Path of Exile: Tips for Capturing Beasts

Since the early access release of Path of Exile 2, players have been very surprised by the performance of Mercenary class. This character, which seems to be out of tune with the game style, has become the first choice for many players who love strategic battles with its super damage output and super practicality.

In the latest Dawn of the Hunt league, the developer added a new Ascendancy class called Tactician, which is a class with vigorous support, survivability and damage capabilities. And some of the passive skills and effect gains it provides have significantly improved the practicality of Mercenary.

For Tactician, you can make it a purely auxiliary support class, or you can make it a part-time auxiliary class. If you have just unlocked this Ascendancy class, but don’t know how to use it correctly, this guide will provide you with the most commonly used and most powerful build tips for Tactician.

It should be noted that the builds provided here are all available for single-player exploration, which will focus more on self-leveling, and we will continue to pay attention to those builds that can benefit your allies in cooperation.

Tactician Build Overview

Before using Tactician, a class with multiple builds, you need to select Mercenary as your standard class before the exploration begins, and be familiar with some subsequent commonly used active skills, such as Fragmentation Rounds, High Velocity Rounds, Explosive Grenade and Gas Grenade.

Because being familiar with the rotation between these skills will make your early game and the campaign process in Cruel Mode very smooth. When you reach the endgame, you can modify your build according to your needs, because at this time you already have a lot of Uncut Spirit Gems to unlock some new spells, thereby enhancing the damageability of the entire build.

But it is worth mentioning that although the damage ability of Mercenary (or Tactician) is strong, its survivability is also very weak. In a boss encounter, the most powerful build of this character will be in serious danger of death after three consecutive attacks from the enemy.

Therefore, many players who use Tactician build often stun the enemy in combat, which will open up a window for them to deal super high damage and successfully complete all challenges. So here are some strategies and tips for using Tactician build during your exploration, including the leveling stage and the endgame stage.

Leveling Stage

Act 1

Since the skills you have in Act 1 are only some basic skills that can help you get through the early game, such as Fragmentation Rounds, which can effectively defend you from monsters. When you unlock Tier 2 and above Uncut Skills Gems, you can cut them into Velocity Rounds and Flash Grenade, two very effective damage skill gems, to have higher clearing and combat capabilities.

Although you don’t have a lot of support gems in Act 1, you still need to place Scattershot and Double Barrel in the support slot of High Velocity Rounds, and Overpower and Second Wind behind Flash Grenade.

In addition, your defensive gear is also very important in the early stages of the game, so you need to try to find some armor or helmets with high dodge ratings and elemental resistance, and then buy POE 2 Currency to upgrade their rarity or re-roll their affixes.

When you level up a little, you can unlock Galvanic Shards and add Lightning Infusion and Martial Tempo to it to expand the effectiveness of this powerful elemental damage skill. Finally, after you successfully defeat King of the Mists boss, you can cut the first Uncut Spirit Gem you get into Herald of Thunder to increase the lightning damage you can apply.

Act 2

In Act 2, you will need to upgrade your existing skills as much as possible and unlock some new skills. The first new skill you need to unlock is Gas Grenade, and place Scattershot and Magnified Effect support gems on it.

In the case of a group of enemies attacking you, you can use Explosive Grenade and equip it with Second Wind and Inspiration support gems. The other most needed new skill in this act is Explosive Shot, because it will work perfectly with Explosive Grenade skill, further increasing the explosion damage you inflict on the enemy, especially if you choose Martial Tempo as its support gem.

At this time, the support gem of Galvanic Shards should be changed from Martial Tempo to Conduction. With this powerful build, the exploration process of this act will be very smooth until you enter Trial of Sekhemas, which can provide you with a tough challenge with a strong Tactician Ascendancy class.

Act 3 And Above

In this more difficult challenge, focus on upgrading your skills as much as possible and unlock Oil Grenade and Ripwire Ballista, both of which make some high-health enemies more vulnerable to high projectile damage and provide you with some defensive capabilities.

For the support gems of these two skill gems, Encumbrance increases the enemy movement speed caused by Oil Grenade by 15%, while Lockdown and Persistence make the damage inflicted by Ripwire Ballista stronger and more persistent.

