Path of Exile 2 patch 0.5 Return of the Ancients launches May 29, 2026, and the meta is already half-baked — patch notes dropped, two new ascendancies are revealed, but key variables stay redacted. Gemling alternate quality is still hidden, Spirit Walker Companion nodes aren't in the files yet, Trothan Cannon drop rates and modifiers are unknown. This tier list is the picture two weeks out, weighted toward what we can read from the tooltips, the leech and energy shield overhauls, and the lineage support changes — not toward the late-league min-max ceiling.
The lens here is the first 25 to 40 hours of the league — campaign smoothness, time to tier 15 maps, defensive baseline at level 80 without crafted gear. Anything is viable at 50 or 100 divines, so endgame-only scaling gets less weight than how cheap a build is to get online. If you plan on respeccing into a twink endgame setup once the economy stabilises, optimise for the leveling window and trust your day-five wallet to handle the rest.
Tiers reflect day-one safety and how cleanly a build carries through campaign and early maps. Each rank gates on a specific bar — anything that has a "we'll see" attached to it sits one tier below where its ceiling would put it. Unknown variables get question marks, not optimistic guesses.
One recommendation: Martial Artist Monk if you can handle the rough acts 1-2 window, Spirit Walker Owl Twisters for the cleanest leveling in the patch. Wyvern Druid stuff sits between the two — easier than Twisters mechanically, harder than Martial Artist defensively early.
Variety picks: Witchhunter Grenades positions cleanly for a Gemling respec once alternate quality drops, Tactician Ballista is the safest totem-flavoured starter, EDC Bonestorm remains the most boring-effective Witch leveling experience, and Disciple of Varashta Plants is the patch's answer to the ES recharge problem for pure-ES casters.
The big unknowns — Gemling alternate quality, Spirit Walker companion nodes, Trothan Cannon mods, Redemption drop rate — will reshape this list within the first week. Plan a backup build that can absorb a respec if your day-one pick gets datamined into the floor.
One ascendancy genuinely stands above the rest in the current reveal. Numbers from the trailer don't line up with the rest of the patch's tuning.
Martial Artist Monk — straight broken. The Martial Artist ascendancy reshapes the Monk's gear stats through passive nodes — gloves with the right rolls hit numbers like 1,200 evasion + 480 energy shield + double gain on stack, well outside the rest of the patch's balance. Way of the Stonefist converts gloves into Strength/Dex-scaling stone gauntlets, the bell-on-back mechanic adds mobility, five extra rune sockets give defensive flexibility, and mirage clones channel skills alongside you.
Works with essentially every monk archetype that touches unarmed strikes, bells, or power charges — Ice Strike, Whirling Assault, Falling Thunder, bell-stacking with Tempest Bell, hollow palm scaling, calling strike interactions. Wyvern works too thanks to the power-charge synergy, even though the rest of the ascendancy's bell and unarmed nodes don't carry over there.
Outside the monk-adjacent space, the ascendancy doesn't transfer cleanly. Martial Artist Bows, for example, gets nothing meaningful from the power-charge tree unless you fish for charge conversion as a spirit skill, charge regulation, and resonance — none of which justify giving up Deadeye on a bow archetype.
Acts 1 and 2 are rough — monk's defensive layer doesn't come online until evasion/ES bases drop around level 30 and the first ascend lands. There's been no help for early-campaign monk survivability in this patch. Once the first ascend is in, the rest of the campaign and early maps go very smooth. Patience in acts 1-2 is the trade for an outer-space scaling curve.
The safe, scaling picks. Anything in this tier carries you cleanly from act 1 to tier 15 maps with low-budget gear, has a clear answer to the patch's defensive changes, and works as a foundation for late-league transitions.
Wyvern Druid was cartoonishly OP in 0.4 — level 31 Wyverns with a level 22 talisman and dog-water modifiers would generate power charges via lingering illusion and one-shot a level 53 Tavakai. Oil Barrage got a real cut to bring it back to earth: base damage down roughly 10%, channel time per power charge from 2.0 seconds to 1.5 seconds — three power charges now buys 4.5 seconds of channel instead of 6. That's a clean 25% damage cut on the channel side on top of the base damage hit, plus a mana cost added. Composite nerf lands around 35% overall.
