TbXie's Poisonous Concoction Pathfinder Build Guide (PoE Trial of the Ancestors 3.22)

Due to the latest balancing changes, we do not recommend playing this build anymore, as it does not meet the high standards we apply to our guides in terms of fun and performance. We are leaving it up as a reference and it might be revived in a later patch.

Introduction

Poisonous Concoction is a poison-based attack skill introduced in Path of Exile’s 3.16 Scourge League. It offers incredibly clear and an old overlapping style of scaling its damage to the point where it becomes an absolute powerhouse. For players who like to blast through the game on a budget and want a build that is minmaxable with an acceptable amount of currency and incredible returns, this is a one of a kind build.

Disclaimer

The skill changed completely mechanically going into 3.21. We had multiple well-versed people look into the guide for a few days straight to come up with a working solution. It has now been playtested and changes have been made accordingly

Mechanics

This build relies on Pathfinder and the insane innate damage of Poisonous Concoction to be able to scale defences out of this world. In the endgame version, it stacks Armour, Evasion, Suppression, Life and Elemental Damage reduction to achieve a very durable build. Whilst doing so, it maintains millions of Bossing DPS and way above acceptable clear speed.

The way the build works is by scaling up your damage via damage over time multipliers and added chaos damage. This is because of the flat added chaos damage you’re getting from the Poisonous Concoction gem. Other than that, there’s a couple of debuff mechanics such as curses ( Despair), damage increments ( Wither) and additional clear speed Plague Bearer which round out the build to have it all.

We used to scale the damage through Life Flasks, but with the change in 3.21 that is no longer an option and we opted to scale differently.

The path of building offers you a starter set of gems & gear and a more optimized late-game selection of items. For more in depth information, please refer to the Path of Building or the appropriate sections in the guide.

Build Viability in Numbers

This is where I’ll rate the build in numbers. The lower the number the worse I actually think the build is in that compartment.

• Durability : 9/10
• Damage : 8/10
• Playstyle : 9/10
• Gearing : 9/10
• Complexity : 7/10

Path of Building & Skill Tree

You can find an optimized Path of Building here. Every build I release will use the community fork of Path of Building. You can find PoB’s Fork, by LocalIdentity, here”:https://github.com/PathOfBuildingCommunity/PathOfBuilding.

If you are not comfortable with Path of Building, you can import the path of building link to poeplanner and it’ll showcase the basics.

More information about the Passive Skill Tree, as well as all the Gem Links can be found on our dedicated page.

Passive Skill Tree, PoB & Gem Links

Ascendancy, Bandits, and Pantheons

Our Ascendancy, Bandit, and Pantheon Power page goes into detail about all the choices you need to make in these regards.

Ascendancy, Bandits & Pantheons

Gear Summary / TL;DR

A lot of this is explained more in depth in the Gear Page, however we will provide you with a basic idea of what gear you’re looking for in this short summary.

Gear, Jewels & Flasks

Early Game – League start Environment:

Item Slot	Item Name
Head	Rare Armour/Evasion Helmet with Life, Resistance, Spell Suppression. MAKE SURE IT HAS MORE ARMOUR THAN EVASION
Amulet	Agate Amulet with Life & some Damage over Time Multiplier
Chest	Rare Chestpiece with Life, Spell Suppression & Maximum Life as Energy Shield craft
Gloves	Rare Evasion/Energy Shield with Life, chance to Suppress Spell Damage, Resistances (Potentially Attack Speed)
Boots	Rare Evasion Boots with Life, Movement Speed, chance to Suppress Spell Damage & Resistances or Atziri's Step
Belt	Rare Belt with Strength, Life, Resistances
Rings	Rare Rings with Life, Resistances & Attributes
Shield	Lycosidae

Late-game:

Item Slot	Item Name
Head	Rare Armour/Evasion Helmet with Life, Resistance, Nearby Enemies take 9% increased Chaos Damage & a Poisonous Concoction AoE enchant. MAKE SURE IT HAS MORE ARMOUR THAN EVASION
Amulet	Catalysed Agate Amulet with Life, Malevolence Reservation Efficiency, -7 Mana Cost, Area of Effect
Chest	Rare Chestpiece with Life, Spell Suppression & Maximum Life as Energy Shield craft
Gloves	Rare Evasion/Energy Shield with Life, Attack Speed, Chaos DoT Multi, Resistances
Boots	Atziri's Step
Belt	Rare Belt with Strength, Life, % increased Life, Flask Effect, Resistances
Rings	Catalysed Iolite Rings with Life, Resistances, -7 Mana Cost, Despair on hit & Attributes
Shield	Lycosidae

