I honestly have no idea how many hours I have thrown into Path of Exile 2’s Rise of the Abyssals league at this point, but it is a lot, and most of it has been on this one Witch setup. If you are tired of hammering your mouse on clicky melee skills and just want something that lets you sit back, the Infernalist Witch with Skeletal Arsonists is a bit of a lifesaver. You are basically steering chaos from the backline while your minions handle all the ugly work, and if you ever feel stuck on gearing, it is not the worst idea to check a site where you can buy poe 2 exalted orbs and smooth out some of the early bumps.
Infernalist Core Setup
The heart of the build is the Infernalist ascendancy, especially the Necromantic Conduit node. Once you pick that up, your minions get Unholy Might, so a big chunk of their physical damage turns into chaos and gets scaled up hard. Skeletal Arsonists already throw those little fire bombs everywhere, so when you stack chaos conversion on top, the screen just starts popping. You are not chipping away at packs; they blink out of existence. Rise of the Abyssals helps too, since the league keeps throwing dense waves of monsters at you. While melee characters are eating random hits in the front, you are two screens away, watching green and orange explosions roll across the floor.
Early Game Issues And Spirit
The build is not perfect right from the start though. Mana can feel rough for a while. If you try to reserve too many auras before you grab Soulless Form or get decent mana regen, you end up dry all the time and it feels awful. Once that passive is online and you clean up your regen and flask setup, it calms down a lot. Gear is pretty friendly by PoE standards. I got going on less than 10 Divines, using a simple +1 to Minion Gems sceptre and some basic energy shield gear rather than anything fancy. The stat that really matters is Spirit. PoE 2 ties your minion cap to Spirit, so if you forget to roll it on rings and amulets, you end up with a tiny crew instead of a proper swarm, and the whole build feels half finished.
How It Actually Plays
Moment to moment, the gameplay is almost lazy, in a good way. You cast Despair on anything that looks remotely like a boss, drop Pain Offering so your minions get that big damage boost, then just keep your Skeletal Arsonists topped up. That is pretty much the loop. You move, you dodge the obvious danger, and you let the minions do their thing. Because so much of the damage is chaos based, it cuts through a lot of the usual resist walls, which is why the build feels great in dense league content and against tanky rares. You will see packs vanish before you really process what spawned, which takes a lot of the stress out of mapping or chain running Abyssal encounters.
Endgame Push And Extra Help
If you want to push deep into late game bosses or hate the grind of building currency from scratch, checking a written or video guide is still worth it, and some players like grabbing a bit of extra currency from services that sell things like poe2 mirror to get upgrades out of the way. The funny thing is this particular Witch setup clears so fast that you may not even feel the need. Once the core pieces are in place and your Spirit rolls are sorted, it feels like you are piloting a quiet little disaster from off screen while everything else just burns and rots around you.