Chronomancer - No Uniques Required - Beginner Friendly - Lightning Warp
 ------------------------------------------ MaxRoll Link: https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/ymvq701j I like MaxRoll's ease of use for showing off armor stats and skill set-up. I don't like the overall quality of community builds on there - it's generally very low. Please take a look there if you have questions on tree/links/gear. ------------------------------------------ End Game Example (Start of Mapping)  ------------------------------------------ 1. Introduction 2. Pros/Cons 3. How to play it 4. Ascendancy 5. Final Passive Skill Tree 6. Gear & Stats to look for 7. Act Walkthroughs 8. Problematic Enemies 9. Theorycrafting 10. Closing ------------------------------------------ 1. Introduction Hello there, if you are reading this, than you, like me, have been on the hunt for a decent guide that doesn't have huge gear restrictions or time investments needed to use and that won't get you stuck in Endgame. I've been playing PoE for about 9 years now with ~3000 hours into it and I'm very passionate about the game and community, so I'm truly hoping this helps people out, at least a bit. I won't be able to respond here a ton, as I am a working Dad - so please be patient with me if you have questions or suggestions. As with everything in PoE2, the game is super new and things are changing constantly, so what might be viable today, might change tomorrow. I will try my best to keep things up to date here. An important note here is I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible for new players, utilizing only three spells at most, so you don't get overwhelmed. While I absolutely love the PoE community and how it constantly strives to obliterate the game by making insane builds, these are usually extremely daunting and confusing to players. I'm hoping this guide can serve as a jumping off point for players to learn the core concepts. Please also note I've gotten a few asks to post up my guides in Mobalytics and while I would love to post my guides in other places, I specifically tried this out and you cannot upload anything unless you are a verified partner with their site. Until that happens, I will continue to make builds right here. I've also started posting on MaxRoll which I will link to when I have it all set. If you ever have questions, please ask in the forum here or stop by my Twitch channel, I stream pretty often and would be happy to answer things live. I play typically on Standard league, to provide help for my friends, but if I'm testing out builds - it will be strictly self-imposed SSF. With all that out of the way, I'm excited to try this build out and update it as I progress. Mainly, this will use Lightning Warp, Ball Lightning and Lightning Conduit to do massive burst damage to melt enemies. ------------------------------------------ 2. Pros/Cons Pros +++ Straightforward - Only uses a few abilities for the most part +++ Easy to Gear - no Uniques that are absolutely required +++ Room to Expand and add your own flare +++ Only need to gear for Lightning Damage +++ Mobility is great on the build +++ The build has a ton of style Cons --- Could be boring if 1-3 buttons isn't enough for you --- Need to change playstyle from Arc to Lightning Warp around Act 3 --- Defensives are a bit wacky and require Int/Dex splitting --- Damage set-up takes some getting used to --- Extremely heavy Movement based, positioning could get awkward ------------------------------------------ 3. How to play it Reminder: I wanted to keep things as simple as possible for this build for new players to get through content and enjoy the game. There is plenty of room for more veteran players to pick this up and experiment/push the boundaries of this as well - more on that in theorycrafting sections. Important Note: This build comes online as soon as you pick up Lightning Warp and Ball Lightning. With those two abilities, you can start tearing through packs quite effectively. Until then for leveling, use Spark until you get Arc, then use Arc until you get Lightning Warp + Ball Lightning. I'll have the gem set-up for leveling on MaxRoll (link above) if you are curious. Arc is really strong by itself, so you should cruise all the way to getting Lightning Warp. I. Lightning Warp
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This is your main ability. It utilizes Cull mechanics to explodes enemies at low life, do a ton of damage around the enemy and create shocked ground in an equally large area. The unique thing about LIghtning Warp, is that you can also use it on Ball Lightning! This means we get to jump around to our orbs and do tons of burst damage because of it.
