League starter builds in Path of Exile are an excellent option for players who want to progress to endgame content without having to spend too much currency. These builds are designed to be accessible to everyone and don’t require any specific items that are difficult to obtain or expensive at the start of a new league.
When selecting a league starter build, there are a few factors to consider. First of all, you need to decide which type of playstyle you prefer, such as melee or ranged. There are numerous builds available, and most of them have league starter variations, so it’s not a complicated process. The ultimate goal of a league starter build is to make your journey to the end game as simple and straightforward as possible.
PoE Righteous Fire Build
Ever since its introduction in Patch 0.9.9, Righteous Fire has remained a cornerstone of Path of Exile. The thrill of mowing down hordes of monsters while breezing through maps is a power fantasy that has captivated players and kept them coming back to this skill gem. The simplicity and effectiveness of Righteous Fire has allowed players to optimize and adapt the build to perform well in every expansion and league, culminating in its continued success in Path of Exile: Crucible.
Righteous Fire builds have always encouraged players to push the limits and find creative ways to overcome the many challenges that Path of Exile presents. From exploiting Snapshotting to utilizing various Ascendancies to enhance damage and life regeneration, players have consistently found new ways to fine-tune this powerful build. And this latest iteration of the build is no different, offering players yet another opportunity to explore the many quirks and intricacies of Righteous Fire.
PoE Toxic Rain Build
The popularity of Toxic Rain as a build cannot be denied, both for league-starting and end-game environments. With its versatility, there are multiple ways to build around it, but this guide will focus on scaling the Damage over Time aspect, commonly referred to as “pods.” Doing so will result in an impressive Area of Effect and clear speed while maintaining excellent boss damage capable of easily taking down every map boss and earlier bosses.
However, don’t be fooled by the initial statement as many builds with similar claims tend to lack proper defensive mechanics, leaving the character with low Health pools. But fear not, this Trickster build invests significantly in defenses, making it incredibly durable. In addition, with the exceptional recovery that Pathfinder provides, there are few things that can effectively harm or kill the character. So, while the build can clear quickly and efficiently, it still maintains high durability.
PoE Venom Gyre Build
The Venom Gyre build offers a thrilling and unique gameplay experience that sets it apart from other builds. With its boomerang-style projectile attacks, which return to the player and can be launched again using Whirling Blades, this build offers both speed and precision in combat. The projectiles launched by this attack have a different pattern and convert 60% of all physical damage to chaos, making it an excellent choice for dealing with various types of enemies.
To maximize its potential, the build emphasizes stacking Strength, which provides a significant increase in melee physical damage through The Iron Fortress. Additionally, skills like Anomalus Withering Step, Blood Rage, Ancestral Protector, and Battlemage’s Cry can help increase the already existing damage output.
While the build has a focus on offense, it also prioritizes defense. With a decent life pool, fortifying a lot of armor, evasion rating, block chance, and 100% spell suppression chance, players can be assured of their safety in battle. The Purity of Elements further enhances this build’s defense by making the character immune to elemental ailments.
During gameplay, players can use Whirling Blades to move around while attacking with Venom Gyre when mapping. For boss fights, it is recommended to use Whirling Blades to dash forward and backward, allowing players to utilize their stored projectiles to deal massive damage up close. Skills like Sniper’s Mark, Fork, and Chain can also increase the number of projectiles, making single-target fights even more effective.
PoE Boneshatter Build
Boneshatter offers a unique gameplay experience as a Melee Strike that is restricted to Axes, Staves, Maces, and Sceptres. It boasts incredibly high base damage, but the caveat is that the attacker also takes damage in the process. This status effect, called Trauma, lasts for 6 seconds and affects both parties at both ends of the weapon. However, the character you play is incredibly tanky and can mitigate a lot of Physical Damage, making it possible to increase this bonus to its limit.
The Juggernaut ascendancy is particularly useful for enhancing Physical Damage mitigation and Endurance Charge perks, allowing the character to reach 7 to 10k of Maximum Life, have an additional reduction in Physical, Elemental, and general Damage, and a massive amount of Resistances. With such defenses, Boneshatter’s damage will have little to no effect on you. You can even reserve your Life to reap the benefits of Bloodthirst, but that requires a lot of Maximum Life.
While stacking basic Attributes can be expensive for min-maxing builds, the Boneshatter build is particularly cost-effective. Many of the best-in-slot items for this build are Uniques, which lowers the overall cost of the build significantly. Your Gloves, Boots, Amulet, Body Armour, and Weapon can all be Unique Items that are cheap and common.
