This video is a deep-dive on the Witchunter’s Sorcery Ward Ability in Path of Exile 2, its mechanics and how to best utilise it in your PoE2 build.
Armour Guide: https://mobalytics.gg/poe-2/guides/armour
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0:00 Introduction
0:22 Sorcery Ward Skill Overview
2:57 Sorcery Ward Mechanics
5:15 Weapon Swap to Force Recharge
6:07 Dynamic Scaling
7:48 Potential of Sorcery Ward
8:44 Using Avoidance Layers
11:33 Downsides of Sorcery Ward
18:18 Mana Before Life?
19:13 Weapon Swap Scavenged Plating Tech
24:21 Witchhunter’s Potential?
25:47 Closing Thoughts
My character has ~13k armour unbuffed, ~22k with 10 stacks of Scavenged Plating
Armour guide: https://mobalytics.gg/poe-2/guides/armour 🪖
Edit: Sorcery Ward DOES work to take damage before Mana with Mana before Life modifiers such as MoM 🔷
Witchhunter with Weapon Master might be pretty useful for a Shockburst build where people swap between crossbows and bows.
I was doing high ev with some es and tried out sorcery ward. I had 538 es (1076 with grim feast), 72% evasion, 2k health and around 3.4k sorcery ward. I found that if i died, it had nothing to do with elemental damage. I felt way tankier switching to the concentration nodes and moving some of the resulting extra ev to es. Wound up with double the es and 86% ev. I also added in the blind nodes at the bottom of the tree (which is both damage and defense), and nothing was really hitting me.
can you link a build, talent tree pls
Great Armour Guide in your link to the mechanics!
Elemental Ward is a great ability and this is a great video. Only issue with the skill is Energy shield is too good for how little investment you put in it. Why would I get armor nodes on the tree when i can get a minuscule amount of energy shield node investment and get the same or more energy shield or even mana that will also block physical and be immune to chaos? I am not diminishing your video, it is great! Just the reason you never see Sorcery Ward used.
I think sorc ward be based off life, but dosnt lower defenses.
If it helps, when the game first released, temporary buffs instantly triggered the sorcery ward to start counting down to a refresh, which in some ways was a more predictable behaviour. The problem was that if you had multiple temporary buffs, each one would reset the timer or cooldown of sorcery ward. This meant that if you got hit by a melee attack with wind dancer, every time winder dancer gained a charge, the timer on sorcery ward reset – with enough things going on this could mean that sorcery ward could have 5-10 seconds extra time after being hit that it would take to even begin the timer to reset. If you had taken a lot of elemental damage and were low on ward, it could really affect your survivability because sorcery ward was never able to reset
I'm pretty sure the strange behaviour about resetting right now was an intentional workaround to this so that it didn't end up in situations where it never reset – hopefully they will come up with an even better fix in the future
@dreamcore_gg Please provide guide to your build 🙏
i was wondering if sorcery ward + blackbraid unique armor would work well, but then i realized i would rather just have the full armor anyway. 50% reduction just seems pretty harsh. Especially when youre comparing it to other ascendancy like titan that lets you get a MASSIVE amount more armor. Like my blackbraid titan has ~70k armor and if he was instead a merc with no huking form and 50% less armor, i would probably only have like 25k at the most, which is way worse and probably not worth the higher "hp" pool from sorcery ward.
Im running Sorcery Ward with Evasion and Cloak of Flames 🙂 ..aand stacking as much HP as I can /sweat
it's weird how sorcery ward has negative synergy with armour/evasion as a defensive layer. going for es/eva (or es/armour if they ever fix armour) gives you two layers – one for phys and one for ele. going for armour/eva only helps against ele dmg and you are guaranteed to die to phys slams which are the most dangerous thing in the game atm because of how they ignore armour.
bizarre design through and through tbh. hope the devs take a look at this soon.
I really think this build would be even stronger if you added 3 uniques (Couture of Crimson Gilded Vestments, Veil of the Night Martyr Crown, and Rondel of Fragility Lunar Amulet). It's build I'm going with asTitan and the only things that can kill me, are huge elemental hits. Even without any elemental resistances you would be able to tank anything, because of ~15k hit pool against elemental hits and ~8k against chaos and physical. Corrupted Rondel gives ~35% skill speed, and with some AoE you can clear like crazy. Also you could add two 2handed maces on weapon swap to cast hammer of the gods against bosses.
It's definitely not the best ascendancy node but it has its uses. So far from what I've tested I've enjoyed using it alongside Doriyani's Prototype and scaling armour and energy shield. It's an expensive defensive layer but so worth it if you can afford it. It utilises the Heroic Timeless jewel that grants a keystone to change your inherit dexterity bonus from accuracy to armour. Pair this with your classic HoWA attribute scaling lightning quarterstaff / bow / crossbow and now you have a relatively offensive and defensive build that benefits from attribute scaling rather than having to invest in heaps of armour / evasion / damage nodes. Attribute scaling also allows you to branch further up the tree and gives us access to strong energy shield nodes like 'Adamant Recovery' which gives us energy shield recharge based on our armour. So this way armour has 4 functions. Lightning damage negation with Doriyani's, sorcery ward hit pool, phys damage negation and energy shield recharge. Hope this helps 🙂
I did same test on evasion + sorc ward. It scales nice, but the main problem is that there ara lots of variants to take damage AVOIDING sorc ward, that in the most of the time I didn't felt as tanky as numbers showed. This is nothing near to ES. It SHOULD take all damage (dots and hits) to be viable alternative
Get some evasion, go CI and get Cloack of flame. So you don't care about ~50% of physical 100% chaos damage and Barrier+evasion covers elemental hits.
