The most recent expansion to Path of Exile

The launching of War for the Atlas, the most recent expansion to Path of Exile, brought with it lots of new skills and an equally large number of changes to existing builds. In this guide, we are going to discuss the mechanisms of a few of my favourite assembles, the Arc Witch, and how it adapts to the changes in Version 3.1.

The Witch in PoE is similar to caster courses in other RPGs. Arc, as its name suggests, is a lightning-based skill that has the ability to chain from one enemy to another. The number of enemies that Arc can chain to is dependent upon a specific character's gem and enchantment configuration, but if it can not chain over 11 times per throw.

As you can imagine, when each throw of your skill is bouncing around and hitting up to 11 different enemies, then the DPS can accumulate fairly quickly. Remember that the DPS mirrored in the tooltip is not telling you the entire story (as is often true with the majority of tooltip DPS, on most skills, in most Path of Exile matches). The tooltip DPS is for each individual enemy hit, so you would need to multiply the tooltip number by yet many enemies you're hitting at once with the ability to be able to get a more accurate read on your DPS.

Shock raises an enemies damage taken by up to 50 percent for an amount of time dependent on the amount of lightning damage dealt with the Path of Exile player. The Arc skill provides an inherent 10 percent poe exalted orbs chance to jolt any enemies hit by it.

The Arc Witch doesn't have to be an extremely crit-heavy construct. Instead, just carry enough crit to result in rather regular Elemental Overload procs. Elemental Overload gives the Path of Exile participant a 40% growth to damage dealt on the condition that you have landed a significant hit in the past eight seconds. Thus, all you need is enough crit opportunity to land at least one crit every eight seconds and you would have pretty much constant Elemental Overload.

No matter how great your build is, you won't get very far in PoE if you're too simple to kill. Consequently, you need to ensure that your character has plenty of defense. This is no less true of the Arc Witch. Block is a good way to boost your defense, since it supplies as much as a 75% chance to completely eliminate attacks and spells.

Good sources of Block are the Ascendancy Skill, Bone Offering, as well as other passive abilities and equipment, poe currency. An important caveat of Block is that it does not mitigate damage over time or other secondary damaging effects.