The Martial Artist is one of three Monk Ascendancy subclasses added in Path of Exile 2 0.5.0 Return of the Ancients Update. Unlike other Monk ascendancies (Invoker and Acolyte of Chayula), the Martial Artist focuses on clone summoning, bell resonance mechanics, glove empowerment, and unique rune slot customization. In this PoE 2 Martial Artist build guide, we'll explore its mechanics, skills, ascendancy tree, league starter, and best leveling/endgame builds.
PoE 2 Monk Martial Artist Builds (Return of the Ancients/Runes of Aldur)
Path of Exile 2 Martial Artist is a Monk ascendancy that focuses on Hollow Technique combos, clone assistance, gear transformation, and rune expansion. Key identity features of the Martial Artist include self-clone summoning for multi-target attacks, auto-proccing bell AoE damage, enhanced glove gear scaling, and extra rune sockets to fix stat deficiencies easily. It balances map-clearing speed and single-target boss damage, with unique mechanical depth unavailable to other Monk builds. To unlock the Martial Artist ascendancy, players must complete Ascension Trials starting from Act 2 of the campaign. These challenging trials grant access to Monk’s three ascendancy options, allowing you to specialize in the Hollow Technique-focused Martial Artist build.
Martial Artist Pros and Cons
1. Pros
Powerful AoE Clear Potential: Hollow Form clones and Hollow Resonance bell effects provide continuous screen-wide AoE damage, making map clearing efficient for mob packs.
Unique Gear Scaling: The Way of the Stonefist passive transforms all equipped gloves into powerful Fists of Stone, upgrading all prefix and suffix modifiers for massive gear value gains.
Flexible Stat Customization: Runic Meridians adds 5 extra exclusive rune sockets, letting players easily fill missing damage, defense, or utility stats without sacrificing gear slots.
Stackable Damage Buffs: Way of the Mountain grants stacking damage bonuses against immobilized enemies, supporting strong burst damage for boss encounters.
Passive AoE Damage: Hollow Resonance bells trigger automatically on critical hits, adding free supplementary damage during all combat scenarios.
2. Cons
Stationary Channeling Requirement: The core Hollow Form skill requires channeling to summon clones, forcing players to stand still and increasing vulnerability to enemy attacks.
Strict Skill Restrictions: Hollow Form clones cannot use channeling skills or conditional skills, limiting the pool of usable main attack gems.
Fragile Stack Mechanics: Way of the Mountain stacks are lost when taking hits or using benefited attacks, making sustained buffs hard to maintain in chaotic combat.
Clone Damage Penalties: Summoned Hollow Form clones deal reduced damage and have lower attack speed than the player character, requiring power charge investment to maximize output.
Unconfirmed Endgame Interactions: Many core mechanics (clone power charge usage, double skill empowerment, bell cooldown rules) remain unconfirmed pending official patch notes.
PoE 2 Martial Artist Ascendancy Skills & Tree
The Martial Artist’s ascendancy tree features six confirmed passive skills showcased in the 2026 Return of the Ancients Livestream. Two minor tree nodes remain unrevealed and will be updated with future official content. Below is a full breakdown of all confirmed skills and their combat mechanics.
1. Hollow Form Technique
Grants the active skill Hollow Form, the core signature ability of the Martial Artist. This channeled skill creates multiple illusory clones of your character at the target location. Clones automatically attack the nearest enemy using your socketed attack skill and vanish after a single attack.
Key rules for Hollow Form: Clones consume 80% of the parent skill’s mana cost, deal 20% less damage, and 30% reduced attack speed. Consuming a Power Charge summons 2 additional clones, drastically boosting total damage output. Notably, clones cannot cast channeling skills or conditional skills, restricting build choices to standard melee attack skills.
2. Way of the Mountain
A stacking defensive and offensive passive focused on enemy immobilization. You gain a stack of Mountain's Teachings with 200% surpassing chance per enemy Power when you immobilize an enemy, with a maximum stack count of 30.