Still extremely strong — just no longer laughably outside the rest of the patch. Brink got moved from tier 2 to tier 1, which brings the Wing Blast + Rend setup-payoff loop online a full act earlier. Rend lost a bug-fix's worth of damage (the unintended Wing Blast interaction was returned to designed values), but the core scaling is intact.
Power-charge generation is the easiest it has been, exposure and shock access is strong, tree is flexible, transitions into other shapeshifts are clean. Probably the strongest Druid league start despite landing from outer space — Wyvern Druid stays the dominant shapeshift this patch. Top of A Tier and arguably the single best generic recommendation if Martial Artist Monk doesn't appeal — easier than Twisters mechanically, scaling comfortably into mid maps.
Spirit Walker Owl Twisters is the safest league starter in the game. Twisters scale through projectile speed, which the Owl spirit notable provides in large amounts at low investment — critical for the first 25 to 60 hours of league when crafted projectile speed gear is still expensive. Sacred Unity drops Soaring Ground trails as a passive AoE layer once all three spirit notables are allocated, and the deer-based ascendancy nodes pad defensive utility. Acts 1 and 2 are already smooth thanks to evasion baseline + parry tech with Fangs of Frost if you want to accelerate the opening.
This is a visionary build — projectiles need walls to bounce off, twister positioning takes practice, and you have to generate ground effects for Twisters to consume. Past the learning curve, the build clears densely and bosses comfortably. Pure-dex layout means the new deflection scaling pays off at medium-to-high investment, and Whirling Slash with blind is a strong free defensive tool for deflection stackers.
Ceiling at 100+ divines is lower than Abyssal Lich Twisters because that ascendancy stacks projectile speed harder via Umbral Well, but Lich Twisters isn't reachable from a fresh character anyway. Spirit Walker leaves transitions open: rarity-bot Ritualist, accuracy-stacking Amazon, Rake Blood Hunt later. Heads-up for trade league: it will be the most popular build in the league, so day-one projectile gear prices will be inflated — buy six-out-of-six failed crafts off other players to avoid the worst markup. Controller players should check the aim-and-fire feel before committing.
Deadeye Ice Snipe — freeze, shatter, snipe. The bow-side answer to Permafrost Bolts — same play style, no crossbow reload investment, and Deadeye's evasion/deflection access is built for it. Snipe's early-act damage took a small adjustment — first hour or two before a decent quiver drops can feel underpowered, but the build scales hard once gear is in place. Spiral Volley handles clear at minimal investment.
Mid-A overall. Probably actually a stronger league starter than Witchhunter Grenades — only economic pressure on top-end bows holds it back from sitting next to Owl Twisters.
Witchhunter Grenades — the Sorcery Ward nerf is overstated. Early maps actually run slightly better thanks to evasion and armor base buffs — roughly +2% sorcery ward, +2% evasion, slightly higher deflection rating at sub-72 ranges. Late game (level 80+ with crafted items) is about 12% worse on sorcery ward, but deflection investment offsets that. At max stack, you went from 10,000 sorcery ward to 9,000 — your max hit pool is still excellent.
Witchhunter Grenades remain a comfortable bossing build with a low gear floor — tier-3 Zest and uber Arbiter are clearable on a very modest budget. Bossing damage is extremely good even with limited items, and you reach pinnacle content with throwaway crafts and a small currency pile. Limitation is clear speed: grenades don't naturally pair with onslaught or high attack speed, so dense map content takes a bit longer than the top picks. Veloc's Vice (100% fire-to-lightning conversion) opens Herald of Thunder and big shock application for clear — small twist that closes the clear gap meaningfully.
The build also positions for a clean transition to Gemling Legionnaire once alternate quality data lands. Two pieces of upside sit behind question marks. First, alternate quality on grenade gems could add AoE or even a second activation per cast — given that marshall-weapon skill levels were nerfed, doubling base damage through a quality interaction would be a substantive power swing. Second, crafted Trothan Cannons reportedly carry new grenade-focused modifiers, and the unique Trothan Cannon "Redemption" grants instantaneous grenade detonation while bypassing grenade cooldowns — exactly the AoE and clear-speed gap the build needs to address.
Keep Witchhunter as a safe baseline that scales no matter what gets revealed. If alternate quality and Trothan Cannon data land well, respec into Gemling once the maps economy is online — if neither pans out, Witchhunter Grenades is still A-tier on its own.
