Boneshatter Smith of Kitava Endgame Build Guide
Forge your own armour, leap fearlessly into battle shattering the earth and bones of your enemies with the Endgame Boneshatter Smith of Kitava!
Rampaging through maps you use Leap Slam to engage monsters, allowing you to follow with Boneshatter for massive fiery explosions. With Brink and Overpower you Leap Slam consistently primes enemies for stun.
Earthshatter is going to be your single target damage and Hammer of the Gods is here to obliterate bosses and any unusually strong rares you encounter.
Your defenses are solved early thanks to the Smith of Kitava ascendancy nodes allowing to cap you resistances almost for free!
This build doesn't require any Unique items to function. But the build does benefit from common Uniques including Thrillsteel and Infernoclasp.
You do not need specific resistances on any item, just get the required total resistances amongst all gear combined. You need to cap your Resistances at 75% unless otherwise specified in the guide!
Path of Exile 2 is currently in early access, this means rapid development including frequent changes to builds as there are balance fixes and we learn more. Pin this page to be notified of any updates.
This Endgame Boneshatter Smith of Kitava build guide assumes you are at least level 68 and have completed the campaign. Learn how to get through the Campaign and level this build using our Boneshatter Smith of Kitava Leveling guide!
Skills
- Earthshatter sends out fissures that spawn spikes you can explode with Seismic Cry or Infernal Cry for massive damage. You can pre-emptively place them while a boss is spawning or right before activating an essence. This gives you a big burst of damage and instantly stuns the target. Note that Seismic Cry does not go on cooldown if it doesn't empower your attacks, which only happens if a target nearby is Heavy Stunned.
- Hammer of the Gods is your heavy hitter. If you encounter a very strong rare, use Infernal Cry to empower it then drop the Hammer!
- Against bosses, you want to wait to land a Heavy Stun with Earthshatter, then use Seismic Cry and Infernal Cry before dropping the Hammer.
- Boneshatter is your big map clear ability. It requires targets to be primed for Stun, which you accomplish with Leap Slam. Note that you cannot use Boneshatter on targets that are Heavy Stunned, which is prevented by linking the Brink support to Leap Slam
- Leap Slam also serves as a movement ability which makes it the best choice to prime targets as it allows you to keep up the momentum while clearing. Make sure you do NOT level that ability as you do not want it to kill monsters. Keeping it as low level as possible also makes your mana a lot more comfortable to play with.
- Shield Charge is used for movement when there is nothing to fight.
Use the <Prev and Next> arrows to navigate.
Skill Rotation
- If you encounter a rare monster that survives the Boneshatter explosions, aim a couple of attacks with Earthshatter at the target and blow up the spikes with either warcry.
- If it is an especially tanky rare, drop the Hammer of the Gods after empowering it with Infernal Cry
- For bosses, you pre-emptively stack as many Earthshatter spikes as possible on top of them and explode them with Seismic Cry when they start fighting you. Keep doing this until the boss gets heavy stunned, then use both Seismic Cry and Infernal Cry, weapon swap to the dual maces and drop Hammer of the Gods.
- ONLY WEAPON SWAP IF YOU HAVE 2 EXTRA MACES SIMILAR TO YOUR MAIN WEAPON, if you only have 1 or 2 good maces available to you, do not bother weapon swapping.
Small extra optimization :
- You often start a boss fight with enough Glory to use Hammer of the Gods straight away. Use it, and put down spikes while the hammer is dropping. When it drops, wait a second to make sure no Aftershock is happening, then explode the spikes to Heavy Stun the boss, which generates enough Glory to use the Hammer of the Gods again right away. If Hammer of the Gods is the ability that Heavy Stuns the boss, you do not gain Glory to use it again which is why we wait to make sure our Earthshatter is the ability that does land the Heavy stun
If you want more details about weapon swapping, check out this article.
While clearing, simply Leap Slam onto monsters and use Boneshatter to explode the primed targets. You can identify a target primed for stun with a glowing orb displaying on top of them. Use Infernal Cry when there are rare monsters to ensure they die from the explosions, or to simply get bigger explosions !
Skill Leveling Priority
Key Mechanics
Primed for Stun
You need to prime monsters for stun to use Boneshatter, which means they are relatively close to getting heavy stunned. However, you CANNOT use Boneshatter on a monster that is heavy stunned. That is why it is important to use Brink support to prevent Leap Slam from accidentally stunning too much and preventing Boneshatter from being usable.
Weapon Swapping
There are a few things to keep in mind when using this feature :
- ONLY weapon swap to use Hammer of the Gods.
- Set your warcries to be ONLY usable by the Weapon Set 1, otherwise you lose your exerts whenever you weapon swap.
- Do NOT set your Hammer of the Gods to only Weapon Set 2, as you want to be able to use it freely with your regular Mace+Shield setup while mapping. Swapping away from your shield in the middle of a map gets you killed.