Love this kind of mechanics that give you a scalable vector, like sorcery ward, arcane surge and double shock and i wish more of the ascendency nodes were like that!
These mechanics make for an interesting and engaging progression that isn't a standard defence/offence for the main stat.
Also love your videos about them, great job Dreamcore!
would fast forward effect sorc ward?
The problem I have with it is the 50% reduction. That's just not a cost I'm willing to pay. Right now, my evasion, backed by blind, lets me avoid almost all hits. So the things that kill me are slams and boss hits that bypass it (and if armour worked properly, this would be less of an issue), and certain combos of elite modifiers. Sorcery Ward doesn't help against the first. In fact, it makes it worse. It will help in some cases against the latter, but not all. And it would leave me more vulnerable to a lot of mobs I can currently ignore.
And so you're basically forced to take another layer of defense (ES or Block) anyway. But if you just take that, you don't need the Sorcery Ward. My phys spell focused monk, for example, has 2k hp and 3k energy shield. My Witchhunter would love to have that, as with Blind on top of that, he'd be living an easy life.
One of the things I've realized about PoE1 Armor builds and PoE2 Armor builds, is that PoE2 has barely any %phys dmg reduction in addition to base Armor to stack onto armor from other sources such as Endurance Charges. Also, utility flasks did a TON for boosting one's defenses which is just not present in PoE2.
4 ascendency points to nerf your consistent defenses for piece of crap gimmick, classic poe2 design
6:06 Dynamic scaling is actually quite problematic. If at any point your armour or evasion change, it will RESET the current cooldown. This is true even if your current Sorcery Ward is low enough that it would make no difference (your current amount is lower than both before and after an increase/reduction). The only time the dynamic change does not reset your cooldown is when you're at zero. Ideally it would not reset the cooldown at all if it makes no difference. As a result, the actual cooldown is often much longer than you would expect when you're juggling buffs and conditionals after taking a couple small hits.
The wonside of Sorcery Ward should be on the second node, not the first. Maybe make Sorcery ward slightly weaker and the second node stronger to compensate.
Very true regarding ascendancy points. You only have 2 nodes really as ward, concentration and decimating strike all require 4 points really. Easy fix would be to combine decimating with culling and both concentration nodes into one and add two new nodes.
It does have automatic dynamic scaling, its just inconsistent, Wind dancer and Freedom of movement for example, force sorcery ward to start ticking down automatically when they are up.
imo the biggest threats in the game are big physical damage hits.
it s really hard (subpar )to use pure armor, but hybrid armor with – 50% is brutal
it s indeed better with a shield than say, a crossbow, kek
that said great content, subscribed
descimating strike is bait
Likely there will be items that give skill quality in the future
Thanks for the overview, I enjoyed Sorcery Ward a ton on my witchhunter. Was doing gas grenade, and it felt very powerful. One interesting thing I noticed was that in the Trial of Sekhemas any damage to sorcery ward didn't damage my honour. Which made the trials way easier!
I wanted to make a Weapon Master build so I opted for a crossbow/snipe setup that clears T16s well and literally one shots all Map bosses I have fought so far (not yet done citadels/pinnacles yet though).
The issue is I opted for Armour/ES hybrid for reasons and so can't stack armour super high, I think I hit about 5k armour and 1,200 ES. Once I select Sorcery Ward physical damage becomes far more dangerous but the ward itself is only 1200 as a result, so while helpful it isn't much. The armour/evasion penalty for Sorcery Ward is just too high to balance the reduction in phys protection.
I’m running a cloak of flame build with 49% phys damage conversion, 90% fire res, and the heat proofing node.
It starts off fairly weak & requires a lot of finicky gear choices to optimize … but it scales extremely well when you finally put all the pieces together.
Physical & fire damage simply aren’t going to kill me ever.
Lightning & Cold damage are somewhat concerning… but they’d still have to go through my sorcery ward to even tickle my health bar.
Chaos damage is my biggest problem… but since it’s the only thing that’ll ever drop my health bar out of nowhere, I can just pop a health potion & reset to a safer position to attack from whenever I see my health bar drop.
Thanks for making this. Not a lot of witch hunter guides out here in these streets
Almost as Sorcery Ward should have been a spirit gem rather than a ascension.
How did you get 3K life on a WH? I haven’t been able to get above 2500. Using ES to give more EHP.
Did you do any testing with Cloak of Flame or heat proofing? I was running this combination together but I didnt do any actual data testing. I figured Cloak of flames was working but I couldn't be 100% sure. I felt more tanky but it could of just been in my head. I should have just found some melee monsters and watched to see if the ward went down.
I'm hoping they'll just make armor apply to elemental damage by default and change the formula to apply armor after elemental resistances like it did in poe1. It's really weird they made evasion work on spells but didn't make armor work on elemental damage. Although I think a lot of these problems will be addressed by scaling down enemies and map mods because it's pretty obvious they didn't balance for you fighting rare monsters with 10 random "things" on them while having 2 damage "things" on your map.
12:19 this is absolutely a problem. Titan completes its first ascendancy and gets… inventory slots… wtf??