Path of Exile 2: Lich Witch Ascendancy Explained

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

Lich Overview

Liches are practiced in the darker arts, specializing in Chaos Damage, Curses, and Energy Shield. They’re able to bind their soul to a Jewel, creating a powerful Phylactery.

Lichs are heavily focused on Chaos Damage, gaining access to Unholy Might for themselves and allies with Necromatic Conduit at the cost of a constant Mana drain that will cancel out their base Mana Regeneration and even make it degen.

Crystalline Phylactery allows Liches to pick one non-unique Basic Jewel to be their phylactery, greatly boosting its effectiveness, but increasing their mana costs if they lack Energy Shield.

Necromantic Conduit

Necromantic Conduit grants us and Allies in our Presence Unholy Might while above 30% Mana. However, we’ll lose 5% of Mana per second.

Unholy Might by itself is 30% of Damage gained as Chaos Damage. Without the potential damage downsides that’d come from a Support Gem, this is a fantastic boost of damage.

With this effect also applying to Allies, it also means it’s great for both Minion Builds and Party Play. However, at least in the case of Minion Builds, it’d also mean using Ranged or Caster Minions that are easier to keep near you without having to put ourselves in danger.

Incessant Cacophony

Incessant Cacophony makes our Curses have infinite Duration.

This effect previously used to be part of the Blood Mage’s Ascendancies, where it was a bit lackluster. With Liches having better effects from Curses, this has far more use here. In particular, Rupture the Soul is powerful with this.

Infinite duration does several things for curses, but more notably allows us to really juice up our Curse Effect and never worry about duration. This makes it easier to also pick up Area instead, allowing for much large curses.

However, one small downside is that the Fated End and Impending Doom Notables both lose half their effects. In the case of Fated end, we’re not losing anything important, it just doesn;t grant the extra duration. Impending Doom will be unable to provide its increased curse effect, which overall also isn’t a big loss but we still can get “instant” curses, the main reason to take the Notable.

Rupture the Soul

Rupture the Soul grants a 33% chance to make Cursed enemies explode for 25% of their Maximum Life as Chaos Damage when killed by us or Allies in our Presence.

For any build that can regularly use Curses, this can dramatically improve its clear speed. With enough investment into Chaos damage scaling, it can even cause chain reactions and quickly clear large packs.

Combining a high-range Blasphemy Curse, like Despair for example, with anything that passively deals damage or a movement skill set up for high damage can allow us to easily move from pack to pack, simply making them explode.

Blackened Heart

Blackened Heart increases the Magnitude of Unholy Might by 4% per 100 Maximum Mana.

For something that isn’t an ailment, Magnitude might be confusing to see here, but this indicates that it’s a multiplicative effect. This means that it’d be calculated in the following way:

Unholy Might Buff = 30 * ( 1 + 0.04 * ( Maximum Mana / 100 ))

The important takeaway is that this increases the damage bonus of Unholy Might by 1.2% per 100 Mana. This is incredibly good scaling, especially with most Intelliegence builds usually having around 1,000 mana on the low end at endgame.

Assuming nothing changes mechanically with the Interaction, this will make the Eldritch Battery and Everlasting Gaze combo very potent here. This allows us to convert our base Energy Shield to Mana, and then still have Energy Shield due to the effects of Everlasting Gaze.

Price of Power

Price of Power Spells to consume Power Charges to deal 40% more damage.

There are several ways to get Power Charges, and this lets us easily gain bonuses from them as opposed to having to use Charge Infusion to make use of them. If we have a way to sustain them, this is a huge damage boost

It’s not super interesting, all things considered. It’s still a powerful damage bonus we can get on top of similar, but weaker, effects on the Passive Tree. Its effectiveness comes down to how easily and consistently we can generate Power Charges to use.

As of 0.3.0, this no longer specifies “Non-Channeling Spells”, which means Channeled skills like Incinerate, Flameblast, Bonestorm, and Ember Fusilade can now benefit from this node.

This is particularly notable for Bonestorm, which paired with the ability to Pin from the Bushwhacker Unique Boots or the Bone Cage Spell to pin for us. Doing so allows easy Power Charge Charge Generation from Combat Frenzy paired with the Resonance Keystone Passive.

Eldritch Empowerment

Eldritch Empowerment allows us to sacrifice 5% of our Maximum Energy Shield to grant 30% more damage to Spells. Additionally, Sacrificing Energy Shield does not interrupt Recharge.

It’s a nice generic damage bonus for most spells, similar to Price of Power. We’re able to sustain Energy Shield through different forms of recovery, which is pretty free. In particular, we can use this alongside the Shavronne’s Satchel Unique Belt to allow our Life Flasks to apply to our Energy Shield, without restoring life when paired with Eternal Life.

In most cases, making sure we’re never on Full Energy Shield, which would cause us to hit the delay again, means we’re able to passively maintain this without much actual investment. We will still have to deal with the delay if we get hit, which can still be a problem, but easy to mitigate with gear and passives.

Much like Price of Power, as of Update 0.3.0, this effect is no longer limited to Non-Channeled Spells. Similarly, it has great potential with Incinerate, Flameblast, Bonestorm, and Ember Fusilade.

Soulless Form

Soulless Form allows 10% of damage taken to bypass Energy Shield, and we lose Inherent Mana Regeneration. In exchange, we gain mana regeneration equal to 6% of our Maximum Life.

Outside of some very niche circumstances, there’s nothing that seems appealing about this Ascendancy Passive. Chances are if we’re investing in Energy Shield, we’ll have next to nothing for life unless we’re forced to keep it like Infernalists and Blood Mages tend to do.

With the natural base Mana Regeneration of 4% of our Maximum Mana being the typical starting point for Mana Regeneration, this means we’d need 66% of our Mana as Life to achieve the same baseline. Of course, if we’re not stacking Mana, this isn’t too unreasonable.

Eternal Life

Eternal Life says that our Life cannot change while we have Energy Shield.

This passive is exceptionally powerful, allowing very easy access to a very safe and sustainable Low Life Setup. This is because outside of sacrificing or Spending Life for Skill, our Life will be permanently locked in place.

This downside to this, however, is that if we’re always spending Life on Skills, if our Life gets low, we will be unable to cast any spell with a life cost.

This also turns the “Damage Bypasses Energy Shield” affix on items like Atziri’s Disdain, the Heavy Buffer Notable Passive, and Soulless Form into a damage reduction stat. This is because with our Life being unable to be changed, any damage that would Bypass Shields instead gets mitigated. This more or less makes Atziri’s Disdain a mandatory item for most Lich Builds.

Crystalline Phylactery

Crystalline Phylactery is a Jewel Socket that doubles the effect of any Non-Unique Basic Jewel Socketed into it. However, this comes at the cost of increasing our Mana Costs if we don’t have Energy Shield.

With how powerful and flexible Jewels are, this has the potential to be absurdly good. It can provide tons of Damage, Defense, or even utility to our build. The only real downside is that it can potentially prevent some other powerful combinations between the other Ascendancy points.

If we wanted to lean into Curses or more specifically Curse Auras to take advantage of Rupture the Soul, we can get both Curse Effect and Aura Effect to maximize the potential of any Curse Auras we run, which could open some very strong Support-style builds.

Outside of that, it depends on the build we run and what else it needs. Increased Energy Shield, Mana on Kill, and all sorts of other damage increases would be just as valuable here.