Path of Exile: War for the Atlas Upcoming Items, Skill and Support Gem Interactions

This recent post on the official Path of Exile website showcases a couple of unique items and Divination Cards you’ll be able to find in the upcoming War for the Atlas expansion, including their art and stats. And then, another post offers a glimpse of the new skill and support gems and their interactions, most of which focus on manipulating corpses in one way or another. For example:

Unearth

This skill fires a physical projectile into the ground where you target, creating a corpse you can use with other skills.

This skill can generate up to ten corpses and can only shoot one projectile at a time when it is not supported by other gems. To maximise the corpse output, you can combine it with Greater Multiple Projectiles and Spell Echo. This is a simple but reliable way to deploy a concentrated cluster of corpses, which is great for skills like Cremation.

The corpses are skeleton archers which are much stronger than most skeleton archers you’ll find in the world. This means they’re reliable ranged spectres if you’re wanting to play a build that rapidly re-summons spectres. There may even be a new unique item on its way that would facilitate this!

Cremation

Cremation explodes a corpse and replaces it with a fiery geyser. This geyser throws flaming shards all around it that deal damage in a large area. You can have up to three cremation effects active at once.

The skill has a special interaction with additional projectiles. The number of projectiles fired are spread out over each second the geyser is active, so Greater Multiple Projectiles and similar supports are a damage boost that also results in more hits and a greater likelihood of hitting an even area around the flaming geyser.

Volatile Dead

This skill turns up to three corpses into fiery orbs that chase down enemies and explode.

Volatile Dead usually only consumes three corpses with each cast but with Spell Cascade, you can consume a whole lot more, quickly creating a ball pit of fiery death or a wave of orbs that will rush at enemies.

Using Spell Cascade with Desecrate can create a perfectly arranged cluster of corpses to consume.

Bodyswap

Bodyswap explodes your old body and recreates you from a nearby corpse, dealing damage where you were and where you appear.

In addition to being a satisfying repeatable movement skill for crossing the aftermath of a battle or for use with Desecrate, Bodyswap can be used with Totems and directed with corpse creation skills to create a teleporting team of totems. The fiery explosions will use Totem life to calculate the self-explode, letting you make tough totems that dish out decent damage whenever they swap bodies with your unearthed undead and fallen foes.