Ladies, gentlemen, and exiles of all ages, last week we had a look at all of the classes in the game from a more holistic standpoint, talking about and ranking them based on their positions in the race to level 100, as well as

anything that I think affects their standing outside of that, too, of course. And especially with patch 0.1.0e happening a couple of days ago, and with people now up in level 98, climbing ever closer towards the actual cap, I thought

it'd be fun to once again have a bit of a discussion and rank the classes based not only on these latter rankings in

general, but again considering any changes to the top builds or their general build philosophies between their play styles, too. For each ascendancy, I'll

generally be talking about their strengths and their weaknesses, the synergy potential that makes them unique from each of the other ascendancies, and

I'll be showing a standout player and build used by the class while doing so. So they'll have their names on screen, so

if you are more interested in their specific setup, feel free to check them out afterwards. At the very bottom of the

rankings, then we've got Acolyte of Chayula. At this point, I want to stress

that these are all being ranked against each other as ascendancies, and as of this moment, after some recent fixes and

changes, none of the ascendancies are incapable of doing late endgame content. But there's always a scale of comfort and ease; there's always an order between them. And from everything I've seen, the Acolyte of Chayula ascendancy for

the Monk just sort of isn't really cutting it comparatively. Going by pure ladder rankings, it's got the lowest top

ranking of any ascendancy; top player down at 2011th. And while it's not inherently lacking, it just doesn't have

Great, specific synergies you can sort of lean into chaos damage with it, but there are better ways to do that, either

through, like, poisons with Pathfinder or through some Witch variations. And so most people just go with the far

more generic Flames of Chul boosting nodes with this, which, just by the way it works, means that it gives you buffs that

pretty much equally affect the majority of things you could do with it; not really leaning into any particular style of

build, not really giving you a specific synergy or a specifically unique way of building. And so it sort of just fits a

jack-of-all-trades role where you can build a lot of things around it. And there is another ascendancy that does

that in a much, much stronger way. Accolade of Shula isn't necessarily bad in comparison to the way that the game's

difficult; it just doesn't have much going for it that you couldn't quite find a way to do better with another

ascendancy at the moment, which is why it is where it is, after that in 11th place.

We have Blood Mage for the Witch, which actually has been getting a bit stronger the past few days after struggling to

find its place prior to this. By later rankings for leveling and XP gain, the highest Blood Mage is in 105th place,

just barely triple digits. And the reason is a lot of the things that it can do, others can do better; however, it

does have slightly more of a niche than Chula Monk does, as there are ascendancy nodes that boost crit damage and crit

chance and synergize around crits in general, as well. It has some unique passive tree nodes that boost minions

that this ascendancy shares with the Hierophant, because it's the other specialization for the Witch, which has

The nodes, and no other class, gets those as they are minion nodes for others. They're just pure spell nodes, and so you

just have a sort of very tight niche for the class, focusing on crits and using minions, but not focusing entirely around

minions. Because once you start doing that, the Infernal and honestly, even Juggernaut Legionnaire actually get better

at it long-term in endgame scaling too. But where I've seen Blood Mage start to excel is boss damage through Detonate

Dead builds, exploding your own Skeletal Brute for hefty damage. And then you just get to collect all the life remnants and

little Grim Feast remnants for more energy shield as well. And it seems to be pretty effective, honestly. Moving on to

10th, then we've got the Chronomancer on the XP ladder. Their top player is now down to 94th place after being up in the

20s the last time that we talked about this. Part of it is seemingly due to the nerfs to chain-freezing enemies that

happened within the recent patch. Otherwise, it could just be that the player has stopped playing quite as

frequent. But to be clear, the ascendancy is in a perfectly acceptable, but not crazy powerful, state right now. It's not

really bad by any means. There are multiple different kinds of builds that are doing quite well for it, whether it

be taking advantage of the ability to reset cooldowns with high cooldown abilities that are very strong as their

main focus, or just a focus on the ability to jump back in time and get your resources back so you can use

really hefty mana-costing builds too. There are a couple of niches available to this ascendancy that make it unique

from the others. It just so happens that none of them are particularly brokenly strong at this immediate moment. Then up

In ninth place, we have the Pathfinder ascendency. Pathfinder, as an ascendency, has one main focus above all else, and it

is poison. You can make enemies spread poisons that are applied to them when they die. You can get the ability to

double the amount of poisons you can apply to an enemy. You really are just fully built to be able to make poison

the main focus of your gameplay. Pathfinders do it, and they do it very well. Currently, the top Pathfinder is

