Dear exiles, this article is about the Witch's walkthrough on Path of Exile 2, shared by the Game Director Jonathan Rogers.
Most classes have access to some minions. But if you want to control an army, the Witch is probably the class you want to pick. In Path of Exile 2, most minions don't require manual summoning. This Celebrant Sceptre gives me a couple of free warriors, but it's also going to give me another resource called spirit, which you can spend on whatever minions you want. You can see the spirit bar above the mana here. On the skill screen, you can pick the composition of your army. This is a level two area, so I can only afford one other minion. I'll pick a sniper for now.
When minions die, they'll be revived automatically so long as no other minion has died recently. So before your next battle, all your minions will come back to life.
You can also order your minions around with a dedicated button. Tell them to move to a specific location, attack a specific enemy, or even open a chest or door for you. We also have temporary minions. This spell is called Unearth. If it kills a monster or if it hits the corpse of a monster, it creates these bone constructs. They can't take many hits and have a limited lifetime, but you can build a real army with these.
While my minions are attacking, I'm going to use some debuffs on the monsters, too. The first one I'm going to use here is Contagion. If a monster dies with Contagion, it spreads to nearby enemies. Each time it spreads, the damage increases. So it's a good idea to try and keep the infection going.
If any corpses are infected when you summon a minion from them, the minion will be infected as well. Each time they hit an enemy, they'll continue infecting them. It's nice to have an army of infected scorpions on your side.
I also have another chaos debuff called Essence Drain. This one does even more single target degen. If the monster is infected with Contagion at the same time, then the Essence Drain will spread as well. This can turn into a real plague of destruction.
Another minion type I can summon is zombies, but they require a corpse. They don't come back to life if they die, but they're fairly tough and can bolster your minion numbers.
Many minions also have command skills. I can order my Sniper to deploy a Gas Arrow on the battlefield to get some damage over time.
Now I'm going to summon a Skeletal Arsonist. They can throw little fire grenades, but they also have a command skill that can detonate your own minions that are low on life.
Use the skill when you see the red indicator, and the minion will boom. It's particularly nice on these bone constructs because they expire quickly anyway. So let's take all these tools we've found and fight the boss of this area, the Carrion Crone.
So that's how many minions you can get at level two. But let's see what minion gameplay looks like at a higher level. This is a level 30 area. I want to try a different group of minions. I still have my trusty warriors, but there are a lot of different types to choose from, like brutes for stunning or ice mages for freezing, and most of them come with their own special abilities or command skills.
I want a couple of Storm Mages to shock enemies, a Cleric to heal and revive my minions, and a bunch of Reavers. Reavers do high damage; you can also enrage them before the battle. They slowly kill them, but my cleric should be able to keep them alive. While my minions are attacking, I can use channeled skills like Bone Storm, which creates a devastating volley of sharp spikes.
The Storm Mage has a useful ability if lots of your minions die. He can summon a lightning storm to strike the location of every dead skeleton in your army. We also have a type of skill called Offerings. These let you impale one of your skeletons on a big bone spike to buff all your other minions. The one I've just used here is called Pain Offering. It makes all of my other minions faster and deals more damage.
After the battle, we have some extra corpses. We don't want those to go to waste. Profane Ritual consumes a corpse to create a Power Charge, which can power up some of my other spells. If I use them to summon zombies, I can create super zombies, which are more powerful. You also don't need a corpse to summon them.
I can also use power charges to channel Bonestorm. If I do that, it adds a devastating AoE.
In Path of Exile 2, even non-boss monsters like Faridun Impaler can be devastating. It has a wide variety of abilities and is pretty tough to defeat. But maybe I can put the body to use better.
This is a Bind Spectre gem. Using it, I can take the body of any enemy and capture its spirit to keep it as a minion. Any monster can be captured, but the spirit cost depends on how powerful the monster is. It takes a lot of spirit for such a powerful enemy, so I'll have to unsummon many of my other minions, but it seems like it might be worth it. If the Spectre dies just like any other minion, it will respawn after a short time.
So I think it's time to fight the boss of this area, Tor Gul, the Defiler.
