The best build of a given class in Path of Exile 2 can be a bit of a slippery subject. After all, what metrics are we using to rate it? Are we trying to find the build that's the tankiest? The one that does the most with the smallest amount of investment? Or the one that can kill the hardest bosses? Let's say all of the above.
The Skeletal Arsonist Infernalist is the most braindead build I've played since Righteous Fire in PoE1, in the best way possible. It's incredibly durable, only involves casting a couple of spells, and has a huge army of minions to do its dirty work. If you're looking for a build that can do a ton with no effort, if you have the reflexes of a potato, or if you just like running around with a bunch of anarchist skeletons throwing firebombs and Doom-inspired death skulls, this is the build for you.
Our main damage skills will be Skeletal Arsonists and Raging Spirits, both of which scale with +minion levels. We'll use Flame Wall to summon the skullybois and add a bunch of flat fire damage to our arsonists' bombs, as well as igniting everything in sight. Personally, I'd level with Flame Wall and Spark until you get to your first chunk of Spirit, but you can start with Skeletal Snipers if you really want 100% stick to minions. The first 15 levels or so are pretty miserable though, so make your choice wisely.
Infernalist is a natural choice for the build, as it improves our minions, gives us a Hellhound to inflict fire exposure, and gives us huge chunks of spirit and energy shield to improve our survivability. We'll use a shield, massive ES, life, and Mind over Matter in this setup to become nigh unkillable, and that's without taking into account monsters attacking our minions instead of us.
Minion Infernalist Witch
Raxx put out a beautiful primer above, but I'll lay out the details below and walk you through everything you need to demolish Path of Exile 2's content with a Witch.
Key skills
Skeletal Arsonist and Raging Spirits will form the offensive part of our arsenal, with a single Skeletal Cleric and Storm Mage providing support. Flame Wall, Pain Offering, and Flammability tie it all together, with Grim Feast doubling our ES, and Shield Charge for mobility.
Skeletal Arsonists
- Scattershot: Supported skills deal 20% less damage and attack speed, fire 2 additional projectiles
- Martial Tempo: Supported skills have 25% more attack speed
- Fire Infusion: Supported attacks gain 25% of damage as extra fire damage, deal 50% less cold and lightning damage
- Heft: Supported skills have 30% more maximum physical damage
Scattershot lets our bomber-men fire more bombs, and anything that results in more bombs is a good thing. Martial Tempo and Fire Infusion offset the loss of attack speed and damage, and strangely Heft seems to parse the best out of the other damage supports. Arsonists convert physical to fire in the damage calculation for their bombs, or so they tell me. You can also use Concentrated Effect but I like the bigger explosions.
Raging Spirits
- Feeding Frenzy: Minions from supported skills deal 30% more damage, take 20% more damage
- Fire Penetration: Supported skills penetrate 30% fire resistance
- Execute: Supported skills deal 40% more damage with hits against enemies that are on low life
- Elemental Focus: Supported skills deal 25% more elemental damage, cannot inflict elemental ailments
Again, we stack up the damage on our skulls. Feeding Frenzy is a no-brainer—they can't be attacked, so the downside doesn't matter. Fire Penetration and Execute help them finish off targets that have been bombed to hell by the skeletons, and Elemental Focus is a huge multiplier. We don't really need the skulls to ignite, as Flame Wall does that job beautifully.
Flame Wall
- Fortress: Supported skills deal 50% less damage with hits, are created in a circle
- Arcane Tempo: Supported skills have 25% more cast speed
- Spell Cascade: Supported skills have 20% less area of effect and deal 30% less damage, but affect areas on either side of the targeted area
- Inspiration: Supported skills have 40% less cost
Flame Wall is a fire spell, so it's a great way to summon our skulls. Fortress and Spell Cascade increase the coverage on the screen, not only summoning more skulls per cast but giving more space for the Arsonists to gain flat fire on their bombs. This is the main ability we use running around, so Arcane Tempo lets us stick and move, and Inspiration offsets the hefty mana cost. If your mana is good feel free to replace this with Mobility, which lets us be even speedier.
Summon Infernal Hound
- Meat Shield: Minions from supported skills deal 35% less damage, have 50% more maximum life
- Fire Exposure: Supported skills inflict fire exposure for 8 seconds on igniting an enemy
- Strip Away: Exposure applied by supported skills has 30% increased effect
- Elemental Army: Minions from supported skills have +30% to all elemental resistances
The Hound is where we spend our first two Ascendancy points, because he's a good boy. He serves as our primary source of exposure, which combined with our Flammability curse removes enemy resistances entirely.
Flammability
- Magnified Effect: Supported Skills have 40% more area of effect
- Heightened Curse: 25% increased effect of supported curses
We'll basically only use this on sticky rares and bosses, but it provides a huge multiplier for our damage. Beware the mana cost—we're using Mind Over Matter and it's pricey, so you'll want to have a quick trigger finger on your mana flask.
Pain Offering
- Expanse: Supported skills have 50% more area of effect, +6 seconds to cooldown
- Persistence: Supported skills have 40% more skill effect duration
Pain Offering consumes one of our minions to give a huge attack speed and damage steroid to our minions. It's particularly effective if we have a Rattling Sceptre, as the skeletal warriors we get for free from that implicit are basically expendable. Even without that though, it's worth casting—the amount of damage it adds is huge.