Support Gems: Unleash The big thing to note here is how it works with Unleash, in that you will almost instantaneous utilize all changes to teleport around and stack damage in an area repeatedly on nearby low life enemies. This works especially well with Ball Lightning+Scattershot, as Scattershot will cause Ball Lightning to create three projectiles, which is exactly enough to expend all of our Lightning Warp charges in one button press. Controlled Destruction we don't stack crit, so more damage is great. Considered Casting the base cast time on Lightning warp is pretty low already and we stack tons of cast speed (having close to 50% increased cast speed just from our tree). the 40% damage bonus is great here. Concentrated Effect This will reduce our AoE size a good amount, but the damage trade-off is worth it in my opinion. Elemental Discharge This will consume shocks to do more lightning damage. While enemies are in shocked ground they are getting constantly shocked so the downside to consuming the ailment is not that dramatic for us. II. Ball Lightning
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This is used to Lightning Warp to and overlap your AoE's, essentially shotgunning down the enemy with huge lightning burst damage. We also stack some debuffs on hit with Ball Lightning to help with survivability and ease of use.
Support Gems: Arcane Tempo The cast time on Ball Lightning is sort of low, especially paired with Scatter Shot, we use Arcane Tempo to help with that. Scattershot Absolutely required for this build. The whole Unleash combo doesn't work without it. Blind Lowering the accuracy on enemies for basically free is just a win, especially considering we are Evasion + ES for defensives. Acceleration/Deceleration I've had mixed results with this - Deceleration was okay in some scenarios when I had low cast speed. III. Orb of Storms
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Basically only use this on bosses or rares. The damage by itself is okay, but we really use it for the Elemental Discharge support. We will be creating shocked ground, so the support will trigger on almost every single cast, doing tons of extra lightning damage based on your Intelligence.
Support Gems: Magnified Effect More Area is great, especially if you are able to cast within it. The more lightning spells you cast within it, the more lightning bolts it shoots out. Expanse Even More Area! This gives the skill a cooldown, which is actually okay, because it sticks around for a long time anyway. Elemental Discharge This causes big lightning damage by removing shock from enemies and causing an explosion based on a percentage (10% - 80%) of your intelligence. The cool thing about this as mentioned before is that Lightning Warp creates shocked ground. So tough enemies will be getting hit with this at almost 100% uptime. IV. Buffs
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The Good Grim Feast this buff is really nice, it grants us Energy Shield for killing enemies which can overflow (up to 2x of normal) our energy shield as well. Ghost Dance Whenever we get hit, we heal a portion of Energy Shield based on our Evasion rating, definitely want to pick this up. Archmage This buff is excellent, and pairs super nicely with Lightning Warp if you grab the Soul Drain (12% mana recovered on enemy Cull) support gem on Lightning Warp. The Okay Artic Armor Throw on some added freeze support and this thing could save you in some hairy situations. It's a pretty nice passive defensive layer. Lingering Illusion It's nice because we don't have a lot of things to drop aggro if playing solo. The Power charge generation could also be neat in some sort of variant of the build. Blink I've always found this pretty clunky to use, but it fits the style of the build and might help with defensives considering we have high cooldown recovery. Cast on Shock The nerfs to this feel pretty brutal. This basically only procs in bosses fights consistently. Otherwise you are getting a cast of one thing every couple packs if you are trying to slot in something like Comet. Unless you spec around this specifically, I found better use out of the defensive buffs. ------------------------------------------ 4. Ascendancy We take Chronomancer here. We use Chronomancer for the really nice defensives of Temporal Rift and the benefit of huge cooldown effeciency with 33% CD reset chance and a skill that resets all of our cooldowns. I. Ascension 1
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First up is Temporal Rift. It may seem weird to pick up a defensive first for an Ascendancy, but it ensures we have a smooth run through to Cruel Acts. You'll use Temporal Rift to reset your HP, Energy Shield and Mana to a state from 4 seconds ago. This is really excellent for Lightning Warp because we will be teleporting into packs of mobs and then teleporting back to when we were out of danger. The flow here is very fun, interesting and what gives this build its style.
 II. Ascension 2
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Here you put your points or into Now and Again, we specifically don't pick up Quicksand Hourglass because we are not casting extremely often, and getting a burst of cast speed could mess with our Lightning Warp combos. The build is also very mana intensive during mid-game, so this would just drain you extremely fast.