If you miss the opportunity to gain Tactician Ascendancy in Trial of Sekhemas, you can also unlock it by completing Trial of Chaos in this act. However, if you have already unlocked Ascendancy class, you can also gain more Ascendancy points by completing this trial.

Finally, once you defeat Ignagduk, Bog Witch, you can use Uncut Spirit Gem it rewards you with unlocking Ghost Dance, which can be used with the support gem Clarity, which increases mana regeneration in this build by 30%.

In Cruel Mode, your overall build doesn’t actually need to be changed much, because most of the skill damage capabilities have been maximized. You can unlock Wind Dancer to enhance your defense capabilities according to your play style.

In addition, at this stage, the support gem slots of Gas Grenades and Galvanic Shards are no longer enough. You need to use two POE 2 Lesser Jeweler’s Orbs to increase this slot and place Primal Armament and Pierce in it.

Endgame Stage

When you complete all the main campaigns provided by POE 2, you enter the more challenging endgame content. Although your overall build is complete at this stage, you still need to modify it for subsequent game content.

For some key passive skills and active skill gems, you don’t need to modify them because their maximum effectiveness has been demonstrated. But the weapons and gear you use may need a major change.

In the early game exploration, your farming effectiveness and clearing ability may not be so important, so most of them are weapons that can inflict a lot of physical damage. In the endgame, you not only need to pay attention to the physical damage you cast, but also need to add some lightning damage to make you more profitable in some group enemy encounters.

Although your defensive gear such as armor and helmets are of a higher level before, and can allow you to complete some exploration tasks safely, the challenges of the enemies and monsters you face in the endgame are more difficult, so you also need amulets that can increase your maximum health and mana to escort you.

Overall Tips

In fact, the operation and gameplay of Tactician build are very simple. You only need to use the correct skill rotation (from Oil Grenade to Explosive Shot to Gas Grenades) to have super high damage output. But it has to be admitted that the cooldown time of these skills is very long. After you use a set of rotations, all skills may enter the cooldown time.

But this does not mean that you can only dodge to ensure your safety during this time. You can also throw Explosive Grenades at the enemy to cause more explosive damage until all skills are restored. Or, during the skill rotation, throw Ripwire Ballista at the enemy, which will stop the enemy from moving forward under the damage of the powerful crossbow, so that it can withstand more damage.

Exiles, the arrival of Dawn Of The Hunt League has brought us some new classes and Ascendancies, which also gives us more options for endgame builds. And here, an excellent league starter build we want to recommend is the new Lich Ascendancy based on Witch class, which is Essence Drain Contagion Lich.

Essence Drain Contagion Lich Overview

Lich is a very interesting Ascendancy class. It not only brings a new gameplay, but also is extremely powerful, causing a lot of damage in both the early and late game.

And Lich has perfect synergy with Essence Drain, because it has powerful defense nodes like Soulless Form and Eternal Life. And Lich class is also one of the few Ascendancy skills that Essence Drain will have a strong damage multiplier when using Eldritch Empowerment.

Essence Drain deals damage on top of regular hits, as well as secondary damage over time debuff that lasts for a set amount of time. When combined with Contagion skill, the damage over time spreads between groups of monsters, turning our primary damage into a large-scale clearing skill, and you can see groups of monsters on the screen exploding in an instant!

So, as the name suggests, this build revolves around two core mechanics, Essence Drain and Contagion. Now, let’s break down its mechanics.

Core Skills

As we said before, the core damage skills of this build are Essence Drain and Contagion, a combination that has actually been widely used since the early days of Path of Exile 1.

First, let’s understand the mechanics of Contagion, which is to apply a debuff to a single enemy and deal chaos damage over time. When an enemy affected by Contagion dies, it spreads all debuffs, including Contagion, to nearby enemies, and increases damage by +100% per jump, stacking up to 300%. This is really crazy!

