[0.5] HOLLOW PETALS - MasterT's Hollow Palm Monk (League Start To Endgame)

Build Showcase: https://youtu.be/E6Niw3NolD4

Intro:

Hellllo internet, welcome to the written guide for the Hollow Palm Eventide Petals Martial Artist, which is built around the Eventide Petals Amulet, Shattering Palm, Ice Strike and the Massive Crit Chance and Attack Speed from Hollow Palm Technique.

This build can be played all the way from Act 1 into the full endgame of PoE 2, with multiple different budget tiers for all stages of currency you can be at.

This guide will cover everything from the basics starting from Act 1 all the way into the endgame with as much min max as possible, so even if you are a completely new player you should be able to get this up and running very easily. If you need any help join my discord through the links below or comment on the youtube video guides and I'll get you sorted the best I can.

My Links:

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/rNVCYuRVkt
Patreon for Early Access: https://www.patreon.com/c/_MasterT

First video (No Petal Amulet): https://youtu.be/pXCJ54Uf4nA

Annoying Map Mods?

The build does not have any map mods that can brick it. There are a few mods that are a little annoying:

1 - Monsters Take Reduced Damage from Crits. Since this build is Purely crit based, reduced crits is a direct less damage multiplier for the build.

2 - Monsters are Armoured. Once you get the Spirit of the Wolf Rite of Passage, it relies on armour breaking for explosions. If monsters are armoured the herald chaining gets less explosive.

3 - Ailment threshold monsters. This also makes the herald chaining feel weaker since monsters are getting frozen or shocked less.

2 and 3 do not affect the build's damage directly, just makes the clear slower.

Crafting Guides For the Gear?

I will do my best to upload some crafting guides for some of the gear pieces that I use, these would only be crafting guides for the highest budget setups, the lower budget gear is mostly made by rng crafting by people on normal or magic bases.

IMPORTANT EDIT ABOUT ASCENDANCIES:

I forgot to explain ascendancies in the video but its very straight forward

Early game you will start with Runic Meridians this lets you cap your resistances extremely easily in campaign.

Second ascendancy will be Way of the Mountain this makes you very tanky in campaign. It works by generating mountain stacks when you immobilize (freeze stun etc) an enemy, these stacks make you take 40% less dmg from Smaller Hits (hits that deal less than a certain % of your max life) and all hits are small in the campaign. And it gives you a big chunk of More attack damage when you have a mountain stack, and since this build is always freezing, you always have mountain stacks up.

In the later parts of campaign, you will swap off of Way of the mountain and spec into Hollow Focus these bells function the same way the Ice Crystals do, and that they help spread your shattering palm shards around.

Once you fix your resistances you will take off Runic Meridians and take Martial Adept instead. Martial adept is Extremely powerful, it is how the build is basically always recharging its ES because youre always consuming combo, and it lets you get your tempest bell slammed down faster for single target or tanky rares. Around this same time you will also get your 3rd ascendancy and take way of the stonefist. This is only worth it when you have a decent glove, if your glove is trash then this node will be trash too.

The final ascendancy is Hollow Resonance this is a very good utility skill that you will use to generate endurance charges with Armour Break III before you get your Rite of Passage

Once you Get a Rite of Passage you will respec your ascendancies to go back into Runic Meridians and Way of the Mountain as they are extremely strong nodes for the endgame.

Runic Meridean Runes:

Refer to the video to know which to use or what to replace if youre struggling with res

Helmet: Exposure Effect Rune (Replace with Legacy of Crown of Thorns when you farm it. you get that by using a legacy of aldur on a crown of thorns helmet)
OR, Use Increased Experience Gain if you are using a Rakiata's Flow
Body: Reduced Effect of Curses & Increased Energy Shield Recharge Rate
Gloves: Inc Magnitude of Non damaging Ailments
Boots: 5% movement speed

You can replace any NON BODY Runes with Resistance runes if you are not capped

IMPORTANT UPDATE:

THE GLOVES IN THE MOBA GUIDE ARE BUGGED, PLEASE CLICK THE POB LINK TO VIEW THE GLOVE MODIFIERS IF YOU NEED TO SEE THEM.