I really want to like this node, but it's hard for me. Maybe GGG will do something eventually like give us 50% recovery during it as well to make up for the Mana drain during casts.  III. Ascension 3
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Unbound Encore is what we will be picking up for CD resetting. This allows us to experiment a lot with cooldown support gems or just keep it simple and use it on Temporal Rift and/or Time Freeze
 IV. Ascension 4
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You have a choice here - Quicksand Hourglass is generally good, but most likely unecessary for your last Ascendancy nodes or grab Time Freeze for the big crowd control cooldown. My personal pick would be Time Freeze here as it gives us even more utility and pairs really nicely with Unbound Encore and Now and Again.
 ------------------------------------------ 5. End Game Passive Skill Tree  ------------------------------------------ 6. Gear and what to look for I. Body Armour & Helmet Anything that has Energy Shield, Resists, Spirit and Evasion is perfect. II. Boots Same as above, but we can't get spirit on boots so Movement Speed is the primary stat we are looking for. III. Gloves Same as above. IV. Rings Lightning Damage and Resists. V. Neck Spirit Neck is great for helping out our buff limit. +Spell Levels is what you want to focus on here. VI. Weapon You can use a staff or Wand+Focus. I personally like the latter for the extra Energy Shield and Artificer slot. But, generally if you find either with +Spell Levels, Lightning Damage & Spell Damage, you'll be good to go. ------------------------------------------ 7. Act Walkthroughs Note: I won't be going through a general guide here to get through the campaign and end game, I'm sure there are guides out there that would do a better job than I would, this is just generally where the build should be at each point in the game. We stack Intelligence and only get enough Dexterity if a gem or armor piece requires it. We will need to stack Dexterity a bit for our Armor pieces and buffs. Intelligence is our super stat though, with all of our passives - it boosts our damage, big time. I. Act 1
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Leveling is really smooth on this one if you are familiar with spell caster. Essentially, you grab Spark + Flame Wall and cast your sparks through flame wall for big time damage. This honestly should get you all the way through Act 1 without much trouble
10 Skill Points
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We grab a bunch of spell damage here to just tear through enemies as fast as possible here.
 20 Skill Points
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Some extra penetration on Lightning spells and a big boost to damage when hitting any shocked enemies. this should signficantly spike your damage.
 II. Act 2
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As you get into Act 2 - things start actually hitting and hurting us, so the first few things we want to do is focus on our defnsives.
33 Skill Points
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We pick up some Energy Shield nodes here to make sure we don't get 1-shot by anything. We also need to come back to this side of the tree later on to pick up some straggler noteables that will really help us out.
 42 Skill Points
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We pick up Echoing Frost and Echoing Thunder at this step. Generally, we don't need to focus on a wand that has any extra cold damage, because we will have the "Drenched" notable, but until then make sure you get a wand that has +% extra cold damage, as it will boost your damage by at least 30%.
 At this point, you should be hitting your Ascendancy trials for the first time - check out the Ascendancy section for information on that. That should wrap up Act 2 with you rolling into Act 3 with mostly rares and hopefully if you are lucky, 50-60% Resistances and with a good amount of Energy Shield and starting to get some Evasion gear on top of that. III. Act 3
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Things in Act 3 do a ton of chaos damage, there aren't a lot of things that help with that that are accessible for us right away, so this act tends to be very burst and 1-shot heavy. The best you can do here is keep your resists as high as possible while boosting your damage as much as possible at the same time. Keep your distance from enemies, you can even run away if things get too hairy and let your Orb of Storms wittle away at packs. You shouldn't have to do this unless you got really unlucky with gear rolls up to this point (like me!).
52 Skill Points
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We start to go into our big Mana and damage tree.
 63 Skill Points
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This is the start of the power spike for us. We grab the 3% Spell damage per 100 mana and our regeneration nodes to help out with our mana regen problems. This build is mana intensive so this should smooth out your playing substanially.
