Today, we’re going to be talking about the Pathfinder ascendancy.  

Intro

Recently, I did a bit of a tier list just breaking down the comparisons between different ascendancies and in that tier this Pathfinder was the highest scoring ascendancy in the Crucible League, putting it ahead of every other ascendancy. I think that’s fair because of just how strong the flasks are right now, how strong defensively Pathfinder can be even with minimal investment and having flasks up reliably all the time is just incredible defensive layers. And those flaws are really strong, with all the flask effects that Pathfinder could obtain relatively easily.

But there’s the other side of the coin as well - the offensive capability of Pathfinder. And right now, we find ourselves in a very poison heavy meta. Poison is incredibly strong right now. We see a lot of different skills being used for poison and the archetype in general is massively over performing right now compared to others.

Ascendancy Rework

The Pathfinder is receiving an ascendancy rework this league. I’d say with the ascendancy being one of the top played ascendancies across all leagues in Crucible. It’s been very successful, especially when you compare it to the Saboteur, which is seemingly in the gutter after the rework and unfortunately made a lot of the Trap and Mine builds far weaker.

Popularity

But the Pathfinder ascendancy landed on its feet after the rework. It was already a decently popular ascendancy in the Sanctum League. You can see pretty much a mid-tier ascendancy when it comes to play rate definitely not unpopular by any means, but again a huge amount of popularity following the rework in this league. And even though we haven’t had much of any kind of meta shift in terms of what’s being played. 

Nature’s Reprisal

It’s just become very popular after this change. So, why is it so popular? This is the reworked tree for the new Pathfinder and one of the biggest changes on the new tree is Nature’s Reprisal.

This notable used to provide benefits that only really helped out with attack based, chaos or poison builds. And the new Nature’s Reprisal is completely generic and they’ll just function with pretty much any chaos or poison based setup and it’ll massively boost your damage. It runs a 25% chance to inflict with it on hit and adds increases with its effect by 50%. With it is a debuff that increases chaos damage taken by six percent per stack, it stacks up to 15 stacks.

Max facts: this node will grant an additional 45% chaos damage taken, which is a massive damage boost. 

The most important thing here, though, is that this is now a generic node that can be used with anything. As I mentioned earlier, poison is massively over performing right now and these coupled together make Pathfinder a very appealing ascendancy, which is why it’s so popular in this league.

PF Most Played Abilities

We can see this in the stats for each league the most played abilities on Pathfinder. These stats are taken from PoE Ninja and you can see that almost all the Pathfinders across all leagues are playing some form of chaos or poison build with a very limited number of exceptions things, like Vaal Lightning Arrow being tested out and stuff like that on a few builds.

But there’s a lot of people playing the poison version of the exploding totems build this league. Lots of Toxic Rain, which remains to be a great league starter. The representation for Despair here is Impending Doom, which is also really strong on poison. There are a lot of Poison Molten Strike builds, using the new Vengeant Cascade. There’s some like Poison Blade Vortex builds and Poison Tornado Shot setups.

You get the point there’s a very large majority of all the Pathfinder builds are chaos or poison based setups. So, what happens when you try to play a non-chaos or non-poison based build on Pathfinder? 

Kobe’s Video & Master Distiller

I actually watched a video from a fellow YouTuber Kobe a few days back and he discussed one of the new notables on Pathfinder.

It’s called Master Distiller. But it’s safe to say this note is quite broken right now even though it’s functioning pretty much exactly as we described on the notable itself. The problem with this node is the use case for it is almost non-existent because whenever you use a skill here, it’s just going to be consuming your flash charges even on a skill that you don’t want to be powered up, like your movement abilities, Shield Charge or Flame Dash, your curse skills or guard skills.

Every time you use an ability, it will consume the Flask Charges to empower that ability. That’s just what you don’t want. And basically, your Flash Charges just get depleted to zero very quickly, and it just makes the node pretty much useless in its current state.

So, Kobe had made a build to use this notable without really noticing exactly how this was going to go. He ended up unspeaking it because it’s completely unusable and this is what his tree looked like in the end.

This was a non-chaos and non-poison build and you can see the only two notables that he was using were the Flask Charge generation node and the Flask Effect mode. And he was using three unique flasks and two magic flasks, so he wasn’t really gaining much value from the magic flask effect notable either.

This is really the problem that I foresee with Pathfinder when the inevitable poison nerfs eventually happen. Maybe that’ll be the next league. But you see, there’s a big problem here where the ascendancy is really shoehorned into that chaos or poison archetype and without it, you have very limited options or, in Kobe’s case, pretty much no options to go for. 

Ascendancy Options

So, if you look at the ascendancy notables, what option we talk about first is the Master Distiller, which is currently unusable. I suspect this one will be revised in the next league or you’d hope so because it’s quite unusable right now, so that may become an option. 

But the Master Surgeon really requires a little of investment by using your POE Currency. Otherwise, you’re just taking this one and you’re basically trading the ability to have your life loss up all the time with about half of the recovery that you get from the flask. So, I think that’s not a great trade-off. Without additional investment, this one isn’t that great.

Also Read: Vaal Ice Shot Deadeye Build Info And Showcase - POE 3.21 Crucible

And the Master Alchemist notable is probably the worst noticeable on the Pathfinder. The removal of Elemental Ailments on flask is decent mainly for freeze, but I’d say that you definitely want to be Ailment immune, especially in the current version of Path of Exile. The chance for flask not to consume charge is nice but pretty much unnecessary on any build that can already sustain flask and that’s just about every pathway in the build.

We already talked about Nature’s Reprisal. Right next to that one is the Master Toxicity notable, which is a poison-only node. This one is really strong, but it literally can’t be used on anything other than poison.

Conclusion

You can start to see the problem here and I think this problem doesn’t really exist in the current league because poison is in such a strong place.

But I think the problem will become very apparent if and when poison gets the inevitable nerf. I think you’ll still see a lot of people playing Pathfinder just because of how comfortable the ascendancy is, but we’ll start to see some complaints about this issue and I think people’s ascendancy trees might start looking like Kobe’s tree as well. What do you think?