TL;DR - Highly specialized Infernal Blow Hollow Palm build utilizing Brittle/Scorch to hit crit cap and shore up Infernal Blow's single target weakness. Built to be extremely well rounded - max 40M Full DPS with totems active, ~27M Infernal Blow DPS by itself. PoB pastebin link, and link to poe.ninja character. Estimated 400ex and my sanity dumped into the build.

EDIT: Video of quick T16 UGS clear, without HH. Sorry for bad quality - don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to video capture D: and of course I roll 40% reduced extra dmg from crit strikes during a showcase lmao

EDIT 2: Video of Maven fight, I'm a little rusty lol

​

Hi everyone! For some strange reason, I've had a fascination with the Hollow Palm Technique archetype for quite some time now, starting way back when it was introduced in Delirium League. Hollow Palm has had its fair share of changes over time, and it got some fun new toys this league, so I wanted to try something "new" with it.

WARNING: THIS BUILD IS HIGHLY SPECIALIZED AND VERY EXPENSIVE. This was an aspirational project for myself and was not meant to be replicated. Many of the pieces of gear are self-crafted and required weeks of farming to gather materials/currency for.

What is Hollow Palm?

For those unaware, Hollow Palm Technique gives a bunch of bonuses while unencumbered (no weapons or gloves):

• You count as Dual Wielding
• 40% more attack speed with melee skills
• Adds 14 to 20 Attack Physical Damage to melee skills per 10 Dexterity

Naturally, you want to stack as much Dexterity as possible.

How does this league shake up the Hollow Palm meta?

With the new tree rework, Hollow Palm got some fun new toys to work with:

• Magebane provides +1% Spell Suppression per 15 Dexterity, which completely takes care of spell defense for our build. This comes at the cost of removing evasion bonuses from Dex, however.
• Skill Tree Masteries make some otherwise painful nodes more accessible, like effect of non-damaging ailments, mana reservation efficiency, and strike skill QoL.
• The mana reservation changes allow for Hollow Palm to fit in a third strong aura if necessary, which we utilize in this setup.

The drawback of no weapons or gloves along with other build restrictions still make it difficult to be relatively tanky, have good clear, and have good bossing capabilities. For unarmed skills, the two most popular are Infernal Blow and Ice Crash. Infernal Blow is notorious for having excellent clear but lackluster single target, while Ice Crash has amazing single target and terrible map clear. Since Ice Crash feels mechanically clunky with the delay effect, I decided to try and fix some of the shortcomings of Infernal Blow by introducing crits to the build.

How are you critting while unarmed (0% Base Crit to start)?

Unarmed attacks have a natural 0% base crit, so where do we start? We could use the Rigwald's Curse amulet to add +7% base crit to our attacks, but our amulet slot is incredibly important for DPS, and using it just to enable our archetype feelsbadman. What can we do to work around this?

• Use Assassin's Mark on hit from rings (+1.5%)
• Use Hatred Watcher's Eye for additional base crit (+1.8%)
• Use Elevated Hunter Chest (+2%, more on this chest later)

5.3% base crit is nice, but that only gets us to about 20% crit chance (27% with bottled faith) with our current setup. This is where Brittle comes into play.

The Interrogation small cluster jewel removes our ability to freeze, chill, shock, or ignite, but allows us to inflict Brittle, Scorch, or Sap on crit. Brittle increases our crit chance against the afflicted enemy by up to +15%, which perfectly caps out our crit chance. We can apply capped Brittle through a combination of things:

1. Converting 40% of phys damage to cold damage through the cold mastery cluster (Winter Spirit)
2. Further scaling cold damage with Hatred aura
3. Scaling the effect of Brittle/Scorch using 40% increased effect of non-damaging ailments (Elemental Mastery from Forces of Nature cluster)

The only thing we need to worry about is hitting the initial crit so we can apply Brittle. Once we do, our damage ramps SUBSTANTIALLY by effectively quadrupling crit chance. We further scale crit chance/damage through 2 double crit multi jewels, Deadly Repartee on 2 large cluster jewels, and crit clusters+masteries. For reference, I can usually kill A9 Sirus's final phase before he teleports away to do his first 'special' attack.

When we land our first crit, we can consistently cap Brittle and Scorch on any enemy, even A9 Sirus (look under Boss health bar for ailment info: -30%/+15%/-20%)

This version of Infernal Blow uses Trinity and Elemental Weakness for additional elemental penetration - Scorch applies an additional -30% ele pen, which is a very nice byproduct from the Secrets of Suffering mechanic. We use Awakened Added Fire Damage Support in order for our Cold and Fire damage to be relatively equivalent and enable Trinity. There are plenty of guides out there explaining Trinity's mechanics if you need them :)

Aren't most Hollow Palm builds incredibly squishy?

