Overview
This Explosive Witchhunter is a crossbow build designed as a smooth, tanky league starter that scales cleanly into deep endgame. Its identity is one skill carrying the whole game: Explosive Shot clears the campaign without a weak patch, then keeps one-shotting endgame bosses and packs well into juiced maps. The creator describes it as one of the best league starts he’s had, with progression that never felt fragile from act one onward.
The final update converts the build to pure lightning damage to abuse Lucky damage via the new Eye of Aldor rune, turning a crafted Siege Crossbow into a major DPS jump. A second key upgrade is an Eternal Rage amulet that effectively grants a 100-spirit aura for free — no strength requirement, no spirit reservation — which loosens the build’s stat budget considerably.
Because the core gameplay is just firing Explosive Shot, it is approachable for newer players while still rewarding the deep crafting investment shown in the video. The heavy lifting on the late build is in the crossbow craft rather than rotation complexity.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Genuinely smooth league start — tanky and strong from early campaign through endgame
- Single-skill simplicity: Explosive Shot does the clearing and the bossing
- Pure-lightning Lucky damage via Eye of Aldor is a large damage spike
- Eternal Rage amulet frees up spirit and strength for a 100-spirit aura
- Always-shocking lightning conversion adds consistent extra damage
Cons
- The endgame crossbow craft is fiddly and expensive (fracture RNG, desecration steps)
- Top-tier amulet roll relies on chaos spamming a -1 prefix/-1 suffix base
- This is the final pre-late-endgame version; the very deepest scaling isn’t fully pushed
- Damage ceiling is gated behind the lightning crossbow rather than raw skill scaling
Key Skills
- Explosive Shot — the entire build’s clear and single-target engine, pure lightning conversion
- Eternal Rage (amulet-granted) — free spirit-less rage aura for damage and attack speed
- Innervate — swapped in over a second lineage support since the build is always shocking, adding +25 on all skills
Gear & Anointments
The core craft is a Siege Crossbow with a fractured tier-one lightning roll, a chaos-spammed second elemental (tier two cold or fire), and a desecrated third elemental tier (aim for tier three or better), finished with Ashard’s Creativity for an extra crafted mod and an Eye of Aldor rune to convert everything to lightning. The amulet wants +2 levels (stop there for cost), global armour/evasion/ES, increased evasion from equipped body armour, and an elemental resistance via catalyst. Specific mod rolls and tree adjustments should be confirmed against the creator’s written guide linked on the source video.
Endgame Notes
The creator reports one-shotting endgame bosses and clearing comfortably with Explosive Shot alone, while noting this is the final mainstream version rather than a hyper-pushed late-late setup. The late-game tree and links are largely unchanged from the prior guide.
Credits & Source
Build credited to Big Ducks. See the source video for the full build’s gameplay footage and crafting walkthrough: Even STRONGER? - Explosive Witchhunter - Final Build Guide Update - Path of Exile 2 - 0.5.