Path of Exile 2: Smith of Kitava Warrior Ascendancy Explained

This guide focuses on the Smith of Kitava Ascendancy for the Warrior, covering their Unique Skills and Skill Interactions.

Smith of Kitava Overview

Smiths of Kitava are skilled in their craft, able to forge powerful weapons and Armour to use in combat. Their experience with the flames of the forge leaves them highly resistant to Fire.

Smiths of Kitava can turn Normal Body Armour into a work of their creation with the Smith’s Masterwork passive. Allowing them to forge a piece of Armour to suit their needs, at the cost of their Acendancy points.

Smiths of Kitavs are also able to masterfully manipulate their weapons as well, tempering them to empower them, or even manifesting them to do their bidding.

Heat of the Forge

Heat of the Forge grants the Fire Spell on Hit Meta Skill, as its name implies this allows our Attacks to cast Fire Spells as Energy allows. Skills linked to this Meta Gem will not have a Mana Cost.

How effective this Meta Skill will be depends entirely on how easily the energy builds for it. If it is balanced well, it could be great for the early game for some extra damage output here and there, while becoming a powerhouse later on if built around.

Being listed to Fire Spells also doesn’t leave much room for interesting options, with the primary options being likely to gravitate towards Fireball. Maybe in specific setups, Firestorm or Flammability could be used too. An interesting consideration is making the trek to Blackflame Covenant, coverting thes spells to Chaos.

As of Update 0.4 Skills cast by this Meta Skill will not cost Mana. This makes it much easier for the Smith of Kitava to not have to worry about taking penalties to their Mana Pool and still make use of this. Sadly the pool of options hasn’t expanded much.

Against the Anvil

Against the Anvil grants the Temper Weapon Skill, causes Attacks to deal Fire Damage and create Fire Damage Explosions on hit. This skill does not cost Mana to use.

Temper Weapon is a nice addition for both early leveling as well as some endgame builds. Having access to consistent AoE and clearing power in general will help Melee to not struggle nearly as much in the endgame.

With Update 0.4 removing its Mana cost, so ong as we don’t mind channeling a short bit, the added AoE can help out skills that are better suited to Single-target damage. This isn’t a wide pool of skills, but helpful for the few that do exist.

Living Weapon

Living Weapon grants the Manifest Weapon Skill, which summons a temporary copy of our weapon to deal damage and fight alongside us.

It goes without saying that the stronger our weapon is, the better this skill is for damage. But that’s just the most basic use of this skill. Assuming that the Manifested weapon doesn’t disappear on weapon swap, we can always have something more interesting in our second Weapon Set to use with this skill.

While there aren’t many super interesting options currently available, the upcoming Hammer of Faith would be an interesting option. Paired with the new Embitter Support, we could have a minion that’s constantly buffing itself with tons of Cold Damage and Freezing enemies, on top of the other Shrine effects.

As of Updates 0.3.0 Minions no longer require Accuracy, as such the Accuracy bonus from Dexterity has been replaced with Attack Speed.

Coal Stoker

Coal Stoker grants modifiers to Fire Resistance to Cold and Lightning Resistance at 50% of their original value.

Coal Stoker essentially makes it so we only need to directly worry about Fire and Chaos Resistances. While it will take 270% Total Fire Resistance to keep our non-Chaos Resistance capped at their baseline of 75% after the scaling penalties, this isn’t that hard to achieve.

If we eventually want to cap all of our resistances out at their maximum of 90%, this will only require us to reach 300% Fire Resistance. It’s not a huge ask, even though it may seem like it, though it may mean we favor Ruby Rings over other rings for a while.

Smith’s Masterwork can also goes a long way in alleviating the pressure on our gear to do this alone by offering a whopping +75% Fire Reistance.

Forged in Flame

Forged in Flame allows modifiers to Maximum Fire Resistance to also apply to Maximum Cold and Maximum Lightning Resistance.

Unlike Coal Stoker, this effect isn’t halved because Maximum Resistance is harder to get, often only coming 1-2% at a time. However, to cap it out, we only need 15% extra Fire Resistance to cap all of our resistances.

The easiest way we can do this also plays into Coal Stoker as well, and that the Unnatural Resilience Notable, found not too far from the Warrior Start area. This grants us 2% Maximum Fire Resistance for every 40% total Fire Resistance.

This means that at the 300% Fire Resistance required to completely cap our resistances through Coal Stoker, we’ll hit +14% Maximum Elemental Resistances. There’s even a 1% node before this to makes it a clean 15% without any further hassle.

Smith’s Masterwork

Smith’s Masterwork is a passive that is free to allocate at any point; however, we’re restricted to only a Normal Body Armour, and its stats will only be influenced by the effects we can give it from the list below. Addtionally, this passive grants 200 Armour per notable used on Armor upgrades.

These effects will only apply with a Normal Body Armour equipped, regardless of its base item type.

A lot of these effects are very powerful, but paired alongside Coal Stoker and Forged in Flame, Tantalum Alloy is a huge standout here, offering far more Fire Resistance any any Body Armour could normally provide. Combined with Kitavan Engraving, Support Straps, and Molten Symbol as the three remaining options, we’ll become incredibly bulky.

If capping Coal Stoker and Forged in Flame by way of Unnatural Resilience, this combination massively boosts our Maximum Life, caps all our resistance to 90%, and even makes us take 22.5% less Physical Damage by converting it to Fire Damage.

With the changes in 0.3.0, the Smith of Kitava can allow Armour to apply to all damage types by allocating Dedicated to Kitava and Flowing Metal. We’ll need to allocate multiple of these passives to scale our Armour enough to get full value out off this combination.

As for the newly added passives in 0.4, Tribute to Utula is exceptionally powerful for gaining spirit. Since it’s a global bonus, it can even scale up what we’d get from something like a Sceptre or other spirit items.

Spiked Plates is usable, but will also heavily rely on spending nearly all Ascendancy point into Smith’s Masterwork. Scavenged Plating combined with other Armour passive provide much of Thorns scaling.

Kitavan Imprint is going to be a vey niche option, but does offer the potential of building around skills like Hammer of the Gods, allowing them to recovery Glory faster. Though this will still require heavvy investment on the passive tree to be impactful.