Path of Exile 2: Elemental Expression Explained

Elemental Expression is an Ascendancy skill available to Invoker Monks in Path of Exile 2 that can provide some amazing wave clear and area of effect damage if used correctly.

However, using Elemental Expression properly requires significant investment that players may not be anticipating, leading to some confusion. Here’s the breakdown.

The Elemental Expression skill received a major buff in Patch 0.3, nearly doubling its damage and making it a lot more viable in the endgame of Path of Exile 2.

What is Elemental Expression in Path of Exile 2?

What Does Elemental Expression Do?

Elemental Expression is an Invoker Ascendancy skill for the Monk class that can be obtained by taking the “…And Scatter Them to the Winds” node in the Invoker skill tree. It has the following in-game description:

Triggers Fiery Explosion, Arcing Bolt, or Icy Wave on Melee Critical Hit

Create a fiery explosion, an arcing bolt of lightning, or an icy wave of projectiles. The chance for an explosion is proportional to your Strength, for a bolt proportional to your Dexterity, and for a wave proportional to your Intelligence.

Cooldown: 0.25 seconds

By default, Elemental Expression only triggers when a Monk performs a critical melee hit. There is no other activation method. Unlike Meta Gems that only require Energy to function, Elemental Expression has a mana cost attached to it that is automatically consumed every time it is triggered. This can get prohibitively expensive if you’re activating the effect frequently. A lot of investment into mana regeneration is required to make this skill work.

Upon being activated, there are three possible effects that can occur: a fiery explosion, an icy wave, or an arcing bolt. The following are their effects:

• The fiery explosion is an area of effect attack that has an impact radius of 3.6 meters. It deals (8-244) to (12-366) fire damage. Chance to trigger scales with Strength.
• The icy wave fires three individual icy projectiles that pierce all targets. It deals (7–200) to (10–300) Cold damage by default. Chance to trigger scales with Intelligence.
• The arcing bolt creates a bolt of lightning that chains at least 7 times. It deals (3–84) to (16–477) lightning damage by default. Chance to trigger scales with Dexterity.

It’s important to note that your stats only determine the chance for a certain effect to occur, but they do not guarantee it. Even if you have no investment in a particular stat, there is still a small chance that the related effect will still occur. If, for example, you have 200 in Dexterity but only 10 in Strength and Intelligence, most of your Elemental Expression triggers will be arcing bolts, but fiery explosions and icy waves will still happen occasionally.

How to Use Elemental Expression in Path of Exile 2

Is Elemental Expression Worth Using?

Elemental Expression does not scale with melee damage, since it does not have the appropriate melee tag. It scales as a spell instead. Though Elemental Expression can deal a lot of damage, doing so requires significant investment in the spell scaling, something that Monks rarely invest in, since most of the rest of their kit revolves around melee attack damage.

Elemental Expression is mostly used as a support skill to give Monk’s Herald of Ice and Thunder more chances to trigger, which is where the real damage comes from. To do so efficiently, players can use Support Gems like Nova Projectiles to make the default AoE radius even bigger.

In most Invoker Monk builds that use Elemental Expression, its main purpose is to clear out trash mobs that surround the player by inflicting freeze and shock. Since most Monks are already specced into Dexterity and Intelligence, triggering the appropriate effect from Elemental Expression is relatively easy to achieve.