Shin's Blood and Steel - Witchhunter

The play style depends on whether you are fighting a single target or packs.


Packs:
Armour piercing rounds in a quick burst to apply broken armour on the pack, then follow up with a flash grenade to break the armor using the exploit weakness support. This will most likely proc a blood off the grenades along side doing great aoe burst physical damage.


Single target:
Same as packs, we start by breaking the armour of the enemy, however this time we use a hammer of the gods top deal crazy big damage then if its still alive we go back to pack rotation.

If you come to a point you get to start a fight or are panicking, pop down a Ripwire sentry. These lil guys draw aggro like crazy!

Defence:

Witch hunter is kind crazy when it comes to negating Elemental hits (not ground effects) with its sorcery ward. This thing gives you a "shield" that completely negates elemental hits until its hp is depleted. Its hp is calculated by 30% of the total of your armour and evasion. This means it can get really large. The down side is it cuts your armour evasion by 50% which hurts allot, but can be fixed by the passive tree quiet easily.

Overall, it is insane against anything that has elemental hits and decent against physical. So keep moving and avoid attacks best you can either way.

https://youtu.be/Bopa162A85I
Updated Guide https://youtu.be/VfRz9SvweC4

Gearing is very simple.

Get a Crossbow with LOTS of Physical Damage and +to projectile gems levels. Best you can get.
Next we want the same but for maces. Loads of physical and + to melee attacks.

Next the unique's. These are cool.

Beetlebite allows us to always have bleed aggravated as long as we are in close range, which we will be most the time.

Next is the coolest part of the kit, the Myrix Uxor. This helm will allow us to turn our culling in to the following: Normal mobs die at 67.5% life, Magic mobs die at 45% life, Rare mobs die at 22.5% life and finally Unique's die at 11.25% life. That's with our tree passive of Cull the Hordes added.

As you could see, that's some damn good life damage we don't have to do.

For the rest of your Armour, you just want armour evasion gear best you can get. Prioritise elemental resists first the increased armour/evasion rolls. And life. Always life.

Main gems are Armour Piercing Rounds, Flash Grenade and Hammer of the Gods.

Id also suggest picking up Wind Dancer asap. But for full details, read on.

Skills and supports explained:

Armour Piercing Rounds:
>Martial tempo>Demolisher>Armour Explosion>Chain

This is our main debuff ability. We don't use it for damage, we use it to remove armour as fast as possible. Due to this, we get chain asap and demolisher to make its purpose just that much better. I popped on Armour explosion to help a bit with clearing the squishy mobs fast.

Use is simple, spray and pray until everything is debuffed with broken armour.

Flash grenade:

> > >
This is our go to area clear and the main reason we can get pretty fast clear speeds. Linked to scatter shot asap and we turn grenade in to grenades, allowing for much larger clear area. Next we link Exploit weakness, ingenuity and Inspiration. Exploit will allow us to do massive damage to all the enemies that we have applied the broken armour debuff too. Ingenuity decreases cooldown and Inspiration helps us with the large amount of mana cost..

Hammer of The Gods:
Scattershot>Exploit weakness>Ingenuity>Inspiration

This is the new addition to the build.

This will allow us to drop a large amount of physical damage in a aoe. This is great for killing tougher mobs that the grenade is just not enough. This has replaced High Velocity rounds as out single target big hit.
We use the normal physical gems. Brutality, Heft and Fist of war for more damage and Fast forward so we are not waiting around for 2.5 seconds as it drops.

Ripwire Ballista:

Ironwood>Lockdown
This things fun! Its so good at gaining aggro that i don't leave home without it. Pop it down to distract packs or prepare for a fight. Linked to Ironwood to make it survive longer and lockdown to increase its ability to pin enemies.

Wind dancer:

Cannibalism>Vitality
This ones amazing. You can get it early and you can add supports as you expand your spirit. It gives you a % of evasion per stack up to 3 stacks and if melee gets through that evasion, the stacks will be spend and a blast of wind will launch enemies away from you, giving you time to gtfo. Must have asap. Linked with vitality for passive life regen and cannibalism for more life sustain.

Scavenged plating:
No links
This ones a no brainer once you have finished the story and acquired all the spirit you get from quests. It gives 3% armour for every broken armour you apply and stacks to 10x so 30% armour just by doing what we do is a great choice all round.

Sorcery ward:
No links
This passive skill is acquired by the first ascendency we should get. See how it plays section for more details.

I used mobalytics for my builds so you can find the tree here
link: https://mobalytics.gg/poe-2/profile/b1ad00fb-3a93-47a1-ba03-cb1b4f8e95ce/builds/65abe06b-5936-42e7-8151-9721a9aaa913

Build tree is broken up in to sections
Get first: Cream color
Get second: Pink
Get last: Green

First lets talk Jewels. You should have 4 jewel sockets by the end and you will want to get the below.
%Increased global physical damage
%Chance to bleed
%increased magnitude of bleeding you inflict

Try to balance magnitude and chance to bleed best you can. 100% chance is ideal but not entirely possible.

Ill list the recommended path, but feel free to do what feels best.

*Select attributes between STR or DEX depending on what you need. Try to keep them balanced as you will need both for gear.

Ascendency order: Zealous inquisition>Obsessive Rituals>Pitiless killer>Judge

Cream:

First we grab Remorseless and Feel no pain followed by Ricochet.

That will help with damage and survival in the starting areas.

Next we get Volatile Catalyst and move to the left to complete all the two handed branch which has Overwelm, Colossal Weapon and Curved Weapon. Then we grab all the bleed nodes above ending with Bloodletting
.
Continuing in the same area, we grab Backup Plan and Cruel Methods. Make sure you only grab the nodes on the right side of the Cruel Methods branch.

Continue down the tree and hang a left to pick up Grenadier, Afterimage and then Defiance. Then move down the tree and hang another left. Grab all the small nodes of the blood tree and leave the large nodes as we wont need them later (you can get the large nodes while you level but you wont see much of bleed until endgame). Then shoot down and over to the right and get Advanced Munitions then Bleeding out using the bottom path.

Pink:
First grab the armour/evasion nodes Leather Bound Gauntlets and General's Blessing. Its at this point you will start getting attribute issues. So lets help with that. Grab Polymathy and feel so much better.

Now go back up the tree a bit and complete the cooldown circle with Distracting Presence followed by grabbing Volatile Grenades. You should now notice a massive increase to your dps with grenades.

Green:

On the left side, grab Crushing Judgement and Authority to make your grenades and hammer do even more aoe damage.

Next we boost our Culling by grabbing Cull the Hordes.

And finally grab Deterioration. Oh and don't miss the last jewel socket right next to it as its the only jewel socket that was not on the path already.