POB LINK:

https://pobb.in/YTbk46fpcFjz

Early Game Skill Rotations:

Clearing Rotation:

Whenever you see a pack of monsters, use Frozen Locus, Take 2 steps back away from the locus, and then press Glacial Cascade with your cursor on top of the Locus to detonate it. The End of the Spike created by the cascade is the part that does all the damage and blows up Locus Crystals. Dodge roll as soon as the ice spikes come out of you to cancel the rest of the animation wind-up.
This will almost always blow up the entire pack from the explosion of the locus, plus the herald of ice explosion.

In Act 4 when you get Shattering Palm you will stop using pounce and use this to dash into a back. If your evasion es gear is not good enough then you shouldnt use that skill, as it will put you right in the enemies face.

Boss Rotation:

Frost Bomb ---> Ice Strike until frozen. Place Tempest Bell, Do a full Ice Strike again ONCE. You do not want to let the freeze end ---> Frozen Locus, 2 steps back, Glacial Cascade to consume freeze and pop the locus, If boss not dead throw a few more cascades to finish.

Once you get Tempest Flurry and Hand of Chayula You will use those first as well before you start using Ice Strike. Both of these skills will be in weapon set 2 after you stop using pounce after act 3 to make use of the big shock from tempest flurry for bosses.

End of Campaign Skill Rotations:

At this point if you took note of the gearing section and me advising to stop here and use the currency you found in campaign to upgrade your gear, you should have decent evasion es gear and can fully swap into the melee brawler playstyle with Ice Strike and Shattering Palm

Clearing Rotation:

If you dont have good gear yet, make sure you have the buffs mentioned further below active most of the time to help fix the holes in your damage.

Shattering Palm to dash into a pack of monsters, Ice Strike to freeze and shatter them, triggering the Shattering Palm shards to explode, as well as triggering Herald of Ice explosions to pop everything infront of you. If there are other enemies slightly close, move your mouse over them and Ice Strike will auto dash into range to kill them too. You can either hold down Ice Strike and move your mouse around, or do what I do which is individually click where you want to dash to next. It feels cooler. Your Hollow Focus bells will also carry Shattering Palm crystals and explode them onto the nearby enemies.
Once everything on screen is dead, walk ahead and keep your cursor at the edge of your screen. As soon as you see a mob's name pop up at the top of the screen, press Shattering Palm to long dash into range, and repeat the same as above.
If you see any tanky rares, drop Tempest Bell on them. It has very good targetting so just pressing the bell with your cursor on the target will drop it in the best spot that you can hit the bell and the enemy at the same time. This bugs out a little bit on the really big bosses.

You will be using Pounce to close the gap between you and the next pack of monsters before you dash into them with shattering palm. Wolf form also moves faster so its best to use it to move between areas where theres no monsters. Pounce is also socketed with Freezing Mark that gives you a %Gain as extra cold damage buff when you freeze a monster with it, this makes clearing MUCH smoother by making freezing easier so use this to engage every ~20 seconds to keep the buff up.

The setup remains the same with Eventide Petals, but now it just does significantly more damage and has more clear because of the petals spawning and shattering.

Boss Rotation:

Hand of Chayula to apply your mark and curse. This sometimes ends up targetting your Hollow Focus bells which is a little annoying, you have to get the hang of it. Ancestral Call II linked to this fixes that.

Ice Strike full 3 strikes +1 from crescendo gives you the combo to place a bell. So the rotation goes Ice strike fully, Bell, Ice strike fully, Bell, then use shattering palm. This places the shatter shards onto the bells and the boss both, then continue ice striking the boss and bells together to pop all the shards and shotgun the boss.

After you get Martial Adept , you will be able to do this combo faster. You will ice strike hit 2 times then Tempest Bell, this does Not stop the rotation of ice strike to reach it's big 3rd and 4th strike if you have enough attack speed, which this build does naturally. So you can easily 2 strike, Bell, 3rd strike 4th strike, Bell, 1 2 strike, Bell, Shattering Palm and then it will massively shotgun the boss down.

Later in progression you will no longer use curses or Hand of Chayula, and will instead engage bosses with Pounce linked with your mark skill and use the below mentioned buffs.

