Archmage Poison Crit Hexblast is a Solid Build - 10-15 Million DPS

[@akarenji6628]

Here is a list of additional tips which I'll populate over time: - The new optimal mapping Hexbalst supports are: Inspiration, Chaos Mastery, Arcane Surge, Arcane Tempo and Lightning Penetration. This allows very fast mapping. For mana sustain and quality of life, add one Sapphire with 15%+curse AoE, and 2% mana gained on kill, - even better if you can get crit bonus and damaging ailment magnitude. - Threaded Light is a very good budget option for a focus if you feel you're low on damage. It can easily add 200%+ spell damage for 1 exalt. It is worse than a focus with +2 spell levels, 100% spell damage and mana but these are much more expensive. Threaded Light will make your damage come online much earlier. - When using Sigil of Power, make sure to set it up to weapon set 2 only and have Hexbalst on weapon set 1. This will avoid bricking your damage by having an unoptimised staff equipped.

[@jo6066]

Thanks for sharing your build, had a lot of fun trying it out

[@akarenji6628]

Hey man glad you enjoyed. I actually think that's the superior version at the moment. Archmage with enough crit bonus and poison magnitude is definitely enough damage and there is a lot of room for adding survivability, which you've done. I really want to add The Everlasting Gaze but I'm being stubborn and want to see if a 100% MoM version will work first, at least until we see what the next patch is. I'm starting to think a Svalinn might be a good option if I path to block nodes, just for smoother delirious mapping

[@jo6066]

@@akarenji6628 Will try out Everlasting gaze MOM EB. I think youre right to assume Gream Fist will be nerfed/changed and that changes everything :D

[@sabbah1093]

Is there a way about using Original Sin ring instead of unique poison glove? I know there's a almost no-way situation to overcome the Original Sin 0% chaos resistance debuff with mana build to gain CI with 0 stun threshold&ridiculous low hit points or you have to suffer full chaos damage. But it feels really good to if we can let the archmage lightning damage join the chaos damage multiplier.

[@akarenji6628]

You can use Original Sin and CI, yes. It depends on whether you value a glove or ring slot more; personally I value the ring slot as Breach rings are so good for mana stackers. On a non Chayula monk this is a fine option. Regarding damage scaling, it probably won't be as impactful as you think for the following reasons: most damage scaling comes from spell damage anyway, which is fairly easy to find on gear and Arcane Intensity adds a huge boost. Chaos damage nodes on the tree are pretty poor, typically adding around 7% chaos damage and some have downsides like Spaghettification. On the super high end, with perfect gear, there is a world where you can roll 100% spell damage and 100% chaos damage on your wand and focus, even some from a ring, but this would require exceptionally good gear which is hard to craft in PoE 2. In my opinion it would be quite a lot of investment for a decent but probably-not-necessary damage increase.

[@sabbah1093]

@@akarenji6628 Thanks for the pretty detailed reply, I would just try cheap trail version first to check if I need more damage here with a 110%sd 90%crit good focus dropped. And I'm converting from Chayula poison bow build to here due to latest Killer instinct change, so I'll also try weapon set to see if I can mapping with bow&heavy boss fighting with hexblast.

[@akarenji6628]

@sabbah1093 That sounds like a fine idea. You could also run a poison comet build for bossing, too. If you have enough crit bonus and poison magnitude, it can do 3x the damage of Hexblast. I'm sure there's a meme poison comet 1 shot build that I could showcase, but it'd require a +5 cold skill level wand

[@DH-hj1gs]

Great vid, any tips on what skills I should be used to level this build? I’m only level 20 but want to build towards this

[@akarenji6628]

I was a normal melee monk until around level 60 or so. Realistically any starter build will be fine until you get to level 45 or whenever you can use Hexblast and Eye of Winter. You can try Essence Drain and Contagion but the single target damage is bad. You could look up Goratha's Chayula bow monk, I think he provided a starting setup and bow skills are very good

[@MrKingdom3000]

Have you tried cast on minion death build with comet? I think it might be broken.

[@akarenji6628]

Not personally, no, but I know it's strong

[@NousagiBrat]

have you thought about running threaded light with a sceptre for spirit? at 300 spirit thats 360 spell damage. obviously downside is not able to run gem levels and crit on your weapons. But I was doing a similar build on bloodmage before swapping out for spark due to mapping clear speed issues.