For Essence Drain, after you fire a projectile, it can apply a powerful Chaos Damage over Time debuff to enemies. Currently, in POE 2, Essence Drain is the only skill besides Contagion that can apply a high Chaos Damage over Time debuff. So when an enemy affected by Contagion is killed by Essence Drain, its powerful Chaos Damage over Time will also spread to nearby enemies along with Contagion debuff.

Ascendancy Nodes

In Path of Exile 2, this playstyle was initially adopted by a few Acolyte of Chayula Ascendancy players, making this class, which was not doing well in the early Early Access period, competitive.

However, after the release of Dawn Of The Hunt, Eternal Life mechanic of Lich class clearly proved that it was a better choice for this playstyle. Eternal Life Ascendancy node of Lich stipulates that life cannot be modified while having Energy Shield. At first glance, this seems to have two benefits, one is that as long as you have Energy Shield, you can prevent being killed instantly, and the other is that you are immune to chaos damage when Energy Shield is activated.

But the key is that when used in conjunction with Soulless Form passive skill, 10% of the damage will penetrate the energy shield. And after having Eternal Life, these penetration damage cannot modify life, which actually means that the penetration rate is converted into damage reduction.

Equipment

The core equipment of this build includes Atziri’s Disdain Gold Circlet, which makes 10% of the damage penetrate energy shield, and it also increases energy shield based on maximum life. In addition to this, you can also get Heavy Buffer, which increases maximum energy shield by 40% and makes 5% of the damage penetrate energy shield.

The combination of Soulless Form, Atziri’s Disdain and Heavy Buffer can get a total of 25% of the damage bypassing energy shield, which is equivalent to 25% flat damage reduction, which is extremely powerful.

Considering that the key equipment of this build is Atziri’s Disdain, we adjust its modifier priority to: Chaos Skill Gem Level > Chaos Damage > Spell Damage.

Currently, the price of Atziri’s Disdain on the market is very affordable, usually 1 Exalted Orb can be obtained, but the price of wands that provide chaos damage is relatively high, so if you want to get a continuous chaos damage debuff, then you may have to buy POE 2 Currency to get them.

In addition, thanks to the unique mechanism of Lich’s Eternal Life, defensive equipment can use life and energy shield at the same time, avoiding dependence on a single attribute, which greatly reduces the difficulty of obtaining defensive equipment. Therefore, except for expensive weapons, other equipment is still affordable.

Pros And Cons

In the character panel statistics, we can see that the damage per second (DPS) of Essence Drain Contagion Lich is 52,000, and the effective health value is 28,000 under normal circumstances.

As a Contagion Lich build with Eternal Life, you can apply various curse debuffs, chaos resistance, or take advantage of low life bonuses to get additional damage bonuses. Therefore, you can use it to clear all non-chaos immune content.

For the advantages of this build, we will consider that Contagion’s spread mechanism makes it extremely fast to clear the field, and the continuous damage gameplay allows you to clear all enemies in just a few seconds!

Of course, the disadvantages are also obvious. First, Essence Drain and Contagion are both single-target skills, so you can only trigger the spread effect when attacking the same enemy, and missing this combo will make you vulnerable. Secondly, running this build requires at least 2 active skills, which greatly increases the complexity of the buttons.

According to the current statistics for the new league, Lich has a usage rate of 13% in the ladder class, ranking second. Atziri’s Disdain maintains a usage rate of about 6% in the entire ladder ranking, making it the seventh most used unique item. The combination of Essence Drain and Contagion currently has a usage rate of about 7%, ranking 15th among all active skills.

There is no doubt that the build is relatively popular, probably because Lich is currently too powerful, but you have to consider that if Lich is nerfed, the effectiveness of this build may be severely affected.

When you enter the endgame content provided by the very popular Path of Exile 2 Early Access, the first thing you need to focus on is how to earn corresponding skill points for your Atlas passive tree faster and easier.

Normally, you can get some Atlas passive skill points by defeating the final boss on the map or completing tasks, but in the latest Dawn of the Hunt League, you can also get additional skill points by finding and cleaning Corrupted Nexus.

The addition of this new endgame mechanism has gradually improved the shortcomings of the lack of depth in the endgame content of POE 2 that has been criticized by players before, and has increased the curiosity of many players who love challenges to explore it.

