Path of Exile 2: Abyssal Lich Witch Ascendancy Explained

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

How to Unlock the Abyssal Lich

Unlike all other ascendancies in Path of Exile 2, the Abyssal Lich is a slightly more hidden Ascendancy. This special sub-ascendancy for the Lich can only be unlocked by defeating the Vessel of Kulemak as a Lich.

This means while we don’t get immediate access to its power, it does give us an alternative

Abyssal Lich Overview

Abyssal Liches are exceptionally adept at controlling the darker arts, turning the Lich’s normal necromancy into heightened power for themselves. Tapping into the power of Kulemak allows them to push the boundaries of what a Lich can do.

Unlike the base Lich Ascendancy, more of the effects that were previously granted to themselves and allies are now almost purely focused on themselves. This greatly enhances their flexibility for how they play, but often comes with tighter restrictions on gear.

The image below is interactive. Hover or tap on a Notable to see its description. Below the image, you will find additional information about each Notable and what you should know about it.

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.

Umbral Well

Umbral Well offers us a wide variety of buffs and should generally be seen as a mandatory choice for the Abyssal Lich. With these buffs providing a strong mix of Damage and Defences, it often means stacking Spirit is the way to go to get the most out of this buff.

This particular form of Spirit stacking also synergizes with several Unique Items, like Threaded Light, which can grant a ton of Spell Damage based on our Maximum Spirit.

Unwilling Offering

Unwilling Offering doesn’t really grant us much, mostly due to the lack of available Offering Spells. It’s neat in concept but just falls short as a viable option due to this.

Pain Offering is the only real option we can get value out of, gaining Skill Speed and Damage. Both of which we can already get plenty of by investing in Spirit for Umbral Well to use instead. If it were a More (multiplicative) buff rather than an increased (Additive) buff, it may see more use.

Soul Offering already affects us by default, which leaves just Bone Offering. This feels like if used well alongside a cheap Spectre or something, it would be a great (but inconsistent) way to avoid one-shots, but due to needing to take Umbral Well first, Skeletons just aren’t an option, making it generally worse overall.

Steward of Kulemak

Steward of Kulemak is a fairly interesting buff, essentially granting Spell Echo to every Spell we cast, so long as we have Power Charges. Power Charges aren’t too hard to come by, thanks to spells like Profane Ritual, we’ll just need to link it to Inhibitor to prevent it from consuming the Power Charges itself.

Sadly, there aren’t too many skills that this would be super interesting for due to its standard fare of restrictions. Fireball and Comet would be the top options, since they’re both focused on a single burst of damage rather than many rapid casts.

Incessant Cacophony

This is a much better and upgraded version of the one Blood Mage had. Not only does it provide the core utility of permanent curses, it even increases our Curse Limit by one, allowing us easy access to two (or three with Whispers of Doom) Curses.

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 also makes it easier to pick up Curse Area or Curse Magnitude instead, allowing for much larger 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 Flesh

Compared to the base Lich, this effect instead deals Physical Damage. It’s not a bad trade-off by any means, but most casters will lack ways to remove Armour, relying almost entirely on Vulnerability or Support Gems on Physical Spells.

For any build that can regularly use Curses, this can dramatically improve its clear speed. With enough investment into Physical damage scaling, it can even cause chain reactions and quickly clear large packs. This at least allows the effect to synergize with skills like Reap or Bonestorm to get more value out of them.

Combining a high-range Blasphemy Curse 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.

Eldritch Empowerment

Eldritch Empowerment is 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

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.

However, alongside bonuses to Mana Regeneration, this is very good early on to enable us to use Mind over Matter as a very strong defensive layer.

Where this shines best is in combination with Eternal Life, turning its downside into a powerful advantage.

Eternal Life

This passive is exceptionally powerful, allowing very easy access to a very safe and sustainable Low Life Setup. This is because, outside of sacrificing Life for Skill in one way or another, 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

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.