Path of Exile 2 Guide: Martial Artist Skill Tree & Passives

The Martial Artist is one of three ascendancy options available to the Monk class in Path of Exile 2, and it plays nothing like the other two. Where most ascendancies push you toward a single dominant mechanic, the Martial Artist stacks three distinct Hollow Techniques on top of a rune-tattooing system, turning your body into the build. After decades of training (as the in-game flavor text puts it), this ascendancy masters illusions, summons spectral bells, and rewards players who commit to unarmed or staff-based melee combat with some genuinely unusual power spikes.

What is the Martial Artist ascendancy?

The Martial Artist is a Monk subclass unlocked through Ascension Trials, which become available starting in Act 2. Like all ascendancies in PoE 2, it grants access to abilities that no other class can replicate, and the Martial Artist's identity is built around three things: Hollow Techniques, Runic Meridians, and a Combo-focused passive system.

The core fantasy here is a fighter who has internalized the art so deeply that his spiritual energy manifests physically. That sounds poetic, but in practice it means you're spawning astral projections, detonating bells for guaranteed critical hits, and tattooing runes directly onto your body for extra sockets.

Path of Exile 2 Guide: Martial Artist Skill Tree & Passives

The three Hollow Techniques

These are the Martial Artist's signature skills, each granted by a dedicated ascendancy node. You pick up all three as you progress through the tree, and they're designed to work together.

Hollow Form

Hollow Form lets you create astral projections of yourself that attack enemies using a melee skill of your choice. You can spend Power Charges to spawn additional projections, which means the more charges you've built up, the more simultaneous attackers you field. This scales exceptionally well with attack-speed investment and any build that generates Power Charges passively.

Path of Exile 2 Guide: Martial Artist Skill Tree & Passives

Hollow Focus

Hollow Focus manifests your spiritual energy as bells that appear around you. The mechanic is straightforward: attack a bell to shatter it, and that shatter always triggers a critical hit. No crit chance calculation, no RNG. Every bell shatter is a guaranteed crit, which makes this one of the most reliable crit-delivery systems in the game for a melee build.

Path of Exile 2 Guide: Martial Artist Skill Tree & Passives

Hollow Resonance

Hollow Resonance places a bell on your back that rings every time you land a critical attack, dealing AoE damage to enemies around you. The synergy with Hollow Focus is intentional and explicit: shattering a Hollow Focus bell guarantees a crit, which immediately triggers the Hollow Resonance bell on your back. Stack both and you're generating constant AoE pulses from a single attack action.

Path of Exile 2 Guide: Martial Artist Skill Tree & Passives

What does Runic Meridians do?

Runic Meridians is the Martial Artist's most structurally unique node. It lets you tattoo Runes directly onto your body, adding extra Rune-only sockets across your armor pieces:

That's 5 additional Rune sockets total, available only to the Martial Artist. Runes provide flat stat bonuses and modifier effects, so this is a meaningful gear advantage that compounds over time as you upgrade your equipment. No other Monk ascendancy gets this.

Notable Passives

Beyond the Hollow Techniques and Runic Meridians, the Martial Artist tree includes four notable passives that define how the build operates in combat.

Way of the Mountain

Every time you Immobilize an enemy, you have a 100% chance per enemy Power to gain a stack of Mountain's Teachings, up to a maximum of 30. These stacks fuel the attacks that benefit from this node. The catch: you lose a stack whenever you're hit, or whenever you use or sustain an attack that benefits from Mountain's Teachings. This creates a defensive pressure loop. You want to land immobilizes quickly, build stacks, and spend them before taking damage.

Path of Exile 2 Guide: Martial Artist Skill Tree & Passives

Way of the Stonefist

This node transforms any gloves you equip into Fists of Stone, changing their base type and converting their explicit modifiers into stronger related versions. You also ignore attribute requirements to equip gloves entirely. The practical result is that you can equip high-tier gloves without meeting their stat thresholds, and those gloves will punch above their weight class thanks to the modifier conversion.

Martial Adept

Two effects here. First, every time you gain Combo, you gain an additional Combo on top of it. Second, each Combo you expend through a skill reduces your current Energy Shield Recharge delay by 0.2 seconds. For builds that cycle Combo quickly, this translates to near-constant Energy Shield recharge activity, making it a meaningful defensive layer.

Martial Master

Simple but impactful: your skills build and retain Combo regardless of which weapon set you're using, and you gain Combo from every attack hit. Without this node, swapping weapon sets can disrupt Combo stacks. Martial Master removes that friction entirely, which matters for any build that wants to dual-wield or switch between staves and fists.

How Hollow Palm Works

Hollow Palm is a technique associated with the Martial Artist's broader identity but functions specifically for unarmed play. It allows the use of Quarterstaff attacks while unarmed, with damage that scales from skill level, Evasion rating, and Energy Shield. This makes it the go-to option for players who want to forgo weapons entirely, using their defensive stats as offensive ones. The Evasion and Energy Shield passive nodes on the ascendancy tree (15% each) feed directly into this scaling.

Path of Exile 2 Guide: Martial Artist Skill Tree & Passives

Building around the Martial Artist: what to prioritize

The Martial Artist rewards players who commit to its systems rather than treating the Hollow Techniques as side bonuses. A few principles that hold up across different build directions:

• Power Charge generation amplifies Hollow Form significantly. Passive nodes and support gems that add charges on kill or crit are worth pursuing early.
• Immobilize sources feed Way of the Mountain. Cold skills, certain support gems, and freeze-adjacent mechanics all work. The more reliably you Immobilize, the more Mountain's Teachings stacks you maintain.
• Combo cycling through Martial Adept is your Energy Shield sustain. Builds that generate and spend Combo quickly essentially never have a delayed ES recharge, which makes the ascendancy surprisingly tanky for a melee class.
• Glove selection becomes more interesting with Way of the Stonefist active. You're not just looking at raw stats; you're looking at which explicit modifiers convert into the strongest upgraded versions.

For more on which Monk ascendancy fits your preferred style, the Path of Exile 2 class tier list and ascendancy breakdown covers power rankings across all options. If you're still working through the campaign and want to nail the fundamentals before committing to a build direction, the early game tips and tricks guide covers currency management, loot filters, and combat mechanics that apply regardless of class.

The Martial Artist is not the simplest Monk ascendancy to pilot, but it rewards players who understand its systems. The bell mechanics alone take a few sessions to internalize, and Way of the Mountain's stack management adds a layer of decision-making that other ascendancies don't have. Get those right, and the payoff is a melee build with reliable crits, wide AoE, and a gear customization angle that most builds in the game simply don't have access to.

For a broader look at everything the Monk class can do across all three ascendancy paths, the full Path of Exile 2 guides collection has you covered.