In this Path of Exile 2 Witch Starter Guide, I’m going to be showing you how to Build the Witch class. This article is aimed at showing you the basic mechanics of playing Witch, what are some good skills to take early on, what equipment to focus on early on. It’s not an advanced build guide, you don’t have to follow it to the letter of the law, it’s not designed to get you through endgame or anything like that. It’s just basically here to give you some guidance for those new Witch players out there on how to get started and some things you should know about the class.
Path of Exile 2 Witch Starter Build - Playstyle
So the general concept of the Witch is it’s kind of like a Necromancer, it’s kind of a different name for the Necromancer class. It has a big focus on summoning minions and other creatures that can attack for the player on their behalf. You do not have to use minions when playing a Witch, it is not necessary. Although the class does kind of lean in that direction, you may choose to just play with spells and curses or something like that. But I would say that if you’re a new Witch player, it’s a bit more challenging to play that way early on. And I think you should probably kind of lean into the minions at the beginning, at least until you better understand the class.
Path of Exile 2 Witch Starter Guide - Skills and Summons
Now the Witch begins at the top of the passive skill tree with options for spell and minion damage or energy shield and mana regeneration. Damage is a better early pick early on in my opinion. Killing things faster means you stay alive sooner. And this is also not only going to improve your damage, it will also improve your minions' damage simultaneously, which is very, very good. And after that you can branch out and focus more on minions or spell casting depending on what you find yourself doing the most. And there are other things like minion health you can take if you find your minions are dying too easily. But I really don’t worry too much about that early on in the game.
And talking about summons a little bit, the primary means that Witch summons minions is by the spirit stat. The spirit stat governs how many summons that you may have at any given time. Each summons that you have will cost a certain amount of spirit. So you’ll need to optimize what minions you have based on the current amount of spirit available to you. Because each minion does not cost the same amount. So, you know, if you have one short of being able to have another Skeletal Warrior for instance, you might want to put it in something else that’s a little bit cheaper so you can at least have another minion until you gain some more spirit.
The best way to increase your spirit early on is by equipping a scepter in your offhand. Scepters will always come with the spirit stat on it. Sometimes they’ll even come with a plus spirit percentage which gives you even more spirit. So be on the lookout for that on your scepter as well. That will allow you to summon a lot more minions. Additionally, some scepters will come with the summonSkeletal Warrior minion skill on them allowing you to summon moreSkeletal Warriorminions at no spirit cost. So this is a good way to build up your forces early on in the game when you don’t have a lot of spirit. And just note that when you’re in your skill screen, if you have summonSkeletal Warriorminion on your scepter and you also have the skill gem slotted, you’ll see two separate skills here. And you can put skill gems into them separately and they’ll be affected differently by those skill gems. And also the level of those skills will be independent of one another. So one Skeletal Minion might be stronger than the other one depending on what level of skill you have on your scepter or what level of skill your spirit gem is.
However, this is not the only way you’re able to get summons early on in the game. There is a way to gain some temporary summons and this is from the use of theUnearthskill which you should get right away. Whenever you kill an enemy with this skill or hit a corpse with this skill, it can summon a minion that lasts 12 seconds. And you can have many, many of these up at the same time which makes this skill particularly great for new witches as it’s a great way to build up your forces early on without having access to a lot of the summon skills or a lot of spirit. So I highly recommend this skill.
Also, something that’s really great aboutUnearthis that it has a pretty good AoE size which you can extend with support gems. And it also does physical damage. So you want to be on the lookout for things that improve your physical damage if you’re using this skill to kill things more easily with it to get more summons more quickly. You can use some strength support gems to increase its physical damage if you have enough strength.
On the contrary, other early-game witch spells deal chaos damage likeContagionandEssence Drain. So things that boost chaos damage are also good for your build since you’ll be using these a lot. What you should be looking out for is things that boost spell damage like on your Wand. Since this will boost both physical damage spells and chaos damage spells simultaneously. So you’re kind of getting a double dip here so look for that.
Contagionis an amazing skill for witch builds because it deals damage over time and spreads to enemies making it very effective. Additionally, if you hit an enemy withUnearththat died fromContagion, your summoned minions will triggerContagionwhen it attacks. Allowing you to keep spreading this effect all over the screen with very few casts. Because as they attack other enemies they’ll spreadContagionto it and then when they die, if you res them, those will spreadContagion. And you don’t have to actually castContagionall that much when using these summons this way. And you may keep this up almost 100% of the time with very, very few casts. If you move quickly across the screen allowing your minions to spread this before they die.
Essence Drainis a more powerful chaos damage over time that takes longer to cast but deals more damage. And it can be spread ifContagionis used on the target afterward. I find that this is not necessary most of the time early on because minions and Contagion do the heavy lifting in most trash pulls. But it is worth knowing and if you don’t want to use minions then this will probably be the combination that you’ll go for. You’ll throw an Essence Drain on a target and then you’ll use Contagion immediately afterward in order to spread it around to other enemies. And hopefully, they’ll die very quickly from your damage over time.