Buffs:

As you progress, you will have more than enough bossing damage but will need some buffs to help make clearing feel buttery smooth. This is where the weapon set 2 Talisman, with Rend and Devour come in to give you MASSIVE buffs.

You Devour your Hollow Focus bells, with Blazing Critical and Thrill of the Kill II socketed into Devour it gives you a ton of %Gain as Extra Damage. This also gives you power charges that you consume with Rend to get a massive %Gain as Lightning buff.
This is very quick, doing it takes 1-2 seconds and the buffs last ~30 seconds. You do not have to maintain them all the time, only do it if the map has alot of tanky mods on it, or for bosses.

In the later stages of progression you will automate the power charge generation with Ailith's Chimes and only use the Rend buff while mapping as that is Very quick to tap the button and keep going every 30 seconds, and the other buffs are only used for bosses or encounters where you have a moment to stop and do it, like Ritual or Expedition.

Mana Issues:

GGG Nerfed Leech overall this league, for both life and mana. So leeching mana is a little bit of a problem. Early on you will be using Mana Remnants, and once you get the bell on your back you will link it to Mana Leech to help with the leech situation. Later on once you get 1 leech mod on gear, plus a node on the passive tree, plus the leech support on the bell, then things do feel better mostly so you can drop Mana Remnants because it's a dead aura. There are still times when you have to use a mana flask, this is fixed once you get Oisín's Oath.

Mana issues in campaign will exist. Mana Flask through it. A mana flask with %More Recovery On Low Mana, and increased charges is ideal. Later on you will have Lavianga's Spirits

Eventide Petals:

Eventide Petals is a very powerful endgame amulet, this has 3 versions the best one is the +2 cold skills implicit. The petals themselves do no dmg, but they are a delivery mechanism for your shattering palm to apply its shards onto the petals, and since the petals have no hp almost, they die immediately, causing Shattering Palm to explode and deal big aoe dmg, and that aoe dmg procs Herald of Thunder, Herald of Ice and leads to big chain shattering through packs. For a visual explanation refer to the video guide.

Auto Power Charge Generation:

This is most likely a bug and will be fixed when the game launches in a few months, but currently if you link Living Lightning II with Culmination II and Ailith's Chimes the living lightnings can Consume your combo for you, and auto generate power charges. As long as you are hitting with your normal abilities (Which generates combo naturally) the lightning minions will consume it and give you power charges at all times without you needing to press anything for it.

You will still use Devour on your bells before a pinnacle boss to get max dmg instantly on the lower budget setups.

Direstrike 2 In Midnight Zenith Bug?

If you put any spirit support gem into midnight zenith, and unequip and equip it at the start of any map, then that support gem gives you the benefit without taking any spirit cost. We use this with Direstrike II for a big damage boost since our build is utilizing Low Life.

If you do not remember to unequip and equip the gem at the start of the map, it will turn off one of your other auras. So get the hang of it. You dont have to use this if you dont want to do that every map, you can replace it with Any Other Red Support gem to still maintain Crystallised Immunities' Ignite immunity from strength support majority.

HOW DO YOU USE ALL SPIRIT GEMS?

Ive gotten this question a million times even though every video answers this.

Direstrike 2 is Bugged with midnight zenith, read the above heading on how its bugged, and thats how i run all my spirit reservations.

In the highest budget endgame, I run trinity because of Atziri's Communion. It makes a gem reserve LIFE instead of spirit, this is how you go low life withotu needing to use Animus Exchange at the highest budget and how you can fit all the auras.

CHARMS:

You want a Bleed immunity and Poison immunity charm MANDATORY otherwise low life will kill you from damage that bypasses it.

You want these charms both to have a minimum of 53% Increased Charges, and As much duration as possible. This will give you 2 uses on both charms instead of 1, with good duration.

3rd Charm is flexible, but i recommend a Freeze charm early on and later you replace this with a Rite of Passage with Spirit of the Wolf.

INGENUITY CHARM ISSUE:

Do not get an ingenuity belt that has INCREASED CHARGES USED as one of the modifiers. It will brick your charms down to 1 use instead of 2 uses, and it will brick your rite of passage to not even work.