Tactician Supporting Fire Ballista — the totem-summoning attack delay that hobbled it in 0.4 is fixed, which puts the build back on the map. Supporting fire setups with armor break and chaining are very strong on Tactician — armor break stacks on bosses while supporting fire towers chain through dense packs, and the ascendancy's spirit and totem nodes pay off without significant gear investment.
Not at Martial Artist levels of OP — just extremely safe with a clean transition into Gemling Legionnaire if alternate quality lands well for crossbows. If you don't enjoy totem-adjacent gameplay, skip — totems are minions, and minion-feel is what it is. Otherwise, this is one of the safer A-tier starters and arguably the easiest mercenary leveling experience in 0.5.
Falling Thunder Wyvern Hybrid Monk is leveling tech that uses Wyvern's setup-payoff to feed a Monk bossing loop. Wing Blast and Rend generate power charges, Falling Thunder consumes them and applies shock, then Siphoning Strike refunds a charge on the shocked target. The result is a two-button bossing rotation — Siphoning Strike, Falling Thunder, Siphoning Strike, Falling Thunder — that holds together against single targets from act 1 through campaign bosses. Brink at tier 1 tightens the setup-payoff window further by speeding up the Wing Blast + Rend stun chain.
Falling Thunder benefits from the new combo bonuses and from Martial Artist's glove and ailment-application interactions — it's actually slightly better on Martial Artist than on Invoker for late-game ailment scaling. The hybrid path scales adequately into maps but not as cleanly as pure Whirling Assault or Ice Strike: wyvern hybrid clear plateaus around level 70 to 80 because the power-charge generation gets clunky in early mapping before charge duration is scaled. Best treated as a strong leveling stage before transitioning into Martial Artist's bell-stacking or whirling-assault endgame around the mid-mapping window.
EDC Bonestorm Lich — untouched, well-supported, race-viable. In fact race-winning viable, which is the strongest possible signal for a league starter. Bonestorm lost the sustained tag — crit is now all-or-nothing on the full hover stack instead of independent per-projectile. Average DPS is unchanged; only matters at the edges of the crit-chance curve. Of all the caster bossing skills, Bonestorm remains by far the best campaign option.
Essence Drain + Contagion remains the smoothest caster clear on both KB+M and controller. The combo is at its best in density content like Breach and Abyss — contagion spread chains across packs cleanly. In sparser map content the clear drops off, but the build is still cheap, easy, and well-paced through the leveling window.
Boring-effective answer to "what should I play if I want to reach maps as fast as possible". No visionary mechanics, and a clean foundation for transitioning into Lich, Abyssal Lich, or summoner setups once you have a few divines.
Plant Oracle and Plant Witch share the same backbone with two different ascendancies. The Plants skill lost a tiny shock-conduction bonus — nothing structural. Plant Oracle earns Inevitable Crit early, which adds massive damage scaling without needing a Cast on Crit setup yet. Witch Plants has slightly softer survivability early because of the ES recharge nerfs, but the offensive tree is identical.
Both pair with Bonestorm for bossing during campaign. Cheap, well-supported by guide creators, and one of the easiest builds to play if visionary mechanics aren't your thing.
Disciple of Varashta Plants — the Disciple of Varashta ascendancy's bonuses to energy shield recharge rate and faster start of ES recharge specifically fix the leveling ES problem the patch created. Pure ES wearers running Varashta are tanky from act 1 onward in a patch where most casters aren't. Damage profile is very similar to Plant Oracle and Plant Lich — the trees are nearly identical and the choice comes down to the defensive layer you want.
Lower in A than Oracle because it's less proven as a league starter, but mechanically it has every tool to handle the patch's defensive squeeze.
Bear Druid went untouched. Armor scales with the early-map buff, endurance charge generation is native, slow heavy slams scale into Walking Calamity at high investment. If you want weighty, slammy melee with big damage chunks and a slower attack speed on a shapeshift class, Bear is the cleanest pick in the patch — better than Shield Wall, better than the mace alternatives, and the only "weighty thing" archetype on Druid that doesn't carry a key limitation in 0.5.