Flasks

1	Granite Flask of the Armadillo
2	Sulphur Flask of the Opossum
3	Silver Flask of Dove
4	Jade Flask of the Impala
5	Quicksilver Flask of the Cheetah

The Cheetah affix should be swapped to a Catarina Benchcraft for Reduced Mana Costs once you swap to the late-game aura setup to reduce the cost of your Poisonous Concoction to 7.

Be sure to check out our Flask Crafting Guide to learn everything you need to know about how to set up your non-Unique flasks.

Tips, Tricks & Explanations about the guide.

Life Flasks for levelling

While we are progressing through the campaign we use 3 life flasks that way we can sustain the drain of Poisonous Concoction and still have flask charges for emergency healing

Gem links for levelling

Again to keep the drain on your life flasks manageable we use a special 4 link for Poisonous Concoction listed below in order of importance

1. Poisonous Concoction

2. Volley Support

3. Faster Attacks Support

4. Void Manipulation Support

in Act 2 after Intruders in Black quest get Poacher's Mark for sustain on Rares and Bosses and Defiance Banner

in Act 3 after Lost in Love quest get Grace and Purity of Elements/ Determination

Mana, Reservation, Quality of Life

First of all, in order to make the build play smooth and reduce the amount of investment needed in other ways of dealing with mana, we opted to aim at 3 pieces with -7 to non-channelling cost and therefore make all our skills completely free of cost.
This is a fairly important upgrade path, meaning that you shouldn’t be waiting until you have every single endgame piece of gear before aiming for those three pieces. There’s a multitude of ways of obtaining them (such as buying them from trade, unveiling jewellery “of Elreon’s Veil” by either farming Betrayal or buying not yet veiled items from trade or finding someone offering crafting services, who can craft it on any piece of jewellery with an open prefix.)

Next up, it might be important for you to figure out how to obtain % mana reservation the most efficiently. Altogether, the build runs 17% reservation efficiency on the helmet, which is fairly hard to come by. Before swapping to the cluster setup you will also need the 2 reservation efficiency jewels. They don’t need to have anything else on them. You can get 3% Reservation Efficiency per rare jewel, giving up some damage & life in the process as finding 3-stats will be hard.

Lastly, everything gets much much easier if you can fit enough resistances in the build so you can drop Purity of Elements. By doing so, you lose your Ailment immunity, which is a fairly huge source of defence but you can almost forego all of the investment in said Mana Efficiency. You could run a Helmet without Mana Reservation Efficiency, drop both the Enlightens & drop the Mana Reservation Cluster. You will need to adapt your gearing process, however, because most of the gear showcased in the late-game setup doesn’t account for resistances as Purity of Elements fixes them by itself. It definitely is doable though. For clarity, you can check the Path of Building, which has an indication of how you could gear up to achieve this version. It will be infinitely cheaper, yet a little bit less tanky.

Plague Bearer

Don’t sleep on this skill. It basically replaces Pconc almost all the time will mapping. Just running around with this when activated will carry your mapping experience, easily.

Helmet

We used the Armour and Evasion Mastery “Immune to Poison if Equipped Helmet has higher Evasion Rating than Armour, Immune to Bleeding if Equipped Helmet has higher Armour than Evasion Rating” so we need our helmet to have higher armour then evasion so we either use a pure Armour helmet or a hybrid armour/evasion helmet where the base item has higher armour than evasion

Questions & Support

If you enjoy my content to such an extent that you’d like to support me and my work, or you have a specific question you request my private time for, you can buy me a coffee over at Patreon. At no point should you feel pressured to contribute, but if you do, your support means more to me than you will ever imagine.

Even though we try to make our guides as complete as possible, obvioulsy it’s possible you still have questions. We have an entire mod-team readily available to support you & your questions on Discord. You can find us on the ARPG Vault Discord. Make sure to open a Guide Help thread so things stay clear in the main channels.