PoE 2 Ascendancy Overview

Welcome to the PoE 2 Ascendancy overview! Path of Exile 2's Early Access features a limited selection of classes and ascendancies at launch. Players can choose from the Amazon, Warrior, Mercenary, Ranger, Witch, Sorcerer, and Monk, each with two available Ascendancy classes. Ascendancies are a crucial aspect of character building in Path of Exile 2, significantly impacting playstyle and power. It's important to note that many Ascendancy notables in Path of Exile 2 grant unique skills that can be supported by gems, offering greater flexibility and customization in character builds. Choose wisely, as the right Ascendancy can drastically transform your build.

Amazon

The Amazon Ascendancy transforms the Huntress into a lethal strike-focused combatant, specializing in critical hits and deep wounds to dismantle enemies. This ascendancy thrives on precise, high-impact attacks, particularly through its signature Infusion mechanic - consuming Power, Endurance, or Frenzy charges to unleash devastating empowered strikes. For defense, it offers two distinct approaches:Stalking Panther significantly boosts the protective value of your helmet, gloves and boots, while Mystic Harvest provides essential sustain by enabling life leech from elemental damage.

Ritualist

The Ritualist Ascendancy offers a unique playstyle centered around stealing powerful modifiers from rare monsters, functioning similarly to a scaled-down version of Headhunter. This ascendancy gains significant power through its ability to equip an additional ring slot, providing extra flexibility for gearing optimization. The Mind Phylacteries passive notably enhances this build's effectiveness by dramatically improving Charm duration and uptime.

Smith of Kitava

The Smith of Kitava Ascendancy allows players to forge their own custom Body Armour by picking between powerful modifiers, allows for smooth gearing by reducing the amount of resistances required on gear and can become extremely resilient to elemental damage. With generically strong defensive nodes the Smith of Kitava Ascendancy can act as a template for a wide variety of different build options.

Warbringer

The Warbringer Ascendancy excels as a defensive powerhouse that synergizes melee combat with strategic totem placement and powerful Warcries. This Warrior specialization thrives in prolonged engagements, particularly against bosses, where its totems serve dual purposes as both damage dealers and aggro-drawing shields. The class offers great survivability through its unique blocking mechanics that remain active even when not actively shielding. Warbringer's armor-shattering capabilities allow it to break down heavily armored foes, making it ideal for players who prefer a tank-oriented playstyle that combines active combat with strategic positioning. The ascendancy particularly shines in situations where controlled aggression and damage mitigation are more valuable than pure speed.

Titan

The Titan Ascendancy focuses on slow, high-damage attacks and strong defenses. It specializes in stunning enemies and trading attack speed for powerful single hits. This makes it effective against bosses and tough enemies. The playstyle is tanky and methodical, rewarding careful positioning and timing. Key strengths include high durability, crowd control through stuns, and satisfying heavy hits. It's best suited for players who prefer a deliberate, defensive melee approach over fast-paced combat.

Stormweaver

The Stormweaver Ascendancy for the sorceress class is focused on elemental ailments, mana, and critical strikes. Your damage nodes increase the damage taken by your enemies, and strip away their resistances while letting you conjure powerful Elemental Storms directly on their heads. As a Stormweaver you can specialize into the arcane arts, enhancing your spellcasting and obtaining generous mana recovery. While this ascendancy doesn't offer much in the way of direct defenses, it does offer indirect options through Recoup and Chill.

Chronomancer

The Chronomancer ascendancy specializes in manipulating time to control the pace of battle. This class introduces unique mechanics like freezing enemies in place, rewinding cooldowns, and altering attack sequences, enabling a highly tactical playstyle. Its abilities focus on creating advantageous moments rather than dealing direct damage, making it particularly effective when paired with high-impact skills that benefit from carefully timed engagements. The Chronomancer excels at disrupting enemy patterns while enabling powerful combos through cooldown resets and delayed effects. This makes it well-suited for players who prefer calculated, setup-heavy combat over straightforward damage dealing. While demanding precise execution, the ascendancy offers rewarding gameplay for those who master its time-bending mechanics, especially in team scenarios where its crowd control and utility shine. The class works best with abilities that have significant cooldowns or wind-up times, allowing players to maximize the value of their temporal manipulations.