Stack management is critical for this mechanic: You lose one stack each time you take damage or use/sustain an attack that benefits from Mountain's Teachings. While stacks are active, you gain increased damage against immobilized enemies and minor damage reduction against small incoming hits. The mechanic’s true potential remains debated due to ambiguous text wording, which may feature unlisted major damage reduction for large boss hits.
3. Hollow Focus Technique
Grants the active skill Hollow Focus, which manifests floating spiritual bells around your character. These bells remain passive until you attack them, triggering immediate AoE damage and crowd-control effects on surrounding enemies. This skill supplements map clearing and helps prime enemies for immobilization to proc Way of the Mountain stacks.
4. Hollow Resonance Technique
Grants the active skill Hollow Resonance, which spawns a permanent bell attached to your character’s back. Every time you land a critical hit with any skill, the bell rings automatically and deals AoE damage to all nearby enemies.
This is an excellent supplementary clear mechanic for fast-paced builds like Flicker Strike, solving the weak AoE problem of single-target melee skills. Current previews suggest the back bell is permanent with no strict usage limit, making it a consistent passive damage source.
5. Runic Meridians
A powerful utility passive that unlocks exclusive rune-only sockets on your gear, completely freeing up build stat scaling. It provides a total of 5 additional rune sockets: 1 Helmet socket, 2 Body Armour sockets, 1 Gloves socket, and 1 Boots socket.
These extra rune slots let players easily fix missing resistance, life, damage, or utility stats without compromising gear affixes, greatly lowering the difficulty of gearing for league starters and endgame builds.
6. Way of the Stonefist
A game-changing gear transformation passive skill. All gloves you equip are permanently converted to the unique base type Fists of Stone while worn. Every prefix and suffix modifier on the gloves is upgraded to stronger, related variants, massively boosting glove stat value.
This mechanic synergizes perfectly with unarmed and melee glove-focused builds (such as Hollow Palm setups). High-evasion and high-energy-shield gloves gain exponential stat scaling, enabling massive defensive and offensive boosts.
PoE 2 Martial Artist Ascendancy Mechanics
1. Combine Hollow Form & Hollow Focus for Max Clear Speed
Hollow Form clones excel with socketed AoE melee skills, as they can cover large map areas and clear enemy packs quickly. Critically, Hollow Focus bell explosions can be triggered by Hollow Form clone attacks. Investing in both nodes creates a self-sustaining AoE loop: clones attack enemies, shatter floating bells, and clear entire screens of mobs with minimal player input. This combination is the foundation of all Martial Artist map-clearing builds.
2. Prioritize High-Roll Gloves for Way of the Stonefist
Since Way of the Stonefist reworks all glove modifiers into stronger versions, high-base-stat gloves with valuable damage, evasion, or energy shield affixes become BiS (best in slot) for this build. Defensive gloves with flat evasion/ES or resistance prefixes scale exponentially, while offensive gloves gain amplified melee damage and crit modifiers. This makes glove selection the most important gearing choice for Martial Artists.
3. Utilize 5 Extra Rune Sockets for Flexible Scaling
Most early and mid-game builds struggle with stat gaps (elemental resistances, life, attack speed, crit chance). The Runic Meridians passive eliminates this issue by providing 5 dedicated rune slots. Players can fill these sockets with targeted runes to fix weaknesses, freeing gear suffixes for pure damage scaling and speeding up build progression.
PoE 2 0.5 Best Martial Artist Builds (Starter, Leveling & Endgame)
Based on livestream mechanics and pre-patch analysis, the Martial Artist has strong build potential across all game stages. Below are the most viable leveling, league starter, and endgame-focused build options.
1. Hollow Form AoE Melee Clear
This beginner-friendly Martial Artist leveling build is designed for smooth, hassle-free campaign progression with zero reliance on rare or specialized gear. It centers on the core Hollow Form skill paired with passive Hollow Resonance bell damage, using cloned melee attacks to effortlessly clear large enemy packs across all campaign acts while leveraging immobilization effects to stack Way of the Mountain damage buffs for tougher elite and boss encounters.
