Path of Exile 2 Witch build: best skills, passives, and support gems to use

Let's cut to the chase. If you've booted up Path of Exile 2 for the first time and are curious about the Witch, it's because you love the idea of owning your own minion army. That's fine, it's happened to all of us. In this article, we've written a Path of Exile 2 Witch build that should get you started as you progress through the game.

In this guide we'll go through the core identity of the build, which skills it uses, the best support gems, and the best passives for what we're aiming for. We've also broken down what you should be looking for when it comes to weapons and armour.

To see this content please enable targeting cookies.

Path of Exile 2 Witch build

So it turns out that a "Witch minion build" has more variety than you'd think! There's a lot of variety here, due to the style of minion master you want to be. Do you see your minions kinda like ammunition, sacrificing them for buffs? Do you want persistent, reviving minions? Or temporary ones that spawn off corpses? Path of Exile has always been good at giving players plenty of freedom, and trying to figure out a Witch build as a prime example of that fundamental aspect of the game.

So what we're going to do is present you a build that focuses around your skeleton archers as the foundation to the build. You get these guys right away in Act 1 player as the Witch, and through building your character around making them more powerful, you'll see the impact your passives, support gems, and skills have on their power as you go. By doing so, by the time you hit Act 3 (which we can't guide you through due to the early access version we had access to), you can choose to either stay true to your archer bone bros, or respec and use what you learned to power up a different variety of skeleton.

• Path of Exile 2 Witch best skills
• Path of Exile 2 Witch best support gems
• Path of Exile 2 Witch best passives
• Path of Exile 2 Witch best weapons and armour

Path of Exile 2 Witch best skills

Here are the skills we'll be using in this build. You'll notice of course the Skeleton Archers here, but you'll see other skeleton summons here to support you, as well as other skills to help keep you and your archers safe, and boost your overall power.

Also, a Witch specific post here. Using your Spirit smartly is important here. You can allocate Spirit to your skills in the skill page, and when applied to summons like the Skeleton Archers, it increases the number of archers you get. So, what we're going to do is allocate the majority of spirit to the archers (more archers = more damage), but also set aside a decent amount for regular Skeleton Warriors who'll be acting as tanks.

• Skeleton Warrior - Summons a skeleton warrior, which will act as your frontline tank and a supporting solider.
• Skeleton Archer - Summons a skeleton archer, which will be your main damaging minion. Deals poison damage!
• Essence Drain - A single target chaos spell that'll give you something to do while your archers are doing god's work.
• Pain Offering - Sacrifice a skeleton in order to send the others into a rage, making them deal more damage and use skills faster.
• Vulnerability - A curse you put on enemies to weaken them, allowing attacks to bypass some armour.
• Skeletal Cleric - A final skeleton that you shall not sacrifice. They'll heal up your other minions and revive dead skeletons.

Path of Exile 2 Witch best support gems

What about support gems? Here's what we picked up for this Witch skeleton archer build! (note, we've listed some tier 2 support gems here to use later on. If you're looking to fill up support slots in Act 1 and 2 for your skills, mix and match with recommended gems until then for a temporary boost to your skills. Who knows! It might inspire a build on your next character).

• Skeleton Warrior - 1: Meat Shield. Makes them tankier, but reduces their damage. 2: Maim. A tier 2 support gem. Mains enemies they hit, reducing their movement speed and evasion. Makes enemies easier to avoid, and easier to hit by you and skeleton archers.
• Skeleton Archer - 1: Comorbidity. Allows the archers to apply an additional poison, but the poisons last for less time. 2: Feeding Frenzy. A tier 2 support gem. Your minions will take and deal more damage.
• Essence Drain - 1: Chain. Allows Essence Drain to chain between enemies. Take this for AOE clearing. 2: Chaos Infusion. A tier 3 support gem. Makes the spell do more chaos damage at the cost of other damage types.
• Pain Offering - 1: Magnified Effect. Increases the range of the offering's aura. 2: Font of Rage. A tier 3 support gem. Gives rage to you and your minions when in proximity.
• Vulnerability - 1: Heightened Curse. Increases power of the curse. 2: Hex Bloom. A tier 3 support gem. Spread's the curse when a cursed enemy dies.
• Skeletal Cleric - 1: Clarity. Gain increased mana regen when the cleric is alive! 2: Vitality. Gain increased life regeneration when the cleric is alive!

Path of Exile 2 Witch best passives

This build is all about getting your Skeleton Archers hella strong, and therefore we'll be focusing on passives that do just that. You'll see general minion passives that boost minion damage, health, etc. But you'll also see some general purpose passives that'll increase your own Witch's power and survivability. In addition, since we're focusing on the Skeleton Archers, we're gonna use more dex here compared to other Witch builds, and we'll take a particular passive that'll reward that dex investment.

(Note: what this means is that you should try to take Dexterity where needed in attribute passive nodes as well as intellect. As this will only really pay off once we take the Dead can Dance major passive, so what you can do is just take which attributes that you need for support gems as you level, prio intellect to boost your mana until Dead can Dance, then adjust with a respect to get yourself - and your Skeleton Archers - more dex once you get the passive).

The major passives we recommend building towards are:

• Raw Destruction
• Open Mind
• Power of the Dead
• Pure Energy
• Living Death
• Relentless Fallen
• Fear of Death
• Necrotised Flesh
• Entropic Incarnation
• Grip of Evil
• Dead can Dance
• Right Hand of Darkness
• Essence Infusion
• Restless Dead
• Growing Swarm
• Crystalline Flesh

So we've got lots of minion passives there, as well as passvies that boost your energy shield recharge rate. What's important to note is Dead can Dance. Once you hit that, it becomes a lot more important to insert some dexterity to your passive attribute nodes. Just make sure you've got enough intellect to use all your support gems and gear!

Path of Exile 2 Witch best weapons and armour

Okay so, what should you equip on your Witch? Funnily enough, because this build will eventually get a nice cash out from Dexterity due to us opting into the Dead can Dance talent, we'll have a nice amount of Evasion rating progressing through the game. But, as this will also be balanced out with intellect, we're looking for gear that provides evasion and energy shields. Early on, before you get Dead can Dance, go for energy shields as a priority as you'll be mostly taking Intellect by default anyway. After Dead can Dance, then having both becomes more beneficial.

Now you've got some gear with evasion and energy shields on it, what sort of sub stats are you looking for? Well, intellect is always nice, as is elemental resistances (which become a lot more important as you venture into the end game). Mana and mana regen is good too. However, due to the quirks of this build, we'd also like to get some Dexterity as that'll boost the Dead can Dance passive when you eventually get it. Once you get Dead can Dance, this becomes much more important. Then, as a ranged class, movement speed is always good! You don't wanna get surrounded and beaten to death.

If you can hunt down weapons and armour with these stats included, you should be good to go. The important thing is not to hoard your upgrade materials. You might be tempted to avoid common gear and weapons in favour of blues and yellows, but you never know if a cheeky upgrade could reveal a god roll on this otherwise junk loot. Remember, upgrade material sitting in your stash isn't doing anything to improve your character's power.

---

With that, we've reached the end of our entry-level Path of Exile 2 Witch guide. From here, you can choose to keep the build going with the fire build, or hey, you can totally switch it up when you feel more confident doing so. Part of the joy of Path of Exile is trying out interesting new builds, so once you've played with this, give some other things a spin.

The above is the detailed content of Path of Exile 2 Witch build: best skills, passives, and support gems to use. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!