Strength is particularly useful for this build, not only for its inherent stats like Maximum Life and Melee Physical Damage but also for the benefits granted by the weapon Pillar of the Caged God. It increases your Physical Weapon Damage by 16% per 10 Strength, meaning 1600% at 1k Str, which is twice the amount of Fecebreaker at its highest roll. The Iron Fortress further boosts the inherent Strength bonus for Melee Physical Damage by one-third and grants you an additional, substantial layer of defense. The Undeniable Notable from your Ascendancy Tree will cover the need for Accuracy Rating. This build is popular among players who value survivability.
PoE Raging Spirits Build
Looking for a league starter build that’s easy to gear and can be used from level 8? Look no further than this unique poison-based minion build. It’s not your typical summoner build, offering a refreshing playstyle that can help you avoid the monotony of repeating the same thing every league. And when it comes to taking on bosses, the build is in a league of its own – the damage output is simply insane.
But, as with any build, there are some drawbacks to consider. One of them is the slight ramp-up time, as you’ll need to re-summon your Raging Spirits consistently to keep the damage output going. Additionally, since your minions do most of the work, there aren’t many defensive layers available. And in low-budget versions of the build, damage halts can occur if your army is wiped out by heavy AoE damage.
The play style is centered around summoning your Raging Spirits, which will fly toward the enemies and take them down with poison damage. It’s important to pick up increased duration nodes from the tree and ascendancy nodes early on to ensure a smooth experience. While SRS minions can’t be directly targeted by enemies, they can still take damage from AoE effects and projectiles. So be careful in higher-tier maps and adjust your positioning accordingly.
PoE Explosive Arrow Build
The core idea behind this build is deceptively simple: stack as many explosive arrows as possible on a target to take advantage of the more damage multiplier on the gem. This is best achieved by playing a Totem build, as all the totems apply fuses to your target. To balance the overwhelming damage output, this build heavily focuses on stacking defenses. That’s why I’m covering the most durable version of this build. For different versions, such as the Hierophant or Elementalist, there are excellent guides available from the YouTubers mentioned earlier.
While this build is an absolute powerhouse in the endgame and can easily handle most mapping, it does have a small drawback. The leveling process can be annoying, especially on a Champion. You will need to level as a melee build until level 28, which may feel tedious. But once you transition to EA, stacking enough attack speed will make you unstoppable. Getting an early Quill Rain will help make the leveling process smoother.
As you progress through the endgame, your focus should be on spamming out ballista totems as you move through the map. During boss fights, drop totems and use Frenzy to generate charges and curse them. One important thing to keep in mind is to find a single roll of Lightning or Cold damage to attacks on your gear or jewels to activate Elemental Equilibrium. Avoid having any “Fire Damage to Attacks” sources, or you risk undermining your build.
PoE Cyclone Build
Cyclone is a fan-favorite skill gem in Path of Exile for its sheer entertainment value when obliterating enemies. However, players take a unique approach to scaling their damage by steering away from the hard-to-obtain rare weapons that Cyclone often relied on. Instead, it provides a clear and concise path for upgrading your character to achieve the build’s fullest potential.
This iteration of Cyclone employs the Slayer Ascendancy for its impressive benefits, including high critical strike chance through Overwhelm and overleech, an underrated yet incredibly strong defensive mechanic. The build also invests in extra Life Recovery Rate, Maximum Leech Rate, and enough Leech to cap, allowing you to almost instantly recover health from any damage taken. This provides a highly enjoyable and effective defensive layer that keeps you constantly leeching back to full health.
The build offers solid damage and clear speed, while its unique pathing and special tech ensures sufficient tankiness for newer players and remains a fun mapper for more experienced players. It provides clear and specific paths toward destroying endgame bosses, although this requires a more offensive approach that may diminish your mapping enjoyment.
Although the gearing can seem daunting, the guide emphasizes achieving a state where the build can smoothly farm toward its endgame upgrades, even in lower-tier content. Cyclone remains a highly enjoyable skill gem with this unique and effective build approach.
PoE Cold DoT Elementalist Build
This build is a unique combination of offense and defense. It boasts high damage output while also being quite tanky thanks to the chilling and freezing effects we can apply to enemies, as well as the lingering ground effects. With its exceptional scaling based on gem levels and minimal investment, this build is powerful enough to help you acquire all the Voidstones with ease, even with little gear.
This build is an excellent choice if you want to progress through Crucible League and take on the most challenging encounters.
