Chase Unique: Temporalis

Temporalis is one of the most powerful Unique items in Path of Exile 2, used to significantly lower or almost entirely remove the Cooldowns of Skills.

Temporalis is appropriately difficult to obtain, requiring the player to complete a 'no-hit' run through the Trial of the Sekhemas.

To attempt this challenge the player will need to possess The Last Flame, a Unique Relic that can rarely be looted from Zarokh, the Eternal, the final floor boss of the Trial of the Sekhemas. The Last Flame must be placed in the Relic Altar along with a Djinn Baryas of area level 80 or higher to enable the challenge run.

When the Trial of the Sekemas is influenced by The Last Flame Relic, the character will have their maximum Resolve set to 1. This means that any point of damage dealt to the character will end their run, deleting the Relic and immediately kicking them out of the Trial.

However if the the player is able to succeed in navigating all four floors without taking any damage in a run influenced by The Last Flame, then Zarokh is guaranteed to drop Temporalis.

This Unique Body Armour has some modifiers that are particularly strong. Whilst the maximum Energy Shield and all Elemental Resistances modifiers are useful for most builds, they're never going to be the reason to use this item. However, the Life and Mana Recoup modifiers, and especially the flat Cooldown reduction modifier, are a different story.

Life & Mana Recoup

'5-30% of Damage taken Recouped as Life'

'5-30% of Damage taken Recouped as Mana'

Recovery in Path of Exile 2 is much more difficult to come by than it was in Path of Exile 1. The availability of Recoup on the passive skill tree and on gear is very limited. This makes any modifiers to resource recovery much more valuable, and those on Temporalis can be considerably valuable if you're lucky enough to hit the top end of the large 5-30% roll range on the Life and Mana Recoup modifiers.

Recoup recovers the stated percentage of Damage Taken from Hits over the following 8 seconds.

At 30% of Damage Taken Recouped as Life, this modifier is approximately the equivalent of 8 passive points spent on the tree, more if you're not already at the locations of those wheels.

The Mana Recoup modifier is generally a bit less valuable due to natural Mana regeneration and nodes such as Adverse Growth on the passive skill tree, but is nonetheless another credit to the item.

Flat Cooldown Reduction

'Skills have -2 to -4 seconds to Cooldown'

By far the most important modifier and the reason for choosing to use Temporalis in any build is its special flat Cooldown Recovery modifier. With a roll range of -2 to -4 seconds, this modifier will need to be well-rolled with priority before any of the other modifiers, with the exact cooldown reduction being important for which skill(s) you're intending to use with this Unique. Importantly, this modifier is rolled with increments of 0.01.

This one does exactly as it describes, removing a flat amount of time from the Cooldown Time of your Skills. However, an important note here is that this modifier can only lower a Cooldown Time to a minimum of 100ms, or 0.1 seconds - it cannot completely remove the Cooldown Time of a Skill. Also note that this modifier is applied before any modifiers for 'increased Cooldown Recovery Rate' and therefore you can only reach that minimum Cooldown Time of 100ms on Skills with a base Cooldown of 4 seconds or less, outside of Corrupted versions of Temporalis with higher values on this modifier.

The potential use cases for Temporalis are large due to the amount of powerful Skill combinations that can be abused with significantly lower, or even no cooldowns. In this article, we'll discuss three strong options.

Frost Wall

The Frost Wall Skill creates a wall of Ice Crystals which is terrain that enemies must path around to get to you. When monsters path into the walls, the Ice Crystals take Damage and explode after taking sufficient Damage, dealing Area Cold Damage that has more Freeze buildup.

Frost Wall normally has a Cooldown Time of 3 seconds with 3 uses, but with a Temporalis equipped with at least -3 seconds to Cooldown, you'd be able to spam this ability, leaving only Cast Speed as the barrier to how many walls you can create.

Players can then utilise the Icicle Support Gem to make Ice Crystals have 50% less Life, in combination with the Shattered Crystal passive skill tree Notable for 60% reduced Ice Crystal Life, to make the walls explode much faster which is extremely powerful against larger bosses.

Blink

The Blink Skill is a Spirit Gem that costs 60 Spirit to reserve. When active, your Dodge Roll is replaced with a teleport ability that has a short Cast Time and around a 4 second Cooldown Time.

With a near-perfect roll on the flat Cooldown Recovery modifier on Temporalis, a player is able to almost entirely remove Blink's Cooldown Time, enabling a very fast-moving playstyle that's more akin to Path of Exile 1's typical endgame gameplay.

Grenades

Many Grenade Skills have Cooldowns that restrict how much you're able to spam them. Grenade abilities are very strong for bossing, particularly against bosses with larger hitboxes where you can get many overlaps on multiple fired Grenade Projectiles. In combination with a well-rolled Temporalis, you have the opportunity to spam a single Grenade Skill, only being limited by Attack Speed, for some potentially ridiculous burst Damage or Control Effect build-up.

There are countless other good options to utilise with this Unique, such as Frost Bomb or some Mark Skills, but this should provide a good idea of the potential of Temporalis.

Ultimately the power scaling of a flat Cooldown reduction modifier is nearly limitless and in combination with the difficulty of obtaining this item, this should maintain the value and alure of Temporalis deep into any Path of Exile 2 league.