What is the best Path of Exile 2 Witch build? The Witch makes her return in Path of Exile 2, but this time her summoner abilities have been simplified without lowering the classes’ skill ceiling. You’re now able to automatically summon most minions, so it’s a lot easier to keep the battlefield stocked up with your legion of monsters.
Controlling an army filled with minions is a difficult task in the original RPG game, but it’s easier to get up and running in Path of Exile 2. Ahead of the Path of Exile 2 release date, we’re going to break down the Path of Exile 2 Witch build to see what abilities are worth using, in addition to what minions you can pick from when deciding how to structure your army.
Path of Exile 2 Witch overview
While there’s a lot of crossover between PoE 1 and 2, the Witch has received a lot of attention to try to make Necromancy stronger. If you choose to go down this path, you can spawn waves of undead minions to bombard anyone that stands in your way. Your army has the potential to spread infections to enemies, causing powerful debuffs and continuous damage that builds over time.
Summoning minions only consumes Spirit in PoE 2, freeing up your mana to give you some flexibility when fighting several enemies. It’s also possible to gain additional minions depending on the buffs your items have. For example, the Celebrant Sceptre automatically summons a level two Skeletal Warrior. As you progress through the game, you can focus on obtaining items that summon minions without having to spend any resources.
Path of Exile 2 Witch summons
The composition of your undead army is selected in the Skill Gems menu, giving you access to various minions with their own set of strengths and weaknesses. Your total amount of Spirit determines how many summons you’re able to unleash, as well as the quality of the minions on offer.
Here are the Witch summons we know about so far:
- Skeletal Arsonist
- Skeletal Cleric
- Skeletal Reaver
- Skeletal Sniper
- Skeletal Storm Mage
- Skeletal Warrior
- Zombies
Witches can also summon Zombies, though the requirements are different from the skeletons. Unlike your army, you have to manually summon Zombies using corpses on the battlefield, and they won’t respawn when they die. However, Zombies are much sturdier than the average skeleton, and they should last longer in combat.
The Witch also has access to the Bind Spectre Spirit Gem, a spell that allows you to capture the spirit of a defeated monster and use it as a minion in your army. As mentioned earlier, the strength of the defeated monster determines the Spirit cost, so you won’t be able to keep your existing army without making some changes beforehand.
Path of Exile 2 Witch abilities
With your army ready to fight alongside you, don’t just sit around and watch them crush your enemies. Using your mana, you’re able to cast helpful spells to aid your skeletal troops, spread corruption, or become a damage dealer yourself.
Here are the Witch abilities we know about so far:
- Bone Storm – Charge up a torrent of bones to launch at enemies to inflict a lot of damage to a single target.
- Contagion – Hit an enemy with the Contagion debuff to deal damage over time. When an enemy dies with Contagion, the infection spreads to other enemies, dealing additional damage. The longer you can keep the infection spreading to different groups of enemies, the more damage it deals. Summoned minions created from infected corpses are automatically infected, and they’re able to spread the effect when attacking enemies.
- Essence Drain – Another damage over time debuff, similar to Contagion. Essence Drain can spread, but only to enemies that have been infected with Contagion, causing additional damage to enemy units.
- Pain Offering – Sacrifice one of your minions for a buff to the rest of your army that makes them faster and stronger.
- Profane Ritual – Take advantage of the leftover corpses after a fight with Profane Ritual to create a Power Charge. This allows you to perform a powered up version of some of your abilities. For example, Bone Storm adds an AoE effect to damage multiple enemies if you use a Power Charge.
- Unearth – If this spell kills a monster or touches a corpse, it creates bone constructs that behave as temporary minions. These constructs are weak and will die easily, but they can be formidable if you can amass many of them.
What is the best Path of Exile 2 Witch build?
It’s unclear exactly which Path of Exile 2 Witch build is the best so far, however, based on what we’ve seen from the Necromancer path, this appears to be the best option thus far. We should note that this information comes from the official Path of Exile 2 gameplay walkthrough, so some of the finer details are subject to change.
How do I use the best Path of Exile 2 Witch build?
The Necromancer Witch requires you to construct an army that can do most of the heavy lifting for you on the battlefield. Determining which minions to summon is the tricky part, largely dependent on the type of enemy you’re facing in each act. Your army needs to be able to take any heat away from you by dealing high amounts of damage, while also being sturdy enough to withstand a flurry of incoming attacks. You must avoid a scenario where you suddenly take all the aggression on the battlefield – be careful launching too many Bone Storms, or else you might become enemy number one.
For every special minion type you summon like the Skeletal Cleric, Storm Mage, or Sniper, we recommend stocking up on at least two Skeletal Warriors per unit. It’s important not to neglect the Skeletal Warriors, as they’re the backbone of your army, providing consistent damage and a decent layer of protection. If you’re confident in your micromanagement abilities, you can lean towards having more specialized units as long as you’re making use of their unique powers. Otherwise, it makes more sense to stock your army with generic grunts that don’t need to be told what to do.
Keep in mind that some of your minions have special abilities that you’re going to want to take advantage of. For example, the Skeletal Sniper has a poisonous arrow that is used to create a deadly gas cloud. Similarly, Skeletal Arsonists can blow themselves up to cause large amounts of damage, but you need to spot when they’re about to die to get the most out of this deadly ability. Clever micromanagement will be essential when playing as a Witch as you need to consider your own abilities, as well as your minion’s abilities and how they can aid you in combat.
As your army attacks enemies, make sure you’re regularly applying Contagion and Essence Drain to individual minions. These damage over time abilities may not seem powerful at first, but during lengthy battles, the effects can stack up to cause devastating damage. Likewise, it’s always worth throwing out Unearth every so often to add extra forces to your squad. Don’t forget to time your offering abilities right before your minion is about to die, that way you can maximize your unit’s life while gaining the full benefit from a spell like Pain Offering.
And that’s all you need to know about the Path of Exile 2 Witch. We’ve also got guides on the Mercenary and Ranger if you want to check out some other classes. If you’re excited about the upcoming game, you should read our Path of Exile 2 preview to see what we thought of the game after a four-hour session. And you can learn about how the Path of Exile 2 accounts system is changing by heading over to our article.