Path of Exile 2 Best Builds Tier List (Patch 0.5.5): Whirling Assault, Twisters, and the Infinite Comet Lead Forbidden Rites
Path of Exile 2 Best Builds Tier List (Patch 0.5.5): Whirling Assault, Twisters, and the Infinite Comet Lead Forbidden Rites
Patch 0.5.5 shipped without any balance changes, which means every build that dominated the Forbidden Rites league launch is still exactly as strong today. That makes this the easiest possible moment to pick a build with confidence — nothing here is getting nerfed out from under you mid-league. Here’s the current Path of Exile 2 build tier list, from league-starter workhorses to full endgame powerhouses.
S-Tier Builds
Whirling Assault Martial Artist (Hollow Form) remains, in the community’s own words, “one of the strongest scaling builds the game has ever produced.” It starts bare-fisted for cheap early progression and transitions into quarterstaff scaling once you’ve got currency to invest, pairing Whirling Assault with Falling Thunder for burst damage.
Twister builds — playable on Spirit Walker, Dead Eye, or Gemling ascendancies — swept the ExCon qualifiers this patch and are arguably the strongest campaign build PoE 2 has ever seen, combining Twister with Whirling Slash for consistent, snowballing damage from Act 1 onward.
For endgame, the Spark Cast-on-Crit Comet Infernalist is widely considered the strongest pinnacle-boss build in the game right now. Running Chaos Inoculation with the Pyromantic Pact keystone, it casts Spark through Cast on Crit to trigger an effectively infinite chain of Comets, giving it a resource loop that never runs dry.
If you’d rather let something else do the killing, the Companion Huntress build tames a Silverback Monkey that one-shots map bosses, pinnacle bosses, and regular packs alike, leaving the player free to focus on looting. And for anyone who wants a safer mapping experience, Ice Shot Deadeye stacks Heralds for reliable scaling while leaning on freeze as a built-in defensive layer, solving most of the early mapping problems other builds run into.
A-Tier Builds
A step below the top five, Essence Drain / Contagion on Lich or Oracle is one of the tankiest low-investment builds available, spreading damage safely across packs without needing to facetank anything. Varasha Ice Storm, paired with Colari, plays almost entirely on rare gear and can hit 10,000+ Energy Shield from character level alone, making it a great budget-friendly defensive pick.
Martial Artist Falling Thunder offers an alternative to the S-Tier Whirling Assault build with a single-charge detonation that hits harder against bosses, while the Storm Blast Bolts Tactician preloads explosive damage that can one-shot most non-boss enemies in the game while keeping solid survivability. Finally, the Vashaajin Summoner comes online as early as Acts 2-3 with minimal gearing requirements and scales smoothly all the way into endgame, making it one of the more forgiving minion builds for newer players.
Since patch 0.5.5 didn’t touch balance, every build above should perform identically to how it played during the initial Forbidden Rites league launch, so guides written for 0.5 remain accurate. For deeper build planning tools and passive tree calculators, Maxroll’s Path of Exile 2 build guide hub is worth bookmarking, and the official Path of Exile 2 Steam page has the full patch changelog.
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