If Path of Exile 2's best early game Witch build had a motto it'd be 'work smarter, not harder.' Well, either that or 'burn them all and let god sort them out.' The Witch is PoE 2's answer to Diablo's Necromancer, and a lot of your play will revolve around configuring your retinue of skeletal summons for maximum damage per second and letting them do the work for you, keeping yourself relatively far from the fray to protect your squishy, squishy body.
Early on, the Witch's passive skills revolve around buffing energy shield to make yourself a little less eminently murderable, as well as boosting the damage and survivability of your minions. I'm going to take you through the best starter build I've found for the Witch, and which potent mix of support gems, skill gems, and passive skills will help you most effectively reduce enemies to thin soup.
Path of Exile 2 Sorceress build: Making magic
Path of Exile 2 Monk build: Flow like water
Path of Exile 2 Warrior build: Shock and awe
Path of Exile 2 Mercenary build: Hail of bolts
The lesson that Path of Exile 2 has for its beginner Witches is the same one that's been learnt by dodgy property developers the world over: You can't go wrong with a bit of arson. I've had good luck in PoE 2's early game by drowning foes in skeletons—a mix of bog-standard Skeletal Warriors and the Bone Crawlers you can acquire through the Unearth skill—and setting them thoroughly on fire.
You could probably achieve a similar thing by swapping out the Skeletal Arsonists (fire-chuckers) for Skeletal Snipers (poison-chuckers) or Skeletal Frost Mages (ice-chuckers), but choosing fiery bone-guys stands you in good stead to select the Infernalist Ascendancy later on. If that sounds good to you, here are the skills and support gems you'll need:
When in doubt, throw bones at 'em. Unearth has quickly become my default attack for PoE 2's Witch—it flings out an AoE cone of bones that does meaningful damage and, most importantly, turns enemy corpses into helpful Bone Crawler minions. That comes in even more handy when you unlock the next skill.
Exactly what it says on the tin: Skeletal Arsonists are the game's bone minions who spend their time hanging back and chucking fireballs at your foes. All well and good, but the synergy with the Bone Crawlers you get by casting Unearth at enemies is what makes them excellent for a Witch starter build. Your Arsonists can command other minions to explode when they dip below a certain amount of HP, turning all your Bone Crawlers (and you can get a lot of them) into walking heat-seeking missiles.
It has the funniest skill name of any talent in the Witch's arsenal, and hurts a bunch to boot. Bonestorm takes a sec to charge up, but clears rooms of weaker mobs like nobody's business. Even better: Enemies who stay alive take a bunch of extra physical damage from the next attack, making them easy work for your summons. I've found the support gem—Minion Pact—dovetails nicely with the Bone Crawlers you get from Unearth, who are pretty much disposable anyway.
This one's a take-it-or-leave-it thing. If you're confident in your survivability, you might want to allocate the spirit you'd spend on keeping one or two Warriors summoned to Arsonists instead, but I found it handy to have a couple of the Witch's most basic summons around. These are great at distracting enemies and soaking up hits, particularly in the more hectic areas of the early game.
Alternatively, you could always keep a few Warriors available by equipping a sceptre in one of your weapon slots, which leaves your spirit available to more damaging minions while still keeping some summons to act as a buffer between you and your foes.
This is the first persistent buff I unlocked and I've not regretted it, especially in tougher boss fights. Like I said up top, the Witch is squishy, which means you'll rely a lot on your energy shield and evasion (plus your minions) to avoid damage. Grim Feast makes it so that anything that dies near you has a chance to drop a Grim Remnant—basically an instant charge for your energy shield—which has saved my bacon more than a few times.
On the other hand, if you're very confident in your ability to stay alive, you might want to beeline for Raging Spirits instead, which synergises nicely with all your fire abilities, both the ones you have now and the ones you'll get as you ascend to Infernalist.
Here are the stats you'll want to focus on to turn your Witch into a murder machine:
Ironically, it's a no-brainer: Intelligence will bump up your mana, letting you cast more spells and do more horrible, damaging things to your enemies. It'll also let you wear equipment that makes you even more of a monster on the battlefield. Dexterity ranks second because, well, it's always a decent idea to improve your accuracy, while Strength will mostly only come in handy for increasing your HP (and you're likely to focus on evasion and your energy shield when it comes to avoiding damage).
A good Witch hangs back and lets her minions do the work, and when she does get pulled into the fray, she relies on her energy shield and evasion to tank the blows while her movement speed gets her out of there ASAP. That's why spirit—which is what dictates how many summons you can have—is number one with a bullet, while your tank-y stats and speediness come in just below. Meanwhile, you'll need a high maximum mana to fling out all your Unearths, curses, and so on, with your life stats coming in last.
Because we're focusing on Skeletal Arsonists and detonating our Bone Crawlers, fire damage is priority number one for our Witch starter build. Coming in at second is pure physical damage—that's what your Unearth and other bone skills deal. Last, the bone construct limit on your Unearth summons is always worth pumping up when you can. More Bone Crawlers means more little guys to distract enemies, and more walking bombs for your Arsonists to detonate.
The Witch's early passive skills focus on her mana (and mana regen), energy shield, and minion damage. I recommend prioritising the last two over that first one, though you'll unlock a pretty easy way to respec early if you decide to go a different way with it.
Here are the passive skills I recommend taking as soon as possible for your Witch:
This gives you a healthy boost to your minions' damage output, your own durability, and even makes the spells you fling around yourself a little speedier and more effective.
Sceptres, sceptres, sceptres. In my early game experience of Path of Exile 2, my Witch cycled through increasingly fancy sceptres like a supermodel cycles through outfits. Not only will a good Rattling Sceptre dole out a bunch of summons for zero spirit cost, they can also grant modifiers like +1 to all the rest of your minion skills, while buffing your summons with more accuracy, armour, or what-have-you.
In terms of other gear, my advice is to prioritise stuff that buffs your energy shield and evasion, as those are your prime Witchy defensive stats. Equipment like the Crown of Thorns, should you find it, is a great early-game boost to your survivability.
