[PoE2 0.5] Prepping for a Solid Twister League Start

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Welcome in everyone. Snoo here. We got one more video coming to you in preparation for 0.5 Return of the Ancients. This video is all about Twister League start. How to hit the ground running with Twister. And it doesn't matter whether you're playing Spirit Walker, Lich, or Invoker or Dead Eye, Oracle, any of the Twister League starts. You could definitely get a lot out of this video. I've sat down and tried to think of all the different things that I would like to know if I was trying Twister, especially for the first time. and just how to better prepare for league starts in general.

[00:00:32]Anything between live searches and setting up your stash tabs all the way to intricate mechanics with Twister, dealing with positioning, dealing with weapon upgrades throughout the campaign and how the rotation evolves and all of that. So, there's going to be a lot in this video, a lot of jam-packed information that will better mentally prepare you for your Twister League start. So, here we go. Let us begin with the initial prep. Things that you can get done in advance before the countdown even occurs. It's a few hours before launch for me and so I should probably go in and make sure my stash tabs are set up and organized the way I would like them to be. There will be merchant tabs that will show up later in the Atlas progression and endgame and stuff.

[00:01:15]And that's where I'll be doing most of my trades, but I might trade things a little bit early in advance. Just make sure I got my tab affinities turned on and I got the dumb tabs in case I want to just throw things in randomly.

[00:01:25]Currency tab, all that nice, clearcut, clean. And by the way, there's a little bit of a bonus thing this time around.

[00:01:31]If you go into unavailable tabs, you can see that if you've already pre- purchased it in POE 1, for example, there is a fragment tab. And this is how I usually color code it. And so it's here. And I'll have to go in and turn the um the affinity on, I suppose, after. But that's like literally the only thing I'll need to do. Hopefully, it'll be right here ready to go. Then we have the loot filter. So, if you go to the options and game, you can see there's an item filter and there will be a list of things depending on which ones you have downloaded. I have a downloadable list that you can see linked in the description of this video.

[00:02:03]I always start with league start. That's what it's labeled. And it's honestly a pretty generic filter blade league start. I will transition into ultra strict and then omega strict and then divine strict was for tempo only. That was ridiculously strict and those may need to be updated with the new changes to different currency drop rates. But anyway, League Start can't go wrong.

[00:02:22]It's going to show more things than I care for it to see, but it'll highlight the important things for me. Then we have the vendor Regex, which is really good if you're following a guide. that it can help speed up the league start process in campaign especially so you're not spending a whole bunch of time scouring all the different items and that are available at the vendor because buying items off the vendor is a very good way to upgrade gear in the beginning. Mine happens to show all flat damage rolls on gloves. It happens to show all rare items, anything with movement speed, which would typically be on boots if it was there as well as attack speed as that is a premium roll.

[00:02:58]It's not the perfect most comprehensive regex and there is room to make some really good ones now. They just expanded the number of slots there, but this is what I have going into the league. You can find it linked in the description below. Then the next one might be a little bit less obvious, but we have keybinds. And you're going to want to at least mentally prepare where to put all the different buttons you're going to use. Twister is a button heavy build, especially in the beginning, combo oriented. So, you're at least going to want to know where to put those buttons.

[00:03:23]You can't put them technically in there in advance, but it's nice to know where it's a good fit for you, and that requires a little bit of practice on your part. So, would highly recommend that you try running twister at least for an hour or so before you just blindly go in at league start. It's got whirling slash and twister as a bare minimum. I'm using barrage on this monk endgame setup, but there's not a whole lot left to it, and that's the nature of an endgame twister build. Usually, you're making it more flow state friendly, removing some of the buttons, but it actually can be a little bit complicated in the beginning with a lot of different skills that we're going to talk about. And lastly, we got on the back end live searches. So, anyone who is not running SSF, if you're running trade, you're probably going to want to have live searches or at least searches that are already prepopulated, ready to go. When the league launches, you'll want to check here and tick the box for Return of the Ancient. That will be an option here. And then you have to kind of think about which items you were likely going to go for in the beginning.

[00:04:19]One pretty obvious one would be some of the leveling uniques or potentially leveling uniques, early game uniques like tangle tongue on the crit swap.

