Week One Meta Builds Analysis: Popular Path of Exile 3.25 Builds

The Lightning Strike Slayer is the top meta build in the Settlers League, surpassing others due to its extreme power and versatility.

### Path of Exile: Settlers League Week 1 Meta Builds Overview
* ⚔️  Lightning Strike Slayer emerges as the **top meta build**, with **49% of Lightning Strike users** choosing the Slayer ascendancy due to its **powerful buffs and charge stacking capabilities**.
* ⚡️  Archmage Hierophant remains a popular choice, despite some unique item price spikes affecting certain builds. The Ice Nova version from Zizaran is **recommended for starting out in the league**.
* 🏹  Deadeye Elemental Hit builds have decreased in popularity, but the Ullr's Bow Deadeye build is highlighted as a **strong option for efficient farming**.
* 🩸  Lacerate Gladiator and Hexblast builds are mentioned as popular choices, but may face **scaling limitations** compared to other top builds.
* ❄️  Frost Blades Raider is still a solid choice, but **Lightning Strike Slayer is considered more powerful for endgame content**.
* 💥  Power Siphon Mines is a unique and powerful build, but can feel clunky and is recommended for **experienced players** or those not focusing on **high-end content**.
* 📈  The economy changes in the Settlers League have impacted the availability and price of certain unique items, affecting **build viability and popularity**.
* 🛡️  Overall, the Lightning Strike Slayer build is recommended as the **top choice** for players looking for a **strong and versatile build** in the early weeks of the league.

all right, boys. So it's been about one week since the Settlers League has launched, and it's been a pretty overwhelming success. Most people are happy, besides one little issue with some tornadoes that seem to be a little bit overpowered. Most things have gone pretty well. The new economy stuff is really cool with the automatic trading and such. All of the new changes to melee have seemingly been received pretty well, although there is one particular ascendancy that we'll talk about here in a moment that seems to be doing better than others. Typically, about a week into the league, I like making this video where we kind of go over how all of the different builds worked, what ended up being popular, and if anything new kind of popped up. If these kinds of videos help you out, make sure to give them a like. And if you want to see more content similar to this, make sure to subscribe, hit that notification bell, stay updated with all the latest videos. Without further ado, let's talk about the week one meta builds. One thing to note

is that the biggest takeaway here? And this is kind of what I was saying right from the jump. Is that lightning strike is just probably the meta skill for this league for right now, until we get closer to about maybe 2 or 3 weeks into the league, and we start seeing some like second really powerful builds. When it comes to, if you had to choose one, it's probably lightning strike. However, the version that ended up being popular is the Slayer, and this isn't really a super big surprise to me. Slayer is just extremely powerful. Now, if we go here and we do look at lightning strike on this list here, you'll see that it's about 49% Slayer. The whole idea here is that Slayer just got an extremely large buff with one, all of the melee changes, and two, being able to inherently stack frenzy and endurance charges at the same time, and how powerful the new endurance charges are really just kind of set this ascendancy apart from everyone else realistically. Warden was still fine and the way

that I would go about is I do think that the Slayer is best. It does have more access to defenses, and you can get similar damage. You can push the damage extremely high. You can still use tentures on Slayer; it's perfectly fine. But the warden does have some pretty interesting options for damage as well as for utility type stuff, especially with like Elemental berserk and things like that. So as I said, this build ended up being super popular, and there are a couple versions that I've linked in the document. Here we have a Slayer version from FB gun. These are all all these videos are just going to be like the most recent videos of that version. This is a very high-end version of it. Slayers tend to go a little bit more on the high-end version. There's other povs available on this channel. The warden version from paleron that I linked in my previous document. This is the most up-to-date video. And then one video that I did see, which was kind of like an experimental dorani PhD shield from sebk.