Witchhunter

The Witchhunter Ascendancy is a powerful class specializing in hunting and defeating demonic and undead foes. This class excels at dealing massive damage, particularly on the first hit, and offers explosions and elemental damage mitigation. With its focus on defeating demonic and undead enemies.

Gemling Legionnaire

The Gemling Legionnaire is a unique Ascendancy that embeds gems directly into their flesh. By leveraging attributes and gem qualities, levels, and colors, this class can create powerful builds with enhanced damage and survivability.

Tactician

The Tactician Ascendancy for the Mercenary class grants very strong defensive options across the board. Between disabling monsters when pinning them, cheaper persistent buffs, and high thresholds against ailments/stuns, the Tactician has a lot of great tools to survive. The Tactician Ascendancy also has great potential for a supportive co-op focused playstyle by providing flat damage and multiple persistent buffs to your party.

Invoker

The Invoker Monk Ascendancy focuses on empowering elemental attacks and spells with focus on Critical hits. It offers a unique blend of offensive tools used to harness the power of Ice and Lightning elements. Stacking high Evasion rating and Energy shield for defences is the Invoker's favoured way of dealing with damage as Lead me through Grace… and …and Protect me from Harm provide great payoffs for doing so.

Acolyte of Chayula

The Acolyte of Chayula ascendancy excels at gaining extra chaos damage from base damage thanks to Reality Rending, while Waking Dream provides exceptional sustain and free aura supports via Chayula's Gift (with Purple flames boosting chaos damage up to 140%). Lucid Dreaming doubles these flame bonuses, and Chayula's Gift solves hybrid defense by mitigating chaos damage penalties to Energy Shield. This creates a unique, high-sustain playstyle that scales both elemental and chaos damage into poison or hit based builds.

Deadeye

The Deadeye Ascendancy offers a playstyle familiar to fans of ranged combat. This class focuses on increasing attack speed, movement speed, damage, and projectile manipulation. By specializing into the Deadeye Ascendancy, players can create powerful ranged builds that excel at dealing damage from afar. If you want to play elemental bow skills, the Deadeye is a great choice, as it provides bonuses to projectile-based builds, including additional projectiles and increased movement speed.

Pathfinder

The Pathfinder Ascendancy for the Ranger class focuses on flask manipulation, mobility, and poison damage. The Pathfinder's ability to double the maximum number of poison stacks on an enemy solidifies it as the most powerful class for the poison archetype. Additionally, it has the ability to turn flask charges into damaging concoctions that explode upon impact with terrain or monsters.

Lich

The Lich Ascendancy for the Witch class offers the option of playing as a spell caster or as a minion overlord. It grants powerful offensive options through extra Chaos damage from Unholy Might, more damage to non-channeling spells, enemies killed in your presence have a chance to explode, your curses ignore Hexproof enemies & you can apply one extra curse and also gain one extra jewel socket slot with double the modifier values. To improve your your defenses you can use Eternal Life in combination with Soulless Form which allows you to mitigate 10% of damage taken as long as you have energy shield. You also have small nodes that grant extra energy shield, life and mana.

Bloodmage

The Bloodmage Ascendancy specializes in life-based spellcasting and ailment damage, uniquely enabling elemental damage to inflict bleeds—opening powerful build options that combine spells or elemental attacks with physical DoT effects. Its core strength lies in scaling offense through life stacking, where increased maximum life directly boosts both critical strike damage. This creates exceptional synergy with high-life builds, allowing Bloodmages to leverage their life aggressively.

Infernalist

The Infernalist Ascendancy is a powerful spellcaster focused on fire damage. This class can summon a loyal Hellhound companion and transform into a demonic form, granting increased damage and mobility. However, the demonic form comes with a significant drawback: increased damage taken over time. To mitigate this risk, players must invest in recovery mechanics.

Path of Exile 2 introduces new Ascendancy classes, each offering unique playstyles and mechanics. From the elemental mastery of the Invoker and Stormweaver to the dark power of the Acolyte of Chayula and the temporal manipulation of the Chronomancer, there's something for every player. Grinding Gear Games has done a fantastic job of adding flavor to these new Ascendancies while retaining the flexibility and customization options that Path of Exile is known for.

Credits

Written by: Crouching_Tuna
Reviewed by: Tenkiei