Pros of this build include strong overall clear speed, the ability to serve as a league-starting character, and the potential for insane damage over time. However, it does require a considerable number of button presses as we rotate through multiple skills to maximize its effectiveness.
PoE Poison Ancestral Protector Totem Build
The game has recently introduced two new Unique Items that are worth checking out. The first one, Wilma’s Requital, is a Helmet that’s perfect for a Totem build. It grants the Ancestral Bond Keystone, which allows you to Summon an additional Totem, but you can’t deal damage directly. The real magic of this Helmet lies in its second modifier – it applies Cast Speed bonuses to your Attacks as well, making it a valuable addition for an Attack Totem Character. However, it’s important to note that you need separate bonuses for both Attack and Cast Speed to make the most out of it.
To fully utilize the potential of Wilma’s Requital, you can combine it with Ancestral Protector, a popular Melee Totem that grants up to 20% more Attack Speed. For the weapon, we recommend using the Echoforge Sword, a new Unique Sword with a high amount of Chaos Damage, but it disables Physical and Elemental Damage. This sword is ideal for Poison Builds and can be paired with the Pathfinder class to deal more Chaos-based Attacks and inflict improved Poisons.
This build offers a lot of tankiness and mobility, with high amounts of Armour and Evasion and a decent amount of maximum Life. The Totem playstyle is also very safe, allowing you to dodge and outmaneuver enemies after summoning them. It’s a cost-effective setup to start and has room for improvement, with most of the Uniques recommended but not required. If you’re looking for an interesting and powerful build, this one is definitely worth considering.
PoE Hexblast Miner Build
Hexblast is a spell in Path of Exile that has some unique features and offers high damage output. It is closely related to Hexes and can deal even more devastating damage to Hexed enemies with improved area-of-effect capabilities. Unlike Elemental Skills that usually rely on reducing a foe’s resistances, Hexblast chooses the lowest resistance of the enemy struck, making it very effective. Additionally, it can apply Ignite, Freeze, and Shock with its Chaos Damage, making it very versatile.
However, Hexblast has a slow cast time and a low base Critical Strike Chance, which can be remedied by using Mines or the Sandstorm Visage Unique Helmet that sets your Spells Critical Strike Chance to the base Critical Chance of your Weapon. Moreover, Hexblast requires a Hex to deal increased damage, necessitating a source of Curse on Hit to constantly reapply Hex for each successive hit.
Despite these challenges, the Hexblast build can be quite sturdy, with ample protection from items like Grace, Determination, and the Skin of the Lords combination and access to a potent Blind Aura. It can be relatively affordable with a few unique items and some Rares to cap Elemental Resistances and Attribute Requirements, but delving deeper into min-max territory can be costly. Overall, playing as a Miner with Hexblast can offer a vastly different gameplay style and should be considered by anyone looking for a new and unique build.
PoE Corrupting Fever Build
This build boasts excellent clear speed and movement speed, making it an ideal choice for those looking for a good League starter. Its gear progression is fairly straightforward, and its long-range playstyle provides innate safety. However, it relies heavily on a few select Uniques, which can be expensive early on. Additionally, its namesake skill cannot be played from the start and needs to be transitioned into, and it can feel a little clunky to level until midway through the campaign.
The key to this build’s playstyle is Corrupting Fever, a Damage Over Time effect that is applied by other things. To get our DoT going on targets, we use Kinetic Blast, a skill that fires projectiles that explode on impact. When combined with Greater Multiple Projectiles Support, we have multiple projectiles fired in rapid succession that all explode on impact, rapidly stacking our DoT on targets and causing them to explode through the use of Haemophilia.
While this takes care of our clear needs and does decent damage to single targets, our single-target damage would still be lacking if this was all we had going for us. To address this, we use Spellslinger early on and later on, The Poet’s Pen, which automatically triggers Exsanguinate and Reap when we attack with Kinetic Blast.
One potential drawback of Corrupting Fever is that it only has a duration of 7 seconds, which could be incredibly annoying to refresh every 7 seconds. Thankfully, the skill is refreshed when we pay a certain amount of life, allowing us to keep it active by simply attacking targets with Kinetic Blast linked to Lifetap Support. This means that while mapping, we can essentially play the build with just one button, excluding movement skill, which many people, including myself, find highly valuable.
Thank you for reading our article on the best POE starter builds. We hope that you found it informative and useful as you prepare for your league. Remember that the right starter build can make all the difference in the early stages of the game, allowing you to progress smoothly and efficiently.
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Once again, thank you for reading, and we wish you the best of luck in your adventures in Path of Exile!
