Best Unarmed Monk Leveling Build in PoE 2

While the Monk class in Path of Exile 2 is armed with a Quarterstaff by default, players can eventually forego their big sticks in favor of their bare fists. The Hollow Palm Technique passive from the game’s veritable skill forest lets players use Quarterstaff skills with Unarmed attacks while letting players scale their offensive stats with defensive ones, often leading to a surprisingly tanky late-game build.

The following is an early campaign/leveling version of an Unarmed Lightning Monk build for PoE 2 that packs a ridiculously high DPS output with a gameplay loop that flows like water.

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PoE 2 Hollow Palm Monk Leveling Build

There’s a lot going on with this build, especially during the early stages. We’ll be going over each of the setups first before diving into the late campaign/early endgame build.

Wind Blast and Staggering Palm

For much of Acts 1 & 2, we strongly recommend using Wind Blast, Staggering Palm, and Vaulting Impact as your main damage skills. Wind Blast deals damage over a large area, while Staggering Palm empowers all of your attacks after you use it to Heavy Stun an enemy. Vaulting Slam is for big AoE burst damage against enemies that have already been Heavy Stunned.

This playstyle is also very similar to the build that we’ll be using for Act 3 and beyond, so you won’t have to worry much about any changes on how the final build itself plays. It’s got much more range compared to something like a Bear Druid build, but it’s also much squishier.

Grab Tempest Flurry and use that instead of your normal Quarterstaff Strike attack. This attacks much faster, can inflict Shock, and triggers Staggering Palm’s wind blasts much more quickly.

Lightning Damage Transition

Once you get Storm Wave, you can equip this in place of Wind Blast and focus on stacking elemental damage bonuses through Support Gems (namely through Elemental Armaments and Rage). At this point in the game, you’ll become powerful enough to fly through the PoE 2campaign and melt bosses very quickly, assuming you have enough flat damage bonuses on your gloves and rings.

We’ll also be replacing Staggering Palm with Siphoning Strike so we can generate Power Charges, and we’ll be getting rid of Vaulting Slam in favor of Falling Thunder too for massive AoE Lightning damage.

Charged Staff

The moment you get Charged Strike is where the build truly comes online. This is a huge buff to our damage output, especially with Tempest Flurry. However, you won’t quite have the survivability to just stand there and tank incoming damage while you’re punching things, so you’ll still have to rely on Storm Wave most of the time.

How to Generate Power Charges

The build uses Lingering Illusion as its main way to generate Power Charges. This is Spirit skill, which means in order to use it together with Herald of Thunder, you’ll need to complete the Tribal Vengeance quest in Act 3 to get the item that increases your max Spirit to 60.

Lingering Illusions leaves clones of yourself after dodging. When these clones are destroyed, they leave a blue ball that grants you a Power Charge when picked up. You’ll basically have Power Charges all the time, provided you don’t forget to pick the orbs up.

Early Endgame Build

How to Play the Build

Spam Storm Wave for clearing mobs and dealing ranged damage, then use Tempest Flurry + Tempest Bell for fighting bosses. Keep using Siphoning Strike and Lingering Illusion to get Power Charges.

Passive Tree

We can’t stress enough just how much of a glass cannon this build is during the early stages of the game. You will likely die a lot if you play this like a melee build, so keep your distance and spam your dodge roll every chance you get.

Focus on getting the following first:

• Concussive Attack
• Immaterial
• Tenfold Attacks
• Killer Instincts
• Conservative Casting
• Spectral Ward
• Blinding Strike
• Agile Succession
• Subterfuge Mask
• Hollow Palm Technique

To summarize, these passives will simply increase your damage, Evasion Rating, and Energy Shield. The Daze and Blind from Concussive Attack and Blinding Strike also contribute to your overall survivability.

Prioritize your pathing based on what you need. If you have enough damage from your gear, then you may want to go for defensive passives like Immaterial first. Otherwise, take the damage-boosting ones instead.

As you continue to level up, path toward Lightning and Crit passives. Take Mana regeneration ones if needed.

When Should You Take Hollow Palm?

As far as leveling is concerned, it doesn’t really matter when you take Hollow Palm Technique. In our playthrough, we immediately pathed towards it so we could take it as early as level 14.

Ascendancy

This build uses the Invoker Ascendancy for the bonuses to Lightning damage and the Meditate skill, which we can use to recharge and Overflow our Energy Shield. The latter is useful for the campaign and early endgame stages, but it’ll eventually be replaced by the Sunder my Enemies passive so we can ignore enemy resistances on crit. Once you get your fifth and sixth points, get I Shall Rage for the Unbound Avatar skill, which is great for fighting bosses.

Equipment

Since Hollow Palm requires you to have no weapon equipped in either of your hand slots, you won’t really have to worry about finding a good weapon. Instead, try to get the following stats across your other gear pieces.

• Flat damage to Attacks
• Mana regen per second/Mana on kill
• Evasion and Energy Shield
• Resistances
• Attack speed

If you want to max out your DPS, try getting a pair of gloves with as many flat damage bonuses as possible. Equip two Iron Rings with damage and elemental resistance affixes, and use Runes to patch up any holes in your defenses. There are plenty of good items being sold by other players, so if you have the currency items to spare, try trading.

Evasion or Energy Shield?

Ideally, you’ll want a bit of both. You can definitely go for Evasion/ES on all of your armor pieces, though you can also try mixing and matching dedicated Evasion and Energy Shield pieces until you’re satisfied with your survivability. If anything, we recommend using an Evasion/ES Body Armour piece at the very least.