bad. One time was because of a Shaper slam while my Flame Dash was on cooldown. Just keep summoning Totem, moving around, and occasionally throwing Wave of Conviction traps to cause Exposure.
It’s important to note that as of POE 3.24, instant skills are no longer tied to the left click. Therefore, we have to link Arcane Cloak to the new support gem, Automation, so that it triggers automatically after activation.
Defense
For defense, you will always have at least four Endurance Charges and Power Charges, and have Conviction of Power Ascendancy, which reduces the physical damage you take, increases your Elemental Resistance, and increases your critical strike chance.
You can also restore 1% of life per second for each summoned totem through Ritual of Awakening. So this build has the high health of Templar tree and a strong defensive advantage of being able to use a shield.
I ran a lot of 8-mod maps with this build to farm Harvest and Expedition. It’s not the best build for this strategy, but the clearing is still very satisfying.
I felt very safe because everything died very quickly and had no problems running in maps with multiple dangerous mods like Increased Crit, Vulnerability and Increased AoE.
Even though my defense only consisted of Mind Over Matter, 100% Spell Suppression and some Block, I could stay away from monsters because of Totem playstyle, which really improved our survivability.
My only concern was Fire, Rock and Projectiles thrown by Cannibals, which blocked me off the screen many times while mapping.
Arc Totem vs Shockwave Totem vs Storm Burst Totem
In terms of clear speed, I think Arc Totem is on par with Shockwave Totem. Even though Storm Burst Totem doesn’t clear very well, it has a very good clear speed.
As for single target damage, Shockwave Totem and Storm Burst Totem are the clear winners. Arc Totem doesn’t even come close. You can get 3 times the damage of Arc Totem with the same budget. So, if you want to farm Uber bosses, either go to Shockwave Totem or Storm Burst Totem.
But to be honest, Arc Totem and Storm Burst Totem are easier to build because they require less unique items. Storm Burst Totem requires some league specific unique items, so it’s not very suitable as a league starter.
Gear & Mods
Finally, I have to say that upgrading with this Arc Totem build is a breeze. Because it doesn’t require mandatory items. You just need to take the time to grab any Sceptre or Wand with the highest spell or lightning damage and slowly upgrade the weapon once you reach the map.
You can totally look for these mods when you make your next upgrade. The most important mod for your shield is +1 to maximum number of Totems. I also highly recommend getting +1 to Level of Lightning Spell Skill Gems.
For the rest of your gear, look for the following mods: Life, Mana, Resistances, Dexterity and Chance to Suppress Spell Damage. Note that Dexterity is important because it helps limit the spell suppression we have because of Magebane Keystone. Of course, you can also try installing some cast speed or damage mods on your Jewellery to get more damage.
That’s it for this complete guide to Crit Arc Totems Hierophant build made entirely with rare items. Whether you’re new to totem builds or a seasoned player looking for a powerful setup, Arc Totems Hierophant is a pleasant choice for you in POE 3.24.
Hello everyone, welcome to this guide. This version of Penance Brand has hits and elements and can deal with a lot of single target damage. If you really like challenging players with Uber bossing and hand-to-hand combat, you will definitely like this. I’ll cover how to use this in this guide.
Before starting, you can expand the scope of your adventure by obtaining POE Currency, and you can also craft and strengthen your equipment to take your gaming experience to the next level.
How To Inflict Poison?
First, let me introduce how to inflict poisons. The reason I want to mention this first is that Original Sin is the most expensive item in the entire build. Even if you may not be interested in participating in the building yourself, don’t rush away. You can also learn a thing or two about the other mechanics in POE 3.24.
Original Sin will convert all our elemental damage into chaos damage. These two types of damage are the only types of damage that can cause natural poisoning. In this version, we can use Herald Of Agony, Skill Tree and Tattoos to get the chance of poison. And different levels of poison damage can be built from gem links, large cluster joules, weapons, but the major source is stacking double explicit corrupted magic adorning jewels. Considering that your goal is to get 8% chaos damage on magic adorn jewels, it is very important that you get an effective magic adorn jewel.