Note that this means you always have to manually swap to Weapon Set 2 if you want your hammer to deal the maximum amounts of damage. Thankfully that is something you only should do against bosses. - It is good practice to set all your abilities other than Hammer of the Gods to only be usable on Weapon Set 1, as the Weapon Set 2 is ONLY used for Hammer of the Gods. That way you never have to manually swap back to your Weapon Set 1.
Ascendancy
Learn how to Ascend with our guides:
- Coal Stoker is a very good defensive node during leveling as it allows you to get a lot more value from your Fire Resistance and makes it easier to get your resistances up. On top of it, this synergizes extremely well with the Unnatural Resilience passive on the tree, further enhancing the value of simply stacking Fire Resistance instead of trying to balance all three elemental resistances.
- If that wasn't enough, this also works extremely well with the Forged in Flame ascendancy node, providing Cold and Lightning Maximum Resistance based on Maximum Fire Resistances. You can now see how well the entire Smith of Kitava ascendancy kit comes together.
- Smith's Masterwork allows you to forge your own normal Body Armour into something that fits your needs. This allows you to go for Tantalum Alloy which gives a LOT more resistances than a Rare Body Armour ever could while you are leveling in the campaign. In conjunction with Coal Stoker , this node gives you 75% Fire Resistance, as well 37% Cold and Lightning Resistance, allowing you to easily cap you resistances as early as Act 3.
Another benefit is that it is very easy to get a good corruption implicit on the base of your choice, so make sure to pick them up and Vaal them all! - Molten Symbol is a big boost for your Physical Damage Mitigation, as the portion of incoming Physical Damage you take is mitigated by your already capped Fire Resistance.
Support Straps is a very good option if you need strength to enable the Giant's Blood keystone. - Kitavan Engraving is a very significant boost to your survivability as it is one of the few sources in the game of Increased Maximum Life
- Leather Bindings is also one of the very few places where you can get recovery and is an extremely comfy node allowing you to not rely nearly as much on Life Flasks for recovery.
- Flowing Metal has very good synergy with Forged in Flame as it also provides Maximum Cold and Lightning Resistances
One of the strength of the Smith of Kitava lies in the extreme versatility Smith's Masterwork provides. Mix and match all the above ascendancy nodes depending on your needs at the time. Here are the benchmarks you are aiming to reach with these nodes :- Enough Strength to enable Giant's Blood.
- 90% to All Resistances.
- Assuming you do not need specific Ascendancy nodes to help meet these benchmarks, here are the recommended nodes to take on top of Coal Stoker and Forged in Flame :
- Molten Symbol
- Kitavan Engraving
- Leather Bindings
- Support Straps
Passives
Click the arrows to open the full tree in a new tab.
- For the attribute nodes take enough Intelligence and Dexterity to meet gear, skill gem and support gem requirements, then use the rest on Strength for more life and to enable Giant's Blood.
- You can use your Gold at the Hooded one or Doryani to respec and change your Attributes if a new skill or gear upgrade leaves you unable to use your skills/items.
- Post-Campaign Tree - You start by transitioning from Perfect Strike to Earthshatter. Only start using Earthshatter with a weapon that has around 1.2 speed, and have enough points on the tree to grab all the Warcry related nodes. At that point you respec all the fire damage related nodes for the ones Warcry related.
- Once you have 2 extra maces to weapon swap, you de-allocate all the Red and Green points on the final tree, then re-allocate the Red points to the Weapon Set 1 (Mace+Shield) and the Green points to the Weapon Set 2 (Dual Mace).
Stat Priorities
Offensive Scaling
- The biggest source of damage comes from your weapons. Getting good Weapons is your primary focus when trying to gear up.
- Speed and Area of Effect are also pretty important stats to improve clear and how smoothly the build plays.
- Having a source of Mana leech is very valuable. You can get it on your Weapon, Gloves or Rings.
- Lighting damage to Attacks from either Rings or Gloves is pretty valuable as it allows your Hammer of the Gods to inflict a sizable shock on the target.
- Sources of #% increased damage: #% Melee Damage, #% Global Physical Damage, #% increased Damage, #% Increased Damage with Maces, #% Area Damage, #% Damage with Two Handed Weapons, #% Attack Damage.
Defensive Scaling
- Sufficient +#% to Fire and Chaos Resistance to cap your Resistances
- +#% to Maximum Fire Resistance up to 90%
- +# to Maximum Life.
- +# to Strength because it gives you more maximum life.
- A shield with a high % Block Chance. Block is your biggest defensive layer while mapping so try to max it out as soon as possible. The Surrender is a good option for Mapping survivability. When block capped through your passive tree and jewels, it makes you nearly unkillable when fighting large amounts of monsters.