During leveling, players can fully utilize the extra Runic Meridians rune sockets to patch up common early-game stat deficiencies, including elemental resistances and maximum life, while any high-stat gloves can activate the Way of the Stonefist passive for free, consistent power upgrades. Complex charge management mechanics are entirely skipped in this setup, prioritizing steady, uninterrupted progression throughout the entire leveling process.
3. Flicker Strike Hollow Clone
The Flicker Strike Hollow Clone build stands out as the top-tier league starter option for the Martial Artist, boasting low gear dependency, exceptional mobility, and outstanding screen-wide map clearing performance. This build combines the fast blitzing melee mechanics of Flicker Strike with Hollow Form’s clone summoning system, where consuming a Power Charge spawns additional clones that can potentially inherit the player’s charge buffs to execute simultaneous Flicker Strike attacks and eliminate mobs across the entire map.
A key strength of this setup is how it fixes Flicker Strike’s traditional weakness of poor area damage, as the permanent Hollow Resonance back bell automatically triggers AoE damage on every critical hit, cleaning up surrounding enemies during constant blitz movement. Requiring only basic power charge generation gear to function reliably, this build delivers satisfying, fast-paced mapping and consistent early-league performance with massive scaling potential if clone charge-sharing mechanics work as anticipated in the official patch.
3. Falling Thunder Hollow Form
Tailored exclusively for endgame boss encounters, the Falling Thunder Hollow Form build is the Martial Artist’s highest-potential single-target burst setup, designed to melt high-health endgame bosses with exponential damage scaling. Falling Thunder already features an extremely high base damage multiplier that scales drastically with each consumed Power Charge, and pairing this skill with Hollow Form clones triples the build’s offensive output by allowing three independent clone units to spam max-power Falling Thunder strikes simultaneously.
The core endgame rotation revolves around stacking 6 to 7 Power Charges before channeling Hollow Form, spending one charge to summon clones that utilize the remaining stacked charges for maximum burst damage. Players can sustain infinite Power Charges via Reaper’s Invocation or weapon-swap skeleton sacrifice mechanics, maintaining permanent peak damage output and making this build the definitive choice for tackling the game’s toughest late-game boss content.
4. Forge Hammer Clone Spam
The Forge Hammer Clone Spam build focuses on stacked screen-wide AoE burst damage and visually spectacular combat effects. By socketing Forge Hammer into the Hollow Form skill, summoned clones simultaneously deploy multiple ground-placed Forge Hammers across the target area, creating a field of dormant explosive damage that can be detonated all at once for massive overlapping AoE bursts.
Players trigger full-area detonation using War Cry or Ancestral Core skills, generating extreme damage stacking that decimates dense monster packs and bulky endgame enemies. While this build often causes significant screen lag due to its overwhelming visual and effect stacking, it offers unique, unmatched burst potential and a highly entertaining playstyle for players seeking a creative, off-meta endgame Martial Artist build.
PoE 2 Martial Artist Unique Equipment & Gearing Guide
1. Core Gear Priority
Gloves (Top Priority): Due to Way of the Stonefist, gloves are your most important gear slot. Prioritize gloves with high base evasion, energy shield, or flat melee damage. Unique gloves with charge-sharing effects are BiS for endgame, as they can share your Power/Frenzy Charges with Hollow Form clones.
Body Armour & Helmet: Prioritize defensive affixes (life, resistances, evasion) and use Runic Meridians extra sockets to fill offensive stats.
Weapons: Fast one-handed maces, spears, or melee fists are ideal for all Martial Artist builds, supporting fast attack speed for clone proc and bell resonance triggers.
2. Hollow Palm Special Synergy
The Hollow Palm unique setup has insane potential with Way of the Stonefist. Transformed Fists of Stone gloves gain massive evasion and energy shield scaling, which directly boosts Hollow Palm’s attack speed and crit rate bonuses. If glove base stat modifiers apply to Hollow Palm scaling, this build will become one of the strongest melee setups in PoE 2.