Most are, yes. Especially the PoB Warrior builds that you might see on poe.ninja. Dex stacking builds miss out on easy health resources, unlike its strength and intelligence stacking counterparts. A majority of Hollow Palm builds must take Garukhan's Flight, which gives +2 Maximum Life per 10 Dexterity, to patch up this weakness. That's not where the difficulties end either - limited gear slots make it difficult to acquire capped resistances and enough evasion/armour to feel solid. What do we do to remedy this?

• Take Magebane, which naturally caps out our Spell Suppression and takes care of defense against spells in one passive point. Although we could convert SS to 75% Spell Dodge with how much SS we have, the consistency of SS wins in my book, and we save the passive point.
• Add in Attack Block to our build. This is relatively difficult to cap, but we can do so by taking 4 block clusters, 2 Deadly Repartee nodes on large clusters, 9% block unveil on our chest, and 12% from the Rumi's Concoction flask. We can also use Unnatural Instinct in the bottom scion jewel slot to get an additional 9%, but you lose out on a crit multi jewel that way.
• Convert all evasion to armour using Iron Reflexes. The downside of this node is the same as Magebane, so there technically is no downside. ~21K armour provides much more staying power alongside attack block, and avoids random physical one-shots when rolling the Evasion dice.
• Take the Charisma mana reservation cluster/mastery plus Enlighten 4 for Hatred, Purity of Elements, and Grace. Grace scales our evasion-based gear harder than Determination would, and provides more total armour after Iron Reflexes. Purity of Elements gives us ailment immunity plus some much needed elemental resistance. This is even more important since we're running Ascendant instead of Raider, and ailment immunity would cost too many passive points otherwise.
• Free fortify from Ascendant's Champion node.
• Reflect Immune with the newly buffed Awakened Elemental Damage with Attacks Support gem.
• Get +48% Chaos Resistance While Affected By Purity of Elements on Watcher's Eye to get chaos res to a passible -9%.

Hollow Palm builds are incredibly difficult to build tanky enough, but this combination of effects feels rather good compared to my historical HP builds. I could get a Mageblood to solve a lot of these problems, but that is a bit too rich for my blood. :)

Why Ascendant and not Raider?

The answer is simple: we are incredibly passive point starved if we want to achieve a well-rounded build. Raider gets 5 less passive points and usually requires more points to invest in Frenzy charges (3 +1 nodes and Disciple of the Slaughter). While we do miss Raider's Exposure, taking the Ascendant Champion node more than outweighs the benefits. We can opt for a better support gem instead of fortify (since we get it for free), and enemies take more damage from being taunted plus a more consistent method of applying intimidate.

Does the clear feel good?

Absolutely. For mapping, I swap out Awakened Melee Physical Damage for Awakened Ancestral Call, and the dex stacking belt for Headhunter. Headhunter is 100% not required to make this build feel good while clearing, but it does add some additional zoom zoom which is nice.

Anomalous Infernal Blow applies a debuff to enemies, causing them to explode on death. This alongside our strike skill targeting 4 additional nearby enemies (3 from Woke Ancestral Call, 1 from Tribal Fury anoint) makes screens absolutely melt with 1/2 punches. We also take a bunch of +melee strike range nodes on the tree (+11, and Strike Skills which target additional enemies can do so from 30% farther away). This allows us to hit mobs about halfway to the edge of the screen.

Infernal Blow already has the reputation of being a great mapping skill, and it feels absolutely amazing with all of the pieces of the puzzle put together.

Which pieces of gear are the stars of the build?

• Elevated Crit Grasping Mail, which provides the build with a bonkers amount of attack speed through the Esh mod. This chest provides a bunch of crucial stats in order for the build to function - 2% base crit, 9% attack block, additional curse (so ele weakness can be run alongside assassin's mark), all with the dex stacking package.
• Dex stacking amulet that made me feel good about replacing Rigwald's Curse. Replacing a 7% dex scourged Rigwald's with this amulet still bumped up the DPS of the build by a massive 54%. Also, the phys as lightning damage mod allows me to consistently apply Sap to enemies I crit, which is another layer of defense I wasn't intending on including.
• 2 Split Personality Jewels (Dex/Str and Dex/Int) to provide a massive amount of dex and shore up my other attribute needs. I built the tree with these in mind, trying to utilize clusters as pathing options when I can.
• An absolutely insane Brutal Restraint jewel that opened up so many possibilities with other gear pieces. This jewel provides 20% increased dex, 40% cold resistance (huge), and Onslaught for 8 seconds on kill. I was able to nab this for 25ex on the TFT discord.

​

Here is the link to the PoB, and here is the link to my in-game character on poe.ninja. Because I have wands/gloves slotted on my character that I do not meet the attribute requirements for, poe.ninja doesn't accurately calculate the DPS (since it doesn't take Hollow Palm into account), nor does it take into account the Brutal Restraint mods. FYI, you can still level gems in these unusable gear slots :)

​

This is a project I've been working all league on. If there are any questions or critiques of the build, I'd be happy to discuss in the comments. Cheers!