[Top 5] Path of Exile Best Low-Life Builds (3.21)

Updated:

05 Aug 2023

5 – Low Life CoC Ice Nova/Ice Spear Occultist

What a mouthful. But LL Cast on Crit is a staple to PoE, and with the buffs to both Ice Nova and Ice Spear, it’s difficult to say which would be the best and, having played both extensively, I feel that Ice Spear wins out in damage, but Ice Nova wins out in the delightful clearing it has. Both are so similar that you can mostly switch between one another at your leisure.

What Low Life CoC Ice Nova/Spear Excels in:

Surprisingly Tanky
Buttery smooth clearing
Scales supremely well with investment
Looks amazing with MTX
Freezes screens of monsters

Pick Cast on Crit Ice Spear if you Like:

CoC Builds
Clear as fast as you move
Demolish all content

Ice Nova/Spear LL CoC full details:

As a Low Life build, we use Shavrone’s Wrappings, and to further make use of our life pool, we use a Prism Guardian in order to reserve 3 50% auras (Hatred, Grace, and Zealotry), and then still have all of our Mana to reserve other auras and utilities, like Skitterbots, Herald of Ice, or Banners.
If you go with the Ice Spear, I’d recommend getting a +2 Proj helm to enchant, as that is a massive boost to DPS since Ice Spear can shotgun enemies. And with alt-quality Faster Proj, you can get 60% return projectiles, which massively increases your single target!
You can either go with a Cospri’s Malice as your weapon, or you can use a dagger with Vagan Mod to not worry about accuracy at all while also getting a ton of good benefits, like Crit Multi, Crit Chance, +1 to all Cold (levels for spells are the best to increase their damage) and attack speed.
That is important because there are certain thresholds you wanna reach with CoC builds, those being 7.57 and 10.10 attacks per second (with all buffs active). So you need a quick weapon to reach that attack speed threshold (and not go over it), as it will significantly ruin your damage. Aim to get it as close but UNDER the point. As well as getting a ton of CDR, with 52% being required for 10 aps.

For more information, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfNVksHFip8

4 – Manabond Hierophant

While I’m not sure who popularized this build, it has definitely picked up speed this league, primarily because of how strong you can make your Mjolner, if you get lucky and get good Crucible Trees on it. It’s a costly but not immediate process; you can take your time getting to it.

What Makes Manabond Hierophant Excels in:

Massive Lifepools, 13k + ES and 10k Mana (MoM)
Spin to win with CwC Cyclone and Lightning Warp
Can start on a small budget, but the sky is the limit for investment.

Pick Manabond Hierophant if you Like:

Big Numbers on ES and Mana
Play a Spell-based Flicker Strike-esque build
Cosplay as Thor arriving at Wakanda

Manabond Hierophant full details:

This build stands on a few core synergistic unique items, like Mjolner, Prism Guardian (Or Squire if you got the budget), Indigon, and last but absolutely not least, The Ivory Tower. This is the crux of the build, which is essentially a Life, Mana, and Str/Int stacker, all in one go.
You’ll reserve all your Life, so you need to deal with Chaos Damage. Luckily, with Ivory Tower, Chaos Damage damages our Mana first instead of bypassing directly to Life. We still need a Corruscating Elixir to be sure to not die to random damage spikes from chaos damage, especially with Manabond and Indigon spending so much Mana.
And that’s where most of our damage comes from. By using Indigon, our mana consumption gets progressively costlier and costlier, and that translates into direct generic Spell Damage (from Indigon), as well as a More Multiplier from Manabond itself, which gets damage based on how little Mana you have, as well as AoE.

For more information, check this guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVVfF-nQZeI

3 – Crit Impending Doom Occultist

This is the sort of build that, while it can be done on a budget, requires a whole different setup, and with essentially only 2 rare item slots, you need a Mageblood to cap out Resists. And that means you can get A LOT of damage from other slots.

What Crit Impending Doom Excels in:

Great one-button clear and single target.
Insanely high damage potential
Exceedingly satisfying to play

Pick Crit Impending Doom if you Like:

Big and dark explosions
Melting bosses with a button
Playstyle similar to Crit Reap

Crit Impending Doom full details:

As I said, this build relies entirely on a Mageblood for the resistance and defences, but this means we get to use all the fun toys because we don’t worry about Res. And, of course, we’re Low Life, so we are using Shavronne’s Wrappings to deal with the Chaos damage.
This build uses a tech created a few leagues ago, the combo of Ralakesh’s Impatience and Malachai’s Loop, combined with Badge of the Brotherhood and Militant Faith’s Inner Conviction Keystone. This means that we, as an Occultist, stack as many Power Charges as possible, which also becomes our maximum Frenzy Charge thanks to BotB. We get 1 PC from Void Battery, 2 from Malachai’s Loop, 1 from being an Occultist, 1 from helmet Corrupted implicit and 3 from the passive tree, for a total of 11 Power Charges and Frenzy Charges.
But there are a couple of caveats. Inner Conviction ruins and removes all sources and ways of generating Frenzy Charges. And Malachai’s Loop makes it so whenever you reach your maximum Power Charges, you lose them all, shocking you in the process. So we circumvent both of these issues with Ralakesh’s Impatience, which makes it so while you’re standing still, your Minimum Charges are equal to your Maximum Charges. And since we’re always standing still when we are casting our spells, we’re always at maximum Power and Frenzy Charge!

For more information, check here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCSfm-zKtBk

2 – Captain Lance’s Righteous Fire Ascendant

Lance’s build is not new and groundbreaking, but the levels he reached on this variant are borderline insane. To most people, reaching over 10,000 ES is considered a lot and, in most cases, more than enough EHP. So when this madman manages to reach over 55k ES, without aurabots or HH buffs, you can’t help but be awed by it. And it’s not a non-functional build and can do pretty much all content in the game.

What Cpt. Lance’s RF Excels in:

Otherworldly tanky, with literally over 55k ES!!!
Respectable single-target damage despite the heavy focus on defences.
Clears delightfully well, like all RF builds do.

Pick Cpt. Lance’s RF if you Like:

Be able to face tank Uber Sirus’ Meteor and laugh it off.
Spending over a mirror worth in gear.
Crafting all your gear

Captain Lance’s Righteous Fire full details:

This build is the embodiment of what PoE stands for. Which is, take a mechanic in the game, a system, and exploit and abuse it as hard as possible, and squeeze it for as much as you can, and you just might be able to create a build out of it. And that’s Lance’s whole ideology for his builds, using a few core pieces that spark his interest.
And in this case, it was the possibility of stacking as much Life as possible and then converting all that Life into ES, by using The Ivory Tower, which grants 30 ES per 100 reserved Life. Essentially a 10:3 conversion rate. While this might not seem much, you can scale Energy Shield a lot higher by stacking as much intelligence as possible, which grants 1% ES per 5 Int.
And because we get so much ES and base Life (15k), our Righteous Fire deals a lot of damage as it scales based on both numbers. So the tankier we get, the more damage we deal in this perfectly balanced symmetry.

For more information, check here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxYY5Cg8z2I&t=495s

1 – Explody Devouring Totem Pathfinder

This is a build that only exists because of Crucible League. It’s based on a mod on Weapon Crucible trees that states, “Totems explode on Death, dealing 200~600% (depends on roll and weapon type) of their Life as Physical damage around them”. This doesn’t look like much until you start considering a few implications surrounding poison with this mechanic.

What Explody Devouring Totem Excels in:

Insanely tanky, nigh immortal in mapping
Can reach Poison DoT Cap with nearly no investment.
Can do all content, including Uber Bosses, with only a single offensive item.
Flaskfinder is broken

Pick Explody Devouring Totems if you like:

Trap Playstyle (yes. Totems and Traps)
Janky and weird-looking builds
Seeing bosses melt in front of your eyes
Poison Prolif

Explody Devouring Totems full details:

You might be wondering what traps have to do with this. The thing is, because when totems are replaced, they are considered ‘dying’. You get more explosions if you keep summoning more totems at once. And with traps, you can throw over 8 traps per throw(with 23 maximum traps), and each can summon 2 to 3 totems (depending on mastery and support gems). However, since your maximum totem limit is still 1 (or 2 if you’re using Multiple Totems), you are essentially summoning and ‘killing’ over 40 Totems in just a few trap throws.
And you can scale your totem life quite a bit, reaching easily over 12k Life per totem. So you multiply those 12k by the 600% multiplier from the Crucible Notable and then by 40 totems(average), and you get an insane amount of BASE physical damage, which can get scaled further with Phys Added as Chaos, all of which accounts for your Poison damage.
As we are a pathfinder, we get to use broken flasks and become even tankier, through the use of Petrified Blood, which both helps with mana sustain of the traps (the hardest thing to balance in this build) and by making us tankier, even if we’re ‘low life’, as well as the most broken flask in existence, Progenesis, buffed even higher by all our flask effect. That, combined with triple Elemental Flasks and Lightning Coil, makes us near immortal to anything.

For more information, check here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa0jgiuGGpU