Scaling Hit Damage
Because the more hit points provided by peninsula dissipation will greatly increase your build ability and will also allow you to reach the limit quickly. Never try to jump out of or block the spell’s first damage. Because Pattern Spawn is a kind of physical damage, and it is fixed physical damage in magic adorn jewel.
But because of Original Sin, this physical damage is of no use to us. To solve this problem, gloves can be used to convert physical damage into cold damage. At least 50% of it will be converted into cold damage, and the other 50% will be converted into lightning damage by the jewel. Another thing to note is that this build can use hatred as its major hit damaging aura and hatred will bring more cold damage to our body. This damage will accumulate with the level of the gem.
We can become a level 21 hatred through “+1 TO LEVEL OF ALL SPELL SKILL GEMS” button in the game. Or insert a gem with two prefix models into a helmet or gloves, which can further increase head damage by oscillating the scepter’s own elemental overload keystone implicit. This keystone will be 40% more elemental damaged than the bill’s hit damage.
Defensive Layers
I’ll break down the defensive layers in this build into five parts. Physical take into elemental conversion, spell suppression, 90% all max resistance, critical immunity, recovery and life recovery.
Physical Take Into Elemental Conversion
Converting physical damage to elemental damage allows us to ignore the role of implementing armor and provide more defense in other defensive layers. This can be obtained from lightning coil, helmet prefix craf, and the remaining 10% can be obtained from chaos mastery in the tree. Keep in mind that this defense will become ineffective over time and additional defenses must be acquired through other means.
Spell Suppression
Spell suppression is easy to understand, which is why it is so popular among players. It can halve the spell attacks received, which is very useful, especially when facing BOSS whose highest attack is spell attack.
90% All Maximum Resistance
This works when combined with the first offensive layer I mentioned. Maximum resistance is capped at 90%, which not only indicates taking most of the elemental damage. It also applies to physical damage taken. This method of absorbing physical damage is much better than reducing physical damage, since armor can only withstand larger hits if your armor level is higher than the damage taken. This simply notifies damage as a percentage of the maximum resistance you have. We can reach 90% of all max resistance from the following, using Flesh Melt along with 23+ Purity. There is also an elemental flask that adds flask effects both explicitly and implicitly, with enchantments paired with the primary blood.
This works best when combined with the first defensive layer I just mentioned. 90% All maximum resistance is not only used for physical damage but also for spell damage. Compared with reducing physical damage mentioned before, this kind of direct absorption of physical damage will be much better. Because only if your armor level is higher than the damage you take, your armor can withstand greater attacks. In combat, we can use the melting of the flesh alongside a level 23+purity to achieve 90% All max resistance.
Critical Immunity
It is very necessary to have critical immunity in battle, especially if you are preparing to cultivate T7 or Uber bossing. Both T7 and Uber bossing will make you take particularly bad damage, but there are two ways to gain critical immunity.
The first method is simple. When you main poison, you can deal damage to enemies you poison, but this requires you to trade the poison and deal damage 20% faster. The second one requires you to take 50% less critical hit bonus damage, Corruption Hidden in Lightning Coil, and the famous Temple of Thought, which gives you an extra 30% bonus damage reduction, with the remaining 20% being gained from the tattoo. It all depends on whether you want the extra damage.
Recovery And Life Recovery
This is the defensive layer that can make you feel you are truly “immortal”. When jewelry is perfectly combined with the tree alongside the fines of destiny, you’ll find that it will not only protect you from smaller heads but also allow your own heads to recover quickly.
Besides the above, there are some other defensive layers that can be used to build houses and so on. Waiting for your novel exploration!
Summary
Most of the construction speed comes from stacking large cluster jewelry. This is because stacking large cluster jewelry will bring us indescribably powerful chaos damage. In this version, note that we need four jewelry, and be aware of Wicked Powell and dark radiation alongside an unspeakable gift while searching.