[00:04:27]That will be an integral piece of gear that you want to get eventually. And so maybe just having that in advance here would be a good idea. Any roll range of crit is not particularly great. You would want much better than average cuz that's a very important role. The other ones don't matter as much though. And so you might do this or maybe you get a little bit more restrictive 7.5 or maybe you just go for a crit one that's over rolled. It doesn't matter. You can choose whichever one you want. But I'm kind of doing this in real time because it is a few hours before league start.

[00:04:54]And so I'll have this set up. Maybe I'll get some of the other leveling uniques available there. I might put Wake of Destruction on there even though it's not actually part of the guide and probably won't be necessary. And then as a sort of side point, it's not a bad idea to have your other resource tabs set up if it's not too resource intensive on your system. Probably not going to care about Peewee ninja there.

[00:05:14]But we got the wiki. We got something we can check, you know, item modifiers and uh item level requirements for certain mods when crafting kicks in. Might have the early access patch notes in case I need to double back check something. And of course, you're going to want to have my build guide open and mobile litics, right? Well, you might not have to have it open anymore. So, kind of teasing the very end of the video here. We got we got a new button down here that might serve you well. Now, let's look at some footage from a recent friendly race that I did last week talking about weapon upgrades, seeing how it's done in real time and where you're likely to get those upgrades. There's basically four different places, either through the vendor, through dropping the weapon, through crafting it, or through trade.

[00:05:55]And this is likely to be the case in the beginning. It's going to be vendorheavy.

[00:06:00]So, right after the red veil is an integral time that you would try to get a vendor upgrade on a weapon with a new iron head spear. It's very likely that you're going to see something better.

[00:06:08]And I did here in my case had to actually shuffle items around just to get the gold for it in an SSF situation.

[00:06:14]Hadn't yet got the talisman, so I bought that here, too. That was for the wolf movement tech. So, you can see I got that in there. But anyway, vendor very good way to look for weapon upgrades.

[00:06:25]The quality of the vendor upgrades or the likelihood that you're to receive one there will taper off over time, but it's especially important in act one to check the vendor anytime you go into town. Let's go ahead and fast forward to act two where you can see me sort of managing different weapon candidate upgrades that I have. The wing spear is an important base. It comes online through the vendor the second you get into act two. It is the fastest spear base. So, a wing spear with attack speed is an automatic shoein for weapon slot one with whirling slash attack speed.

[00:06:54]And then it can also be the highest DPS spear you would have at the time. The war spear is another great candidate. As far as twister damage spear bases, whichever base is most level appropriate is typically going to be the best one.

[00:07:06]The only reason I'm not crafting on one right here is because I don't have a regal orb because I got a few good bases there. I got the good flat fizz roll. I got some good percentage fizz rolls. And one or the other, turning it into a craft is a pretty good idea because if you can manage to slam in flat fizz with percent fizz, either through essence or regal orb, or if you can get lucky and get a percent fizz roll, hybrid fizz roll with the flat fizz that's already on there in a magic spear, that's great, too. One of my favorite things about the campaign is moments like these when it's such an impact, just a drop. Okay, not a perfect drop, but a GG unethical drop for sure for the level. If you ID a spear like this at this point in the game, you got it made for the remainder of the act, for the following act, you don't even need to think about upgrading your weapon for like two or three more acts. And that is a good feeling for sure. So, between the vendors or crafting with Regal Slam and Exalt Slam, maybe with an odd jawbone in there, or just dropping it straight out right, you have a decent chance of getting an upgrade. And if nothing else, as a fail safe, you still got trade. Now, let's have a little more meta discussion about Twister, how to optimize its rotation and positioning to be in your favor.

[00:08:18]These things matter a great deal, especially early on. Unfortunately, the game pace is pretty slow and so you have extra time to prep these things.

[00:08:24]Position the boss where you want. Angle the twisters how you want. And you can see even as early as Clearfell, we're using the core package triple whirling slash to maximize the twister count AoE.

[00:08:35]And we're trying to position ourselves so that it's perpendicular to the wall.

