Dagger Wielding Witch, because why not

Tennative passive build :

(disclaimer: this build is mostly because I think it would be fun. I'm not trying to power-game, but I am trying to make this build the best it can be)

I've searched the forums, and there isn't much discussion I could find about it. My basic idea is I would use double-strike, and use a shield, grab as much energy shield as I could, and go for crits/dagger passives. Haven't put too much thought into what skills I would use other than the aforementioned, and I'm most concerned with the viability of this build and the passive tree rather than skill specifics, but all advice is welcome.

How well do you guys think this will do? How is my passive lay-out? What changes would you make? All help and advice is greatly appreciated :D

First off, if you might wanna consider a Shadow for a build like this, they're much better, but if you really want to build a witch:

1. If you're gonna go with a lot of ES, might aswell grab Chaos Innoculation, and since you're gonna go CI, you could also get Ghost Reaver, since Ghost Reaver + CI + Blood Rage really synergize well together.

2. Mind Drinker is good if you're having mana problems.

3. You might also wanna go Flicker Strike for Blood Rage's frenzy stacks.

4. Just Double Strike + Flicker Strike isn't gonna cut it for damage, your character as it is would benefit a lot from grabbing Lightning Strike, since both Arcing Blows and Shock are really close on the Shadow tree.

5. You grabbed a lot of useless nodes, like 15% increased critical strike chance with daggers, where you could have taken 15% increased critical strike chance nodes instead, or the 20% critical strike chance in the shadow starting area instead of the 10% near CI, and the nodes for dagger damage/accuraccy between the ranger and shadow starting areas too, those add very little to your damage.

6. You're gonna have very little survivability, you might consider going into the Templar area for more Energy Shield and stuff.

7. There are also some plain mistakes were you end up using more points than necessary when you're going to a certain area of the tree (like when you're leaving the witch starting area to go right).

8. Note that this build is gonna be VERY HEAVILY dependent on getting extremely good gear so you don't die, so I can't stress this enough: don't make this build as one of your first characters, if you still want to do this, you might consider making it a life/ES build, as it's way less gear dependent.

first off, thanks a lot for the help!

Yes, I know the shadow is much better suited for this, but I wanted to more or less just prove the point that it's possible to create a viable character using this build as a witch.

I'm a little confused, because you criticisize mine for making lots of redundant/inefficient pathing, while the link your provided seems to waste nodes travelling in the top right part of it. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what you were trying to accomplish there.

Are you saying I should grab the dagger damage/crit nodes between the shadow and ranger starting area? Because they seem equivalent to the ones I'm grabbing between the witch and the shadow area, unless I'm being totally clueless here.

Definitely using flicker strike, glad we agree there. And yeah, CI was something I was going to pick up once I had enough ES. Which kind of contradicts your other piece of advice about grabbing the life/es stuff from over near the templar or whatever though.

Lightning strike is definitely something I will look into and probably grab, hadn't really considered it before, thanks for the tip.


All in all, again, thank you for your time, your advice has been more than helpful in refining this build. I definitely understand what a challenge it's going to be, but I like challenges :) I think the feeling I get when I finally get this build working, and it's kind of an atypical build, will be rewarding. Perhaps I will start another toon in the meantime though to use for gearing this one if I start having too rough of a time.

Ok, updated the skill build using some of your advice and other builds I've found on the forums:

Basically, I'm using a modified build of the week 14 build to fit a witch. I'm not exactly sure which order of the passives will work best for leveling, but I think the build as a whole should be pretty powerful once I complete it.

I'm still open to any criticism anyone might have.

Nice work. I'm also going towards dagger witch build.

awesome! Let me know how it goes. So far I've hit 30, and I definitely seem pretty gear dependent. Luckily managed to nab a unique dagger that boosted my dps quite a bit, pretty sure I couldn't manage without it right now.

I've made some more changes to the build, and fleshed it out all the way to the end-game, if anyone is interested: http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMBBX0FtQdjDPIOSA_EEHsRLxFQEZYX2Bi9HdkhAyLqKCorCitvLOEtVTBUNj07fDvhQ1RLxE-_UEJW6lb1VytaplzGZfFtGXBScFZw1XWKd_15SH3jfll_xofbiEKIa4t6jDaNv46KkBuX0JlXmZqaE52WnaOiLqKjpcumf6crrGaxs7JEtMW1SLb3uMq5Prt8u9a-OsBRwQDBxcHzw23QCdA51AXYdtsa227b1NzH4vfjhOaB6Hvo1un-6xTrY-wY7UHz6vVL_Ks=

Lightning strike + fork + LMP will clear the screen for you pretty easily if you have the mana pool to keep firing it off.
I'm using the same thing on my shadow atm I'd suggest grabbing some life nodes early on and then save up your respec points for when you're going to finally spec into CI.

So why is this less gooder than a Shadow? I've used Invalesco's crit dagger Shadow, and it follows pretty much the same path. Just kinda swaps start point for end point.

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Gunfingers wrote:

So why is this less gooder than a Shadow? I've used Invalesco's crit dagger Shadow, and it follows pretty much the same path. Just kinda swaps start point for end point.

Yeah, you're probably right. The main difference is the different starting stats, different skill gem rewards, and different starting point. All of these contribute to a harder leveling process for the most part, but in the end I believe the two builds will be similar. I just think it's cool that it's a witch and not a shadow, ppl will be like "wtf? That witch is using daggers?"