 72 Skill Points
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If you weren't absolutely destroying enemies before, you should be now. We get 60% increased lightning damage, 3% Spell damage per 100 mana, and 2% increase Lightning Damage per 10 Intelligence. This is why Intelligence is so important to this build, as it double dips into damage stats for it.
 IV. End Game
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Now you'll be getting into end game so we will start focusing more on what makes this build strong. This is also a great time to spread out and try things out for yourself and make some unique edits. I'll get into some ideas for that in my theorycrafting section.
81 Skill Points
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Even more lightning penetration and flat spell damage % increase. Another big power boost for us. Our cast speed suffers a tiny bit, but we should have plenty where this isn't super noticeable.
 92 Skill Points
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We grab even more cast speed and start picking up increased Evasion nodes to help with our defensives.
 102 Skill Points
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Now we drop down to the Monk tree and start picking up the big notables for defensives and cast speed around their starting point. We start be grabbing all the bigger Evasion nodes near us.
 114 Skill Points
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Pick up all the really decent Monk nodes for us, including Skill speed, extra Lightning damage and Evasion nodes.
 Final Tree
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We finish with our tree rounding out some additional Energy shield bonuses and flat Spell damage (at the expense to minor area reductions).
------------------------------------------ 8. Problematic Enemies
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Viper Napuatzi Boss (Act 3) Oh man, this is probably the hardest fight in the game for us as we are just barely transitioning into Lightning Warp at this time. This boss is super hard by itself, but mixed with our movement based attacks, this becomes a very rough fight. If you got even a couple good rolls on items, this shouldn't be much of a problem - it took about 15 tries for me as my items were exceptionally bad at the time. My best advice is to be very liberal with your use of Temporal Rift and save pots as much as you can, this is a rough one. The Cruel version of her is not nearly as bad as we are more prepared with our build the second time around that we fight her.
------------------------------------------ 9. Theorycrafting I'll go over some of my ideas for alternatives for the build or how to make it just generally better while adding some complexity to it. Please feel free to also hit me up with your own suggestions or if I overlooked something here. I. Cast on Shock
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I tried a lot of Cast on Shock things, but nothing really panned out as much as just have defensives up constantly.
II. Lightning Conduit
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I thought this spell would be great, considering it's based off of shock magnitude. Turns out I was wrong, the cast speed is kind of terrible and it barely does equivilant dps to lightning warp.
III. Blink
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I didn't try Blink on this build, but I could see it being very very fun, especially when you get a string of free cooldowns. Defnitely something to try out!
IV. Just use Arc
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I'll be honest and say that I think Arc has better potential to scale up and be an easier time overall. However, I couldn't pass up the cool factor of Lightning Warp. You could very very easily use this build for Arc as well and just get the extra chaining nodes. I would also suggest grabbing the cast speed Ascendancy if you were keen on doing that.
------------------------------------------ 10. Closing I finished up this build last weekend through the first couple map quests and I can honestly say it was super fun to play. Even with really terrible gear, I was able to power through up to Tier 4 maps within an hour or two. With the proper gear set-up, there's very little chance you would be running into issues here. Lightning Warp offers a unique playstyle and the scaling potential on the build is really incredible. Thanks for reading, see you later exiles! ------------------------------------------- Update #1
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Thanks to Phoryst#5308 and TTVGutzilla3#8315 for pointing out the original tree had a bit too much Lightning Penetration for end game content. That has been fixed and updated.
------------------------------------------- If you enjoyed this, check out my other guides here: Titan - League Starter/SSF - Beginner Friendly - Fire Build to get to Endgame https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3625751 Acolyte of Chayula - League Starter/SSF - Off-Meta - Hexblast Monk to get to Endgame (and beyond) https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3645471 Pathfinder - No Uniques Needed - Beginner Friendly - Bleeding Concoction to get to EndGame https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3657241 -------------------------------------------- Shoutout to monik390#5560 for the guide format. They have a very good style with the guides they make, please check them out as well! Last edited by Kobyjoe#5354 on Jan 7, 2025, 6:23:16 PM Last bumped on Jan 7, 2025, 6:34:07 PM
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Woah, you've done the guide better than I did =)
Looks fun, might try it later. Good luck =) |
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" Monik! Haha, no way I could have done it better than you! Your guide at the beginning of launch inspired me to start writing these up, I'm super appreciative of you and all the other guide writers in the community for the time and effort you put in just to help people, it's really amazing to see. Mainly for me, I also hate seeing people struggling, getting really frustrated and giving up on this game because barrier to entry is pretty high (granted much lower than PoE1), so I'm hopeful that I can help even a small amount of new players at least get into the swing of things before they branch out. |
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I've wondered about Lightning Warp viability in PoE1 for some time, so it's great to see this guide!
