Path of Exile 2: Amazon Huntress Ascendancy Explained

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

Amazon Overview

Amazons are formidable fighters, able to greatly empower their weapons and exploit the weaknesses of an enemy. They’re also capable of manipulating the Elements, infusing them into their weapon.

Amazons lean heavily into Attacks, rather than Spells, making them lean heavily into their weapon of choice. Regardless of whether they go for Melee or Ranged, Amazons are a force to be reckoned with thanks to their Penetrate passive increasing their Physical Damage and the unique Elemental Infusion skill to convert some hits to purely elemental damage.

The Amazon also has unique Access to Azmeri Brew, which turns all of her flasks into hybrid Flasks, recovering both Life and Mana. This, alongside access to Elemental Leech, allows her many unique recovery options.

Critical Strike

Critical Strike allows our Chance to Hit to exceed 100%. In addition, 15% of our excess Chance to hit is converted to Critical Strike Chance with Attacks.

With the Amazon being a Dexterity-based class as well, the abundance of Accuracy found in the Dexterity area of the Passive Tree, this has a lot of potential to provide a ton of Critical Strike Chance. With the Player Accuracy changes in Update 0.3.0, it will be very easy to cap on this bonus thanks to the capped penalty for accuracy.

With this Passive granting Base Critical Strike Chance, this means that even though it grants a maximum of 7.5% Critical Chance, this can be further scaled by other modifiers. In turn, this allows for an easy time reaching 100% Critical Strike Chance, often with much lower investment in Gear and Passives.

Penetrate

Penetrate grants Added Physical Damage to Attacks with our Weapon equal to 25% of Accuracy Rating on the Weapon.

If getting Critical Strike Chance from Accuracy wasn’t enough on it’s own, how about more Added Physical Damage to go with it? This requires Critical Strike to be taken, but the combination of these two effects is going to open an easy avenue for high damage output.

The wording on this Passive is a bit weird, but given how powerful it would be otherwise, we can only assume this requires an Accuracy affix on the weapon itself. If it were to scale off the Total Accuracy, this would easily add several hundred flat damage, which is just insane to think about, considering the high end of flat Physical damage on a 2H weapon is up to 94, and this applies to any weapon.

It’s safe to say that Critical Strike and Penetrate together will result in a good base for any Physical Damage skill we want to use, for any weapon outside of maybe Maces.

Predatory Instinct

Predatory Instinct reveals Weaknesses on Rare and Unique Monsters, making portions of their Life take 50% more damage when hit.

This effect is potent, but also very gimmicky. This is because the section of the enemy’s Life that is affected appears to randomize with each hit. This can lead to a very unpredictable bonus to make use of, despite how powerful of a bonus it is.

If we get used to working around this however, using weaker hits until the next hit is on a Weakness and exploiting it with a stronger skill, it may prove to be incredibly useful. Though it’s hard to say just how much uptime it will have in the long run.

In for the Kill

In for the Kill grants a bonus to Movement Speed and Skill Speed when an enemy with an Open Weakness is in our Presence.

Being limited to the range of Presence generally means this will require more precise positioning for Ranged builds, but also generally stronger melee builds as a result.

However, if we play around Presence well enough, this does provide a significant enough bonus to be worth taking in our Ascendancies. Though generally, with it being limited to Presence Range, the Skill Speed will have more value.

Elemental Surge

Elemental Surge grants the unique Elemental Surge skill, which creates high elemental damage explosions when Projectile Attacks reach the end of their flight, consuming the Infusion. 3 Surges of a corresponding element are generated when Endurance Charges (Fire), Frenzy Charges (Lightning), or Power Charges (Cold) are consumed.

A lot is going on with this skill, and it has the potential to add a lot of Lighting Damage to a majority of Ranged builds through the use of Combat Frenzy and Charge Infusion. If we include the Resonance Keystone as well, this can instead generate Power Charges for Cold Damage.

There are several other ways to generate charges in varying amounts. In particular, Scold’s Bridle paired with the Catalysis Notable Passive and various Unique Charms can allow for very consistent generation of charges and, by extension, Surges if we can consistently spend them.

Infused Avatar

Infused Avatar grants a 50% chance to not consume an Elemental Surge when attacking.

This is a very nice bonus to have, making it easier to have a steadier supply of Infusion to work with. This just means more damage output for our skills in our element of choice. Alongside the mentioned synergies above, this can make them more stable.

Stalking Panther

Stalking Panther doubles the Evasion Rating from our equipped Boots, Gloves, and Helmet at the cost of halving the Evasion Rating of our Body Armour.

At a glance, it’s easy to look at this and say the penalty on Body Armour is quite rough and might negate any benefits this can have. However, since most Evasion builds already take Beastial Skin to increase the Evasion Rating for Body Armour by 100%, that more or less balances out Stalking Panther’s downside.

However, for this to be of any real benefit, we need insanely good Boots, Gloves, and Helmet to have it make an impact. This would, however, specifically require these Items not to have Life on them to make room for more Evasion Rating. It’s a strong option for min-max characters that really want to push their evasion for the endgame.

Azmeri Brew

Azmeri Brew allows Life Flask to also recover Mana, and Mana Flasks to also recover Life.

While this is essentially glorified Hybrid Flasks, this does open several really powerful combinations and synergies. Even at a basic Level, it negates the downside of the “Also consumes % of Resource” mods on basic flasks, opening them to be far stronger.

Since this doesn’t currently specify that it doesn’t work for Unique Flasks, for a Chaos Inoculation build, Melting Maelstrom becomes an instant full heal when paired with the Shavronne’s Satchel Unique Belt. The same is true of Olroth’s Resolve, acting as a second burst of instant Mana Recovery, though it likely won’t provide additional Guard for any excess Mana Recovery.

This would also pair very well with the Waistgate Unique Belt, allowing us to double up on Life Flasks and get a ton of Life and Mana recovery from the much stronger Life Flasks. For a Chaos Inoculation and Eternal Youth Build, we could potentially use two Melting Maelstroms and essentially never run out of Energy Shield or Mana.

Mystic Harvest

Mystic Harvest grants us Life Leech from Elemental Damage in addition to Physical.

The vast majority of Skills are often Elemental Skills, which convert Physical to an Element, leaving very little left to leech from. This, at the very least, says that we’ll always leech based on all of our damage we deal, unless it’s Chaos Damage. Considering that for most skills, their inherent conversion is 60% or more, we’re gaining roughly that much in terms of Leeching Power by taking this.