this is the guy who made the instak trickster version of kinetic BTA fragmentation last league, and realistically, this was kind of a setup that me and the boys over on Discord were kind of talking a little bit about right before the league started. I figured that there would be some kind of dorani setup using the PHD Shield pop up at some point. It's interesting, but I do think this is one of those, like, if you're good, you can try to mess around with it. Most people should probably just play either the Slayer from FB gun or the warden from palston. Now, next on this list, we've got the Ark Mage hofan 133% ended up being in the hofan here very, very popular, and, yeah, I mean, I'm not surprised here realistically. Um, I kind of knew that this was going to be the case. Arch Mage was extremely powerful last League. That's why I suggested it for most people this league, and although there were one or two problems that I

kind of like called out that might be an issue. They were a little bit more of an issue than even I thought. One big change that happened this league, um, is that group magic finding got heavily nerfed and realistically isn't worth it anymore. So the price of any popular but rare uniques that just dropped from generic content like generic Maps kind of skyrocketed quite a bit, getting upwards of 15, 20, 30 divines at some point. This did affect archage builds because of its foible. However, you don't really need that item. Everything else, mostly okay. There were some like jewels that had some problems, but a lot of builds got hit really hard with these random insanely expensive uniques. And this isn't unique to Arc Mage. Pretty much all of the builds that used any kind of map drop uniques got hit with this a little bit. If you're starting up an arc Mage at this point in the league, you can just jump straight into the auto ice Nova version from zizaran. I know a couple of

people said this isn't Zarin's build, and I get what you're trying to say. It's basically like a hybrid of the one from Gatha from last league, as well as the one from Palon on last league. It's not really exactly the same as either one of those. Zizin did put a lot of work into the guide itself. I think it was Zarin and Zy. So I know a lot of people are like it's not Zarin's build. Listen, people don't really own builds anymore, okay? Zizin put out a PO. It's kind of his own take on it that he played himself in the league you're watching his video. And the last document I did put in this version from Uberdan, which is a ball lightning of orbiting. I think that this is not as good as the Ice Nova version for sure, especially if you're a softcore player. But Dan always puts together some really crazy powerful builds. He is a master crafter though, so do keep in mind that if you look at

Dan's Po and try to get the same gear that he's got. Good luck. He also plays hardcore so if that interests you then go for it. Either of these are perfectly fine. And I do want to note that uh there is a small possibility I haven't seen anything about this yet that a normal version of ball lighting arcage might pop up again at some point. This is mainly because of the colandra Mist existing as well as projectile like reduced projectile speed being avail ailable on amulets. There might be something like this so if you're interested in that kind of build keep an eye out for it. Someone will probably put something together or you can find something on Poe ninja. That's pretty much it for Arc Mage. Next let's talk about bows. Now bows did not end up as popular as they were before. If we go here to Dead Eye and we look at Elemental hit of the spectrum it's about 40%. You've got some people using tornado shot as well and some people using lightning Arrow so most dead eyes are

still playing a bow, but Dead Eye only ended up about 7% way lower than it's pretty much ever been in quite some time. However, I would kind of say that potentially at the like middle tier of Dead Eyes, that Dead Eye build characters got significantly stronger from last League. Now, I know that there were some Nerfs that went through, but um, the build that I'm personally playing is just the version that is using ulas. There is a PO that I'll talk about in a moment that's linked from FB gun. The whole idea is that you're using a bunch of uniques on this build, so it kind of makes sense to use ulas. This was something that I was thinking about a little bit, and Fub gun already, of course, had a PO put together with the entire idea done. So, the idea is that you use all these uniques that have no life on them, and then you craft just a couple pieces of gear that you make sure it has no life modifiers on it, and you can get like

4600 is life, as well as all of the benefits of the upgraded taming which is super duper powerful now. The fledgling which does a ton of damage, it causes you to have far shot which is 60% more damage at range, which is also going to be stacking with the normal dead eye far shot which is a 30% more damage range, so overall kind of just crazy that it's even more powerful than it was before. But it is what it is now. As I said, even though this wasn't as popular, probably in my opinion, this is still a better generic farming build than something like lightning strike. Lightning strike is new, it's popular, it's fun, it's different, so if that's what you're looking for, I suggest you probably just go ahead and play lightning strike. But if you're just looking for efficiency and you just want something that really, really just has a bunch of good stuff going for it, the bow dead eye is still kind of up there now.

