PoE 2 0.3 Best Ravenous Swarm Build (Support Skills, Passive Tree, Gear)

Path of Exile 2’s third major update, The Third Edict, has brought a host of changes, new skills, and mechanics to experiment with. Among these, Ravenous Swarm stands out as a fascinating choice, offering a unique persistent minion playstyle that’s both thematic and fun. If you prefer trying new builds, enjoy experimenting, or want to channel your inner anime bug master, Ravenous Swarm is a great skill to investigate this patch. Let’s walk through how the skill works, what makes it special, and the best ways to build around it.

What Is Ravenous Swarm in PoE 2?

Ravenous Swarm is a new intelligent persistent buff gem, functioning as a spirit gem. Activating it costs spirit, and while it’s active and enemies are nearby, swarms of insects emerge from your character to pursue and attack enemies, inflicting poison. These swarms are untargetable minions, so there’s no need to worry about their survivability. If they do end up taking lethal hits (if that’s even possible), new swarms instantly emerge to replace them.

The skill draws some fun thematic inspiration, too: it feels reminiscent of the Naruto character Shino, with hand-to-hand combat and swarms of insects attacking your foes. The playstyle is a bit like Righteous Fire, activating a persistent effect that damages anything in your presence.

PoE 2 0.3  Ravenous Swarm Build Guide

Ravenous Swarm stands out as a fresh, creative minion skill in Path of Exile 2’s current patch. While it has some bugs and balance issues to iron out, the playstyle is unique and brings a lot of flavor, especially for fans of thematic or anime-inspired builds. Scaling the damage requires some creativity, but with the right supports, passives, and a bit of experimentation, you’ll find plenty of ways to make it work.

If you’re looking for a build that’s off-meta, thematic, and fun to tinker with, Ravenous Swarm is worth trying. As more players share their findings and GGG addresses bugs, expect the build to keep evolving. Give it a shot, and see if the swarms pass your vibe check!

Early Impressions and Core Mechanics

Testing so far shows that Ravenous Swarm, out of the box, deals quite low damage. In early acts, the skill felt underwhelming until you add key supports like Feeding Frenzy, Prolonged Duration, and Rapid Attacks. Feeding Frenzy, in particular, helps boost damage and clearspeed.

Other skills are often needed to supplement damage, especially during the campaign. Many players are pairing Ravenous Swarm with spells like Essence Drain and Contagion, which help carry the build through early acts and provide extra sources of poison and chaos damage. This combination allows you to clear efficiently while your swarms chip away at enemies.

Key Support Gems and Aura Choices

For the best performance, several support gems and aura combinations stand out:

• Feeding Frenzy: Greatly improves minion aggression and damage.

• Prolonged Duration: Increases the uptime of your swarms.

• Rapid Attacks: Boosts the attack speed of the swarms.

• Blasphemy + Despair: Applying Despair curse helps scale chaos and poison damage.

• Withering Presence + Vitality: Adds sustain and further improves damage over time.

While these supports shore up the skill’s weaknesses, keep in mind that Ravenous Swarm may still lag behind other meta picks in raw boss damage, especially before scaling up your gear and passives.

Passive Tree and Progression

Building around Ravenous Swarm means focusing heavily on minion and poison nodes. Early on, prioritize minion damage and mana sustain, especially since using Ravenous Swarm with Necromantic Conduit requires a healthy spirit and mana pool.

Key passives to target:

• Minion Damage Clusters: Path to these early for a direct boost.

• Mana Clusters: Ensures you can sustain your skills and auras.

• Expendable Army: Meant to be strong for Ravenous Swarm, though there are some bugs with the swarm limit not functioning as intended.

• Gigantic Minions: Increases swarm size and provides a solid damage multiplier.

Later, consider nodes like Adverse Growth and Preservation for better swarm sustain. There’s also an option to pivot into Eldritch Battery if you need more mana utility in the endgame.

Dealing with Current Bugs and Limitations

There are a few bugs and quirks to be aware of:

• The swarm limit is currently stuck at three, regardless of passive investment.

• Increased minion duration from the tree does not impact swarm duration—only Prolonged Duration support seems to work.

• There’s no on-screen indicator for how many swarms are active, making management a bit trickier.

Despite these, you can still make the build work. Focus on maximizing your uptime and adapt your tree to invest in other quality-of-life or damage nodes until these issues are resolved.

Advanced Damage Scaling: Impale and Physical Synergies

One creative way to boost swarm damage is by leveraging Impale mechanics. Since Ravenous Swarm deals a rapid series of small hits, it synergizes well with Impale’s stacking nature. The idea is to apply strong Impales via your character or other minions (like Skeletal Brutes or physical spells such as Bone Storm or Bone Cage) and let the swarms repeatedly consume those stacks for extra damage.

For this approach:

• Use a physical skill to apply high-damage Impales.

• Ensure lots of hits to maximize stack consumption.

• Consider support gems or items that further increase Impale effectiveness.

This approach is especially useful against bosses, where stacking multiple Impales and letting your swarms repeatedly hit the target can really add up.

Ravenous Swarm Build Variations and Playstyle Ideas

Ravenous Swarm’s biggest appeal is its flexibility and style. You can build around:

• Full Minions: Pairing with Skeletal Brutes or other physical minions for strong Impale synergy.

• Physical Spells: Using Bone Storm, Bone Cage, or even Thorn for high base damage and Impale stacking.

• Unarmed Attacks: For those who want to go full hand-to-hand ninja, unarmed skills with supporting Impale mechanics are a fun niche.

• Hybrid Spellcasters: Supporting with Essence Drain, Contagion, and auras for a poison/chaos hybrid.

The skill’s theme, flexibility, and persistent effect make it very satisfying if you want a “zero button” or low-action build that still looks and feels stylish.