[2019] New Gems for the Poisonous Assassin Archetype in Path of Exile: Blight

Last week, we revealed some of the Poison attack skills coming with Blight. Today we'll show the two remaining Poison gems, Venom Gyre and Plague Bearer.

Venom Gyre

Venom Gyre is a new level 12 Claw and Dagger skill. Fling out a poisonous shuriken blade that deals damage based on your weapon, with physical to chaos conversion and some added chaos damage. It returns to you when it hits an enemy, wall, or after a time. When returning, the blade folds up to pierce through enemies, but deals less damage.

Catch all blades that return to you, storing them around you like charges. You can have up to 30 of these blades floating around you.

If you use Whirling Blades, you'll fling out all stored blades over the length of the whirl, throwing them out in a spiral. Whirling straight through an enemy will cause lots of the blades to hit that foe.

The skill has many interesting interactions with projectile modifying supports; Pierce lets you deal damage to an enemy twice by hitting them once when you throw it through them and then again when it returns, Faster Projectiles lets you fling the blades much further before they return, Chain bounces the blades between enemies before it returns to you, and Fork splits the blades into two, so you get to catch twice as many blades as you threw out.

Plague Bearer

Cast Plague Bearer once to enable an ongoing effect on your character. While active, you'll deal less poison damage, but a portion of the remaining damage your poisons apply will be stored up in Plague Bearer's buff. The higher the level of Plague Bearer, the more damage it can store. It stops lessening your poison damage when the skill has stored its maximum amount.

At any point, you can activate Plague Bearer again. It will switch modes, become a damaging area around your character. This deals 12% of the stored damage per second as chaos damage over time to enemies around you. This lasts until it runs out of stored damage, or until the skill is activated again. This damage isn't affected by your character's damage modifiers. While in this damaging mode, you won't be able to store up any more poison damage, and your poisons will be full strength again. When you reactivate the skill or the stored damage runs out, the skill returns once again to storing damage.

The skill acts much like a temporary Righteous Fire, letting you run through packs of enemies to wipe them out, or giving you an additional damage boost against tougher foes when you need it most.

Check out these gems in action by watching the video below:



We hope you've enjoyed this look at the upcoming skills, and that you'll give them a go in the Blight league coming at the end of this week. You'll be able to find more details on these skills in the upcoming level 20 gem reveals.