[00:08:39]And the twisters will have a tendency to bounce straight back and hit the boss once, more than once, two or three times potentially in their lifespan. This is before getting any supports to twister, which will increase things like its skill effect duration or possibly its AOE or at least its damage. And you can see that's what a boss fight looks in the very beginning. And it may seem a little bit complicated. It takes a little bit of practice there, but again, the pacing is pretty slow and so it's easy to do. Things start to ramp up a little bit with a few extra buttons somewhere around the cemetery quest line. When you get your level three skill gem online, especially for the mini bosses here, it's it's definitely a good idea to start doing a little bit of parry fangs of frost. Get that chilled ground in. This is the only real convenient way to get chilled ground into the build at this point. That's a 50% more damage multiplier in the form of cold damage. if you can get the boss to position themselves in a place like this where you can kind of swing the twisters around. You can see I'm doing exactly what I did earlier on pretty much every boss. And so positioning is still premium here and hopefully the boss will continue being parable. You may not get that kill ground for the entire fight, but you do what you can.

[00:09:43]I'm going to show you example of where positioning can be turned very much in your favor. So for a fight like the executioner, for example, I like to have him meander his way over here to this tight little corner. still doing the parry fangs of frost. He tends to give me flaming fire burning ground anyway.

[00:09:59]But you can see with twisters bouncing back several different ways. I mean, I'm actually very low level at this point.

[00:10:04]Probably level nine in a 13 zone with a weapon that's not all that great and he's just getting absolutely crushed because he's stuck in that little corridor and those twisters are bouncing all over the place. Now, there will be a lot of fights where you can't necessarily take huge advantage of positioning like big wide open arenas in the center piece like the final boss fight of most acts actually, but you can still use a lot of tools that you have such as new buttons like war banner. So, war banner is definitely something you want to use on boss fights. The glory acquisition is like almost instant. It's a huge speed and damage multiplier allowed you to get more twisters. They hit a lot harder. still working in the parry and fangs of frost at this point.

[00:10:47]And you can see even with a mediocre weapon and and mediocre positioning. I mean, that boss is still getting wrecked. A lot of people like to say Twister really comes online as of act two, the very beginning when you get your first level two support gem right in alignment with your level five skill gem, Ice Tipped Arrows. Frost Nexus gets put into Twister and suddenly you no longer really need to do parry fangs of frost. It's still a good idea to do it on an opener for bosses, I think. And I still plan to use parry somewhat in the end game, but those of you who are perhaps a little more allergic to using parry, you can rest assured at this point it's not really that necessary and the rotation becomes much more simplified. Here's a little bit of footage on what it looks like to combine the frost nexus with ice tipped arrows out in the campaign in a regular environment. You can see there's chilled ground just coming up all over the place on the left side of the map, right side, anywhere where there was enemies. The only catch is that you're doing enough physical damage and cold damage and actually using whirling slash twister properly to do that. Even if you don't go the full three whirling slash, you can quite often kill trash enemies with the ice fragments. Sometimes it'll kill the ground, sometimes not. And quite often, you know, if you do it right, it's just going to cake the floor with a bunch of ice like that. But again, using parry right there, even on a spell attack and getting the fangs of frost is a nice way to open up mini boss fight, getting that barrage in there, and then getting the war banner. This is a pretty uh by the numbers way to [ __ ] a boss right off the bat at this stage of the game. Spires of Dashar is my absolute favorite leveling zone for the landscape, how it's set up, where I can kind of close the gap or separate separate myself from enemies by hiding in the hallways. At this point, we're moving pretty fast. Got pounds in there.

[00:12:33]Got freezing mark automated through pounds or you can hard cast it if you don't want to use the wolf tech. It's pretty awesome being able to just go through and again take the floor with twisters. They're automatically infused with cold. And you know, it's just it's just a good time. And you can kind of see here with the passive tree how it's set up pretty much in alignment with what I'm planning for in 0.5. And now let's give you a little bit of footage of a truly endgame twister build. And I show you this to juxtapose what you just saw with all the uh intricate rotationing and having to deal with positioning. No more. No more. Not you don't even have to deal with running anymore. You just whirling slash straight through. Still on WD mode, but not even needing to use those buttons at all. It's a true spin to- win experience. Gas twister. Run alongside them four or five screens deep. They last a long time. There's a cool down component to it with barrage. You have frenzy charges for a massive quantity of twisters. You got salvo. They go out in every direction. So again, positioning doesn't matter. Tons of power and a much simpler way to play the game, but also much faster pace and it's a lot of fun.