LOW LIFE SETUP:

The build functions around using a Low Life Setup to get a massive amount of bonus damage. This bonus is utilized through things like Direstrike II and Killer Instinct giving a constant 130% increased attack damage bonus to everything, plus Execute III giving 30% more damage, and 30% more on top against enemies below 35% life, which sums to around 42% more damage average on all your skills. This more than doubles the build's damage. The only disadvantage of low life is not being able to go Chaos Inoculation, so you need to solve bleed and poison. I solve both by using a bleed and poison charm, notes for that are above in the gear section.

You go low life by using Animus Exchange, a kalguran skill that sacrifices a chunk of your life to refill Ward. You do not care about the ward refill part, just the life sacrifice. This skill linked with Second Wind II brings you to low life with 2 simple button taps.

DO NOT EQUIP LIFE FLASKS. You will accidentally press it and go above low life.

How much Crit Chance do I need for the Petal Amulet?

You want to aim for above 75% Crit Chance in hideout for regular skills, and around 60-70% for shattering palm so that when you generate your power charge in maps it will push you to around 90-100%. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. Do not upgrade to higher budget tiers which do not use pinpoint critical until you have enough crit for it.

Damage or Defense is Lacking?

First, please actually make sure your gear is similar to the budget tier you are aiming for. This is not like other builds this is a Hollow Palm Build, the Evasion or Energy Shield stats on your gear matter ALOT, even a difference of 30-40 es on an item is ALOT, so if you do not have the currency to go for a higher budget setup then stick to the ultra low or min budget setup. Same goes for Jewels, you need crit chance on every jewel, max rolled ideally. even if you can only afford ONE stat jewels, make sure that stat is Crit chance. You need atleast 60-70 or more crit on palm, and 75 or above for all other skills.

For damage, make sure your Rend and Pounce buff with Freezing Mark is active. These help ALOT with damage and clear.
Make sure you are doing the direstrike at the start of the map. V IMPORTANT THAT YOU DO NOT IGNORE THIS, if you want to ignore it then remove the gem entirely and replace it with Armour Break.

Also make sure you do NOT have any source of life gain/life regen anywhere (sulphur on a mageblood also makes you regen), this takes you above low life and you lose a ton of dmg.
On that same note, make sure you're actually going low life otherwise 1 whole support gem on everything is not active.

For Defense, this is a hollow palm build again so by scaling your evasion es stats on gear, you get better defense.
and also, this is an evasion build, so fixing that as well as the other things above also fixes your damage, which makes you kill things faster Before they get through your evasion to hit you, and then through your es to kill you.
also make sure your charms are correct, and not being bugged out by the ingenuity belt (check the faq for that too)

Can I Equip Atziri's Communion at Any Budget?

Yes you can. If you want to use that gem to skip using Animus Exchange you can do it at any point, just be sure to balance your red gems to stay Ignite immune with Crystallised Immunities

How to Balance Trinity Resonance?

The build is only using Lightning and Cold affinity, i tried to make it have Fire too but its just impossible to get enough gain as extra fire without sacrificing other things that I did not want to sacrifice. Just make sure you have your Rend buff active, and flat lightning on your rings, and gain as extra lightning on your Heart of the Well and that will give you enough damage spread to have Lightning and Cold affinity.

Attribute Issues?

The build needs the amulet to have high int on it, and also One roll of 20+ Dex or Int on your gear, on any item (dont do a ring though ring mods are too important) as long as you have that, you can adjust the remaining attributes on gear.
If you do run into any attribute issues at the Minimum Budget setups which require alot of red gems, you may have to use a Strength rune to solve them temporarily.

When should i Get the expensive aldur's legacy rune for Pain attunement?

The rune is currently around 180D, so I would recommend getting that after you reach the medium budget with the Rite of Passage, getting it before that is not as good. You'd get more damage with it but I value the clearing power of rite of passage.

F.A.Q:

The questions you all ask me the most will be added here.

