Path of Exile 2: Infernalist Witch Ascendancy Explained

This guide focuses on the Infernalist Ascendancy for the Witch, covering their Unique Skills and Skill Interactions.

Infernalist Overview

The Infernalist specializes in Fire Spells and can reserve a portion of their life to increase their stats.

Infernalists can convert their Mana into Infernal Flame, increasing their Infernal Flame with each cast until it reaches its maximum where it deals self-damage. This allows for them to effectively have no limit to casting Spells so long as they can survive their own damage.

An Infernalist can also take on a Demon Form, allowing them to fire off powerful Spells quickly. This form will also drain their Life at an increasing rate, making it dangerous to maintain this transformation.

Altered Flesh

Altered Flesh allows us to take a portion of Cold and Lightning Damage as Fire Damage. Additionally, it allows us to take a portion of Physical Damage as Chaos Damage.

Altered allows us to stack up bonuses to Fire and Chaos Resistance without a need for pushing other resistances just as hard. Converting a portion of Cold and Lightning Damage to Fire means we’ll get plenty of benefits by keeping our FIre Resistance high. Taking Physical Damage as Chaos also lessens our need to stack Armour, acting almost as if we had extra Physical Damage Reduction.

In both cases, however, we’ll still benefit from pushing our Elemental Resistance and Physical Damage Reduction. This is because the damage we take is split before being mitigated at all, keeping those defenses relevant.

When using Chaos Inoculation (CI), the conversion from Physical to Chaos will just negate that portion of the damage. This makes this passive quite a bit better on CI Builds compared to most others. However, this comes with the downside of being unable to use any of the Beidat passives.

Beidat’s Gaze

Beidat’s Gaze reserves a quarter of our Maximum Life, in exchange we receive 1 Mana per 6 Maximum Life.

Out of the set of Beidat’s Passives, Beidat’s Gaze is arguably the better for general use. In most cases, Mana will rarely be an issue, even with frequent casting but this is still useful for Infernalists not using Infernal Flames.

However, when used alongside Mind over Matter (MoM), it can be incredibly powerful. This is because MoM turns our Mana Pool into an extra Life Pool, meaning that while we have reduced life, the extra Mana helps to balance it out.

Beidat’s Will

Beidat’s Will reserves a quarter of our Maximum Life, in exchange we get 1 Spirit per 25 Maximum Life.

Of the Beidat passives, this one is rather weak. While Spirit is a very useful stat, the amount gained from this effect is limited. The minimum we can get where it’d enable a Meta Gem is 30 or 60 Spirit, which would require 750 or 1500 Maximum Life respectively.

This amount of health isn’t hard to reach, but Spirit doesn’t offer many options for offsetting the life reservation with more recovery or a different stat unlike the other two.

Beidat’s Hand

Beidat’s Hand reserves a quarter of our Maximum Life, in exchange we gain 1 Energy Shield per 8 Maximum Life.

This is easily one of the stronger Beidat passives, as it averages out to be 1 Energy Shield per 2 Unreserved Life. With Energy Shield being quite strong in POE2, this is exceptionally valuable an very easy to scale.

Paired with Grim Feast, this effectively doubles anything we gain from this passive before accounting for any bonuses from the Passive Tree itself. Combined with the Passive Tree, it’s very easy to gain more ES than the Life reserved, making this exceptionally good.

Demonic Possession

Demonic Possession grants the Demon Form Skill, which Drains Life grant More Spell Damage per Demonflame while active. Demonflame is capped at 10.

The Life Drain cost and Spell Damage bonus both scale with Demonflame, a stacking buff granted while in Demon Form. While this can continue to ramp up until it eventually overwhelms our Life Regeneration, it will require a lot of Life Regen just to prevent that from happening in the first place.

Currently, Maximum Life can be difficult to stack up, and the same is also true of Life Regeneration. This can make this very hard to maintain at a level that reasonably offsets the downside of the major downside of this boost, our weapons being disabled.

As of Update 0.3.0, Demon Form no longer removes our weapon when Shapeshifting. This allows for so much extra scaling potential compared to fully relying on Demon Flame Stacks for all the damage.

The shift from being Increased Spell Damage to More Spell Damage is a huge damage increase, as our weapon and Passive Tree mainly provided Increased Spell damage, making it less valuable previously. With More Damage, it now provides a good amount of damage, even when limited to 10 stacks initially.