39th in the overall ladder rankings, and they were 14th the last time we checked in on the race to level 100. This

change in its stature is likely mostly due to patch 0.1.0e, which happened recently, which nerfed the

damage of Fine Arrow's poisoning effect pretty significantly. This was a pretty big hit for this specialization, of course, being the poison synergy

ascendency. It took advantage of the strongest methods of using poison damage in the game, and clearly the developers

thought that it was just a little bit too effective at poison. The ascendency is still good for sure, even past this,

but I've got a place where it is because its placement dropping on the ladder is indicative of its main limitation, in my

opinion, which is that Pathfinder will pretty much always just be as strong as poison is as a concept. It's the niche

that makes it what it is, and there's nothing else it synergizes particularly well with compared to the other

ascendencies, at least until someone comes up with some crazy flask bombing build that is. But I haven't seen that

pop up at least quite yet. Up in eighth, then we have the Witch Hunter, the top player on the ladder being in 47th place,

so a worse position than Pathfinder. But as I was just talking about, the Pathfinder is on much more of a downward

sort of curve. Witch Hunter has also been on a slight downward curve, but a much less steep one, and so in all likelihood

I expect this to overtake and pass the Pathfinder. The main reason is that Witch Hunter is generally just sort of

very strong. Crossbow skills in general are in a good place, grenades are powerful, and Witch Hunter does have a

lot of just general power from a combination in the Ascendancy nodes of just really good group clearing, boosting

through Zealous Inquisition, which gives a 10% chance for enemies to explode when they die and do 100% of their maximum

life as damage to enemies around them. They can also get both Calling Strike to instantly kill low-health enemies, or

Devastating Strike to have a chance to just cleave off the top 30% of any enemy's

health bar, too. This is especially good for the tankier bosses that exist, too, and with that in combination with

Calling Strike, you really only have to deal with the middle section of most enemies' health bars. And then if you

choose to instead work in a bit more safety, the high-end build can work in Sorcery Ward without too much of a hit

to their overall physical survivability while gaining quite a bit of elemental defense. After that, we have our seventh

place Ascendancy, which is the Warbringer. This one has been impressive to me in its own way since release. 22nd currently

on the leaderboards, which is a step up from before, and it's occupying a very specific space based around just

absolutely bombing through enemy armor as a way of destroying everything on the screen, and nothing does it better than

Warbringer does, thanks to its Ascendancy nodes that not only make it easier to break armor just with your hits in

Generally, but you can also apply armor break. Below Zero armor puts enemies into negative armor, and you can use that to blow things up. Pair that with a bunch of armor break passives on the tree, use skills like

Stampede to hit everything on the screen and watch the armor explosions. Support the gem with Herald of Ash and Overkill

explosions; entire packs with a single button press. This combo was nerfed in the recent patch for lower-level

characters. They made it so the explosions from armor explosion can't trigger armor explosion, which was the main way to trigger

the domino effect before. But with proper endgame gear and the rest of your skill tree worked out, it still works

just fine in the endgame and can do even Tier 15 maps.  Survivability has actually gone up a ton

recently. For the ascendancy, a really fun combo uses the Swen unique shield, which

gives you lucky block chance. If you have 40% block chance and the attack gets through, you then get to

roll 40% block chance a second time—a second shot at blocking every time an enemy attacks you. If it fails again, the

attack hits you, but it gives you a second shot.  Even though the shield

itself only has a 26% base block chance, which is really low, you completely remove that restriction with

an ascendancy node unique to Warbringer that makes any shield have a 40% base chance to block, regardless of the

shield's actual values. Then you have the Turtle Charm ascendancy node, which also blocks damage from all hits

even with the shield not raised, with a bit less block chance. This lets you use very high-end gear.

with something like a 60% block chance that also gets a second chance to roll if it fails the first time, while still

wielding a two-handed mace in your main hand due to the Giant's blood notable passive. And even if power-wise it's down

in seventh place, I just find this to be a very fascinating class as far as the synergies within. Next up, in sixth place,

then we have the Infernal, with the top player being in 10th place on the ladder right now. So we're getting up to the

point where these ascendancies have just reached obscenely faster levels of speed and power, at least as far as getting

through large amounts of mobbing through actual maps. The simple reason is that the things that they

synergize with in particular are either related to skills that are tuned very strongly right now to begin with, OR they

are just incredibly strong at scaling damage as gear improves. Further, for Infernal, this is from a combination of

an ascendency node that lets you gain one maximum spirit for every 25 maximum life that you have, as well as one that

lets you gain maximum energy shield for every eight maximum life that you have. This means maximum life, which is one of

the best survivability-increasing modifiers you can get on endgame gear, to scale upwards with. Anyways, also boosts

your damage output by giving you more Spirit on an ascendency that focuses around using minions, anyways. And then

you gain a ton of energy shield as a bonus, anyways, for even more survivability. And that's on top of the

Path of Exile 2 - New Best Most GAME BREAKING Ascendancy - Class & Build Power Ranking T15 Guide!

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