Based on the above guide, I believe you have a great understanding of the construction of Poison Penance Brand of Dissipation Pathfinder. What I’m talking about may be part of the game’s combat. The rest needs to be explored on your own! Happy gaming!
In this guide, we’ll talk about a forgotten unique item, Apep’s Supremacy. We’ll discuss the mechanics of this item and look at any synergies or interesting use cases they might have, especially given the many trend-changing or new unique items that have been added to the game recently.
Apep’s Supremacy is a unique shield introduced in Incursion League, located within Temple of Atzoatl, and is a combination of the predecessor unique Apep’s Slumber on Altar of Sacrifice, as well as Vial of Awakening.
This shield has unique modifiers that allow you to take physical damage from chaos damage instead of bleeding, while requiring you to be poisoned to benefit from its maximum resistance. This set of modifiers, along with Tainted Pact and other POE items, has some interesting potential.
This unique shield is exclusively dropped from a chest in Toxic Grove, a level 3 room in Temple of Atzoatl. Apep’s Slumber is a prerequisite to unlock it, and the other component, Vial of Awakening, can be dropped from the last boss of Temple.
Modifiers
Let’s first look at the modifiers on Apep’s Supremacy. We have a flat added damage modifier that adds (50-55) to (72-80) Chaos Damage. This is equivalent to a level 9 or 10 Added Chaos Damage Support.
Then there’s a very large flat energy shield modifier that adds 130 to 150 maximum energy shield. With a good base energy shield roll and 30% quality, you can actually get up to 280 energy shield from Apep’s Supremacy, which is pretty good. In addition, you also get 30% to 50% Energy Shield Recharge.
Chaos Damage From Bleeding
Now let's look at the special modifier on this shield that makes you take chaos damage instead of physical damage from bleeding.
Bleeding is a Damaging Ailment that deals physical damage over time, and is generally considered the most dangerous Damaging Ailment in the game. Bleeding deals 70% of the base damage of the blow that inflicted the ailment every second for five seconds, at least from the perspective of the monster that inflicted it on the player. But when the target is moving, the damage dealt is tripled to 210% per second.
Many characters will choose to use Soul of Ralakesh Pantheon Power to make Bleeding less dangerous. It essentially subverts the bleed mechanics so that it deals less damage to you when you move.
But now, Apep’s Supremacy will make you take Chaos damage instead of physical damage whenever you have Bleeding. The immediate synergy here is Chaos Inoculation Keystone, which sets your maximum health to 1 and makes you immune to Chaos damage.
By combining this Keystone with Apep’s Supremacy, you’ll be able to effectively ignore Bleeding. Sure, you may still be affected by Bleeding, but it won’t do any damage to you.
The modifiers on Apep’s Supremacy don’t just apply to Chaos Inoculation. In fact, it’s so strong that it can also be used on standard setups with capped Chaos Resistance. Because the vast majority of builds won’t have a lot of extra physical damage reduction to help mitigate damage from bleeding.
Apep’s Supremacy vs Soul Of Ralakesh
Next, let’s compare the modifiers for a character using Apep’s Supremacy to a character using Soul of Ralakesh Pantheon Power.
A character using Apep’s Supremacy takes extra damage from bleeding while moving. So they take 210% of the damage from hitting per second while moving. While stationary, they take 70% of the damage from hitting per second with Chaos Resistance at 75%. So they actually take 52.5% of the damage from hitting per second while moving, and only 17.5% of the damage from hitting per second while stationary.
Meanwhile, a character with Soul of Ralakesh doesn’t take the extra damage from bleeding while moving, and they take 25% less damage from bleeding while moving. So in this comparison, they’re actually taking 52.5% of the damage dealt per second while moving, and 70% of the damage dealt per second while stationary.
You can see that a character using Apep’s Supremacy with Chaos Resistance capped takes the same amount of bleeding damage as a character using Soul of Ralakesh while moving. But they take much less damage while stationary.