Mastered Darkness

Mastered Darkness removes the cap from Demonflame.

If we are considering using Demon Form and Demonflame as means of dealing more damage, this Ascendancy is required. Uncapping the Demonflame stacks means that we can gain more power from them.

The downside to this, however, is that it will become harder and harder to overcome the Life-draining effect, especially now that it’s a flat amount rather than a percentage.

Previously, Life Regeneration in combination with low Maximum Life was able to offset the cost of higher stacks of Demonflame. Now it will rely on having higher Maximum Life and means to recover it quickly either through Support Gems, Flasks, or other healing effects.

With Update 0.3.0, the Life Drain is also reduced at higher levels, making it overall easier to sustain and stack further. With enough investment, having uncapped stacks will open the potential for a very high More Damage multiplier.

Pyromantic Pact

Pyromantic Pact replaces our Maximum Mana with Infernal Flame equal to twice our Maximum Mana. Casting Skill will generate Infernal Flame and damage us if we reach Full Infernal Flame. Infernal Flame is lost at a rate of 25% per second after two seconds of not gaining Infernal Flame.

This effectively grants us unlimited Mana by replacing it with occasional self-damage. The occasional self-damage isn’t too big of a downside either. This does come with the added downside of being unable to use Mind over Matter, should we have wanted to go in that direction.

The important thing to keep in mind with Infernal Flame is that the damage dealt is Fire Damage, meaning having high Fire Resistance will significantly reduce the damage we take if we reach Full Infernal Flame. This helps mitigate the downside and keep it reasonable.

Bringer of Flame

Bringer of Flame makes all damage we and our allies deal contribute to Ignite Chance and Magnitude.

This effectively means that all of our damage, the damage of any minions we have, and any other player we play alongside gain the ability to Ignite. This can be incredibly powerful if we scale Ignite and use a strong skill to apply the Ignite.

One strong advantage this does offer is that anything can Ignite, which by extension means anything can also apply Fire Exposure through Fire Exposure Support. This combined with Strip Away Support can mean much stronger Fire Hits and Ignites.

With Update 0.2.0 the requirement of having to take Pyromatic Pact and only being in effect while on Low Infernal Flame was changed. It’s now a standalone Ascendancy and much easier to make use of.

Seething Body

Seething Body grants extra damage as Fire Damage to us and all allies while we’re on High Infernal Flame.

Seething Body can be a huge damage increase but is significantly harder to maintain compared to Bringer of Flame. This is because the High Infernal Flame requirement means staying above 65% while not reaching 100%.

Since Infernal Flame reduces incredibly quickly, this requires more specific setups to be used reliably. Particularly, we either need high Mana or very low costs to balance things out for long enough to get value from this.

This isn’t super unreasonable, but will be harder to manage overall. How easy or hard this is to manage depends on how Mana converts to infernal Flame or is changes to Skill Cost still affect Infernal Flame generation.

Loyal Hellhound

Loyal Hellhound grants the Summon Infernal Hound Skill, a Minion that attacks with melee while Igniting nearby enemies.

The Infernal Hound is insanely good at applying Fire Exposure thanks to it passively Igniting enemies near it. Using the previously mentioned combination of Fire Exposure Support and Strip Away Support offers a lot of extra damage to any Infernalist Build.

While its Damage mitigation was removed in Update 0.2.0, it can still be used similarly with the added Loyalty Support Gem. Though this is only 10% compared to its previous 20% and reduces its Maximum Life.

Grinning Immolation

Grinning Immolation Ignites for a portion of our Maximum Life and Energy Shield us when we Critically Strike. In exchange, we gain a multiplicative bonus to Critical Damage Bonus.

Much like the downside of Pyromatic Pact, Ignite is Fire Damage and can be mitigated. With capped Fire Resistance, this means the 15% Ignite becomes 3.75% instead. This is a much more manageable amount of damage to take.

The upside for taking this damage is also great, as there are very few multiplicative bonuses to the Critical Damage Bonus. This can allow us to become an incredibly powerful Critical Strike-based build compared to most other classes. Combining this with the high amount of Spell Crit around the Witch area of the Tree also works exceptionally well with this.