Best Huntress starter build in Path of Exile 2

The Huntress is Path of Exile 2's newest character class, a fearsome Azmeri warrior who hunts monstrous wild creatures armed with a buckler and her trusty spear. She darts in and out of combat, effortlessly parrying attacks while transitioning between melee and ranged combat in a mesmerizing, graceful dance of violence and death. Or, if you're like me, she grabs a crossbow and blasts everything in sight.

One of the beautiful things about Path of Exile 2 is that as much as a weapon type might be associated with a character class, there's nothing stopping you from doing something different. When I was looking for the best way to start a Huntress in 0.2, I was leery of signing myself up for a complicated playstyle like the spear. So I looked through the patch notes, found out crossbows were basically the only thing buffed in what was otherwise a bloodbath, and locked in.

My experience turned out to be one of absolute joy. While the internet exploded with people whining and complaining about how overtuned the monsters were and how bad the nerfs hit them, I sailed through the campaign into maps and continued blasting. Here's how I did it.

Key skills

This build uses the Glacial Bolt crossbow skill combined with Artillery Ballista to control the battlefield, clear packs, and absolutely decimate bosses with large hit boxes. Unfortunately, you can't get Artillery Ballista until level 31, so I recommend starting with Lightning Arrow. You can use crossbows from level one with grenades and other nonsense, but LA uses all the same scalings and requires no respeccing of your passive tree at all.

To start with, roll a Ranger. Get your bow, get the Lightning Arrow skill, get your uncut gem from Renly, and chuck everything in your stash. Then when your Huntress gets to the encampment, you'll be able to get the Lightning Arrow/Lightning Rod combo going, which will carry you through Act 2. Grab a bow with as much physical damage, flat damage, and attack speed as you can and go to work.

Lightning Arrow

• Martial Tempo: Supported skills have 25% more attack speed
• Lightning Infusion: Supported attacks gain 25% of damage as extra lightning damage, but deal 50% less cold and fire damage

Lightning Arrow will carry you through until you hit level 31 and can make the swap to crossbow. Martial Tempo helps with early attack speed, and Lightning Infusion is one of the best more damage multipliers you can get with a level one support gem.

Lightning Rod

• Scattershot: Supported skill fires two additional projectiles, but deals 20% less damage and has 20% less attack speed
• Concentrated Effect: Supported skills have 40% more area damage, but 50% less area of effect

Drop Lighting Rod on rares, big packs, and bosses for huge amounts of damage. Once you have a field of rods down, your Lightning Arrow will trigger them to zap everything, shock them for multiplicative damage, and clear things out.

Herald of Thunder

• Precision: 30% increased accuracy while a supported skill is active

Don't worry too much about supports for Herald of Thunder. It adds a bit of extra damage to what we're doing, but isn't crucial. If you find an amulet with 10 extra spirit chuck Precision in there.

Crossbow Transition

Once you hit level 31, I recommend making the swap to crossbows. Note that you'll need a level nine uncut gem to make your Artillery Ballista skill, so don't make the swap until you have that in hand. You'll be using Glacial Bolt as your primary skill both for clearing and bossing, which shoots out icy bolts that make walls in a v shape. When these walls take enough damage or are pushed by enemies, they explode for big damage and freeze.

Normally, this would require us to load another ammo type or fire a grenade to break them. Instead, we'll be using Artillery Ballista. This skill fires explosive bolts that rain from the sky, meaning if we drop these down, busting the walls becomes automated. It's a comfy playstyle with big damage, unreal boss kill, and unparalleled battlefield control.

Glacial Bolt

• Cold Infusion: Supported attacks gain 25% of damage as extra cold damage, but deal 50% less lightning and fire damage
• Scattershot: Supported skill fires two additional projectiles, but deals 20% less damage and has 20% less attack speed
• Bullseye: Supported skills have 50% more accuracy rating

We'll support Glacial Bolt with Cold Infusion, Scattershot, and Bullseye. Cold Infusion gives us a nice damage increase, while Scattershot fires more bolts which means more walls. Bullseye is an incredible third gem once you start finding lesser jeweler's orbs, because the Amazon Critical Strike node gives us crit chance equal to 25% of our excess chance to hit—which essentially turns accuracy into damage.

