How it Started

• Poison frenzy hollow palm is an abomination I thought of after playing poison seismic trap last league. I loved it and cleared all the way up to the feared and wave 30 sim in ssf. I love hollow palm to death but despise the cheese from multi totems giving you almost double damage and inflated PoB's. Ice crash is awful to play personally and infernal blow is a blast to map with but the boss damage is lacking without borderline mirror tier gear and having totems up 100% of the time. This build is meant to take advantage of pathfinder's poison proliferation to simulate an infernal blow pop as well as having nice sustained boss DPS with no PoB cheese or having to ensure totems are out. It also benefits from nodes such as magebane and iron reflexes to have a more comfortable experience playing a build that is meant to be squishy.

The Mechanics

• Hollow palm reads "adds 14-20 physical damage to melee attacks per 10 dexterity while you are unencumbered. 40% more melee attack speed while unencumbered. You count as dual wielding while unencumbered". Unencumbered means you can not use either weapon slot or gloves. This makes gearing easy yet the same time difficult to find resistances. You also have a limited skill set. In this case we will use frenzy as it can be used unarmed. Frenzy is a skill gem that can be both melee and ranged. It generates frenzy charges on hit. That's the basics. Frenzy also benefits from bow skill modifiers on the tree and through support gems even though it will be used completely melee. This allows us to access some powerful nodes to make the damage more meaningful. This works because frenzy has the tags BOW and PROJECTILE. Hunter's gambit is a node that is taken which provides 25% increased damage over time with bow skills, 10% chaos damage over time multiplier, and 10% increased skill duration. Even though frenzy is being used in melee, it is still indeed a bow skill and benefits from the bonus damage. This works because the said node does not specify that the damage over time has to come from a bow. It only has to be a skill that CAN be used by a bow. This is the same for a support we use. Vicious projectiles. It is singlehandedly the largest source of dot damage in the game being 59% more with a level 5 awakened version. You may say why not just use melee physical damage support instead? There is a downside. Melee phys support gives 10% LESS attack speed which in turn gives 10% LESS damage. The damage over time portion of vicious projectiles does not specify that the damage over time has to be applied through a projectile, only the skill gem it is supporting must have the projectile tag. Frenzy does. These interactions and the fact that frenzy gives permanent uptime on 6 frenzy charges mean you can scale poison damage more efficiently. This build also allows you to run supports to further enhance your damage that have very good to true 100% uptime. Withering step gives 8 wither stacks and with enough skill duration you can potentially overlap to have 15 stacks at all/most times. I only tick 8 stacks in PoB since that will more than likely be the true amount given you are dodging mechanics and not hitting a punching bag. Plaguebearer also adds an unlisted amount of damage. I really don't know how much damage this skill does but it seems like its more than what it says. I could be wrong.

The Ascendancy

• This is a pretty no brainer choice. Pathfinder gives quality of life to something that desperately needs it. The poison proliferation makes clear amazing. The extra chaos damage notable is just purely more damage and more aoe for withering step and plaguebearer. The flask recharge lets you have much more uptime on bosses unlike other builds that will have flasks checked on and not be able to sustain it the rest of the fight. It also gives 6% reduced ele damage taken which is about equal to 1.5% maximum resistances. The last node just gives attack and movement speed. It makes mapping faster and bosses a little bit faster as long as your flasks are active. You also benefit from 20% increased flask effect which can go a long way for defensive capabilities.

The Gear

• This is a pretty easy build to gear early on. You can use a 6-link briskwrap or wildwrap until you can craft a suitable chest piece. The ideal chest will have -mana cost warlord mod and %inc dex because frenzy costs so much to use. Amulet of course we will be going with an astramentis and boots garukhan's flight. The perfect belt, rings, and helm will all have dexterity, resistances, and life. That is all you need. if you can craft -mana cost on rings it would be ideal. Having the hunter nearby enemies have -9% chaos res mod would also net you a large amount of damage. All missing resistances can be made up with jewels. I would not shoot for overcapping resistances to ele weak cap unless you want to have a bad time. That is just the nature of almost any hollow palm build. Mageblood of course will be able to alleviate all resistance problems and make you a walking tank but that is not something I expect anyone to aim for.

The PoB

https://pastebin.com/ijAygK56

• This is the template I am using for now. Skill links are already put in. For single target I recommend swapping to behead support simply because the strike range is invaluable and when a boss drops below 50% your damage skyrockets. You also DO NOT ANOINT TRIBAL FURY. The reason for this is because divergent frenzy at 20 quality gives you tribal fury for free. Being able to anoint a reservation notable will allow you to use malevolence, determination, and herald of agony. You can always run an evasion version instead with grace I just prefer using determination + iron reflexes. You will also see there is a spot for a brutal restraint right below duelist. This can potentially make your build have god tier damage because you take 8 NOTABLES WITHIN THE RADIUS. You will probably never see all 8 with 5% increased dexterity but it makes the chance of seeing 4-5 more common which is more than most hollow palm builds have.

• In the custom modifiers in configuration I have to manually add the 41% increased damage over time with bow skills as 41% increased damage with poison. PoB does not recognize this interaction but it is correctly applied in game. It DOES work. Also I just set elemental resistances to 75% to give a more accurate ehp because the gear will eventually provide enough to cap all resistances. I just did not want to add random resistance rolls to gear because that's not how crafting works.

How it's Going

• I started playing this character about 2 days ago. I am currently level 80 and in yellow maps. The damage for single target is good and the clear is amazing. With the ability to spread 300% increased damage poisons from the poison mastery and plaguebearer being able to clear those mobs before the poisons expire, all of those 300% inc damage poisons will get spread to the tankiest enemy and they will cease to exist. I am still building currency in order to craft gear with dexterity essences but with no dex on gear other than boots and a briskwrap, I'm sitting comfortably in yellow tier. I'm sure this will be able to handle most if not all endgame with investment like every other build. I just wanted to make an off meta version of two of my favorite playstyles, hollow palm and dots.

Test Run T8 Map

PoB for the run in the video: https://pastebin.com/xRsT69AJ

I'm not using malevolence but it is socketed in my helm to level. I also have awakened ancestral call instead of behead support for clear speed.

The test run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82AbnyCWvNk