I have burned a silly number of hours in Path of Exile 2’s Rise of the Abyssals league already, and if you are in the same boat, you might want to look at the Infernalist Witch before your mouse hand gives up. The build feels like a chill mix of strategy and chaos: you stand back, your minions do all the ugly work, and the screen just dissolves. If you really cannot be bothered trading all day, grabbing a little starter boost like buy poe 2 exalted orbs can help you gear faster, but the real fun here comes from how the whole setup plays, not from stacking crazy items.
How The Core Setup Works
The heart of the build is the Infernalist ascendancy, and the big piece is the Necromantic Conduit node. Once you pick that up, your minions get Unholy Might, so a chunk of their physical damage turns into chaos and they hit way harder. You then lean on Skeletal Arsonists, who are basically little lunatics lobbing firebombs everywhere. When their explosions start landing inside big packs, you get this messy chain of chaos and fire damage that just erases monsters. You are not slowly chipping bosses; it feels more like flipping a switch and watching health bars fall off a cliff, especially once your minion count ramps up.
League Mechanics And Mapping Feel
Rise of the Abyssals throws a lot of density at you, which is where this build really shines. While melee characters are edging forward, taking hits to the face and hoping their flasks keep up, you are just walking behind your army and letting them open every Abyss crack for you. You will notice early on that you are more of a director than a fighter: drop a curse, keep your offerings up, and let the Arsonists handle the rest. It is the kind of build where you can clear an entire wave while you are half watching a stream, and it still keeps that satisfying “screen pop” every time you pull a big pack together.
Gear, Spirit And Early Annoyances
The early game is not completely smooth, though. Keeping your aura running can wreck your mana until you solve it with the Soulless Form passive or some proper mana regen on gear. Once that is sorted, the build calms down a lot. For items, you do not need anything wild to get going: a basic sceptre with +1 to Minion Gems and some halfway decent energy shield pieces will carry you into endgame maps. The one stat you really cannot ignore is Spirit. In PoE 2, Spirit controls how many minions you can actually field, so if your rings and amulet roll everything except Spirit, you end up with a sad little squad instead of a proper horde, and the whole build feels weaker than it should.
Bossing, Playstyle And Pushing Further
The moment the build really clicks is when you start doing bosses. The flow is simple: slap Despair on the target, drop Pain Offering to juice up your minions, and keep resummoning Skeletal Arsonists whenever they die or wander off. Uber bosses start to feel less like a big test and more like a damage check they quietly fail. If you want to push hard into the top-end content or just hate grinding out every single upgrade, some players dip into external help like poe2 gold buy to speed things up. You might not even need that, though, because once this setup is online, it chews through maps and league mechanics so quickly that the real problem becomes finding time to play something else.