With the exception of the first Corrupted Nexus in the game, the locations of the Corrupted Nexus maps are completely random, So in this guide, we’ll show you a few ways to find and clean up Corrupted Nexus this difficult content and quickly earn Atlas passive skill points.

Corrupted Nexus Overview

In short, Corrupted Nexus is a special map in Atlas that contains some corrupted monsters and a Beyond boss that you need to defeat. This map only appears in zones and biomes affected by combined corruption, so you can identify it by the neon red corruption icon.

To enter Corrupted Nexus, you need to prepare a Waystone with at least 4 modifiers to unlock it. It is worth mentioning that the tier and modifier number of Waystones you have after entering the endgame is not high, so you really need to buy POE 2 Currency to increase and effectively roll the modifiers you have.

However, if you fail to complete this Corrupted Nexus, it will disappear, so make sure the modifiers of Waystones will not interfere with your exploration. In addition, the monsters and bosses in Corrupted Nexus are more challenging than those in the same level maps, so you also need to upgrade and reinforce your own build.

Location Of Corrupted Nexus

Although there is a very obvious red icon on Corrupted Nexus map, you cannot immediately see the location of this special map under the cover of Fog of War. Usually, you may need to unlock all the explorable maps on 2-3 screens to encounter a zone containing a Corrupted Nexus, which is very unfavorable for you who want to effectively farm Atlas passive skill points in it.

But fortunately, there are now two tricks to help you quickly determine the location of Corrupted Nexus and the direction you are heading on Atlas. First, you need to find a Corrupted Nexus, a black stone spire that is clearly corrupted. If you can’t find the exact location of the stone spire, you can keep shrinking the endgame map until it is the smallest, and then identify its location through a black miasma.

In addition, you can also expand the entire POE 2 endgame map to the maximum and check whether each tower is surrounded by red corruption, because in general, there is a prime chance of a Contaminated Nexus being present near a Contaminated Tower. Through these two methods, you can clearly determine the approximate location of this profitable map and start exploring it.

How To Complete Corrupted Nexus?

Once you have found the exact location of Corrupted Nexus, you can start to plan to farm Atlas passive skill points in it. In this process, you can get 2 Atlas skill points every time you unlock and complete a run with the required Waystone.

So you need to repeat the cycle 15 times to get the 30 Atlas skill points that Corrupted Nexus can provide you. The remaining 10 are hidden in other special maps and battles, such as you and Xesht, Kosis or Omniphobia, etc. However, keep in mind that you can’t use a Tier 15 Waystone to unlock Corrupted Nexus and gain 30 Atlas skill points all at once.

The sign of completing a Corrupted Nexus map is that you have cleared the map of Beyond Bosses. There are currently only 3 Beyond Bosses on this map - The Skittermind, The Eater of Flesh, and The Pale Angel. They all have over 10,000 health points, but are not very resistant to elemental damage.

So when fighting them, be sure to prioritize casting elemental attacks that can cause great damage to them, and upgrade your defensive gear in your build as soon as possible to ensure your own safety during longer encounters. After you defeat them, you have completed the task of cleansing Corrupted Nexus.

After cleaning, nearby corrupted maps will be transformed into cleansed maps, which contain multiple monsters and bosses to challenge. On top of that, these maps will also reward you with Fracturing Orbs, which is one of the most valuable currencies in the game.

Above is an overview of the new endgame mechanics called Corrupted Nexus in Path of Exile 2 Dawn of the Hunt League, and a look at how you can explore. Hopefully, with the help of this guide, you can find this special map more quickly and farm Atlas skill points more easily to make your build more powerful. I wish you a happy game.

As you explore in Path of Exile 2 Early Access, you will definitely have to deal with the topic of mapping correctly, whether you are in the leveling stage or the endgame stage, and mapping will require numerous Waystones of different levels.

Once your inventory is low, your exploration may be forced to slow down or stop, especially in high-level challenges. So players have been looking for some ways to store Waystones stably in POE 2.

