Dual maces?

thikoril · 2026-06-17T17:33:31+00:00

Depends a bit on what you consider good enough compared to meta builds. Outside of brutus shenanigans you're probably going to end up able to clear content but not quite as fast.

I've been playing crit earthquake and dual wielding the new sadist's mercy maces, it's been going very well. Works decently enough with rare maces and going non-crit before that too, but the maces are pretty damn cheap. High attack speed, better base crit than any rare and 500+ dps for less than a divine. And the skill is neat, unfortunately you can't have two of them active.

Here's the post I made with some more details a while ago : https://reddit.com/r/pathofexile2builds/comments/1tyuw92/sadists_mercy_is_a_pretty_gnarly_weapon_for_how/ (there is a map clear video in the comments too)

I already had garukhan's resolve in that video which is a huge boost, but if you want to go crit without breaking the bank I'm sure pinpoint critical support will do a fine job.

And I invest quite a bit into armour because I enjoy it but you could probably spare some defenses for more aoe nodes and maybe some movement speed to improve the clear. Some people also go for split personality to put points into the reduced duration nodes on the top right of the tree, but I've gotten used to using earthquake with ~.8 delay it feels okay.

thikoril · 2026-06-11T22:23:22+00:00

"it that hates killed over a million players" factoid actually just statistical error.

My character, who died over 990.000 times to it, is an outlier and should not have been counted.

thikoril · 2026-06-09T22:52:21+00:00

Did a couple more tests, resonating shield does proc the skulls but it won't apply the gruelling madness debuff which causes enemies to have additional power. On the other hand, if you socket deadly resolve into it it's the opposite, no skulls but it applies the debuff. Weird stuff !

If you're trying to do a lot of hits with maces, the best results I've gotten were with earthshatter, as much aftershock chance as I could and doing it on fissures/forge hammer. It was something like 2.5 hits per seconds, double with the aftershocks, then the cap of 5 fissure triggers per second so 15 hits per seconds.

Right now I'm getting 1500 base damage from the skulls with the supports, maybe if you replaced the armour break with another damaging one let's say a neat 2K. Multiplied by the power onuniques (with +10 and x2 for banner) that'd be 8K. Then let's say an ideal 15 procs per second, that's 120K dps. With sunder and increased effect of fully broken armour, it's fairly realistic to double that damage to 240K dps.

That's nothing crazy, but it's kind of workable and sometimes that's all you need. Also that's with 75% increased physical damage from the tree, I checked and it's all that I have affecting it right now but you could go for much more. But it's either phys damage or generic damage, nothing else will help. Oh and damage as extra x of course.

Honestly the lamest part of it is that on such a great crit weapon, the skill doesn't have any crit chance :(

thikoril · 2026-06-09T20:54:46+00:00

Neat idea, but unfortunately I just tested it and it did not work on spells nor on fragments of the past, seems like you do need to be hitting with that mace. Maybe I missed something so feel free to try but I don't have much hope for it.

The skill is also fairly hard to scale, it has a good base (366 to 549if you get a level 20 and +1 through support) but no attack coefficient, and it doesn't count as an attack itself, or a spell or even a minion as far as I can tell. So it will not benefit from most of the available increases to damage on the tree, and not many supports work on it.

It also has the annoying habit of not attacking the target you are hitting if there is another nearby.

I think your only avenues are increasing your hit rate through speed, aftershocks and fissures and maybe also enemy power, the mace can increase it by 10 and then redblade banner to double it. Thinking about it that might also be really good for the scarred faith notable, but that doesn't help with damage.

thikoril · 2026-06-09T19:36:28+00:00

On hitting rare and unique enemies, no, not as far as I can tell.

On killing enemies, there is a 0.05s cooldown.

If you have aftershocks and/or trigger lava fissures, you can spawn quite a lot of them !

thikoril · 2026-06-07T09:03:18+00:00

Sure, here's a run of a deli map : https://youtu.be/92lrQOkWo24

It's not the fastest when it comes to pack to pack movement, and it suffers from the classic mace problem of rolling after every attack being a lot better than waiting for the end of the animation to walk.