[@akarenji6628]

I have thought many times about using an offhand scepter for more spirit, mainly to run 2 Blasphemy auras and Blink. Giving up both weapon slots, however would mean a loss of 7 gem levels, and 100% crit chance. When I ran this through my damage calculator it's an overall 50% loss of damage. You could use Threaded Light with a wand for a budget way to get high spell damage though - that would be -2 gem levels and 50% crit chance but +200% spell damage so it's probably fine

[@zachmichel4850]

Thanks for the vid - set this up on my chonk and I'm having issues with mana sustain in t15/16s. Seems that I get hit a few times and it's all gone. Any testing / is it worth investing in some recoup? I have 243 mana regen per second and 3700 total mana rn. Real issue is only during bosses. One hit and my mana is gone and then casting is a pain.

[@akarenji6628]

I have 200% mana regen from Breach rings and run Clarity on my Into the Breach, this gives 312 mana regen which is just about enough if I pick up blue flames after a boss hit. You could find some 'increased mana leeched" jewels that give the flames more leech. Mana recovery is always tricky on any MoM build but this has been fine for me so far. If you have the currency, you could get a Melting Maelstrom flask. Luckily, if the damage is there Difficulty 4 map bosses should die in 10 seconds or so anyway

[@zachmichel4850]

@@akarenji6628 Appreciate the reply! I have the high mana regen breach rings, will give clarity a shot. I think next up is get my damage higher so I do melt bosses that fast

[@akarenji6628]

@zachmichel4850 if you have a good amount of increased poison magnitude from jewels, and crit multi, with archmage and Plaguefinger then the damage is there. It might also just take practice learning to cast eye of winter to keep Withered stacks up

[@zachmichel4850]

@@akarenji6628 I'm at 353% crit multi, 74% chance to poison, 17.57% crit chance, and 91% magnitude. Maybe my magnitude is low? Or, what you said and I need to keep withered up. Did a T17 boss and it took me a while to kill. Still need to fully test this on a pinnacle boss. SSF so it's a struggle to farm the materials

[@akarenji6628]

@zachmichel4850 magnitude is a bit low but it should be enough for bosses, I have around 250% increased but I'm on trade league. Its also important to have a wand or staff with a good amount of spell damage, bosses should feel smooth at about 50k on tooltip dps for Hexblast, but that doesn't count poisons. Always add withering touch and extraction to eye of winter so that it adds 10% critical weakness and 50-70% Withered in one cast

[@orochimarusannin7544]

I'm new to POE so sorry if I'm asking something stupid, but this build is heavily focused on poison, right? And the only source to apply poison is through the gloves? I'm trying to use it (currently lvl 47) but thats exactly the problem. Sometimes my enemies do not get poisoned so they survive for too long, but yeah, when the poison hits they're melted.

[@akarenji6628]

Normally only chaos and physical damage can poison but they also need 'chance to poison on hit' modifiers. Plaguefinger gives 10% on its own so you'll have to find the rest from the tree and emerald jewels. What Plaguefinder is supposed to do is add all damage types to the damage of the poison, but a person in my comments found that Plaguefinger actually let's you poison ekth all damage types, but you still need to find some 'chance to poison on hit'. There's a support gem which adds 50%. Also you'll need to scale increased poison magnitude as the base value is only 20%, so if you hit for 1000 damage only 200 of that is added as poison, but if you have 200% increased poison magnitude that will now be 600 damage per poison - you can easily get 3 poison stacks from the tree

[@SidneyVang]

Do you have a leveling build for this setup? Im trying to mimic this but im doing no damage at lvl 42 through regular campaign. Is this more of a end game setup? Also cant wait for your build planner

[@akarenji6628]

I switched to this build at level 60, so I'd have to think about how to optimise at lower levels. Firstly you'll need a wand with chaos levels and spell damage, I found a +3 chaos levels wand with a vendor. Youll also want to have Eye of Winter linked to Extraction and Withering Touch, this alone will double your damage on bosses. Around maps you should aim for +200% increased critical hit chance as this will make your poison dps much smoother. You will also need at least 2, preferably 3 maximum poison stacks for better single target. One you have Archmage and Plaguefinger your damage really comes online, but you won't have this at level 42. I would prioritise spell damage and chaos damage early to get you through the campaign

[@akarenji6628]

If you want more damage fast you can get a Threaded Light with 12% spell damage per 10 spirit

[@stepladder-q8y]

thanks for your guide. it really is an awesome build. i was just wondering how can i get 3 poisons?