But one thing to note here is that Soul of Ralakesh reduces all physical damage you take by 25% while moving, not just bleeding. So it can be used to protect against physical damage from other sources as well.
Something else that might be useful is that the modifier on Apep’s Supremacy lets you take Chaos damage. But physical damage from bleeding is not actually a damage modifier taken. This interaction happens before damage modifiers taken are calculated. This means that technically, you can still shift that portion of damage to another damage type.
Slow Down The Expiry Time Of Poison
Now, there’s another potential use case for this modifier, and it takes advantage of another unique item, Tainted Pact Amulet.
Before discussing this synergy, however, we should first look at the other modifiers on Apep’s Supremacy plus the 25% Poison Chance. This modifier will give all incoming physical or chaos damage a chance to poison you.
The added Max Resistance modifier will increase all resistances, including Chaos Resistance, as long as you are poisoned. Meanwhile, Poison Expiry Rate modifier will effectively double the duration of poisons on you by slowing down the expiry time by 50%.
This differs from Poison or Ailment Duration modifiers, which are technically a multiplier of the poison duration, but do not actually increase the duration of the poison. This modifier stacks with other sources of slow expiry rate effects, up to a maximum of 75% slower expiry rate.
Tainted Pact Amulet
Now it’s time to discuss the aforementioned Tainted Pact. This unique amulet will make chaos damage heal you over time while leeching life.
Poison itself deals chaos damage over time and bleeds will also make you take chaos damage over time instead of physical damage. This is thanks to Apep’s Supremacy, and this combination of mechanics will allow you to potentially self-inflict ailment, which actually heals you instead of hurting you.
Now the interesting thing about Tainted Pact is that the healing benefit gained from Chaos Damage over time is actually based on the damage mitigated, i.e. the damage you take from the source of Chaos Damage over time.
This creates an interesting balance after it’s been mitigated by things like Chaos Resistance. You want your Chaos Resistance to be high enough so that you don’t die immediately from Chaos Strike Damage, but low enough so that you benefit from the healing over time from Chaos Damage.
However, using Tainted Pact does have one very important prerequisite. For the healing to work, you must keep leeching life until unreserved life fills up. You will need a way to maintain life leech.
You can get this effect from some non-Ascendancy mechanics. For example, the Immortal Ambition Keystone can grant this modifier. To keep you from ever reaching full health, you can also use Petrified Blood and make sure you don’t have 50% or more of your life remaining so that the life leech effect isn’t removed at 50% of the maximum recoverable amount of life.
Divine Flesh
Finally, I’ll mention Divine Flesh because you might want to use this Keystone with Apep’s Supremacy.
But if you plan on playing a build with a capped Chaos Resistance, I recommend only using Tainted Pact and Divine Flesh in this setup. Because this Keystone turns 50% of elemental damage into chaos damage.
If you choose lower chaos resistance to ensure you get a lot of healing over time from chaos damage, you will inevitably die from the upcoming elemental blows. But without Tainted Pact, using this Keystone with Apep’s Supremacy and focusing on scaling your chaos resistance and other means of chaos damage mitigation is a powerful combination.
Is Apep’s Supremacy Still Worth Using?
So why isn’t Apep’s Supremacy used more often? Honestly, I think this shield is seriously underrated right now.
But that being said, it has competitors like Saffell’s Frame, which provides an extra 1% max resistance compared to Apep’s Supremacy and doesn’t require prerequisites like Poison.
In fact, the need for Poison prerequisite is the biggest downside to this shield. Because it requires an investment elsewhere to really be effective and also makes it less reliable as a defensive mechanic.
So if you’re using a shield and taking advantage of other synergistic mechanics at the same time, it makes sense to really lean into this mechanic.
That’s it for our in-depth discussion of all the mechanics of Apep’s Supremacy. Hopefully, this guide will shed some new light on this for you!