of course, I have linked fub gun's build sheet here because he doesn't really have a video for the Dead Eye because he's not playing it um so make sure to give him a sub over on YouTube. Don't just go to a sheet and don't do anything else. Now for the next couple of builds we're going to be talking about these are builds that are popular. These are builds that are good but coming from my personal perspective these are ones that either have problems or ran into issues in the early League or maybe are not performing as well as some other builds are. And I did want to mention one or two builds that I didn't talk about in the previous video because I didn't think it would be a good idea for people to play them but at this point if you're looking for a second build it might be something worth looking into. Now first one on that list is going to be lerate so a lot of people love lerate. This is one of those more beloved skills of all time. However

I have never really understood why people like lacerate. I think it feels awful to play. Doesn't matter how much attack speed you get, doesn't matter pretty much any of that. I've always felt that the lacerate skill in general has felt really, really bad to play. Now this ended up being super popular. If you look at Gladiator at 133% here, uh, 51% of the people playing Gladiator playing lacerate. There's some people playing special Shield throw and then a whole bunch of other just like nothing percentages, right? 51% of people playing lacerate on Gladiator. So obviously it's very powerful. As we move into week two and further on and further on. Crafting some of the higher end pieces of gear for lacerate Gladiator will become easier as those materials become more available. So it should be easier. However, I feel like if you're playing lacerate Gladiator, it might be a good idea to start thinking about transitioning into some kind of Slayer like lightning strike or something like that. It would

probably serve you a little bit better just because that build ended up being so powerful, and it has so much room to scale. Whereas a bleed build kind of hits its peak at around 18 to 20 million DPS, even with a ton of gear invested into it. It can get very tanky, don't get me wrong, but you could be doing 50, 60, 70, 80 million DPS probably and still be tanky, if not tankier, on a Slayer. So, in my opinion, last rate super strong build, a lot of people like it. I personally think it feels terrible to play, so that's my feel on it. There is, of course, a gladiator that is available as Zarin and it's linked here. Next on the list is going to be hex blast. So, this was something that I said could be an issue with hex blast. A lot of people were like, Oh, the helmet's not going to be that expensive, it won't be that bad. And to all of those people that said that, I felt that it was going to be bad and it

did end up being bad, so realistically now on August 1st, which is today, this helmet is roughly 13 Divine or 2,000 chaos orbs. It peaked pretty hard on day 2ish, and then it went down a little bit, and it's coming back up. The helmet's expensive, you can't really get around it. It's more powerful than it was before, and if you want a very good Sanctum SL, like really powerful tier 17 farmer, I mean, this is still one of the best builds that exists for that. But just keep in mind, like, it's not, it's not a free build. You can do other low versions of it, and Ventu has put versions of that in there. But as I said in my previous document, uh, this item is probably going to be super expensive, and it did end up being very expensive. So make sure you've got some currency. And of course, the version by Venta is linked here. So next on the list, we've got Frost Blades of Catabasis. This was the Rue build, and

while I do think that the build is still very good, there's absolutely nothing wrong with this build. Uh, it just honestly didn't end up being as good as lightning strike. I kind of expected this, but um, even on a player, lightning strike just kind of ends up being better. Now, this build, this Frost Blades of catabasis build, is still extremely powerful, uses very, very little gear for its strength, and can scale extremely well. But at the end of the day, if you're just going to be pumping money into it, it really does feel like you should just go with a lightning strike-based Slayer if you're looking for power. But I would say that if you're just looking for something different and you still want to play a Slayer, it's still a very good build. There isn't anything wrong with it, and R has been keeping it updated, but lightning strike is just going to end up being a little bit better. So, that's my suggestion, that you play it if you're just looking for raw power, Ruse build.