[@akarenji6628]

Thanks man, have a look at this early setup passive tree (maxroll.gg/poe2/passive-tree/tq58a0wu) You'll see there's pathing to 3 poison clusters, the bottom and right ones have nodes which give +1 to poisons. Late game the bottom nodes are inefficient and its better to get poison magnitude and chance to poison from jewels instead and use Comorbidity for +1 poison

[@ldeni]

impending doom does not work with blasphemy, it only work if u cast the curse yourself

[@akarenji6628]

I'll add it to Conductivity and see what happens

[@Sarengo_HF]

Do you think going poison is the best way even for classic archmage spark builds?

[@akarenji6628]

If poison worked like it did in PoE 1, then yes - poison really benefits from big hits in PoE 2 and Spark relies on many small hits. For the current meta Spark builds, I think they would struggle to fit in increased magnitude, chance to poison on hit and adding chaos damage to spark, which you need at least one point of to apply poison. Plaguefinger only adds damage to the poison magnitude but you still need chaos damage to inflict it. There may be a way to get poison Spark to work on a Pathfinder, as they get double the poison cap. You may be able to run an 8 poison Spark setup, which sounds good but would require a lot of testing. Maybe if Spark gets nerfed (very likely), we could see people looking at this

[@adriankaczynski6100]

nice vid even with the worst ascendecy u make it work

[@akarenji6628]

Thanks man, this ascendancy could be very good with just a few quality of life changes to Into the Breach. I would love it if this class became the best way to reliably get overleech, because right now picking up Flames of Chayula feels miserable with how fast the late game is

[@bjornt3612]

What if you go comet? More hit dmg = more poison 😊

[@akarenji6628]

Whilst Comet does have a base damage at level 34 of around 6.5k and you can use Spell Echo with it, self-cast comet feels terrible to play while mapping since it always has a +1 second to its cast time no matter what. Before the CoC and CoF nerfs this would have been amazing. You could create a boss one shot build with Comet I suppose, I ran a very quick calculation and it looks like it would do 20 million damage on a 2 poison setup. I might play around with this for bossing only, thanks for the idea Edit - this comes with the caveat that you'd need a second weapon setup that gives cold spell gem levels instead of chaos and the tree would have to be modified to add chaos damage to Comet

[@bjornt3612]

@@akarenji6628 Do you need chaos dmg on comet? :) Trying it out now, and yes its to slow for maps. But freeze a boss and you do some real DMG. Also go whit climate change for 25% added dmg to frozen.

[@akarenji6628]

Yeah you need at least 1 point of chaos or physical damage to apply poison, along with poison chance. You're right the damage is definitely there, I'll buy a +7, 150% spell damage staff and test tonight

[@bjornt3612]

@@akarenji6628 The gloves makes them not need chaos/phy. Have only cold dmg on my comet and poison works fine !

[@akarenji6628]

That is very odd. The text says they only allow poison magnitude to benefit from all damage types, but nothing about inflicting poison. Maybe this is bugged or maybe its intended, interesting. Can you check the tooltip to see if you have any chaos damage? Does the tooltip on your comet have a like about poison damage?

[@MrKingdom3000]

Why don’t you use ambush?

[@akarenji6628]

Combat with bosses always opens with Eye of Winter to apply critical weakness and wither, so the boss is never on full life. Without critical weakness, Hexblast crit chance would be about 20%, so Ambush raising this to 40% but would lose its benefit on one Eye of Winter cast. For mapping I prioritise adding more spell damage and cast speed

[@wojciech9001]

Like you said it's tricky to know for sure, but I think Impending Doom is not doing anything. If I swap it to Decaying Hex enemies do not take any damage in my proximity. There's a cost multiplayer on both of those supports, but the spirit cost of using Blasphemy is not increased.

[@akarenji6628]

Agreed. I tested it much earlier and it seemed to be adding about 5% damage, but that could have just been the normal damage variance of a cast. I just have it on since I have a free slot

[@iuriverginio37]

Nice build, could you make it in mobalytics?

[@akarenji6628]

I'm working on a Maxroll guide, yes. It should be done by the end of the week

[@iuriverginio37]

@@akarenji6628 thxx

[@akarenji6628]

maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/yk19w0qv guide is up