And yeah, after a few nights in 0.1.0, I don't think Martial Artist is some meme sidegrade at all. People are tunnel visioning the unarmed part and missing why it actually slaps. I swapped into it after my staff setup felt mid, and while fixing my gear I ended up getting some PoE 2 Currency from there just to test rune combos faster, and the class felt way better once I stopped building it like normal melee. Hollow Resonance is the whole point. If you're just punching and hoping raw gear carries, you're kinda playing it wrong.
What actually made it click
I tested a few different attack speed setups, and the Bell trigger is where the damage starts making sense. A lot of players in chat kept saying “stack speed as hard as possible,” but that didn't feel right in my runs. Bell has that 0.5 second cooldown, so if you're over-swinging, some procs feel wasted. Once I lined my tempo up better, map clear got smoother and bosses stopped feeling like sponge fights. And the Hollow Form illusions are way better than I expected too. They repeat your last skill at 45% power, which sounds whatever on paper, but with three of them up during a boss phase, it adds up fast.
Why the rune body slots are kinda busted
Look, the Runic Meridian stuff is probably the sneakiest strong part of the ascendancy. Crown, Bracers, Heart, Greaves. Four body slots, two runes each, and suddenly your floor is way higher than most melee starters. I noticed this the second I socketed Celerity runes and stopped relying on trash weapon rolls. Attack speed, crit, flat damage, even pen, and some of it scales off your level instead of begging RNG for one decent drop. Ancient Call boosting rune effect by 25% is also doing a ton of work. That's why I think Martial Artist is gonna stay meta unless it gets hit. Not because it's brainless, but because it skips some of the usual gearing pain.
Stuff people are glossing over
Thing is, it's not free. I know everyone's been hyping the illusion spam, but survivability can get sketchy if you assume the echoes cover everything. They don't leech from what I could tell, or at least I never felt any sustain coming from them. My direct hits were still doing the real recovery work. Hollow Shell felt mandatory in tougher fights because 20% damage reduction while an illusion is active is a huge deal. I also messed with Palm of the North for the cold conversion on Bell, and ngl, freezing packs off those bursts felt cracked. Could be wrong on the exact feel in deep endgame, but in early bossing it absolutely saved me.
Where I'm still not sold
But I still think there's missing info nobody has nailed down yet. I haven't figured out how illusion mana cost scales, and I haven't seen clean testing on whether supports fully affect the echoed skill or if it's reduced behind the scenes. Same with whether this setup is even worth touching if you don't stay fully unarmed. If somebody already cracked that, cool, post it. I've also been checking prices and trade chatter because if this thing keeps performing, high-end rune stuff is gonna spike hard, and I found a poe 2 Mirror of Kalandra listing there while comparing gear plans for later. Curious what everyone else thinks?