The Druid shapeshift tree pairs with Bear's slam tempo through innate Bear nodes, endurance charge interactions, and glory generation depending on the path you allocate. Where you start on the tree changes your damage output noticeably — check a build guide before committing. Warrior players looking for the same weighty feel should jump to Boneshatter Titan below.
Bear is immune to the leech changes — none of the 40,000 damage cap, instant-leech removal, or one-source-per-resource rules matter for an armor stacker with endurance charges. The build sustains by being big and tanky, not by leeching.
Wolf Druid has a faster base attack time than Bear, which puts the clear ceiling higher at parity gear. Craft Slash remains very strong, Wolfpack minion scaling is untouched, and Uruk smelting paired with Herald of Ice chaining clears dense packs as well as anything in A Tier. The whole shapeshift tree is well-supported, so the build is easy to follow without a dedicated 0.5 guide — a 0.4 wolf build can be ported into late maps with minor tweaks.
Combo-heavy by design. The full chain runs Pounce to place a freezing mark, Cross Slash to activate the mark, then Lunar Assault and Shred to close. Some players love the ramp; others find it tedious because every kill is a four-button sequence rather than a one-shot. Freeze and chill act as a passive defensive layer — chilled enemies have reduced action speed, which slows boss attack patterns and gives reaction windows pure-melee classes don't get for free. No real key limitations; sits below Wyvern only because Wyvern is itself outer-space strong.
Deadeye Twisters — projectile speed stacking with Tailwind for evasion scaling. Slightly lower max hit ceiling than the Spirit Walker variant because Deadeye lacks the defensive notable on the spirit-side ascendancy. Bossing damage and clear are both strong. Solid league start — just less fresh than the new Spirit Walker pet flavour, which is why most players will gravitate to Owl Twisters instead.
Boneshatter Titan — Rolling Slam lost 15% base damage but gained 0.5 seconds off total attack time — net DPS roughly equal with a much smoother feel, which is the right direction. The previous problem was killing mobs with Rolling Slam instead of Boneshatter, because Rolling Slam's AoE is worse. Faster and weaker fixes that.
Brink moving to tier 1 plus the mace base improvements from 0.4 put this on track for the best Titan act 1 in a long time. Perfect Strike bossing animation is slow until attack speed is layered on — early bosses can be frustrating without practice. Weapon craft is cheap and easy (160% physical damage two-hander + greater abrasion + perfect battle + perfect haste + desecration). Low A for me because Perfect Strike in practiced hands is excellent, but it earns a high B if you're new to the animation.
Solid options with one or two key limitations. Each entry has a real bottleneck — defensive gap, gear dependency, missing data, or a specific gear floor — that keeps it below the safe picks but doesn't kill viability.
Wyvern Monk is the Wyvern skill set played on a Monk ascendancy rather than Druid. Less efficient than Wyvern Druid because Monk's defensive layer is weaker through early acts. Power charge synergy still works, but you give up the broader shapeshift tree access. Workable but Druid is the better home for the Wyvern skill cluster.
Poison Pathfinder — Overwhelming Toxicity went from 35% to 50% less Poison Duration. Unique-item changes hit some of the build's enablers. Late-investment ceiling is strong, but the leveling experience never felt particularly satisfying, and the patch direction made the bottlenecks worse. Top of B Tier — playable if you specifically want the play style.
Witch Minions — easy to play and very safe once core gear lands. Requires specific affixes — a minion scepter, a +level minion helm — and splitting tree investment between minion nodes and contagion/clear-skill nodes during leveling slows the early pace. Once a few exalts of trade buys the core items, it becomes one of the easier mapping builds. High B because of the gear-luck variance during the campaign window.
Spirit Walker Companions — Zoo Master flavour with the new Companions, including unique-beast capture via The Natural Order — Silverfist and Great Tusk become permanent pets at high investment. 19 companion-specific nodes are confirmed but unpublished, so the actual scaling envelope is unknown. Could be defining (companions inherit your evasion rating, faster attack speed, scaled defences) or filler (small additive bonuses). Theorcrafting from the build's expected playerbase will push refinement hard regardless of how the floor lands — even if the build's bait at release, large-audience streamers playing it means rapid optimisation through the first week.
