POE2 Martial Artist runes in 0.5 aren t cheap saved a ton buy currency on U4GM

[Hartmann846]

.the part that sold me wasn’t even the punchy monk fantasy, it was how dumb the Hollow stuff gets once you stop treating Martial Artist like normal melee. I was short on testing mats and topped up my PoE 2 Currency pile from the same place I’ve used before, then spent a few runs swapping runes around instead of chasing weapon upgrades. Ngl, in 0.5 Return of the Ancients, this ascendancy feels way more cracked than people are giving it credit for. My take: if you’re scaling weapon DPS first, you’re probably playing it wrong.

Don’t build it like old melee
Most people I saw are still talking about attack speed plus big weapon rolls, which is fine, but kinda mid here. Martial Artist feels better when you build around repeated hits, crits, and the weird echo damage from Hollow Form. I tested a basic fast strike setup and the damage spikes weren’t from the hit itself. They came when the illusion copied the socketed attack and dumped extra burst into the same window. Could be bugged, could be intended, but it slapped way harder than my normal Monk setup.

The Bell thing is not background damage
Hollow Focus and Hollow Resonance are the nodes I think people are sleeping on. The automatic Bell trigger proccing when you get hit or land crits sounds like flavor text until dense packs start popping from resonance pulses. In my runs, the clear felt way smoother once crit chance got high enough to keep the rhythm going. I’m not 100% sure on the internal cooldown, and I haven’t seen clean numbers for the pulse scaling yet. But it didn’t feel like random bonus damage. It felt like the engine of the build.

Runes carry bad gear way too hard
The Runic Meridians setup is the other reason I’m high on this class. Helmet, gloves, chest, boots getting body runes means campaign gear doesn’t feel as awful as usual melee leveling. I noticed my bad weapon mattered less once the rune bonuses started pushing the Hollow interactions. That’s huge for league start, imo. You still need accuracy, attack speed, and some early crit, but I wouldn’t tunnel damage so hard that you explode before your clones even swing. Evasion plus energy shield felt safest for me so far, though I don’t know the boss breakpoints yet.

What I’d actually do right now
If you’re trying this, I’d start simple. Pick a fast single-target strike, get illusion uptime feeling consistent, then add AoE through Bell procs instead of forcing clunky clear skills. Don’t overcook it with five moving parts in Act 2. I saw someone say Hollow Form is just fancy multistrike copium, but nah, it has real burst if the socketed attack interaction doesn’t get nerfed. The only trap is assuming every melee gem works cleanly with the illusion. Afaik we don’t have a full compatibility list yet.

Still missing some answers
The big unknown for me is rune sourcing. If those body-inscribed runes are boss drops or tier-gated in maps, the whole league-start hype changes a bit. I’ve been checking trade chatter and even comparing notes with stuff I find through U4GM when I’m looking at currency or item availability, but nobody seems fully sure yet. For now, my honest advice is build around Hollow first, weapon second, and don’t skip defense just because the DPS preview looks spicy. Hope this helps, lmk if I missed anything.

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