Path of Exile - Top 5 Best League Starter Builds For Lake Of Kalandra (poe 3. 19)
Intro
hey folks, this is Riker with a Path of Exile article on the best starter builds for the upcoming expansion, Lake of Calandra. I coordinated with Path of Exile expert Palceron, from the max role team, and Maxwell, who just launched its Path of Exile branch, to come up with a list of five excellent builds to start the new league with.
These are builds that will not require you to get a bunch of lucky drops or do a ton of trading to get the right gear. These are builds that will scale well with the content. They'll get you easily through the campaign and well into the endgame content. These guides were created by a variety of great Path of Exile content creators, many of whom are now on the Maxwell team.
We'll also make a quick note here that we're generally not attributing ownership of any of these buildings to any single individual. There are a lot of different versions of different builds that have been modified and re-emerged over the years. We're just forwarding you to people who have made guides on these builds, so without further ado, let's dive into our top five.
Ea ballista
First, we'll start with a build that's familiar to our last league starter article, the explosive. With this build, you lay down a bunch of ballista turrets. Those turrets shoot volleys of arrows at enemies and then, after a dramatic pause while the fuse burns down, those arrows explode, and the more arrows you have sticking out of an enemy, the bigger the damage and radius of the explosion.
But that's not even the best part. The best part is the ignite proliferation mechanic, which means that even when an enemy dies, its corpse on the ground will still be on fire, and then other enemies walking over those burning corpses will also catch fire. Then you take the elementalist ascendancy, which turbo charges your elemental damage and the size of your explosions and gives you a protective shield against incoming elemental damage.
This build is very easy to gear, making it a painless league starter thanks to proliferation. It can easily clear all enemies on screen. The play is also really safe because you just lay down your ballistas and then duck for cover, and while yes, this build's single target damage did get nerfed with this patch, it now deals 15 to 20 percent less single target damage.
The nerf doesn't matter. This build still deals a ton of single target damage. As great as this build is, it's not without its downsides. First off, it's quite dependent on your life flask for health recovery. Also, there are some easy mistakes you can make with this build.
Boneshatter
On to build number two, the bone and shatter slayer. This build revolves around the bone shatter skill, which is a melee attack that hits enemies so hard that some of that damage splashes back onto you, and if you stun an enemy with this attack, a damaging pulse will shoot out, damaging enemies in an area around you.
To explain the mechanics a bit, when you hit an enemy with bone shatter, you're going to gain a stack of trauma. Every stack of trauma you have gives you a small damage buff, but you also take physical damage for every trauma stack you have. Because of this, you want to focus on things that reduce the amount of physical damage that you take.
Like armor, life recovery is also important to counteract the damage you're bringing upon yourself. Bone chatter is a fast, visceral, and exciting play style. You just run around with your raging bone shatter and as long as you can keep it up, you can go all night. You start off by picking the duelist, which is a hybrid strength and dexterity class that's great at both dealing damage and avoiding damage.
Then you take the Slayer Ascendancy, a class that zeroes in on the offense side of things while also giving you access to a lot of life leeches. In fact, you gain the ability to life leech beyond your max life, which means your leeching continues. Even after you stop attacking enemies, the bone chatter continues.
Slayer is a great build for running maps and is arguably the best build for melee players. On the downside, this build isn't great against bosses. You can tank through the boss fights; you won't die, but it's going to take a while to whittle down the bosses.
Righteous fire
Since we're on the topic of builds that hurt ourselves, we have this build that's based on righteous fire, which is a spell that engulfs you in fire that burns nearby enemies and you, too. You're on fire. That's just how fire works; the damage Righteous fire deals scales with your life and energy shield.
The more you have, the more damage you deal. And while you're under the effects of righteous fire, your spell damage is greatly increased now because you're on fire and burning yourself constantly. In order to survive with this build, you want to stack a ton of life regeneration as well as maximum fire resistance.
Righteous fire is great for dealing with groups of enemies, but it is weak against single targets, which is why you also want to work a fire trap into the build. A fire trap makes you throw a fire, which explodes and leaves a burning patch on the ground that will hurt enemies that walk through it.
You start by taking the Templar class, which is a hybrid of strength and intelligence. It is a hybrid class of warrior spellcaster. It's kind of like Path of Exile's version of a cleric. Then you take the Inquisitor ascendancy class, which focuses on enhancing elemental damage, perfect for buffing our fire damage.
This build is something of a fan favorite among people. I love it. It's amazing at running maps. It's also great at staying alive thanks to all the defenses and life regeneration you're stacking now. As for downsides, this is another build that's not great against single targets until you get good gear.
Killing bosses will take a while, but again, you'll have the defenses to survive the fight in general. This build's itemization is a little more finicky than most starter builds, but as long as you grab the affixes that are recommended, you should be fine. The creator of the building pox is arguably the world's expert on righteous fire.
He's been doing righteous fire since, basically forever. He's made multiple guides. He even runs an actual wiki on the skill that should answer any questions about the skill mechanics that you could possibly have.
Poisonous concoction
Pathfinder, which returns from last league's league starter article that we made and is the league starter that I ran with last league. What's really interesting about the poisonous concoction skill is that you can't have a weapon equipped at all, so that's one itemization slot you don't have to worry about.
