Top PoE Builds for Patch 3.5 the Betrayal League

Following our PoE Starter Builds article, we decided to cover some of the Top PoE Builds for the current 3.5 patch. These builds are not built with price or ease of play in mind, if you are interested in those builds please check out last week’s article. These builds will be concentrated on being as strong as possible within an archetype.

What are top 3 builds for the Betrayal League?

1. Winter Orb
2. Glacial Cascade Mines
3. Elemental Hit

1. Winter Orb

We’re starting with this build because not only does it utilize a new skill, but a variant was featured in our beginner build. Last week’s variant focused on the lower end and the ability of Winter Orb to scale cleanly through the acts, but the potential is much higher. Elementalists can clear extremely quickly by utilizing Winter Orb or BV plus Inpulsa, but there’s another variant that has far more potential. Inquisitor Winter Orb can scale critical damage to insane numbers and has the potential for massive upgrades.

Dying Sun can provide a huge damage boost to start things off. This scales nicely into all of the critical strike multiplier that you can go for on your dagger and shield. A well rolled Loreweave provides incredible defensive bonuses, while your jewelry fills the missing slots. Since you have so many rares in your build, the potential for high-end gear is insanely high. The damage output scales off of both critical strike bonuses and additional projectiles, meaning you can very easily get this build into the millions of damage, even against bosses like Shaper.

While we don’t have a guide, I’ve been following Etup’s build. If you are interested in doing the same, there’s a Path of Building code. The unique thing about this tree is that it makes use of Spiritual Aid to convert minion damage to apply to you as well. This allows you to get gear with implicit stats that increase your damage as well.

2. Glacial Cascade Mines

This is another build that is great because it can easily be started on a budget but scaled into the highest content the game has to offer. A new archetype has become popular lately, which is the Low Life variant of GC Miner. If you are able to afford the gear that goes into such a build, it will be some of the most damage you can ever output.

This build isn’t fast the way that others on this list are. In fact, as far as farmers go, this build is incredibly slow. What it does have is likely the highest possible damage in the game, particularly on bosses. Because of the ability to set up beforehand, most bosses die before they can even react. Placing four mines at once (with the helmet bonus) allows you to output nearly quadruple the damage of a normal build. This build is particularly great for farming Uber Elder, Shaper, and Uber Atziri, while many other builds cannot.

NOTE: While this build is very slow for most people (including myself), it is the build that was used to hit level 100 first in HC SSF this league. So clearly it has the potential to go extremely quickly if you can get around the clunky playstyle.

It should be noted that this build is also incredibly good at farming normal Atziri, which is a great way to make money – particularly early in the league. Starting off with a life-based lower-budget version of this build will allow you to farm content that others cannot far faster, meaning you can make enough bank to take this or any other build to their highest points.

3. Elemental Hit

Not much getting away from Elemental Hit. Now that many of the top builds have been nerfed, Elemental Hit has gotten even stronger in relation. There are two ways to play this build, and both are extremely powerful. Both of them make use of the Avatar of Fire (or Xoph’s Blood amulet) node as well as the two Combat Focus jewels to prevent Lightning and Cold damage, making sure you deal only fire damage and convert most of your damage over.

The first is the Deadeye variant. This variant concentrates on getting as much damage as possible and moving quickly. It is essentially a glass cannon built to farm fast and efficiently. Playing this variant without a support will ensure that you die several times, if you plan to farm high tier content, as you simply do not have the defenses to avoid deaths to things like Abaxxoth. That said, it’s about as much raw damage and speed as you can get out of an efficient farming build nowadays.

The second variant is either Slayer or Scion (and is the build linked above). It makes use of every single health node on the tree and as much flat life on gear as you can muster, as well as every increase to leech possible. Once you have all the health you can imagine, hitting anything will push your life to max instantly. Because of this, you will have a very hard time dying, as you’ll be leeching over 80% of your life per second, with a life total over 8000. You also have inherently decent damage due to Elemental Hit’s high base damage. I personally have played this build to level 97, 98, and 100 twice. It’s about as solid as a potential level 100 build can possibly be if you are playing solo.

Anything that else I should know about Top PoE Builds?

There are a lot of strong builds, and we’ve only highlighted a few so far. The most obvious honorable mention is playing support, either aura or curse support. These builds may not do anything on their own, but they enable your teammates to do double to quadruple their damage, regardless of their build (except righteous fire). The reason it wasn’t listed isthate, honestly, it sucks to play. Playing a support is exactly what it sounds like, and unless you’re one of the people who enjoy playing a loot bot, you likely won’t enjoy it.

There is also the dual Nebuloch consecrated path, many Poet’s Pen builds, Toxic Rain, and the ever-present Tornado Shot. We also have the HowA builds with over 10k ES and damage high enough to split the sun. There are a ton of viable builds this league, and there are likely many more we haven’t properly discovered, or I simply didn’t list. Good luck, and have fun crushing content!

For a list of builds from 6 categories, check our Path of Exile Wiki page