Path of Exile is now around one hour away from releasing and with it comes the new Scion class. This week we caught up with Grinding Gear Games to find out how they like to play the new class by sharing with us some of the builds the team are currently playing.

On hand was Designer Rory Rackham, Senior Designer Carl de Visser, and Quality Assurance Lead Mark Roberts.

Mark’s Discharge Scion

Using Voll’s Devotion and Ice Spear to generate charges, this Scion builds up towards a mighty Discharge for massive damage. This can be improved with Blood Rage to make it a Tri-Element exploder. By also picking up the passive keystone Conduit, you can be very useful to parties in multiplayer gameplay, giving all charges you earn to your allies. This build takes a lot of passives to work, with bonus charges and reduced Aura costs required to make it powerful.

Carl’s Elemental Hit Scion

This tanky Scion uses Elemental Hit, along with the three defensive skills, Molten Shell, Arctic Armour and Tempest Shield. Because it’s a Scion it can then head to the ranger, gaining a lot of the projectile specific nodes, accuracy, attack speed and picking up the Ondar’s Guile keystone. The gear is biased towards the heavier side, with Strength and Intelligence gear, for a heavy shield and strong defences.

Rory’s Trap Scion

This Scion has a full set of high Evasion gear, with Iron Reflexes being used to turn all evasion into armour for increased defense against swarms of monsters. It also has access to a variety of powerful trap passives that protects traps from damage and let the Scion easily throw large numbers of traps. It also uses the Sunburst unique belt to cause all traps to explode after a short duration and a very fast Lightning Warp skill for almost instant teleportation.

When the game launches later today perhaps you should try these out, but remember what Chris Wilson said on today’s podcast, take time to explore the game, don’t jump in with your highest level character and start a new character on one of the four month leagues to fully enjoy the new content.