It is worth celebrating that the process of obtaining Waystones in the endgame stage of Path of Exile 2 Dawn of the Hunt League has been greatly simplified and the drop rate is higher, making it easier to keep Waystones.

This means that the previous methods of obtaining Waystones in the game are no longer used, so this guide will introduce you to some effective strategies and steps to keep the number of Waystones within a stable range.

1. Prioritize Boss Maps

In the current POE 2 game content, the most effective way to maintain Waystones is to use some of the high-value Waystones on some more profitable endgame map nodes, such as Boss Maps, which will give you a 100% chance of picking up Waystones of a higher tier than Waystones used to enter the map.

For example, if you enter a Boss map node with a Tier 10 Waystone, after you defeat the boss in it, it will drop at least one Tier 11 Waystone. Although you may need to buy POE 2 Currency to upgrade the offensive and defensive capabilities of the build, this method is the best way to quickly increase your Waystones by one Tier because it has no drop rate.

In addition, even if you enter a map node without a final boss but with a final rare monster, you will at least get a Waystone of the same Tier as you unlocked the map. In short, as long as you complete any Boss Map, you will get at least one Waystone of the same Tier or higher.

You may also get some Waystones from chests or monsters while exploring, but be aware that this strategy does not work for Tier 16 and above Waystones.

2. Use Atlas Skill Nodes that Increase Waystone Drop Rates

Once you complete the quests given to you by Doryani in POE 2 endgame, you will unlock some nodes on Atlas skill tree, some of which will provide you with this buff for increasing the drop rate of Waystones. For example:

• Constant Crossroads: Increases the number of Waystones by 20%.
• Fortunate Path: Increases the rarity of Waystones by 100%.
• The High Road: Increases the chance of getting higher Tier Waystones by 20%.

Once you complete Tier 4 maps, you will be able to unlock all three nodes, and you will have a very efficient experience farming Waystones, as long as you can use them wisely. In addition, if you have previously unlocked other Atlas passive skill points, you can respec them using POE 2 Gold.

3. Perfect Your Endgame Build As Early As Possible

In the endgame exploration, one of the most common confusions among players is why Waystones are consumed so quickly? One of the key reasons is that the build you use is not the most perfect endgame build, which will cause you to die frequently in battles with bosses, rare monsters, or even ordinary monsters.

Once you experience death, all Waystones and POE 2 Currency you just invested in this map will be burned. So the advice here is to go to the player community or social platform as soon as possible to check the best endgame build that suits you best, so as to reduce the number of times you die in battle.

Similarly, some of the combat methods you used in the leveling stage may not be applicable in the endgame, so you also need to change your combat strategy and game style to expand your possibility of earning more and higher-tier Waystones in these maps.

4. Investing Currency In Waystones

Although in the current POE 2, many players have always been impressed by the currency such as Regal Orb and Exalted Orb, which can only be used for trading or crafting, but if you use it to upgrade Waystones, you may be surprised.

You can think of Waystones as a kind of craftable item in the game. The more currency you invest in it, the more rewards you get. This is a very beautiful, virtuous circle, but the premise is that you don’t die in the exploration.

For Tier 1-5 Waystones, you can invest in Orbs of Augmentation and Orbs of Transmutation, which allows you to upgrade your regular items into magical items. For tier 6-10 Waystones, you can invest in Regal Orbs, which turn them into rare items. Regal Orbs, POE 2 Exalted Orbs, Vaal Orbs, and Delirium Instills allow for maximum enhancement of tier 11-16 Waystones.

As you level up your Waystones, you may also roll over the modifiers on them. There are two main types of modifiers you should be looking at: modifiers that increase the drop rate of Waystones (by at least 200%) and modifiers that increase the rarity of items in the exploration area, both of which will make your mapping process very profitable.

In addition, modifiers that increase the number or rarity of monsters in the exploration area are also good results to roll, but this means that you will face a higher difficulty when you enter the map unlocked with this Waystone, so please do it according to your ability.

The above are some methods and strategies you can use to keep your Waystones in a stable range in POE 2 Dawn of the Hunt League. Hopefully, you can use this guide to farm Waystones more effectively and explore more interesting endgame stages with them. Have fun playing!