Archmage Poison Crit Hexblast is a Solid Build - 10-15 Million DPS (more with high mana)

This build uses the high base damage of Hexblast, multiplied by Archmage to apply powerful poisons using the unique gloves Plaguefinger, which allow all damage to count towards poison magnitude. It also uses Mind over Matter for a solid defensive health pool with 50% evasion rating for survivability. It's important to run both poisons, crit and Archmage with Hexblast otherwise the late game damage will be 93% lower.

Important note - Acolyte of Chayula is not the best ascendancy for this archetype, which is probably Blood Mage or Gemling Legionnaire. I'm sure GGG will buff this ascendancy, so let's see how that changes. I'll also work on a more detailed Maxroll guide, this is more of a showcase

Strengths

• Solid offence and defence at all stages of the game
• Very good scaling
• Simple playstyle
• No abuse of unintended mechanics
• Relatively cheap to gear due to the unpopularity of chaos builds

Limitations

• Early single target damage is a bit low until poisons come online
• High Spirit demands due to the necessity of running Blasphemy
• Lower clear speed than the top meta builds

Skills

Hexblast - The mapping setup is to run Considered Casting, Inspiration, Chaos Mastery and Arcane Tempo with flexibility for the final slot, which you could use to apply electrocute or lightning penetration

For bossing we switch out arcane tempo for Concentrated Effect and Chaos Mastery for Deadly Poisons. If you have a 6 link, then add comorbidity as the final support. I haven’t yet worked out if I should take +1 poisons on the tree and use chaos mastery instead of Comorbidity, but for now this setup will work well. If you have very high cast speed in the super late game, you could experiment with a 4 poison setup for possibly up to 20 million dps, but maintaining 4 poison uptime would be quite tricky with low cast speed so I’d advise against it in most cases. For late game 3 poison setups, the poisons make up more than 85% of total damage so it is very important to have 3 of them active at all times.

Eye of Winter - This serves many important purposes. I use Extraction for added chaos damage, Unleash and Withering Touch so that it rapidly adds full withered stacks and critical weakness instantaneously. This is combined with unleash for more effect and I’ll also add skill effect duration to maximise wither uptime. Try and cast one of these every 4 or 5 seconds to keep your poison DPS topped out.

Blasphemy - I run temporal chains while mapping and swap to despair for bosses. I’ve added in Impending Doom for some bonus damage, though I’m not sure how well it works but we have some available space. Magnified Effect is mandatory here and you can also add 25% curse effect if you want, but this does raise spirit cost so you may have to disable some 30 spirit auras if your running one.

Archmage - Levels and quality, that’s all

Conductivity - I use it but it's not important. We only really care about poisons; reducing enemy lightning resistance only applies to the hit damage of Hexblast as poison magnitude is not dependent on the damage dealt post resistances. Reducing enemy lightning resistance to zero only adds about 6% more dps, which you would probably lose more of in the time it takes to cast conductivity over another Hexblast. I only use this once at the start of boss fights.

Mana Remnants - Optional, but adds some overleech.

Mana Tempest and Sigil of Power - Both massive damage amplifiers. I use sigil of power regularly for bosses but I hardly ever use Mana Tempest– this is powerful but very dangerous and requires precise timing to not nuke your own mana pool – use at your own risk.

Gear and Stat Priority

General

Jewels - Jewels are extremely important for the late game damage of this build. You'll notice from the tree that there is very little poison chance nodes taken, this is granted from Emeralds which can also have increased magnitude with poisons and increased magnitude of ailments from critical hits, meaning each jewel can give more than 30% magnitude with poison chance and mana leech/ evasion rating/ lightning damage etc. You can also use Sapphires for crit bonus and effect of Withered.

Early game I would spec more into poison chance until you have enough jewels to hit around 100% chance to poison.

Gem Levels and Spell Damage - Both extremely important. Spell damage is the king of damage scaling as it scales all your damage sources equally. Gem levels are the foundation of your damage and will be the primary means by which you achieve late game power

Mana - Very important as this build runs MoM and Archmage. You'll need mana on every rare item.

Crit Chance - Very important for poison damage uptime, but you'll only need to hit 200% increased chance due to applying critical weakness on bosses. You can achieve this through a combination of gear and the passive tree

Chaos/ Lightning Damage - Good to have if available but significantly less impactful than spell damage.

Life - You still need life on an MoM build

Weapons - Wand and Focus or Staff is fine. A staff might be a little more damage late game but you'll be under more modifier pressure as you'll need 7 chaos gem levels, 200% spell damage, crit chance and cast speed with mana. It's simpler to use a wand and focus as you maximise the chances that you'll hit the rolls you need.

Helmet - Energy shield base with mana, rarity and resists. You an also gain spirit from a corrupted implicit.

Chest - Morior Invictus with increased maximum mana % and spirit, preferably 5 socket.

Gloves - Plaguefinger, but you an use gloves with rarity for mapping if you want.

Boots - Hybrid ES/ Evasion, mana, movement speed and resists.

Amulet - Must have around 40 spirit unless you have spirit from other sources (Grand Spectrum, implicits or a 5 socket Morior Invictus). You can get +3 spell levels which you'll need late game Use mana quality catalysts. Anoint Subterfuge Mask for massive evasion rating. You can use THe Everlasting Gaze if you have enough spirit.

Rings - Breach rings with mana and mana regeneration at 50% mana quality.

Belt - Ingenuity if you can afford it, rare belt with mana and resists if not.

Why No Energy Shield? I think it is quite likely that energy shield or Grim Feast is changed quite a bit in the coming weeks as it is simply too strong relative to other defences, particularly in the case of grim feast. To pivot into energy shield I would have to take out some damage nodes from the tree and deselect eldritch battery, which would reduce my damage by quite a bit and force me to run grim feast to make up for the low energy shield recharge rate. It’s not a pivot I want to make until I’ve seen GGG’s stance on where they want to go with energy shield. As a compromise I do intend to run the everlasting gaze if I can find more spirit in the meantime. I will add that an ES variant of this build would be significantly better defensively, so you can opt for an ES variant if you want, but my personal stance is to wait for a few weeks. My current mana value is enough of a defensive layer with 50% evasion, only getting better with more mana, but I do still die now and then almost always due to getting boxed in by mobs – so maybe the solution is to get even more spirit and run Blink – I’ll test this out next time.

Passive Tree

Early game - https://maxroll.gg/poe2/passive-tree/4d1p2801 - this takes more poison nodes to make up for the fact the lack of jewels

Late game - https://maxroll.gg/poe2/passive-tree/2y15j90v - switch to this when you can make use of the jewel sockets and don't need to rely on poison nodes from the tree