Path of Exile has had a few of them over the years. Many many different types of builds can be very powerful with the right gear and skills, but some have been so obscenely powerful that they've shaped the meta for years at a time on occasion.
- Before patch 3.0, Energy Shield was the dominant defensive setup in the game for a very long time simply because of how quickly it could scale with gear, to the point where it was possible to gain so much Energy Shield as to make characters functionally invincible
- Patch 3.0 massively buffed Vaal Pact, turning it into a must-have for most melee builds thanks the sheer amount of life leech it gives you - Marauders especially benefit from it thanks to their Ascendancies like Cloaked In Savagery, which has excellent synergy with Vaal Pact. This gets even more ridiculous when combined with the also-buffed Mind Over Matter node, which makes 30% of the damage you take drain your mana instead of health. It was eventually nerfed in patch 3.1.
- Well-made summoner builds are this in some players eyes. Since minions are completely automated, they allow the player to focus on avoiding damage which makes surviving the bosses much easier. This also means that Reflect, one of the most dreaded effects in the game, is utterly useless against a minion summoner. Several Witch Necromancer Ascendancy nodes - in particular Mistress of Sacrifice, which allows your Offering gems to apply to you as well as minions - make them even stronger and faster. However, minion builds are finicky in actual game play, difficult to gear properly due to the mechanics of the spells/abilities, and often considered boring by many players due to the passiveness of the gameplay, so summoner builds are relatively rare and they are often described as Difficult, but Awesome rather than game-breaking. Mistress of Sacrifice was also nerfed in patch 3.2 to only give 50% of the Offering effects to the player, forcing Necro summoners to keep a much closer eye on their own well-being.
- Also with summoners, the new acts introduced in The Fall of Oriath also added new enemies. Of particular note are the Tukohama's Vanguardsnote , Solar Guardsnote , Frost Sentinelsnote and Wicker Men note . They're all Demonic Spiders when you fight them, but for summoner builds, these enemies are incredibly powerful as Spectres with proper Spectre gearnote , capable of utterly melting endgame bosses like the Guardians while the player runs around like Sonic the Hedgehog thanks to Flesh Offering and tanking huge damage thanks to minion passive nodes/Bone Offering. It's one of the primary reasons why the Necromancer is by far the most popular Witch Ascendancy.
- Before then, the Act 4 Stygian Revanants and the aforementioned Fire Sentinels were this as well.
- Tabula Rasa is both this and/or a Disc-One Nuke depending on your build. Tabula is a white chest armour piece that has six-linked gem slots and has no level requirement, with the tradeoff that it also has no stats on it whatsoever. This is ludicrously powerful, since most of your damage comes from support gems linked to attack gems, making it easily the best leveling item in the game - to the point where it can take some builds all the way to the endgame. It's also typically inexpensive and is rather common to drop from enemies (and barring that, it can also be farmed with Humility divination cards). This gets taken up to eleven if you're lucky or rich enough to find one with a "+ level to Socketed Gems" corruption or double Vaal corruption.
- With War for the Atlas the new mods for Shaped and Elder items can get disgustingly powerful, especially since you can roll multiple special mods on the same item. Rolling multiple "Socketed Gems are supported by [Support]" affixes can turn an item into a pseudo 7-link or 8-link (see the above note about Tabula Rasa). This gets especially ridiculous with offhand gear like one-handed weapons and quivers, particularly ones with "Gain % of physical damage as extra (element) damage" suffixes.
- The Headhunter belt is best-in-slot item for the majority of builds in the game, as it allows you to gain all of a rare monster's mods after you kill it for 20 seconds. It's also one of the rarest and most valuable items in the game, selling for dozens of Exalted Orbs. Even the divination cards that you can collect to get one (The Doctor, The Nurse, and The Fiend) are worth a pretty penny in orbs.
- Loreweave is a very powerful chestpiece for a single reason; it can increase your maximum resistances over the 75% cap up to 80%. Due to the way resistances and damage scaling work in this game, this increases your defenses exponentially and makes you significantly tankier against any form of non-physical damage. As an added bonus, it also gives you a fair amount of extra damage and life.
- Indigon makes mana costs and spell damage of spells rapidly increase with every spell cast in quick succession. Zerphi's Last Breath heals you for 8 times the mana cost of spells cast by you. Poet's Pen casts a spell every time you attack, but you do not actually 'spend' its mana cost. Before nerfs, the resulting build could accelerate to dealing up to 60 times the damage while outputting so much uncounterable self-healing it could not die to 'anything' that did less than its total effective health pool in one hit.
- The introduction of cluster jewels in the Delirium league (special items used to further customize your skill tree) lead to a build which, thanks to allowing the repeated use of notables, allowed the player to use all heralds and a good amount of auras to grant the player incredible damage output and survivability before even taking gear into account. To put it into context: Without reducing the amount of mana they reserve, you can't use more than four heralds, and a single aura can take up to half of your total mana. This instance is special in that, while the developers usually refrain from patching out exploitable builds while the league is ongoing and even announced at first that this would be the case with this build as well, they have since reconsidered this position
. - Mageblood can best be described as Boring but gamebreakingly practical, as it doesn't operate on the same level of flashiness as the likes of Headhunter, but it gives some decent resistances and dexterity, as well as making your equipped Magic flasks permanent. Due to the permanent uptime, it also completely nullifies the negative effect of the "70% Increased Effect / Gain no charges during flask effect" enchantment, so your permanent flasks can be nearly doubled in effectiveness. When used appropriately, it can almost singlehandedly max out your resistances (Freeing up a lot of passive tree / equipment slots) while making you able to run at lightning speeds at all times.
