Overview
Rath’s 0.5 take on the Plants archetype is pitched at one specific audience: anyone who freely admits they are not the sharpest mechanical player in the pack. The whole pitch is comfort — a two-button leveling shell on Blood Mage that survives mistakes, leeches through hits, and lets the plant field do the killing while you keep walking. Rath openly calls himself trash at the game and built this around playing absolutely terribly and still finishing acts.
The clear loop is simple: throw a Thunderstorm to seed shock and water the field, drop an Entangle on top so the plants grow, and roll away. Living Lightning sparks chase mobs while Accelerated Growth’s exploding bombs handle most rare and trash packs. For bosses the rotation flips to Bone Storm — preload a stack, release it onto the boss, then spam Entangle to consume the impale stacks for a damage spike. Thrashing Vines is on the bar but Rath bounced off it, calling it a wet noodle versus the snappier tactile feel of Bone Storm.
It is explicitly not the fastest version of Plants. Other builds will out-clear it. This one trades top-end speed for defenses, leech-based sustain, and the kind of leeway a glass cannon will never give you.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Two-button leveling — Thunderstorm and Entangle do the campaign, no rotation to memorise
- Strong defenses for a witch: leech via Vitality Siphon keeps you alive while shocked and standing in damage
- Forgiving playstyle that survives sloppy positioning and missed casts
- Cheap to get going — works on essentially any witch shell, you can respec into another ascendancy later
- Living Lightning is getting buffed in 0.5 (no more overwrite bug, gem-level scaling on rank 2) so the engine is trending up
Cons
- Not the fastest map clear in 0.5 — this build optimises for safety, not speed
- Bone Storm rewards landing the cast cleanly; fumbling boss positioning still leaks DPS
- 0.5 leech changes cap the high-end and switch to single-instance leech, so against multi-hit shotguns you have to actually slow enemies down with Entangle and Temporal Chains
- Trial of Chaos for the second ascendancy can be brutal without a respectable weapon — easy to grind your morale into the floor pushing it early
Key Skills
- Entangle — main plant; seeds the ground, slows enemies, and consumes Bone Storm impale stacks on detonation
- Thunderstorm — waters the plants to trigger Accelerated Growth explosions and applies shock for the lightning damage layer
- Bone Storm — boss-killer; charge, release, then spam Entangle to dump the impale stacks for a burst
- Living Lightning (rank 2 around Act 4) — chase-spark minion that scales off your stats and gem level after the 0.5 fix
- Blasphemy + Temporal Chains — slow aura keeps packs from gang-tackling you while leech ticks
Gear & Anointments
There is no headline craft here — the build is pitched as ascendancy and skill-gem driven rather than gear-gated. Rath structures the guide act by act so you know which gems and supports to pick up when, and roughly where your passive points should sit at the end of each chapter. The single biggest passive priority is Wild Surge Incantation for plants — 50% more damage, 50% less cost, 75% less duration — and you path toward that early.
- Ascendancy — first node is Vitality Siphon for the leech in Act 2; Sundering the Flesh from Trial of Chaos in Act 3 if your weapon is good enough to clear it
- Passives — Wild Surge Incantation first, then crit nodes through Act 3, layering defensive nodes as you feel squishy
- Aura setup — Blasphemy linked to Temporal Chains for the pack slow, leaning on Entangle’s own slow as a second layer
- Amulet — extra shock magnitude rolls help, since Shock Conduction rank 2 is going away in 0.5 you lean on tree and amulet shock to compensate
- General gear — anything with energy shield and resistances during campaign; nothing exotic is required to make the shell function
Endgame Notes
Rath frames this primarily as a league-starter and leveling shell rather than a pinnacle pusher. He explicitly says you can respec into other witch ascendancies later if you outgrow Blood Mage, and admits there are faster versions of Plants out there. The 0.5 leech rework is the main thing to keep an eye on for the back half — single-instance leech feels more consistent against bosses but punishes you when a whole screen of enemies is hitting you at once, which is exactly why Temporal Chains and Entangle’s slow are mandatory layers.
Credits & Source
Build credited to Rath of Exile. See the source video for the full build’s gameplay footage + voice commentary: Comfiest League Start - Plants Blood Mage | POE2 Build Guide.