[00:13:38]You just have to get here. That's all.

[00:13:41]Now, I'm going to show you something very important so you don't get confused or lost alongside the way. We're going to be looking at weapon sets, looking at them on the passive tree, looking at them in the skill pane window, looking them at them in the character sheet because this all applies there. And you want to make sure you get all your ducks in a row so everything is right. If you're running the version of Twister that I am, in the very beginning, it calls for a talisman to be put in weapon set one and then a spear. Any spear to be put in weapon set two and then buckler. You basically just move those into weapon set two. And that is because for the lifetime of the build, you will always have weapon set one points be dedicated to speed. Either movement speed at first or attack speed. And then weapons set two points will always be for damage. The reason for this is because way later after the fact you're going to get rigald's ferocity and that has to be set up this way. So you don't want to do this massive respspec after the fact. Just get them on the right weapon sets to start with.

[00:14:40]>> Now let me show you how to handle the weapon set points in the passive tree.

[00:14:43]You can see there's arrows and weapon set points. You can just dedicate these to regular, you know, weapon set one and two points just default points. But if you separate them, in order to do that, if you've already specked everything, first of all, you would have to unspec.

[00:14:57]So, let's just do a few of these points real quick right here. And you can see suddenly I now have three additional passives that I didn't have available, but I actually have six if I split these off. And so, you can use the arrow here to put these points in where they should go. That's weapon set one or weapon set two. Actually, now you can just hold shift and right click for weapon set two. Hold shift and leftclick for weapon set one and call it a day. Now, there are a few respecks that take place, so you want to make sure you have enough gold to do that. But that's fundamentally how you set up your weapons at points. Now, on this side here, you can see whirling slash turned off cuz I have a talisman. So, actually, I'll go ahead and show you that first.

[00:15:40]Typically for this version of the build, I have a fast speed spear in weapon set one and a slower, higher DPS spear in weapon set two. In the event that I wanted to assign the same spear to both weapon sets, you can see there's a lock symbol up here. And then if I click it, it will now be on both weapon sets. You can assign the same weapon to both. That will happen actually pretty frequently, especially in act two when your wing spear is both the fastest and highest DPS spear. But for the majority of the game, they are going to be split like that. You want to make sure you have an empty off hand because that is the synergy with dance with death. So major respe happens. Uh if you're following my build once you get dance with death, you remove the whole talisman setup. Do this. But fundamentally again, speed for weapon set one, damage for weapon set two. That never changes. On the skill pane window, you'll see that these are checked on only one side. So use with weapon set, they default to both checked. So you're going to uncheck two for whirling slash. You're going to uncheck two for barrage. Barrage works with either one, but it reads off of skill speed, things like acceleration.

[00:16:45]So it's smarter to have it on weapon set one. Now, it is very important to put twister on weapon set two only, as well as ice tipped arrows, which I don't have in this build right now. It's very important you put ice tipped arrows on weapon set two only. Everything else on the build can be in both weapon sets.

