[Top 5] Path of Exile Best Witch Builds That Wreck Hard! (3.20.2)

Updated:

30 Sep 2023

In this revised sprint of builds showcase, Witches are as a whole, a lot more popular than what they used to be. Getting a combined 33% of all builds, when you have 7 classes is insane. While Occultist lost her Malediction, it’s still a clear-cut favourite, with 15% representation by herself, beating Deadeye by 2%.

And so here are the best builds of this patch for the Witch!

5 – Explosive Arrow Ballista Ignite Elementalist

Obviously one of the best builds in the game, both for league starting and uber bossing farming, EA Ballista ignite has dominated the meta with the sheer ease to deal millions of damage while running around and dodging skillshots.

What Explosive Arrow Ballista Ignite Excels in:

Tankyness.
Can reach the DoT Cap (~37 million damage) easily.
Very cheap to get started with, and can do all content
Perfect for league start.

EA Ballista Ignite full details:

Because of how Elementalist works, any source of flat damage becomes fodder for your ignite damage. As such, you’ll want as much Flat damage, physical, chaos, elemental, doesn’t matter, as possible. In fact, you don’t want Flat Added Fire damage to attacks because that would brick Elemental Equilibrium and cost you millions of damage.
The name of the game for EA is attack speed, combined with Faster Ignite. You must reach 20 stacks on the enemy, explode, and then do it repeatedly. The more ballistas you have, the quicker you get there, increasing your overall damage per second.
Since the ballistas can cost a lot of mana, as EA has one of the highest base cost skills in the game, you can either use Lifetap or go with a Devouring Diadem, which also helps increase the amount of damage you deal, allowing you to fit in an extra aura, as well as providing you with a lot of damage with a Focus button.

For more information, check here: https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds/char/gladkopls/Pain_Sanctum?time-machine=week-3&i=3&search=time-machine%3Dweek-3%26skill%3DExplosive-Arrow%26sort%3Ddps

4 – Cast on Crit Ice Spear Occultist

This is what CoC Ice Spear looks like when you have near infinite budget, and can toy around with one of the best and most broken uniques introduced this league, Nimis. It’s a ring that makes it so all projectiles return to you, regardless of their travel. This means they can also double-hit and shotgun. However, it comes with a drawback (which isn’t a big drawback depending on the skill): it fires your projectiles in random directions.

What Cast on Crit Ice Spear Excels in:

Insane clearing.
Buttery smooth gameplay. You kill as you spin.
Amazing single-target damage.
Can clear all content.

Cast on Crit Ice Spear full details:

Nimis, as I said before, makes it so all your projectiles fire in random directions and then return to you, hitting enemies on their path once again. And since Ice Spear is an exceptionally quick projectile, and Sniper’s Mark creates over a dozen more projectiles, with Nimis, you’re dealing by sheer virtue of projectile count, a buttload of damage.
You can either go with a Cospri’s Malice as your weapon, or you can use a dagger with Vagan Mod to not worry about accuracy at all, while also getting a ton of good benefits, like Crit Multi, Crit Chance, +1all Cold (levels for spells are the best to increase their damage) and attack speed.
That is important because there are certain thresholds you wanna reach with CoC builds, those being 7.57 and 10.10 attacks per second (with all buffs active). So you need a pretty quick weapon to reach that attack speed threshold (and not go over it, as it will ruin your damage significantly. Aim to get it as close but UNDER the point. As well as getting a ton of CDR is needed. 52% is required for 10 aps.

For more information, check here: https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds/char/phasegrenade/CallMeKermitTheFrog?time-machine=week-3&i=1&search=time-machine%3Dweek-3%26skill%3DIce-Spear%26item%3DNimis%26sort%3Ddps

3 – Poison SRS/Spiders Necromancer

While not necessarily a new build, it became popular thanks to Balormage. As such, people took the build and threw their own spin to things. And thus was born Poison Spiders/SRS.

It requires a few unique items to work, and though this one has a Mageblood, you can do without it. Just gonna be a lot harder to cap resistances while also getting fully spell suppressed.

What Poison SRS/Spiders Excel in:

Insane single-target damage
Extremely Tanky
Fantastic clear
One of the best Sanctum clearers in the game
Doesn’t need much to start but excels with investment.

Poison SRS/Spiders full details:

While Spiders have inherent chaos damage, Summon Raging Spirit does not. It also has 50% of its Physical damage converted to Fire, which is a wasted stat for us, since Poison only scales off of Physical and Chaos. So the way to get around that is by stacking as much Flat Added Chaos damage as possible. And the strongest poison Body armour in the game does exactly that. With the Covenant, you get a whopping Level 29 Added Chaos gem. That’s basically 3x an Awakened Chaos damage gems as a free 7th link!
Most builds use United in Dream, which gives your minions a 60% chance to poison, so you’d only need 40% left to make it work. But since we’re doing Spiders and use Arakaali’s Fang, we have no poison chance from our sword anymore. This means you must get 100% through Ghastly Jewels and utilising the Chance to Poison gem. It does come with some extra added chaos, but not much, and this means you’re losing one of your strong supports.
And your spiders, curiously enough, get summoned while mapping because the Poison kill counts as yours, just like with the traps, and so you don’t need to keep casting while mapping to clear insanely quickly since the spiders are much faster than SRS!

For more information, check here: https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds/char/ohnoes4/Snknsss?time-machine=week-3&i=0&search=time-machine%3Dweek-3%26skill%3DSummon-Raging-Spirit%26item%3DArakaalis-Fang

2 – Ethereal Knives Ignite Elementalist

Similarly from the Cast on Crit, this requires a massive budget, and when you have it, it’s glorious to see in action. This is the stronger, better looking, faster brother to Wave of Conviction Ignite, and often what you play as before transitioning to EK.

What Ethereal Knives Ignite Excels in:

Amazing clearing
Feels great to play
Explosions with Oriath’s End
Can clear all content

EK Ignite full details:

As usual, being an Elementalist means that all types of damage you deal will matter for your ignite. And since Ethereal Knives is a physical spell, you want to convert it to an element to get as much damage as possible out of it since % elemental damage would then increase both the hit and the ignite damage you dealt with it.
This also double dips with Cold to Fire Support, so your cold damage gets even more fire damage and is converted to fire. You get your conversion from Phys to Cold through a mastery as well as a glove mod, and with a good Watcher’s Eye, since you’re specced into Hatred, for more Cold Damage (as well as Gain Phys added as Cold), for another 35%.
And as an ignite build, you want as many Faster Ignites as possible to reach your total dot quicker, reapply, and deal more damage faster. If you equip a Headhunter, your build becomes insanely tanky (which is an issue for this otherwise squishy build), especially when your only source of real defence is 30k armor and evasion, as well as spell suppression.

For more information, check here: https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds/char/LiQu1n/LiQuinEK?time-machine=week-3&i=1&search=time-machine%3Dweek-3%26class%3DElementalist%26skill%3DEthereal-Knives%26sort%3Ddps

1 – Poison Spark Occultist

With the introduction of Nimis, and the resurgence of poison builds, combined with the vastness ‘overpoweredness’ of Occultist, it makes sense Poison Spark would also return to the meta. And all you need is an Ashes, a Nimis and a Mageblood (I’m kidding, you don’t need a MB, wink wink).

What Poison Spark Excels in:

Fantastic Clearing
Great at Sanctum, can hit behind walls.
Insane amounts of damage.
One of the best Maven Invitations Farmer because of the arena.
Quite tanky.

Poison Spark full details:

Nimis makes it so all projectiles you fire go off in random directions at the benefit of them returning to you at the end of their flight. This means your sparks will hit the enemies very often because whenever they bounce, they reset their enemy count, and then once again when they come back to you.
And you need Ashes of the Stars so you can increase your Phantasmal Spark’s quality to over 50%, meaning you get to convert 100% of your lightning damage into chaos, enabling the full damage of your spell as a poison application.
You also make use of the borderline broken Incandescent Heart interaction with CI, making it so you take 25% reduced elemental damage, for free. And not only that, but you also gain 20% of your Elemental (Lightning) damage as Chaos, for even more poison damage.

For more information, check here: https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds/char/poepenguin/sanctPenguin?time-machine=week-3&i=0&search=time-machine%3Dweek-3%26class%3DOccultist%26skill%3DSpark%26item%3DNimis%2CIncandescent-Heart%26sort%3Ddps