Artillery Ballista

• Overabundance: Supported skills have +1 to limit and 50% less skill duration
• Martial Tempo: Supported skills have 20% more attack speed
• Primal Armament: Supported skills deal 25% more weapon elemental damage

Artillery Ballista is normally a solo player, but with Overabundance we can have two down at a time. Even with the skill duration reduction you still get them for eight seconds, which is plenty. Martial Tempo allows them to attack more quickly and Primal Armament is a nice damage multiplier. Early on, this skill deals substantial damage so be sure to keep it leveled up alongside Glacial Bolt.

Herald of Ice

• Precision: 30% increased accuracy rating while a supported skill is active
• Magnified Effect: Supported skills have 30% more area of effect
• Clarity: 30% increased mana regeneration while a supported skill is active

Herald of Ice is where we use our spirit. It adds a nice additional source of damage and shatters corpses, which is handy. We use it to socket the extremely important Precision gem, because again, accuracy is critical hit chance. Mag effect makes our shatter explosions larger and if you have an extra jeweler's lying around you can throw Clarity in there to lessen your reliance on your mana potion.

Thunderous Leap

Throw a spear in your offhand weapon setup, preferably with attack speed on it. We'll use Thunderous Leap to reposition around walls of ice that haven't exploded or jump past mobs of monsters. A quality of life improvement that makes the most annoying part of the build much more manageable, and also lets us jump over walls and gaps!

Passive tree

Our passive tree will focus on a few important things: attack speed, attack damage, movement speed, and accuracy. This build requires almost no attention to defense, which is one of its great strengths. Monsters are so busy attacking ice walls or ballistae, pathing around channels of frost, or frozen in place, that they hardly have a chance to attack us in the first place. Here's where to spend your points:

• Start by pathing through the attack damage nodes to Primal Instinct and Eagle Eye. This gives us a nice base of damage and accuracy to make sure our shots are hitting and hitting hard.
• From there, head to the Precision Salvo cluster and Primal Sundering. More attack speed, more accuracy, more damage. You're gonna notice a trend here.
• Take Escape Velocity while pathing toward Maiming Strike. This build requires a ton of stats between crossbow skills requiring both strength and dex, and Herald of Ice requiring intelligence. Maiming Strike is nice because it maims enemies, which reduces their evasion rating, further juicing our Critical Strike node. Remember, it's not just excess accuracy, it's excess chance to hit. This is important!
• After Maiming Strike, you can head over to Acceleration or start working toward the Monk starting area and Blinding Strike. Blind also lowers enemy evasion rating which makes it super effective, but I found myself unable to pass up the movement speed.
• After Blinding Strike, path down through Essence of the Mountain and take Step Like Mist. The stats help a bunch, and I'm a sucker for movement speed.

This setup should make for an excellent start. Moving forward with your tree, keep your eyes peeled for critical damage bonus, skill speed, attack damage, and movement speed. Palsteron has a more advanced version of this build and you can check out his video here for further evolutions of it.

Ascendancy

We'll be selecting the Amazon as our ascendancy, and with it one of the most incredibly powerful nodes I've ever seen, Critical Strike. It turns 25% of our excess chance to hit into critical strike chance, and it's hard to even express how good this is.

It's important to note, as I've talked about above, that it's not just accuracy that scales this, but our chance to hit in general. That means that things that lower enemy evasion, like maim and blind, also help. In addition, the way the chance to hit tables work in Path of Exile 2 means that the closer we are, the higher chance to hit we have. If you're up in something's grill, you're almost guaranteed a crit.

This is one of the most satisfying things about the build, as we can pepper enemies with Glacial Bolts and Artillery Ballista, wear them down, chill them, and if we see a good window or freeze them, we can dart in and absolutely unload from point blank range. So good.

For your second set of points take Predatory Instinct, which gives you a nice juicy more damage multiplier against rare and unique monsters.

Gear and stat priorities

Gearing this character is extremely simple. Step one is to make sure you have the absolute best crossbow that money can buy. Huge percent physical and flat physical rolls are best in slot, and attack speed and accuracy are close behind. You can basically just go on the trade site, search by pdps, and grab the best you can afford and equip.

After that, you'll need to make sure you have the attributes required for your skills. This build is extremely attribute hungry, and you'll need lots of them. Every point of dex gives a whopping five points of accuracy, which again translates directly into damage. Crossbow skills require strength as well, and you'll need some intelligence to level your Herald of Ice.

Finally, you'll want to make sure you have the best movement speed boots you can afford and then get to work fixing your resistances. You'll want as much as you can get, but aim for at least 50 in each of the elemental resistances by the time you get to maps. You'll also want as much life as possible, for the monsters that shoot you with stuff or manage to get past your walls of ice.