Path of Exile: Harvest - Slam Skills and Crafting Options

Path of Exile’s upcoming Harvest expansion will, among other things, reclassify a number of existing skills as Slam skills, add some extra skills of that type, and introduce some new mechanics supporting them. And if you’d like to know how this new system will work, you should check out this announcement. First, here’s a video preview:

And here are the text parts:

In Path of Exile: Harvest, we’ve created a new category of skills called ‘Slams’. We’ve introduced one new support and one new slam skill while several existing skills have been recategorised as Slams. Today’s news post reveals which skills are now considered slams, how they’ve been improved and information about the new Slam called Earthshatter!

In general, we’re looking to provide more support for two-handed playstyles and builds that hit slower but hit harder. These changes come alongside improvements to two-handed base types, more passive skill tree support, improvements to Warcries and more.

The Fist of War Support

Alongside our announcement of Harvest, we revealed the new Fist of War Support that works with all slams except Vaal Slams and Ancestral Warchief. Every few seconds an ancestor appears above your character and performs your slam in unison with you, creating a supercharged slam dealing much more damage with an increased Area of Effect.

The following slam skills can be used with the Fist of War support.

Ground Slam

Tectonic Slam

Earthquake

Earthshatter (New)

Sunder

Ice Crash

Consecrated Path

Perforate

Leap Slam

Doryani’s Touch (from the Doryani’s Fist unique item)

Earthshatter

Earthshatter is a new level 12 slam attack that sends out five damaging fissures in all directions when you slam the ground. At the end of each fissure, a spike bursts from the ground and remains for a short time. If these spikes are in the area of another Slam or Warcry used by you or an allied player, the spikes will explode, dealing damage in an area around them. The range of the fissures combined with the area of the exploding spikes ends up spreading damage over a large area, with explosions overlapping near the location you slammed.

You can alternate between slamming with Earthshatter and using a Warcry, letting you kill enemies around you by detonating your spikes while simultaneously preparing to exert your next use of the skill. You can also easily Leap Slam onto your spikes to trigger them while you move. Any exploding spike can detonate other spikes near it, so you can leave a trail of spikes with repeated slams then set them off by leaping onto one of them.

Tectonic Slam

Tectonic Slam has received an impressive new visual effect and no longer uses ‘charged slams’; it instead counts Endurance Charges to grant more Area of Effect and additional damaging cracks in the ground. This improves the reward for investing in Endurance Charges by providing both a larger and more consistent Area of Effect. It now consumes an Endurance Charge every three Slams, rather than at a random 35% chance. The additional cracks that Endurance Charges generate can spread out further from the base impact and are more deterministic.

Enchantments that previously granted a chance for a Charged Slam now grant an additional chance for cracks.

Perforate

Perforate now provides flat physical damage that scales as the gem levels. The distribution of its spikes in Blood Stance has been made more consistent. A higher percentage of its spikes should hit a small target and investment in Area of Effect and/or the number of spikes should keep this percentage of spikes hitting consistent.

Sand Stance’s base area starts off slightly smaller but increases as the gem levels. Perforate also provides one additional spike at all levels and also grants two additional spikes if you’ve changed stance recently.

The issue with Perforate in the past was that in Sand Stance, there were large gaps between Spikes which meant that enemies within those gaps would be missed. The extra spikes it now provides and additional Area of Effect vastly improve the number of targets that can be hit by a single Slam.

In Blood Stance, increased Area of Effect used to result in a loss to single target damage and the extra Spikes from the Perforate enchantment would be placed outside of the range of most small enemies and therefore wouldn’t contribute any damage to single targets.

These changes to Perforate improve its ability to hit enemies more reliably and with a better spread of damage.

Sunder

As part of our effort to encourage slower and heavier-hitting Slams, Sunder has become a much wider and longer but slower cascade. Using Sunder while one cascade is still in motion will cause the existing cascade to end prematurely. These cascades will always travel a minimum length, so you can still use Sunder effectively with Multistrike and fast hitting weapons when close to enemies.

It still releases Shockwaves which can overlap when they hit enemies. Leveling the gem no longer scales its radius but instead scales its Area of Effect. Overall it now provides a better Area of Effect for slower hitting weapons.

Earthquake, Ground Slam and Ice Crash

These skills are receiving numerical changes which will be revealed closer to launch. In general, the idea is to make them generally stronger.

Other Slam Skills

The other skills that are now categorised as slams are mostly unchanged but have had their visual effects improved and can be used with the Fist of War support.