But one thing I want to note is that ensure you keepEssence Drainup on hard-to-kill enemies likeElites,Uniques, andBosses. Because it actually does quite a bit of damage and will drain their health very quickly. And also some boss fights don’t have minions, right? There’s nothing that you can kill with Unearth or hit corpses with Unearth to keep raising the minions that you get from that skill. So it can be kind of challenging in those boss fights if you don’t have Contagion and Essence Drain. And when you’re in those boss fights you should strive to keep Contagion and Essence Drain on those bosses as often as possible and just keep refreshing them. And it will take away boss health rather quickly so that you don’t have to rely on your minions in those fights.
Path of Exile 2 Witch Starter Guide - Summons
Next, let’s take a look at some of the early minions that you can summon. You haveSkeletal Warriorminion, you haveSkeletal Sniperminion,Skeletal Arsonistminion, and you have theBone Constructminion. Warriors are just meat shields that do melee damage and so are Bone Constructs.
Bone Constructsobviously are being summoned withUnearth. They have a very finite lifespan that’s very quick so they’re not the same asSkeletal Warriorsin that regard. But they operate kind of similarly.Skeletal Snipersshoot from range and they can use theGas Arrowskill in order to drop poison gas all over the screen. Which does poison damage over time so that’s another dot over time. It’s good to have that up in conjunction withContagionorEssence Drainin order to deal more damage over time. AndArsonistscan lob firebombs and they can also detonate low health minions to explode at your command. And you can see what these look like. They usually have a red glow over their heads to give you a cue that you can detonate them. And if you explode these guys inside a gas cloud then you will basically detonate that whole gas cloud and it will do a lot of damage all over the screen. So there is a bit of a synergy there as well.
Path of Exile 2 Witch Starter Guide - Stats
Moving on to statistics. For stats you’re going to want to focus on Intelligence because a lot of the skills that you use will have Intelligence for the requirement. It will also increase your mana which is very needed because you cast a lot of spells very regularly in this build.
It’s also needed for the type of armor that provides Energy Shield. As I mentioned earlier there are a lot of passives near the start of the skill tree where you start for which that increase the effectiveness of Energy Shield. So this is going to synergize with armor that provides Energy Shield. However you will still need some Strength if you use Unearth or any other physical damage spell in order to use some Strength support gems. Since these typically favor physical damage. And you will gain some more health from each point if Strength. A little bit of Dexterity is also not bad to have on a witch early on since there are a few support skill gems in Dexterity that affect damage over time and chaos damage. And since Contagion and Essence Drain both do that, those can be very valuable for those skills.
Equipment wise look for armor withEnergy Shieldif you’re takingEnergy Shield passives. But otherwise use whatever you can that has high armor, evasion, orEnergy Shield. You don’t die often when your minions are out so stacking Energy Shield is not super necessary early on. Particularly if you’re not taking passives in boosting Energy Shield anyway. Scepters are pretty much mandatory if you want to summon minions. But you could use a Focus if you want to improve your spell damage more and don’t want to use minions. These also boost Energy Shield by default. So try to make sure you have some passives to improve Energy Shield if you’re going to be using a Focus.
I find that I don’t use the skill found onwandsall that often becauseUnearthis an AoE and raises bone constructs. But you can use the skill found on your wand if you want. I generally look for the passive benefits on my wand far more than the actual skill itself though. So keep that in mind if you’re using a wand. Another thing to note is that look for a health flask that also replenishes some health to your minions when you use it. This can help keep them alive particularly as you get further into the game and things get more challenging. You have more minions and you’re keeping better tabs on their health and things like that. These are not too hard to find so just keep an eye out for them when you see them.
Final Thoughts
And lastly, with regards to ascendancies, these are basically the subclasses that you’re going to get to choose once you get to Act 2 and you do the trial there. The ones available currently for Witch areBlood MageandInfernalist.Blood Magefocuses more onspellcasting and physical damagewhileInfernalistfocuses onfire damage, ignite, and minions. So the choice of which ascendancy class you’ll take will largely depend on whether you’re going the minion route or if you’re going predominantly spellcasting.
Obviously if you’re going to go spellcasting then Blood Mage is the obvious choice and Infernalist is there if you want to go the minion route. So that wraps up our Witch article. I hope you guys found this one useful. A lot of people tell me that Witch dies very easily early on in the game but I have just not found that to be the case. They slap hard and they’re really fun to play if you understand some of the basic mechanics. But if you guys have other tips about the Witch class that I forgot to mention or other questions, please leave them in the comments and I will try and get to them as soon as I can.