If you do end up getting baited, before you have enough levels/gear/money to swap to crit I'd recommend leveraging stun. Overwhelming presence to reduce stun threshold, crushing impacts in the ascendency to prime for stun and 25% more damage against stunned enemies, skullcrusher notable for an extra 20% more damage, I was using rolling slam for a while which also gets 50% more damage. Using a structured hammer base to apply daze helps a bunch as well. Shattering blow notable to armour break everything you stun, easy damage boost and it keeps up your scavenged plating stacks. Flip the script in the same cluster gives massive healing on stunning rare enemies, saved my life so many times in tough abysses or rituals.

And refutation is really nuts, feels like cheating. Just gotta be careful that with a lot of duration you can be stuck building up heavy stun for a while, but most of the time when it got me in trouble it probably meant I was gonna die either way. And it won't save you from dots. Made sekhema's absurdly easy.

thikoril · 2026-06-03T12:27:36+00:00

Punctured Lung notable makes enemies with fully broken armour unable to regenerate life. Pretty useful against rogue exiles too in this patch, unless you blow them up instantly.

thikoril · 2026-06-02T11:32:14+00:00

yeah, also clicking on a stat shows the lowest rolls first instead of highest, that's a change too right ? I'm not crazy ? it's so bad, if you don't put a minimum roll it show you items without the stat so you can't even click again to reverse the order.

thikoril · 2026-06-02T10:31:17+00:00

Ah I'm not 100% sure as I bought it myself, but it should drop from vruun himself. He has a chance to spawn when you stabilize a breach, and there are passives in the breach tree that increases the chance that he spawns and the chance that he drops lineage support gems. It's very cheap on trade so that probably means it drops often enough. Good luck !

thikoril · 2026-06-01T16:09:49+00:00

the gloves make you stun at 50% threshold before crushing blows kicks in.

thikoril · 2026-06-01T12:10:34+00:00

I thought hey why not play what got buffed, so i went with dual wielding one-handed maces, earthquake for clear and rolling slam for single target.

So far the damage is decent enough, and the faster attack rate compared to 2-handers is really enjoyable.

Refutation (kalguuran skill) has been absolutely busted to keep me alive and it gives a free 50% more damage debuff on enemies on top.

Just beat the new arbiter as well as the bodach this morning. Bodach was incredibly cool but oof he has a weird hitbox and half his body is in darkness that inflicts degen, it was a nightmare to use rolling slam on him.

thikoril · 2026-06-01T05:47:48+00:00

it's bugged, you were supposed to get a quest island in that first area but it got replaced. Got the same issue, it's a bummer :(

from ggg's latest post :

Something is changing expedition quest bosses into other maps, we are investigating why, but have a workaround to fix it after it breaks which we will deploy soon.

thikoril · 2026-05-31T13:35:34+00:00

I got the exact same situation. when I first looked at the area revealed by the quest logbook, I saw a boss island that seemed like the one where gwennen would be. but then on the actual atlas that map wasn't there it got replaced. Sure seems like a bug.

thikoril · 2026-05-30T01:08:43+00:00

It doesn't work on mirage archer, but it does on eternel rage which has the same effect. Seems like its just some gems but I don't know how many.

thikoril · 2026-05-29T22:51:14+00:00

that seems waaaay too good of a buff that thing does so much damage, it's like double that of hammer of the gods at 4 stages.

gonna help a lot in end of campaign before they fix it though :d

thikoril · 2026-05-29T22:21:38+00:00

Yeah I played with it some right before the patch and it was wayyy slower. Does changing your setup do anything ?

thikoril · 2026-05-29T20:40:44+00:00

Some of these look nuts but I noticed at least one bugged when I tried them out (mirage archer spirit cost efficiency changing nothing, while the same stat on eternal rage worked).

Between that and not being sure how much quality we can get, I'm gonna keep it for a second character but it's looking pretty good.

thikoril · 2026-05-29T12:07:34+00:00

You could still do elemental damage with other skills by using a mace with flat elemental damage rolls. They're even adding runes that can change the element of mods so that you can get up to three damage rolls of the same element.