Trusted Kinship's rework was explicitly designed around companion builds: 30% more reservation efficiency for companion skills with a 20% less penalty on others, and no more "less defences in exchange for companion defence" trade. Pairs with Idolatry on the Spirit Walker tree, which scales companion damage and reservation efficiency at the cost of resists per non-Idol augment. The pair was designed together — Idol-heavy gear becomes mandatory once Idolatry is allocated.
Backup plan if the companion node reveal disappoints is Owl Twisters on the same class — worst case you fall back to the best build in A Tier, which is the safest "high upside" wager in the patch.
Gemling Grenades — alternate quality list is unpublished. Virtuous Barrier from the new Essence of Virtue notable caps around 105% increased evasion, armor, and ES at full investment — defensively weak at the leveling stage. Advanced Thaumaturgy grants an extra quality stat per gem, which could become huge for grenades if AoE or double-detonation lands.
Running Assault on Pathfinder got nerfed (30% less Movement Speed Penalty, was 50%), which means Gemling with a green-gem-heavy socket setup may actually move faster while attacking. Strong upside, real defensive gap at start. League start Witchhunter Grenades or Tactician Ballista, respec into Gemling once alternate quality is known.
Deadeye Grenades — Endless Munitions and proximity-based damage scaling are excellent for bossing. Defensive gap is the issue — pure evasion has no native max hit scaling, and the faster start of ES recharge nerfs hit hybrid evasion/ES setups hard. Mid-progression (end of campaign through level 85) is the rough patch. Bottom of B because the bossing damage is genuinely top-tier once gear is online.
Sorceress Elemental Spells — infusion scaling didn't get any help in this patch, which means the first three acts are the bottleneck on every elemental spell. Maintaining infusions before lesser jewellers' orbs come online is tedious, and building the infusion engine usually takes until the middle of act 3 — easily 10 hours of campaign play depending on skill and comfort level. Sorceress as a whole is in the same spot it has been in for a while: race-meta against Bonestorm, but never overtaking it.
Ember Fusillade remains the best pure-elemental bossing skill once infusions stack — fine to level on if you're tired of Plants and Essence Drain Contagion. Ice Nova appeared in a competitive race recently paired with a separate bossing skill — roughly as fast as Contagion with better defensive uptime because incoming melee mobs freeze on contact, and new Chronomancer synergies close the gap further. The catch is constant casting drags movement speed, which makes the build feel slow.
Spark needs cast speed or a meta-skill trigger like Cast on Element or Cast on Crit to scale. All three elemental options are diminished by the ES recharge changes early. Solid for variety; Plant Oracle and EDC Bonestorm are still the faster paths to maps.
Viable if you specifically like the play style. Each entry has a better alternative on the same class or skill cluster — league start something else and transition in maps if the archetype calls to you.
Lightning Arrow, Lightning Spear and Arc — Lightning Arrow beams can no longer chain multiple times onto the same target, which gutted single-target burst — you can no longer pre-stack a Lightning Rod with all the chains and dump damage into it. Bosses also gained an initial damage reduction layer, so the build hits a worse burst window into a defensively buffed target. The Lightning Rod projectile-count fixes are a real upside — dual-string bow, multi-shot, and on-tree surpassing-arrow interactions are no longer broken on skills that use projectile count to place projectiles (Rod, Storm Blast Bolts, Gas Arrow).
Even so, Lightning Arrow clear during campaign struggles because of the walk-backwards-while-firing pattern — lower damage per hit means multiple attacks per mob, where Twisters, Snipe, and Grenades all one-shot. Lightning Spear needs frenzy charge generation that scales better on Twisters now. Arc is the same infusion story as Ember Fusillade and Spark, only later to come online. All three are playable; all three lose to better picks on the same trees.
Permafrost Bolts Mercenary is the same archetype as Deadeye Ice Snipe but worse. Crossbow reload investment eats 5-10 tree points, and Witchhunter is less offensively oriented than Deadeye for evasion/deflection hybrids. If you want the freeze-shatter play style, play it on bows.
Galvanic Shards, Storm Blast Bolts and Plasma Blast Mercenary — Arjun's Mettle went from 100% reload-on-kill to 25%, and the lineage support that defined fast-clear crossbow in 0.4 is dead. Dense content still proc's adequately; sparser map progression makes the reload windows obvious. Previously Arjun's Mettle let you skip reload bonuses on the tree; now you need 5 to 8 points of reload-speed investment, which eats damage nodes and slows the clear rhythm.
