Witch - ★🩸 Dark Pact Occultist 🩸★ - Forum - Path of Exile (2024)

Dissolution of the Flesh - Mandatory for this build.

Forbidden Flesh and Forbidden Flame (with the Forbidden Power ascendancy). This is very cheap and will help you a lot for the crit cap and additional AoE.

Militant Faith with Dominus (Inner Conviction) - a lot of damage boost. Try to take one with bonus to AoE damage and Resistances. We put this in the socket right above the Witch starting point.

Rational Doctrine - Relatively expensive and not mandatory but an awesome way to boost your damage.

We need two Large: A Chaos base with 8 points. Has to have: Wicked Pall, Touch of Cruelty and Unholy Grace.

We will have a place for 3 Rare jewels. We rely on them mainly for boosting Life and resistances. You can look for additional Crit chance and Crit multiplier.

There are two main things for damage scaling: Life and Criticals. We aim to stack up as much Life as possible through gear and jewels. Equally important is to get your critical chance to the maximum and stack up multiplier. Overall DPS is between 5 million and 20 million on pinnacle bosses based on gear investment and your choice of curses.

The defense is based mainly on two things: Damage and Petrified Blood.

-As it is said - the best defense is our offense. This may make you feel uncomfortable but it's true and after some time playing the build, you will see for yourself.

-Petrified Blood, socketed into the Essence Worm ring, is our other line of defense. Speaking for itself, it provides a lot of damage absorption. Very important thing to know is that the Life lost over time from this skill is completely overhealed by the Life Recharge we have from the Eternal Youth Keystone. You can read the skill tooltip until you understand how it works. Anomalous quality recommended.

It is important that this part is understood by the player. Even if you directly copy the build, it is recommended to know how it works.
Dissolution of the Flesh makes so that the game won't consider your character taking Damage and the Life will be Reserved instead of Lost. This works perfectly with the Recharge mechanic and Petrified Blood. Petrified Blood will absorb some of the damage taken below 50% Life and then your Recharge will overheal the degen part from Petrified Blood. Life Recharge will not be paused from the degen effect of Petrified Blood.
The reservation from Dissolution of the Flesh disappears after 2 seconds of not taking any damage. You may somehow try to get Evasion on the gear even though it won't be much but will increase the chance for you not getting hit within 2 seconds until the Life Recharge starts.
This whole thing may feel weird but unlike my previous build on the Blood Sacrament, there's no danger to be suddenly killed within the cast time of the spell simply because you're not reserving nearly all your Life to cast it - you're just sacrificing some. Note that the sacrifice won't trigger Life reservation since it's not considered damage.
If you die, it's simply because you took too much damage. You just need to keep an eye of how much life you reserve by taking damage from monsters. It takes practice to feel the monsters around your character so that you don't spam at just any moment but rather when you have a clean shot. Skill has a lot of damage potential so continuous spam for mapping is unnecessary and not recommended.

We're using 5 unique gear pieces:

-Two Void Batteries. This is mandatory for nearly all builds that use Power charges. It's perfect for our build. It's also cheap.

-The Skin of the Lords with the Blood Magic keystone is a great way of boosting the base damage of the spell since it boots its level. Of course socketing Empower is a must.

-Essence Worm is another mandatory part of our gear. It is the perfect place to put your Petrified Blood skill.

-Crown of the Tyrant gives our character another big chunk of up to 175 Life, and weakening nearby enemies with additional -10 to their resistances. It also gives a slight bonus of added damage.

-Double Impresence with Despair and Punishment is best in slot.

Rare items are planned to boost our Life and help with resistances.

Dark Pact is a skill preferred by few people due to its mechanics and interactions. Most of the builds with it are using Skeletons for safer encounters. But using skeletons is a bit boring and requires at least two casts if you are to eventually clear your screen. This bothered me too much and I went around the self-cast version.
The skills does a mediocre base damage + additional damage based on the Life of the 'sacrificed' unit - whether that's your skeleton or your character. If using skeletons, it would chain so that it explodes from several skeleton units. The good thing about the self-cast is that your hits will do a lot more damage if you're using your own Life. Further increasing the gem level with the unique armour proved a very good idea.

Helmet: Currently empty. You can put any gem there. Must be a white socket so that you can benefit from the added Chaos damage.

Gloves and Boots: We socket our Curses, making them auras. Feel free to use Empower since it won't increase the Reservation - it's set to 0 because of the amulet. We only need one 4L for the Curse auras so unless you find Gloves with # to level of socketed AoE/Aura gems, etc, it won't matter where you put the Curse auras...

Armour: We put our Dark Pact setup here. It's a crit build so we use both crit gems for chance and multiplier, along with the Empower, Void Manipulation and Power Charge on crit. The Power Charge on crit can be exchanged for an Awakened Added Chaos damage - it will be a great damage boost but only if you find another good way of generating power charges. Please note that the ascendancy (which we obtain from the Forbidden Jewels) Forbidden Power uses mana to generate power charges and we spend 0 mana since we don't use and don't have any.

Additional links:
-You can put one or two defensive setups in the rest of the items...
For example Frost Wall + CWDT or change the Steelskin with Enduring Cry and then use the defense setup of CWDT + a guard skill (Immortal Call or Steelskin);
-Vaal Righteous Fire supported by Increased duration for some additional Spell damage on burst for bosses. Definitely not mandatory but it will help with around 20% more dmg for approximately 7 seconds on use.

-Blood Magic: Big boost to our Life. We acquire this from the Skin of the Lords. Generally, it does not matter if it makes our skills reserve Life instead of Mana since the only thing we have with reservation is socketed in the Essence Worm;

-Iron Will: Provides additional Spell damage;

-Pain Attunement: Petrified blood makes sure that we don't Recharge more than 50% Life so we benefit from this keystone all the time;

-Eternal Youth: This keystone works in great synergy with the Dissolution of the Flesh jewel.

-Inner Conviction: We get this through the Militant Faith jewel on the Hex Master keystone.

+50 to maximum Life

+25% crit multiplier against Unique enemies

+3 to level of all Critical support gems

10% more damage to enemies that have Energy shield

The easiest way to level with this build is with Blight, Soulrend, Bane.
After completing the campaign you can adjust your gear to make it work. The skill allows you to play efficiently at lower levels or you can play it on skeletons if you find it satisfying enough.

Nothing special - just running around spamming the skill. Your best friend is doing damage. Your Profane Bloom will help a lot with the clearing. Level up to get more and more passives on the tree, as well as benefit from all the dmg/defense penalties for monsters.

Baran T16:

Mapping:

https://i.imgur.com/gr6nIJh.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/wdcyciP.png

PoB: https://pobb.in/AsAE3OWX2dCi (Full tree at lvl 100)