My gloves rolled low quality, what do I do? Do I need to divine it somehow?
No! Please dont waste divines. You can reroll the quality on the gloves by Altering The Item somehow. The only way to do this is by using the new FLUX items, if your gloves have a resistance mod on them you can reroll the resistances with Fluxes into different resistances, this also for some reason divines your melee skill quality so do that. You need 11% Quality on your gloves, 10% will make Ghost Dance not be able to reserve the right amount of mana. In the end game you can also just get 1 more spirit on your amulet. There is no way to check the quality without equipping the gloves.

Can I use a Staff?

This build will have SIGNIFICANTLY Higher damage if you use a staff, but it will be significantly slower. Hollow Palm's attack rate is unbeatable even if you have a t1 attack speed staff. The damage goes up alot if you equip a very good staff, but I like the speed more personally. You do not need to change anything, if you want to use a staff just equip a good strong one and use it.

When do I swap to low life?

You will swap to low life when you have good gear, you dont want to kill majority of your life pool when you have bad eva es gear, you need the defense stats to carry the lack of being able to life flask your way through danger. As long as you have similar gear to what I have at around level 77, you can swap to low life with Animus Exchange.

How to farm Atziri's Communion gem?

This is a very expensive gem, currently at 450D and will probably go higher as divs get more inflated. You can easily self farm this gem, thats what I did too, might take a day or 2 of grinding but you will get it. There are many videos on how to rush atziri kills, and I will be posting my own too. I've gotten 3 of these, and every patron of mine that has been farming atziri has dropped one.

My life keeps going back to full after Animus Exchange

Checkpoints in maps refill your life so you have to reuse Animus after checkpoints, you will get the hang of this pretty easily.
Also do not have any sources of Life Regen or Life Gain on Kill/Hit on your build, and do not equip a life flask if you are prone to accidentally using it.

My Explosions and Heralds arent chaining and the clear is bad

For your heralds to chain like mine do you will need a Spirit of the Wolf Rite of Passage. Refer to the video guide timestamp where I explain this in more detail.

Also make sure you have good flat cold and lightning on your rings.

How to Get +2 Skills Petal Amulet?

The Eventide Petals amulet is an Expedition Unique. These uniques are special and can be upgraded with the Verisium Anvil, but you need to unlock the recipe by doing grand expeditions after the questline. Theres 3 different upgrade outcomes that can happen so you do have to hit the 1/3 to get the right outcome which has +2 cold skills.

If you want to gamble on a very well rolled amulet and try to hit +2, but dont want to run expedition for the recipe, just ping me in my discord if im available I'll slam it for you.

My Charms dont have 2 uses like yours, or my rite of passage shows 0/0 uses

Check the ingenuity issue title above.

The Build Plays Around a Few Different Mechanics, I will give a TLDR Here but they are best explained in the video guides.

The early progression stages are mentioned above in the skill rotation section, and how all the skills function so I will not be writing that again here.

Eventide Petals:

The best way to explain this is visually, check the timestamp in the video guide.

Damage Scaling :

Hollow Palm Technique lacks ways to scale damage, it has very high attack speed and base crit, but crit doesnt matter if you dont have base damage that a big quarterstaff would give. Going low life gives a massive multiplier to our damage, which compensates for the lack of big base damage allowing us to maintain the amazing high attack speed feeling of Hollow Palm Technique, while not having to deal with the downside of not enough damage.

Martial Artist's Way of the Stone Fist also helps alot by giving an extra source of Gain as Extra Damage, as well as the Wyvern Form Buffs with Devour and Rend mentioned above. Way of the stonefist gloves also give a MASSIVE amount of evasion es, further scaling hollow palm to the point where in the level 94 Mid Endgame setup the build has 100% crit chance.

Martial Artists' Hollow Focus and Hollow Resonance give alot of QOL to the build, making Shattering Palm have better explosive coverage, give us perma blind source on our back, and the Physical damage bell makes it possible to break armour with the Armour Break III support gem, and generate endurance charges with it for Charge Regulation. The Hollow Focus bells are also free cull targets for Thrill of the Kill II, and free sources of power charges before you get Ailith's Chimes late game. It is just a ton of character power and qol that no other ascendancy can easily provide.

