Best League Starter Builds for Path of Exile Crucible

Path of Exile by Grinding Gear Games is one of the longest running live-service action role playing games. New content is released in the form of leagues every few months, and it’s once again time for a new league in the form of Crucible. This time, the league mechanic focuses on forging skills on your weapons! The Crucible is a tough mechanic to beat. Powerful monsters are summoned as you charge up the Crucible to unlock skill nodes on your weapons, so you’ll definitely be wanting the strongest starter builds for this new Path of Exile league.

What Are The Best Builds When Beginning The Path of Exile Crucible League

It can be really tough to find the build that will get you off to the best start in any new Path of Exile league. You’ll always begin fresh and won’t have much currency to work with until later. So far, I’ve found two incredibly powerful (and league-starter-friendly) builds that have been a blast to play as well as absolute weapons, ripping through the Crucible content with minimal investment.

Vaal Venom Gyre Deadeye

To tear through maps at 100 miles an hour while dispensing hundreds of projectiles that chain, fork, and return to you, look no further than Vaal Venom Gyre. This skill is amazing, especially once you have a few links going with it and an ascendancy or two under your belt when you’ll really see it ramp.

This build focuses on using two claws as your weapons, which is pretty cool considering claws aren’t used for many builds. It’s a nice change of pace to using bows like most other Deadeye builds. You’ll want to find the highest elemental DPS claws you can, as this build focuses on elemental damage scaling.

One of the best parts of the build is that you will have so much mana leeching capability that you’ll never have to worry about running out, which can be really tough to manage for many other builds. You’ll also have tons of life leech and life gain on hit, meaning when you have hundreds of projectiles flying around, you’ll pretty much be regenerating any damage you take right away.

This build also makes really good use of Marks. It allows you to apply Sniper’s Mark with the Mark on Hit support gem to curse enemies, allowing your projectiles to split out to hit other targets near the marked ones. Thanks to the skill tree, you’ll also be generating frenzy charges to buff your attack and move speed when hitting marked targets, as well as applying Culling Strike to them, meaning they die instantly under 10% HP. This is incredibly useful against map bosses, rare monsters, and the main boss fights.

Overall Vaal Venom Gyre Deadeye is one of the best starter builds for Path of Exile Crucible. It starts strong and ramps well into the end game, making it a viable build to progress through most content. Just be aware that things can get a little wild on-screen in maps with lots of enemies, and if you don’t have a beefy PC you may run into some lag using this build.

If this sounds like something you’d want to try out, you can import your Path of Building to try it out. Path of Exile YouTuber KobeBlackMamba also has an excellent video guide for the build.

Vaal Absolution Necromancer

This is one of the smoothest builds to play, and you will have little trouble leveling all the way to end game content. It’s a powerhouse of a build that needs very little investment to be strong and can be scaled with some great items later in the game, such as a certain combination of a Doriyani’s Prototype and two Ventor’s Gambles with specific rolls.

The damage this build can achieve even with low-level items is absurd. You can summon Absolution Sentinels as monsters hit by your Absolution attacks die and then just watch them shred your enemies. The Vaal version is even better. Once you have enough souls, you can summon the absolute giga chad Absolution Sentinel in addition to your three regular Absolution Sentinels, and let me tell you, that thing is a boss melter.

The build has a core focus on minions. You’ll be working towards making your Absolution Sentinels as strong as possible, as well as adding a host of other minions to your roster to make a mini army to roll through maps. In addition to your Absolution minions, you’ll have Zombies to tank damage for you and Spectres that can be made into incredibly effective damage dealers. You’ll also be using Summon Phantasm to generate additional minions on hit.

Image via Grinding Gear Games.

Most of your skill tree will focus on increasing your minion damage, allowing you to run multiple auras and bolster your defenses. It does all of these things very effectively and you’ll find yourself to be a tanky powerhouse strolling through content in no time!

If you enjoy a minion-based playstyle, you’ll really enjoy this one. The Path of Building link for this build is available here. Otherwise, Path of Exile YouTuber GhazzyTV, who specializes in minion builds, has a solid video guide. 

If you’re not sure of which starter build to take into the Crucible league of Path of Exile, but want something solid before you experiment with other, more expensive builds, these two are definitely worth considering. Both are powerful starters that will enable you to blast through the league! And if you’re looking for more about the new skills introduced in the new league, you can find them all here.