[00:17:03]All right. And for a nice little section on things to watch out for, there's three big things in my opinion that I quite often hear complaints about or just kind of issues with the build in general that I personally feel like aren't that big of a deal, at least if you kind of know what's going on behind the scenes. The first one is name locking. So sometimes you'll name lock to an enemy with whirling slash and then like if if you move your cursor. So if I pretend Dorian is an enemy here and I I just happen to click right click when he's there and then I move my cursor off to the side because he's a friendly it allows me to go in the direction that my cursor dictates that I go. But if it wasn't an enemy instead I would just be sitting there locked onto him. So this happens to you guys sometimes on an account of doing an initial click while over the hitbox of an enemy. All you have to do is release your whirling slash. just click it a couple times to get off. Basically, any single time that I feel myself going in the direction where my mouse is not indicating, I will release whirling slash and just press it down again. It's pretty much as simple as that. Another thing is whirling slash getting in the way of twister or rather twister getting in the way of whirling slash. If you accidentally overcast twister, you can see if I have three whirling slashes and I use twister, these are, you know, fully empowered twisters. But if I use one whirling slash and twister and then I try to start whirling again, well then my whirling slash is just gone because those twisters weren't fully empowered and so they eat up the whirling slash buff. And so you might have experienced this yourself where you're trying to use whirling slash and then your whole rotation just got completely gobbled up for some reason for 5 seconds while on a boss fight. And that usually happens because you didn't just tap the twister button, you actually held it down for a couple milliseconds too long. Let's see if I can copy it. There you go. You saw me actually move my hand and the first attack of Twister was fully empowered and then I snuck in a nice little completely unempowered one that bounces off the wall, goes back into whirling slash and it'll definitely mess you up, especially on a boss fight. So, you kind of want to be aware of that. Don't just sit there and hold twister down too long. It's very much a sensitive, finicky tap only button. Speaking of buttons, this is a very buttonheavy build as you guys have probably gathered, but it doesn't really have to be, at least not in spirit. So, if you happen to be running mouse and keyboard mode and try to use whirling slash from farther outside, you'll instead just jog there until your mouse cursor in the proper place. It's very uh it's very clunky. Doesn't work at all. So, everyone basically runs this build start, middle, and end on WD mode. But guess what? You don't actually need to use WD. I mean, you can if you really want to and, you know, uh, actually move with the twister cast a little bit when it's happening and do that whole thing, but it's absolutely unnecessary because you're going to move so slowly that it just doesn't really matter for me. In the beginning, I always just dodge, roll, and sprint anytime I want to move, even through town. Later on, I'm just fundamentally moving with whirling slash anywhere I want to go. and the whole twister casting barrage setup and ice tipped arrow stuff that all happens fast enough to me that I don't really get much value at all out of moving. In fact, that makes like deliberation support a pretty good support choice. I don't have in the build, but it's a nice sort of backup choice if you just want to add another damage support to twister. So, in my opinion, this WD build actually removes four buttons right from the get-go, not needing to use any of them. And so if you want to kind of get used to eliminating four buttons to make up for some of those extra ones, you can. Don't need to overclock your brain here with like 12 different buttons that you're using. Uh it's really not that bad in my opinion.

[00:20:39]And with that, we're almost finished, but I just want to point your attention to the fact that we have a full-blown mobile build guide that is very well fleshed out. worked quite hard on it and hopefully it would be of some use to you if you're following what we're doing with the twister build this time around with spirit walker. A lot of great information there. Some things I definitely didn't talk about in this video would still be there. But the real reason I'm bringing you here is because of this button right here. You saw it teased earlier in the beginning of the video. Download build file. Some of you might have forgotten we now have build guides that are implemented straight into the game. Evidently, now I haven't had a chance to really look at this and and see if everything is set up right, but this is an automatically integrated thing through the mobileics build guide setup and we're only a few hours away from League launch. So, you know, with a fairly high level of faith, I think everything will probably work out on this, but it is a new system and it may not work very well. As a backup, we have, of course, the written guide that you can just refer to if you need to.

[00:21:42]All right, guys. That's going to do it for this video. I can't wait to be right on this screen starting logging in to a spirit walker huntress and kicking it off with a really rad version of Twister. You guys feel free to join along. We'll be on the Twitch live stream as well as YouTube. If you have any questions, you can use comment section down below. Although I will not be looking at comments very much once league starts after that. Just use the live streams and then maybe the Discord as well. And then we'll hopefully get you a sort of build update or how it's going sort of video. what my day one two experience was like maybe. And we're going to have a whole bunch of new things to look at with the endgame as well. But at first, we got to prepare you for the League start campaign Twister experience. It's a bit different if you've never done it before. Still got a few hours to practice it if you got some time. Highly recommend. But anyway guys, hopefully this informed you and got you better mentally prepared for what's about to happen as you try out your own version of Twister and the experience you have in there. Thank you guys for watching and I will see you next time.