[Build of the Week Submission] [.3] Hollow Palm/Frag Round Weapon Swappin' WitchHunter| Build Guide

Video Update 1

Video Update 2
POB:


Hello, My Name's Tusk

This is a Written Guide to my Hollow Palm WitchHunter. This Witchhunter has taken to the ancient technique of culling to kill the heretics with his bare hands. He also has a. uh. Back-up plan


Basic Idea:

Clear:
Use WitchHunter's Culling Strike and Decimating Strike, along with cull threshold stacking, to instantly kill people with 1-2 shattering palms and create chain explosions, using the Zealous Inquisition notable. All you need to do is switch between shattering palm and ice strike to kill off any stray magics or rares. If a rare is giving you trouble, freeze them and use the back-up plan.

Bossing:

For-go any honor and use your Gun. Ice Strike and Wave of Frost, (Along with Hand of Chayula and Mark of Frost), can build up Freeze like crazy. Our high attack speed also help. Once the Target is frozen, pull out that Gun and shoot them in the face (with a tree tailored to making that blast as powerful as you can). Rinse Repeat if needed.


Culling Threshold Stacking

"

Huh... Pai Mai Taught you the Five Point Exploding Heart Technique? -Some Old Movie or Something

Here's What you need to max out Cull for General Use (it helps for bossing somewhat, but it's not it's strongest aspect)

Myris Uxor https://www.pathofexile.com/trade2/search/poe2/Rise%20of%20the%20Abyssal/6q727D2tG
- Biggest Piece of Culling Threshold in the Build. at max corruption you can get 125% which is more than all our other culling threshold nodes combined.

Finish Them and Bounty Hunter Notable Cluster: large amount of Cull threshold

Tandem Assault: 20%, cheap on an annoint or megalomania. not worth pathing through unless you fit in a companion.

Heart of the Well: Big 25% max piece. expensive because it can come with other good stats

Culling Strike II: a Support Gem! getting a cull gives a 20sec 20% boost to cull. Easy to maintain and since our clear skill can cull so easily, it's a no brainer

Gear

We set ourselves up slightly differently than other hollow palm builds, getting pure Evasion on all our gear. We do this because our current pathing does not allow us to grab a couple key hybrid clusters, which means going that route spreads us too thin. melee levels on gloves. resistances. prioritizing as much defense as you can. Deflection chance is very useful.

The GUN is interesting. You want 2 things: Highest flat damage as you can and +6 attack gem levels. This can potentially cost a ton, so get what you can. We don't care about aps or other stats, just the biggest boomstick you can find. Your best bet is to find a basic rare or magic item with the required phys stats and trying to roll a +6 onto it.


V.S. Frozen
This is the main thing we're focusing on for bossing. Turns out, frag rounds can do a big chunk of damage versus a frozen enemy. We set this up by giving freeze build up to our ice strike and shattering palm.
We support Frag Rounds with Pure damage supports like Rigwalds Ferocity on weapon set 2, Concentrated effect, elemental focus, Cold Attunment,Close Combat, and Elemental Armament. A phys mastery could also fit in here.
We use our second skill tree to slot out of attack speed and freeze build-up, and go fulling into damage and crit. We want to put as much as we can into doing this immediately.

IMPORTANT: TO help with build-up/damage, use a Hand of Chayula with Freezing Mark, both qualitied, to add a ton of more freeze buildup. It makes re-freezing bosses take only a couple seconds.

Skill Tree

Currently, We have about 40-45 points allocated on our weapon swap tree. I would want to have more specialized, but we require at least 3 jewel sockets, and that means a lot of our pathing is based around requiring that amount of points be across both sets.

Weapon Set 1 is specialized into attack speed and cull. The reason why we don't have cull across both sides is that cull isn't damage, and the instant weapon swapping means we can benefit from the cull with little downside and only an extra button press. We grab attack speed and Evasion as our nodes. Evasion is mostly on our weapon set 1 because we want as much put into damage as possible, so we are actively sacrificing our defenses when our gun is pulled out. Which is fine, when it's only pulled out for 1-2 seconds at most every so often.

Weapon set 2 is specialized into as much flat additional damage as we can get. we don't specialize into crit because of the lack of 100% crit chance possible in the game currently. Despite potentially higher numbers, we ignore crit scaling for more consistent damage whenever we pull out the execution stick. We spec into additional damage, elemental damage, and penetration. See the POB for details on which nodes in particular. Feel free to switch them out, as I just followed whatever notables would give be the best average single hit of the weapon.

But as it stands, the tree works for both sides, give each equal power for their respective role. The hollow palm side gets attack speed and mana sustain, while the GUN side gets crit, damage, and more damage.

Gear


Conclusion

Very Happy with this Build so far. it's been really fun to blast maps and shoot bosses in the face. Build needs a couple very expensive upgrades to be "Uber viable" Such as an extremely expensive crossbow upgrade, rakiatas flow on frag rounds, and A +3 Frag round prism of belief.


Currently: Build has completed juiced t16s and killed t2 pinnacles minimum. Build can handle everything until uber content
Thanks for reading