Skeletal Cleric
- Last Gasp: Minions from supported skills die 4 seconds after their life is reduced to 0
- Ingenuity: Supported skills have 30% increased cooldown recovery rate
The Cleric is a handy quality of life improvement for our army when you get access to it at level 52. They can resurrect fallen Arsonists, making sure our damage uptime is as good as we can get it. Ingenuity lets them cast the ressurect more often, and Last Gasp gives them a four second immune period when they take lethal damage—which often lets them revive an Arsonist or two if the whole squad takes a big hit.
Skeletal Storm Mage
- Conduction: Supported skills have 100% more chance to shock
- Overcharge: 75% increased magnitude of shocks inflicted with supported skills, supported skills have 50% less shock duration
- Stormfire: Shocks from supported skills do not expire on ignited enemies
You won't notice this guy most of the time, but against juicy +4 bosses or pinnacle content, he'll earn his keep. Shock by default gives us a 20% damage increase, but with Overcharge that's even higher. With Stormfire to keep ignited bosses shocked the whole fight, we negate the downside and just get a huge DPS multiplier. Don't sleep on this guy if you're facing tough content.
Grim Feast
The Grim Feast doesn't even need any support gems to be totally overpowered. We want to use all of our Spirit on minions, but doubling our energy shield is too good to pass up. My Infernalist runs around with 11k ES with this going, and her gear is unspectacular.
Shield Charge
- Second Wind: Supported skills have 50% less cooldown recovery rate, have twice as many cooldown uses
We basically only use Shield Charge to traverse open space in the event we have to backtrack, since we don't really wanna plow face first into monsters. Second Wind lets us cover double the distance in those moments, and we don't miss the cdr most of the time.
Passive tree
There's a bunch of different stuff you can do with Infernalist on the passive tree, but in keeping with our objective of being as brainless as possible, we're gonna keep it simple. Minion stuff, energy shield stuff, mana stuff, a little block stuff.
- Raw Destruction, Power of the Dead, Growing Swarm, Lord of Horrors: I like to make a beeline for Lord of Horrors while leveling, mostly just grabbing minion damage on the way. The reduced reservation gives us more bombers, which is more bombs, which we've established is always a good thing
- Deadly Swarm: It may seem like a strange decision to dip down over here for minion damage, but we really want minion damage. The travel nodes help us hit our breakpoints for gem levels anyhow.
- Ingenuity: Depending on your gear, you may need to get this earlier or later to keep up with the intelligence requirements of the build. If you're having trouble keeping up with the requirements on your gems, head over here. Remember, the level of the gem is the most important thing for your damage, so don't skimp.
- Bringer of Order: This cluster has a ton of good stuff for minions, including a whopping 25% damage node.
- Wide Barrier: This cluster is our only node for block chance, but even with just this my Witch sits at 54% block chance with Oaksworn (and my block chance roll is garbage). Very efficient cluster.
- Relentless Fallen: This cluster has lots of options, but Relentless Fallen isn't optional. Movement speed on your minions is incredible. You can take the revive speed early on before you get the Cleric or accuracy rating if your chance to hit isn't 100%.
- Dampening Shield, Patient Barrier, Melding: We take some big ES nodes when we get to endgame, especially after picking up Beidat's Hand. With this and decent gear, your energy shield will be huge.
- Mana Blessing, Insightfulness, Mind Over Matter: For our final defensive layer we'll take Mind Over Matter. We don't stack mana to the heavens like an Archmage, but it adds to our EHP and keeps us nice and cozy.
Ascendancy
Ah, Infernalist. There's a whole lot of neat stuff here, but we're gonna keep it simple. For your first two points grab the Hellhound—he adds a little bit of damage, soaks up some attention, and gives you a hefty 20% reduction in damage from hits. Add to this his ability to inflict exposure and he'll earn his title as Witch's best friend.
Second we'll take Altered Flesh, mostly because we have to to get down to the life reservation skills. If you wanna take this build to even higher heights, there are versions that go Chaos Inoculation to make the physical as chaos a straight up reduction, and we can stack % max fire resistance jewels for giga elemental survivability.
For your third time through the trials take Beidat's Will, and on the fourth take Beidat's Hand. Will gives us a huge chunk more Spirit, which combined with Lord of Horrors lets us really get a nice army going. Hand stacks up that energy shield and makes us super tanky.
Gear and stat priorities
For your sceptre, try to get a Rattling Sceptre if you can for free Skeletal Warriors, but the most important thing is + to minion levels (max is five) and a big % Spirit roll. The Allies get damage and attack speed rolls are also very good, but this can get spendy quickly.
Oaksworn is your best choice for a shield. It's very very cheap, and gives us a nice chunk of Spirit and chaos resistance. It's even cheap enough that you can buy a bunch of them with max block chance and corrupt them if you really want to—you can hit mana gained on block, % maximum block chance, and some other neat stuff.
On your body armour, you want a fat chunk of base energy shield so all the multiplication you get on the tree actually does something. You'll also want as much Spirit as you can possibly manage, and a big life roll to help you scale your Beidat's nodes. Unfortunately those are all prefixes, so even if you're made of money something's got to give.
You'll want +2 to minion skills and 30% movement speed on your boots, but apart from that, your other main slots are pretty easy to fulfill. Get life rolls, mana rolls, resistances, preferably on energy shield bases.
Same goes for jewelry, simple simple. Get life and mana, +3 minion skills on your amulet, and cap your resistances. You can anoint Flashy Deflection on your amulet like Raxx did, but I was feeling tanky enough so I grabbed Two-Pronged Attack for more DPS.
Ingenuity adds a tremendous amount of power to the build if you really want, and rarity on rings will help you get more bang for your buck. If you don't wanna shell out for that, just grab life, mana, and resistances.