Hollow Palm Scaling:

If you do not understand it fully, this is a short summary:
Evasion on gear gives you attack speed. MORE attack speed, this is multiplicative with your other sources of INCREASED attack speed. Evasion on gear does NOT refer to %inc evasion on amulets, or flat evasion on rings. It only works with the evasion on your gloves helmet boots body armour.

Energy shield gives BASE CRIT to ALL attacks, including Herald of Ice. This is how we scale our crit to 100% on almost all our skills. This works same as evasion above, only scales with the ES on gear, not rings or amulets or the passive tree.

SKILL GEM LEVELS!!!!!!

The BEST AND MOST IMPORTANT damage scaler is your gem level. Hollow palm gives a base flat amount per level of the skill, similar to how spells scale. This replaces the damage you would get from a quarterstaff, but not nearly enough as i mentioned above. Thats why you need to get as many skill levels as you can on all sources, them being Gloves, Amulet, lvl 20 gem with +1 corrupt, etc etc. Every gem level on any skill is 10% MORE multiplicative damage.

Way Of The Stonefist Modifiers:

This ascendancy is epic. The glove mods on base gloves, or unique gloves, all transform into something specific, it is not RNG like a timeless jewel.

THE BASE TYPE DOES NOT MATTER. You can equip Any base type, any attribute requirement, the ascendancy will transform it into evasion es modifiers and evasion es base stats.

The modifiers are all very fun to play around with, but the ones for this build are the following:

- FLAT Defense Stats (Flat armor, flat ES, flat hybrid) you NEED this to be t1, otherwise you will miss out on ALOT of hollow palm scaling. This mod transforms into + flat evasion and es PER Level, the higher your character level the more you get.

- %Increased Defense stat (Not the hybrid one that comes with life, the big one that goes upto 100% at t1), this transforms into Global evasion and ES. This does not scale hollow palm as it does not make the number on your glove go up, but it is a massive tankiness boost.

- MELEE SKILL LEVELS. Do not get a glove without +2 melee, it will be a huge dps loss. +2 melee transforms into +1 melee and 10-12% quality.

- Flat damage to attacks, it converts to %Gain as Extra. This is a very nice damage boost. Physical damage is the best to help scale the Spirit of the Wolf explosions at the mid budget, at lower budgets cold damage or lightning damage is the best. Fire is the worst.

The above 4 mods are what i would get ALWAYS, and these last 2 are flexible.

- Attack speed, this is amazing it converts to Onslaught On Hit, giving you movement speed and attack speed both on hit.

- Phys mana leech, if you do not have this on your ring then get it on the glove. This transforms into just a higher number of mana leech basically.

- Reduced Attribute Requirements. This transforms into All Attributes, 20+ and will instantly fix all attribute problems you might be having. Only use this for v low budgets.

- Resistances, i would not recommend wasting your glove slot on this it only transforms into the same resistance with +1-2 max res of that resistance. Not worth it. I would go with attack speed and mana leech.

Use this trade search to try to find the right glove, it is a little funky trying to find t1 mods of Any base type, you will still have to look at what youre buying before you do it but this should help. Check on the extra mods for the gloves depending on your budget and what you need, res or attributes or mana leech etc.

https://www.pathofexile.com/trade2/search/poe2/Runes%20of%20Aldur/LgROQOE5Sn

How to Craft the Gloves

I have been getting reports that gloves for this build are very hard to find on trade now with the recent popularity of it, so heres a barebones way of how to craft them:

Get a magic +2 melee glove on any base, with any other desired prefix mod
Greater Essence of enhancement to get t3 %defense on it, t3 is good enough it helps lower the rng of trying to make a glove like this, you can try to go for better by using a perfect regal orb and hoping it rng hits one of the desired mods.
Then use a greater exalted orb + Omen of greater exaltation to slam 2 other random mods on the item, and hope that both of them hit one of the desired modifiers.

If you now have a glove with 5 desired mods on them, congrats you win. Desecrate the 6th mod and hope that the omen of light jail does not hurt you too much, If the remaining mod you need to desecrate is a Prefix i suggest using Ancient ribs, since the tiers of the prefixes do matter, the tiers of the suffixes do not matter so you can just use a regular rib for that.

There is a far more expensive way to try to deterministically craft it, I will be posting a video for that on the weekend. I will link it here when its posted