Rotha's Assault (reload on dodge roll) mostly survived with a clunkier rhythm. Plasma Blast survived as a bossing skill at high investment, and Storm Blast Bolts remains one of the best low-budget pinnacle killers in the game. Galvanic Shards specifically is the worst-hit league starter in the patch — playable once two or three lineage supports stack, dead on day one.
Disciple of Varashta Summons — the classic fire-and-ice djinn summoner setup is very strong at endgame but requires multiple ascends to reach full power. To scale damage you spec out of on-tree damage and into on-tree AoE and cast speed — which means weapons need to carry the damage, and weapons don't drop with the right rolls during the leveling window. Level on Disciple of Varashta with defensive bonuses and EDC, then transition once you have a good staff and a second ascend.
Cast on Crit Oracle — Inevitable Crit didn't get nerfed and remains ridiculous. The catch is meta-gem scaling — Cast on Crit needs cast speed, projectile count, and pierce stacked on the trigger skill, none of which is available in early acts. Level on plain Plant Oracle for a smooth campaign, then transition to Cast on Crit Comet once you have a 20-divine budget for the trigger gear.
Shield Wall Titan — the Shield Wave shotgun interaction with Fortifying Cry is gone. In 0.4 the build stacked armor on the offhand via Fortifying Cry, then shotgunned Shield Wave on segment break — that's what made it oppressive. POB simulations land the net hit between 35% and 50% damage loss at level 31 and above; Shield Wall's base damage scaling itself is unchanged thanks to the offsetting shield armor buff.
Damage is now in line with other mace skills, but the slow animation is no longer covered by overwhelming per-hit numbers, and single-target may need two casts where one used to suffice. The build still requires totems, war cries, and ascendancy investment to come online — a problem for a league starter. Still viable for HCSSF thanks to big shield investment paying off defensively. Outside that niche, Bear Druid or Boneshatter Titan covers the same weighty feel without the nerfed payoff.
Earthquake and Non-Slam Mace — Earthquake at low investment forces stationary fighting on jagged ground — it slows the leveling pace because you can't keep moving forward through the campaign. Hammer of the Gods needs glory generation that doesn't come online until after the first ascend. Titan Earthquake scales well in maps once AoE is stacked — level on slams and transition if you want the play style.
Too expensive, too gated, or actively bad as a league starter. Most of these are fine builds at high investment — none of them are good day-one picks.
Hidden ascendancy via the Abyss questline — level a Lich, then access the Abyssal Lich path in maps by defeating Kulemak. Top-tier Twister scaling thanks to Umbral Well projectile speed stacking and tree-wide bonuses that are extremely relevant to twister mechanics. Genuinely ridiculous at endgame; will be one of the strongest mapping builds in the league.
None of that is reachable during the leveling window by design — Abyssal Lich requires maps progression to unlock, the build wants specialised gear, and the faster-start ES recharge nerfs hit caster ascendancies hard early. Transition target, not a starter. League start Essence Drain Contagion with Bonestorm on a Lich, then move into Abyssal Lich Twisters once Kulemak is dead and the gear pile is online.
The leech overhaul wrecked Blood Mage's signature sustain — 40,000 damage cap per leech instance, all instant leech removed, and only one source of leech can be active per resource at a time. Vitality Siphon's buff from 10% to 20% Spell Leech doesn't compensate for the cap. ES recharge nerfs land on top of all that on a build with no native ES recovery — life-based casters have no defensive escape hatch in this patch.
Endgame strong once leech-scaling gear stacks the right affixes to overcome the cap, but reaching that pile requires playing something else first. Level on a Lich and respec into Blood Mage Cast on Crit Comet only after a multi-divine budget. Or skip Blood Mage entirely this league.
Stomping Ground is gone. Bleed needs base physical damage on spears, which goes against the fast-low-hit spear archetype. Tree investment in bleed chance and aggravation eats simple damage nodes that other spear builds get for free. At 100+ divines with accuracy stacking and Herald of Blood chaining, it's a screen-clearing endgame build. As a league starter, don't.
The single worst ascendancy investment in the game. Lowest pick rate on poe.ninja, no creators play it, no flask-mechanic solutions, no scaling path. Don't.