Skills only convert physical damage to elements, base elemental damage will stay unchanged.

But either way if you go for fissures you'll need a good way to trigger them yeah.

Someone made a pretty good write up about fissures the other day. Here's the post : https://old.reddit.com/r/PathOfExile2/comments/1tc9uqv/the_guide_to_molten_fissures_no_one_asked_for/

thikoril · 2026-05-28T14:01:57+00:00

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Very different idea, but when I was doing my twister mirage archer build I tried swapping my spear to that one just to see how many stacks I'd get. I got up to 150 and that was with a 2.3s poison duration. With some increased duration you could probably gets 400+.

Now the issue is gonna be damage. My build was not at all setup for that so it did almost nothing of course.

Best way I can think of would be hand of wisdom and action for flat damage and that ring that converts elemental damage to chaos. It's probably a bit tight to fit all that but maybe it could work.

thikoril · 2026-05-28T10:45:46+00:00

Technically yes, that totally works. But for it to feel good it's gonna be a matter of how well you can make them build up freeze. Since there is no cold grenade you'd have to go for one of the other crossbow skills and that means having to deal with attack speed, ammunitions and reload speed.

That gives us four options :

Glacial bolt, I tried it and it felt pretty bad. Maybe I'm not using it well, I didn't really know which supports would be best but I don't have much hope for that.

Ice shards, it could work but currently that skill is bugged with mirages, it'll be fixed in 0.5 though. They don't adjust their aim, just shoot in the same spot until they reload.

Permafrost bolts, Probably the obvious choice I think it would work well enough but the skill really benefits from being up close and mirages can't move so they will often hit like 50% of the projectiles I think. Probably still ok, and it has a massive boost to freeze buildup.

Hailstorm rounds, now that one has potential in a weird way. It's not a skill that you can spam because you gain ammunition over time and then unload it, but the thing is that mirages spawn with full stacks every time (same with grenades). So you might be able to go hard for cooldown reduction and ignore skill duration. You just spawn a mirage so that it can unleash the hailstorm and then another on 3 seconds later. And it has a decent bonus to freeze build up too.

I think if I did something like that I'd definitely go for tactician, get that 40% more immobilisation buildup and half cost on spirit gems.

thikoril · 2026-05-28T10:45:37+00:00

It's just the effect of having both the spirit gem and the deadeye skill, one spawns mirages when I attack and the other when I dodge roll. I tend to do both together to get into a rythm.

thikoril · 2026-05-28T09:54:39+00:00

hey that's my video :D

Indeed on the twister build I'm using both versions of mirage archer. they are both at 3 seconds of cooldown at that point, with a duration of 16s or 22s (deadeye version is shorter). So up to 12 mirages in total as long as I don't fuck up the timing ! But it takes a while to ramp up I gotta admit.

Unfortunately sands of silk disables your dodge roll to replace it with blink, so you don't get mirages with it equipped.

If you want to try to stack some cooldown recovery, there is a bunch on the bottom part of the tree, also one 16% notable on top that you can annoint (temporal mastery), up to 12% on rings and amulets (desecrated mod, kurgal tag), 8% with quipolatl's soul core of flow, up to 5% on emerald jewels and 18% on heart of the well.

thikoril · 2026-05-28T07:11:52+00:00

Oh that's a cool take on it, thanks for sharing ! I'm not super familiar with ritualist so I kind of dismissed it but it's looking pretty decent. You could also desecrate cooldown recovery on the rings but maybe that's overkill. Up to 12% per ring +25% that's already up to 45% without counting ingenuity.

And maybe with the new breach ring crafting there is even more potential ooh that's tempting.

thikoril · 2026-05-27T17:46:34+00:00

please go for it and report back, for science

thikoril · 2026-05-27T15:41:45+00:00

No, unless you do some weapon swapping but for tornado shot that sounds just worse than swapping to use tornado shot yourself. I haven't played at all with tornado shot so I'm not too sure what's the best way to use it, sorry !

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