sheet is linked here. He does stream on Twitch as well, but he doesn't have a YouTube channel, so I always just link his build sheet right here. So, if you're interested in the Frostblades build, make sure to check it out in the build sheet. Now, last but not least, we have this Power Siphon Locus Mines. This build is a little bit strange. It uses a very kind of weird setup. The fact that Power Siphon Auto-targets enemies around you, and you kind of use Locus Mines to abuse that to get an autotargeting wand ability that typically suffers from not really being able to scale attack speed on it very well, turning it into a mine, which makes it scale extremely well, but it is a little bit clunky. One of the big problems with this build is that it kind of only works at medium range. It doesn't work very close, and it doesn't work very far. And a lot of the time, one of the most powerful positions to be in in PoE is either right up in the boss's face or

very far away. So, if you're a good player, I think that this build is perfectly fine. If you aren't looking to do like super duper high-end content, I think this build is fine, but it does feel a little clunky sometimes. And that's why it didn't go on my top five list before. Now, Jung has put out a recent video that has a bunch of high-end versions of this build. So, if you're interested in something kind of weird and quirky and a little bit different, make sure to check this out. It's a very good build. There's nothing wrong with it, just a little bit clunky. At the end of the day, as always, the notes for this video will be down in the description below. So, remember boys, if you enjoy this content, give this video a like, subscribe to YouTube channel, hit that notification Bell to stay up to date with all the latest videos, and stay safe out there in Ray class. And I'll see you guys in the next video. [Music]

The BEST Builds of Week 1 in Path of Exile Settlers League

Big Ducks

The Settlers League has been mostly successful in its first week, with the exception of some overpowered tornadoes.

Lightning Strike has emerged as the dominant meta skill, particularly with the Slayer ascendancy, which has been greatly boosted by the recent melee changes.

The Warden ascendancy also offers interesting options but has been overshadowed by the popularity of the Slayer in the week one meta builds.

The Kinetic Blast Totem Assassin build was a pre-planned setup discussed in Discord before the league started, offering an alternative to the popular Slayer and Warden builds.

The Arc Mage Hierophant build remained highly popular, despite the heavy nerf to group magic finding, causing a significant increase in the prices of rare uniques.

The Auto Ice Nova version by Zizaran emerged as a recommended choice for players starting an Arc Mage build in the current league, while Uberdan's Ball Lightning Orb build was also highlighted, though considered less powerful than the Ice Nova version, especially for softcore players.

The Arc Mage build may see a revival with the potential appearance of a normal version of Ball Lightning in the future, thanks to the existence of Colandra Mist and the availability of reduced projectile speed on amulets.

While bows have become less popular overall, the Dead Eye build has become significantly stronger in the middle tier, especially when using unique items with no life modifiers to achieve high damage and benefits from the upgraded Taming.

Despite being less popular, the bow Dead Eye build is still considered a better option for generic farming, while the new and popular Lightning Strike build offers a fun and different experience for players seeking that.

Fub Gun's Dead Eye build lacks a video guide, making it difficult for players to follow.

The Lacerate Gladiator build, despite its popularity, is criticized for its poor playing experience and limited scalability, leading to a recommendation to transition to a Slayer build.

The Hex Blast build is highlighted as problematic, with the cost of the required helmet being a cause for concern, contrary to some people's beliefs.

The Current Status of Sanctum SL Helmet and Frost Blades of Catabasis Build

The Sanctum SL Helmet is currently very expensive, peaking at around 13 Divine or 2,000 chaos orbs, but remains a powerful choice for a tier 17 farmer.

On the other hand, the Frost Blades of Catabasis build is still strong and requires very little gear, but in terms of power, it is outperformed by the lightning strike-based Slayer.

However, it still offers a good alternative for players looking for a different experience.

Analysis of Power Siphon Locus Mines Build

The Power Siphon Locus Mines build is unique, using a unconventional setup to exploit the auto-targeting wand ability, although it has limitations in terms of range.

It is suitable for players not seeking high-end content, and Jung has released a video featuring high-end versions of the build.

Overall, the build is effective but can feel clunky at times, offering a different and quirky playstyle for those interested.