Do you think this could be viable with Stormweaver as well? I can see how Temporal Rift could be pretty key to the build, but SW solves mana and can stack extra shock plus exposure - I imagine it might be more of a glass cannon but maybe still viable? |
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" It's absolutely viable as SW. SW is super strong and should have no problems with running this for exactly the reasons you state above. One of the reasons I went Chrono is that I felt it was being a bit underutilized and I wanted more people to try out and have fun with the class. Warping, blinking and rewinding your position is super fun and feels really good with Chronomancer and Lightning Warp, but I totally understand if you just want to blast things with SW as well! |
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Looking over your build I like it but I really think these 4 nodes should be put somewhere else probably into the shock magnitude nodes up top.
https://imgur.com/a/Se8NX9C <- these bad late game https://imgur.com/GIutjVA <- these good late game but maybe I am the noob and mis-understanding the reasoning. Last edited by Phoryst#5308 on Jan 7, 2025, 1:31:46 PM
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" Hello! Thanks for reply and taking the time to dissect the build a little bit! Ill break down the two nodes a bit so we don't have to jump between images for the sake of others: Shock Magnitude Node Cost: 3 Skill Points Overall Passives: +30% Chance to Shock, +15% Shock Duration, +25% Shock Magnitude. Lightning Penetration Node Cost: 4 Skill Points Overall Passives: +5 Intelligence, +10 Dexterity, +27% Lightning Penetration So, this build doesn't really care about shock duration or chance to shock. Lightning Warp creates shocked ground so you basically have 100% uptime on shock (which is also why we use elemental discharge). We essentially would be spending 3 points here to increase our Shock value from 20% to 25%, which when compared to going from basically 100% Lightning damage penetration to 73% Lightning damage penetration... really doesn't seem worth it. Not to mention, the extra Dexterity in that node is super nice as it frees us up a bit from needing to add dexterity in any of our attribute highways. This build is also mostly intended for new players leveling up and getting through content, not necessarily burning through T15+ maps (though I'm sure it could with the right gear). Happy to see calculations or examples that tell me I'm wrong though! |
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Hey!
I finally able to find build with Lightning Warp. Due to lacking of such till now I was trying to something by myself while playing as Blood Mage and rely on Crit. So I made something like this: https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/651ee0ze It's don't need any Lightning pen as almost every hit is Crit, but is totally based on ES with 0 evasion. The problem is that I'm kinda new to PoE and not really understand it an so on testing there was not much dmg (rares and bosses is almost no-go) and survive ability (randoms one-shots while blinking) on maps. Do you guys have any ideas how can I improve it with a thought in mind that I'm pretty poor (3 divs in total and all were used on builds testing). And thanks for ur build! May be I can take some inspirations from it Last edited by gettsuga#8136 on Jan 7, 2025, 3:07:44 PM
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" well mobs can only have 75% ele resistance and pen cant lower there resist below zero only exposure so you having that much ele pen is actually kinda useless i think and even having 75% ele pen isnt useless per say but it will end up being useless in a lot of situations unless your curse plus your exposure already isnt bringing enemies close to zero resist. And again this all only comes into play on maps where enemies have ele res whereas more shock affect would help with those enemies as well and in every other situation in the game. so it depends on how much you run ele pen maps and how much you value ele resist mobs not slowing you down. me personally my dmg is high enough that even running maps with ele resist im usually fine, and if its ele res with monster life or alotta delirium effect then i would simply save that map till i have a few like that then respec into the ele pen nodes for a few maps. |
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