Honor's Chaotic Blood Witch Build Guide & Concept

Hello, my name is Honor (ignore reddit name). I am an experienced POE build creator and I wanted to post about my take on an interesting mechanic with Path of Exile 2, and some ideas to build around it, as well as what I'm currently doing. I now present to you... The Chaotic Blood Witch!

Disclaimer: I have not fully tested this build and my gear is terrible, but after swapping to the skills and playing with it a bit, I feel comfortable enough to throw a guide on there to see if anyone might have any ideas as to how we can improve it.

First of all, I want to explain some core mechanics that make this build possible:

• Blasphemy now applies curses in an area around the caster every 0.6s (1.64 casts per second). This means you can use it as a primary means of applying curses to explode for Hexblast, assuming you don't go over 1.64 casts per second. This is our first major breakpoint.
• Hexblast only explodes/removes 1 curse per use, in the order of the first curse applied. This can double our first breakpoint for cast speed and enables us to scale cast speed much higher. This also means the order of curses in Blasphemy matter (you want Despair on as long as possible).
• Running Eldrich Battery, you can gain a very large mana pool for Impending Doom. This skill becomes a powerhouse with the above two synergies because its base damage is 15% of your mana and it can crit. Every time you expire a curse, this will trigger, which is all this build does.
• Not a core mechanic, but I thought I'd mention it: Spell Cascade seems to suck. I don't know if it's just me/it needs more testing and cast speed, but yeah, Arcane Tempo just seems way better.

Now, as to why we go Blood Witch:

• Critical Strike chance is very difficult to scale with spells, however Sunder the Flesh sets your base spell critical strike chance to 15%.
• Critical Strike multiplier is now obtained via your largest defensive layer: Life. With Gore Spike, you gain 1% increased Critical Damage bonus per 40 life. This is actually not the best node, but we need Sunder the Flesh, so it's a nice bonus on the way.
• Vitality Siphon allows us to offset the massive cost of Hexblast with Leech. Ideally, I wanted to also go Blood Magic, but as I'll explain later, this is pretty difficult.

And finally, here is the summary of the build: you are a Blood Witch utilizing the new version of Hexblast, Blasphemy to deal large amounts of burst damage by exploding curses. You're a mid-range caster, meaning you'll often be near melee range due to Blasphemy, but due to your double health, that doesn't matter as much. Your clear is fantastic, but your bossing will be sub-par until crit is online

Here is the tree (so far); we will be anointing Dark Entries via Delirium: https://maxroll.gg/poe2/passive-tree/ugcc705b

• Your first goal should be to pick up all the chaos nodes and curse effectiveness nodes possible. Here is a tree for leveling prior to being able to run two curses.
• Next, you'll transition into two curses around level 50~60ish. This means you'll grab Whispers of Doom and look for much higher Cast Speed on your Wand for Hexblast.
• Finally, only after you grab Sunder the Flesh, you'll switch to filling out those critical strike nodes on the final tree and regretting some of the temporary mana/cast speed nodes.

Gear setup (TL;DR, go ES because EB and ID scaling):

Even though we're running Life, we'll actually be using full Energy Shield gear to benefit the explosion from Impending Doom by converting all of that Energy Shield into Mana. Down the line, I think it might be useful to take nodes like Lucidity or any %damage taken as from mana, which is why we aren't running pure Blood Magic. The only thing that's fairly specific is running Malice on your Scepter as it will increase your DPS by a large margin once you transition to critical strike chance.

Gem Setup:

This is another thing that's in testing still. Here's my setup, let me know what you think.

• I use Essence Drain and Contagion to add a bit more pack clear. Contagion alone, then Hexblast is enough to clear the vast majority and ED just becomes a side-character. With it's new mechanic of stacking damage per spread and a refresh of all your debuffs, Contagion is just awesome. You just want Hinder, Expanse, Magnification, and Chaotic Freeze in it. It will debuff the entire pack.

• Skeletal Warriors only need to be the base two-socket with Meat Shield and Last Gasp. They are our source for Minion Pact's 40% more damage support. You really only need 1 or 2, ideally 2 skeletons, up at a time.

• Hexblast is obviously our main skill. Support it with all the damage you can. This means Chaos Mastery, Controlled Destruction (prior to going crit), Minion Pact, Extraction (if you can afford the %Life hit), Concentrated Effect, Considered Casting, etc.

• Blasphemy is interesting. You want Despair AFTER Temporal Chains in the gem order (or Enfeeble, your preference of 2nd curse). It casts on it's own interval, meaning it will happen every 0.6s whether you've destroyed a curse or not. This means your curse application may look a bit weird sometimes.

• Dark Effigy is used to apply stacks of Wither to harder targets. Just summon it away from the enemy so it doesn't die.

• Withering Presence is used for the same. It's a great way to keep those stacks up and you'll often be at ~50% Wither, which is just 50% more damage. It's also a great place to support our persistent buff skills like Vitality. I also use Persistence with it to increase the time on Wither stacks applied by it.

All and all, this is a nice single-minded build that focuses on chaos burst damage and ES>Mana conversion for damage. I am extremely excited to hear everyone's thoughts on this and maybe your own takes. Thank you for coming to my TED talk (: