<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Path of Exile 2 (PoE 2) introduces an immersive, deep, and dynamic world that is packed with POE2 Currency complex mechanics. As with its predecessor, PoE 2 allows for a high degree of character customization. However, this freedom, while exciting, can also be overwhelming for new players or those unfamiliar with the different class options and mechanics. Among the many classes, the Witch stands out as one of the most versatile and powerful spellcasting classes in the game.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">In this guide, we will focus on how to build the best Witch leveling build in PoE 2, particularly for those who want to maximize efficiency and damage output while avoiding spending excessive Path of Exile 2 currency. We&rsquo;ll discuss how to properly build your Witch, which skills and passives to prioritize, and how to balance offense, defense, and sustainability. By the end of this***, you&rsquo;ll have a clear understanding of how to level up effectively and create a powerful Witch that can dominate both in PvE and PvP scenarios.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Understanding the Witch Class</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">The Witch class in Path of Exile 2 is a highly flexible character that specializes in spells, chaos damage, and physical damage. Witches are powerful casters with access to a vast range of abilities, which makes them ideal for players who enjoy casting destructive spells or controlling the battlefield with minions.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Strengths: High intelligence, spellcasting abilities, control over chaos and physical damage, great scaling potential.</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Weaknesses: Fragile early on, requires careful management of positioning and resources, needs strong minion support for survivability.</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">To make the most of the Witch class, you&rsquo;ll need to focus on increasing spell damage, critical hit chance, and scaling your intelligence (the primary stat of the Witch) for higher damage output.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Witch Passive Skill Tree and Key Passives</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">The Witch&rsquo;s passive skill tree is intricate, offering many paths to explore. Understanding which passives to prioritize early on can drastically improve the effectiveness of your Witch build. Since the Witch excels at dealing both physical and chaos damage, we&rsquo;ll focus on passives that enhance these aspects of her skillset.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Early Game Focus: Raw Damage Boosts</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">In the early stages of the game, you&rsquo;ll want to focus on boosting spell damage and critical strike chance to maximize your damage output. Here&rsquo;s how you can prioritize your passives:</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Raw Destruction: This passive skill should be one of your first focuses. It grants an additional 16% spell damage and significantly enhances your damage potential.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Jagged Shards: This passive increases physical damage and cast speed. As you'll be using physical and chaos spells, improving both your casting speed and raw damage is essential to maximize efficiency.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Practiced Signs: This passive skill further boosts your cast speed and enhances your critical strike chance, which will be important for scaling your Witch's damage with spells that benefit from critical hits.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Mid-Game Focus: Critical Overload and Spell Scaling</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Once you progress to the mid-game, you should continue progressing through the Witch&rsquo;s skill tree to unlock more critical hit chance, critical damage, and spell scaling passives.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Critical Overload: This is a critical node to target. It significantly boosts your critical strike chance and spell damage, which synergizes perfectly with your build focused on physical and chaos damage.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Potent Incantation: This passive boosts spell damage even further, making it a must-have for increasing your overall output.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Sudden Escalation: This passive increases cast speed and enhances critical strike damage with spells, making it a great pick for any Witch build focusing on high burst damage from spells.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Late-Game Focus: Spell Damage and Defense</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">By the time you reach the late game, you&rsquo;ll need to focus on increasing your damage further while also ensuring that you have adequate defense, sustainability, and scaling.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Cut the Bones: This passive enhances spell damage and increases critical damage, which is essential for any high-damage Witch build.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Blood Tearing and Shredding Force: These passives further enhance your critical damage and physical damage, ensuring that you maintain high burst damage throughout the game.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Witch&rsquo;s Best Skills for Leveling</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">When you first start leveling your Witch, you&rsquo;ll want to focus on spells that offer high damage, good area-of-effect coverage, and ease of use. The key skills for a leveling Witch build are Contagion and Bone Cage, both of which are powerful and effective early on.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Contagion (Chaos Damage)</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Why it's great: Contagion is a damage over time (DoT) spell that spreads chaos damage to nearby enemies when a target dies. It can quickly clear packs of enemies and is great for applying pressure in both solo and group play.</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">How to use it: Cast it on groups of enemies to spread chaos damage across the battlefield, dealing sustained damage while you focus on surviving and setting up your next casts.</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Bone Cage (Physical Damage)</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Why it's great: Bone Cage is a melee-range spell that causes physical damage. It&rsquo;s effective for dealing quick damage and may trigger critical hits, especially when combined with critical-hit boosting passives.</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">How to use it: Bone Cage can be used as a single-target spell or for area damage when surrounded by enemies. Combine it with passives that increase physical damage and critical chance to maximize its effectiveness.</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Bonestorm (Core Damage Dealer)</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Once you reach around level 7, Bonestorm becomes available, and it should become your core damage dealer. Bonestorm is a devastating spell that summons Bone Spikes to deal massive physical damage to enemies. The ability to summon multiple Bone Spikes in quick succession allows you to melt bosses and large packs of enemies.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Why it's great: Bonestorm deals massive physical damage and has a critical hit chance. By upgrading your cast speed, you can increase the frequency of Bone Spikes, significantly boosting your overall damage output.</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">How to use it: Use Bonestorm in both single-target and multi-target scenarios, making sure to maximize your critical damage and spellcasting speed.</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Curse: Vulnerability</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">In addition to your offensive abilities, you&rsquo;ll want to weaken enemies to increase your damage output. Vulnerability is a great curse that reduces the armor of enemies, allowing you to deal more damage with your physical spells like Bonestorm.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Why it's great: It greatly weakens enemies by ignoring their armor, allowing your physical damage to penetrate more effectively.</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Witch Stats: Intelligence and Sustainability</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Primary Stat: Intelligence</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">As a Witch, Intelligence is the core stat that enables you to cast your spells and unlock various Skill Gems. Intelligence increases the effectiveness of your spells, so maximizing it should be your top priority.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Start with around 20 Intelligence in the early game to use basic Witch skills and gear.</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">By Act 2, raise your Intelligence to 55 to unlock mid-game Uncut Skill Gems.</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Ultimately, aim for 120 Intelligence by the endgame to fully optimize your build and unlock the most powerful Witch abilities.</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Secondary Stat: Strength</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Although the Witch is primarily focused on Intelligence, Strength should be prioritized as a secondary stat to enhance your life pool and defense. Strength increases your survivability and provides better sustainability during difficult fights.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Focus on Strength early on to boost your health and ensure that your minions can tank hits.</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Support Gems like Meat Shield and Last Gasp improve the effectiveness of your minions, making them tankier and more resilient.</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Defensive Minions for Added Protection</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">While the Witch excels in dealing damage, she is fragile early on and may require additional defense. To overcome this, consider investing in defensive minions like Raise Zombies and Skeletal Warriors. These minions will act as shields, absorbing damage for you and distracting enemies while you focus on casting spells.</div>
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<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Raise Zombies: These zombies will fight for you, absorb incoming damage, and allow you to maintain distance from enemies. Pair them with Instability support gem for added offensive utility (zombies explode when they die).</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Skeletal Warriors: These warriors can tank enemies and push them away from you, allowing you more breathing room for spellcasting.</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Conclusion</div>
<div style="min-height: 1.25em; color: #333333; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">Building the best Witch leveling build in PoE 2 requires a blend of strategic passive skill choices, powerful offensive skills, and defensive minions to ensure survivability. By focusing on spell and critical damage passives early on, prioritizing high-impact skills like Bonestorm, and increasing Intelligence for better scaling, you can create a build that excels at dealing massive damage while maintaining solid defense.</div>
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Through this guide, you should have a clear understanding of how to approach leveling your Witch and maximizing her potential in both solo and group play. Remember, PoE 2 is all about experimenting and fine-tuning your build, so feel free to adjust based on Path of Exile 2 Currency Orbs your playstyle as you progress. Good luck, and may your spells always hit true!