- Armour helps mitigate some of the Physical Damage you take while mapping, but should never be prioritized over Maximum Life
- If you are still struggling check out our Survival Guide for additional useful information!
If you're struggling to survive, or want to learn more about damage and defenses in Path of Exile 2 check out these additional resources:
Gearing
- This is where the Smith of Kitava shines. As you enter the Atlas of Worlds and begin mapping, you already be resistance capped, and can focus all your efforts into getting higher tier weapons, the strength required to use them and cap your Chaos Resistance.
- Better resistance from gear allows you to swap out Tantalum Alloy for Support Straps and help towards using higher tier weapons, or Flowing Metal for more Maximum Resistances if you do not need the Strength
- If you do not have a good shield with high Block Chance, now would be the time to focus on getting one as it is the biggest survivability boost you can get at this stage.
- Work towards your weapon swap setup by getting 2 extra maces, being able to swap to a Dual Mace Weapon Swap to drop Hammer of the Gods is a massive boss damage increase.
- Gloves and Weapons with Attack Speed are also a big boost as it makes the build feel lot smoother to play and increased your clear speed significantly
- Keep improving your gear with better Life and Resistance rolls and acquire the relatively common Uniques the build utilizes
Use the buttons to navigate between gear sets.
FAQ
Pick Strength for every travel node, pathing to the Polymathy cluster allows to get a good chunk of extra strength, and more importantly the small Reduced Attribute Requirements passives significantly reduce the amount of strength needed to meet the requirements. Other than that, just try to look for as much Strength as possible from gear and do not feel bad about using a lower tier weapon. A well rolled mid tier weapon is good enough to last you until you have enough Strength to use the highest tier weapons.
The red and green lines represent the weapon set specific passive points.
When you are using your Weapon set 1 (which is your 2H + Shield setup), the tree allocated includes the red passives. These are passives you have to allocate by first clicking the "Weapon Set 1" arrow at the top right of your passive skill tree.
When you are swapping to your Weapon set 2 (which is Dual Wield 2handed Maces), the tree allocated should include the green passives. Again, these passives have to be allocated after clicking the 2nd arrow at the top right to switch to "Allocating points for Weapon Set 2"
The passives that aren't colored are simply allocated normally without doing anything in particular
- Make sure your Leap Slam gem stays at low level to prevent it from killing monsters.
- Make sure it is linked to the Brink support as it is what enables you to NOT heavy stun monsters instead of simply priming them for stun, which enables Boneshatter to be usable.
- Make sure it is linked to the Overpower support as it allows even a low level Leap Slam to still build up enough stun to prime targets.
It is very important to make sure you follow the single target damage rotation. Not using your Warcries properly can result in your Hammer of the Gods dealing a small fraction of the damage it is supposed to.
Note that Infernal Cry provides a huge amount of damage to Earthshatter as well, so if your Hammer of the Gods is not ready yet or you do not feel like you need to use it yet, do not hesitate to use Infernal Cry to boots your Earthshatter damage as it has a fairly low cooldown.
- A single Mana Leech roll on a Ring or Gloves solves all your mana issues.
- Do NOT level your Leap Slam, Infernal Cry or Seismic Cry gems. It is still useful to level you Infernal Cry gem for extra Warcry Speed, but only do it if your mana feels comfortable OR you have a 6link to support it with Lifetap.
NOTE: These bonuses are minor, if you picked something different for the Venom Draught, don't worry too much!
Focus on the main Atlas tree until you are able to afford the cost of expensive boss keys to take on Xesht, the King in the Mists, Olroth, Simulacrum, and the Arbiter to fill out your league mechanic points.
- This build can do pretty much every mechanic very efficiently thanks to how Boneshatter functions against big monster density. The more monsters there are, the more damage you deal and the more your explosions chain.
- Trials of Sekhema is the content where you are most likely to encounter issues until you are more proficient with the build or have good damage and speed.
Video
Summary
- Leap Slam and Boneshatter work together to enable massive screen wide explosions.
- Boneshatter mechanics allow for absurdly high damage in high density. Fighting an extremely tough Rare or Essence? Fight it in a giant pack of monster and it will get obliterated.
- Earthshatter makes quick work of potential surviving rares and has very good pre-stacking damage and stun potential to start off boss fights with a very early Heavy Stun.
- Hammer of the Gods takes advantage of heavy stuns to deal massive amounts of damage by utilizing the weapon swapping mechanic.
- Versatile mobility options with Shield Charge and Leap Slam.
- Block allows you to mitigate the majority of the attacks coming your way, with The Surrender making you virtually unkillable if you get overwhelmed (but beware of Area Attacks as you cannot block them!)
- EXTREMELY tanky character impervious to elemental damage with some of, if not the best recovery option available in the game.
- BIG BOOM.
Credits
Written by: cArn-
Content Reviewed by: Crouching_Tuna
Language Reviewed by: Tenkiei