Path of Exile 2 can be punishing. Compared to PoE 1, player characters are more fragile. Monsters hit harder, and they’ve got movement collision—if you get cornered, you can get surrounded so thoroughly that no amount of dodge rolling will help you. With this Titan build devised by YouTuber Panzerfaust, however, there’s a simple solution to the onrushing hordes of skeletons and hyena demons: Just keep them from moving. Ever. Permanently. As long as they stay within like, a 30-foot radius, at least.
Unlike most Warrior builds that tend to focus on smashing things with hammers or summoning totems and spirits to smash things with hammers for you, Panzerfaust’s Titan build is extremely light on bludgeoning, instead using spells for most of its damage dealing. Rather, the Titan ascendancy provides the Hulking Form passive, which provides a huge 50% boost to the effect of all the “small passive skills” the character’s selected on PoE 2’s sprawling skill tree.
While that Hulking Form increase doesn’t apply to many of the more interesting passive skills on the tree, it does apply to many of the passive skills Panzerfaust’s selected that increase the effects of curses and reduce the time it takes for abilities to activate. Then, by using the Blasphemy skill gem to turn the Temporal Chains curse spell into a constant aura around the character, Panzerfaust is able to constantly apply a -100% speed debuff to every enemy in the Titan’s vicinity.
It takes investment, of course, requiring some endgame progression and a specific rare glove stat that’ll cost you a chunk of currency if you want to assemble the build for yourself. And it doesn’t lock down bosses, but it stacks enough relevant passives to turn the Detonate Dead skill into a near-instant boss melter.
For map clearing, though, the results are extremely effective.
In a YouTube video showcasing the build, you can watch Panzerfaust march through crowded map hallways. As soon as the Titan gets in range, entire packs of enemies are rendered entirely immobile and helpless, leaving Panzerfaust free to detonate them with Living Bomb and Frost Bomb spells.
While I doubt I’ll have it in me to recreate Panzerfaust’s build for myself, I’m pleased to see PoE 2 players are already able to construct builds that simply disable entire parts of the game. That’s Path of Exile, to me.
