Identity
Witchhunter is Mercenary's execute-and-barrier Ascendancy: it tracks a resource called Concentration on your enemies, draining it with Hits to unlock a burst-damage window, while a second Ascendancy branch grants Sorcery Ward — a Barrier that absorbs damage before your Life, Mana, or Energy Shield — traded for a chunk of your natural Armour and Evasion. A third branch, Weapon Master, lets you build genuinely different passive loadouts per equipped Weapon Set.
Notables
Small passives
- 8% increased Area of Effect
- 6% increased Cooldown Recovery Rate (this passive appears on the tree three separate times, not folded into any notable — confirmed via this site's own datamined tree data; taking all three stacks the bonus)
- 15% increased Armour and Evasion Rating (this passive appears twice on the tree — confirmed via this site's own datamined tree data; taking both stacks the bonus)
- 35% increased Damage with Hits against enemies that are on Low Life (this passive appears twice on the tree — confirmed via this site's own datamined tree data; taking both stacks the bonus)
Keystone
Witchhunter has no keystone-tier node of its own.
Practical notes
- Obsessive Rituals trades a large chunk of your natural Armour and Evasion for an entirely separate Elemental-damage Barrier — worth building around Sorcery Ward as your primary elemental mitigation layer rather than treating the 50% less Armour/Evasion as pure downside to compensate for elsewhere.
- Sorcery Ward's Barrier only covers Elemental Damage on its own — Ceremonial Ablution is what extends the same Barrier to Physical and Chaos damage too. The two work as a pair if you want a genuine second life bar against everything, not just elements.
- No Mercy and Witchbane form a complete loop: Witchbane's Hit-based Concentration break is what feeds No Mercy's missing-Concentration damage bonus, so the two are best taken together rather than in isolation.
- Pitiless Killer and Judge, Jury, and Executioner both key off enemy Life thresholds (Culling Strike's kill-below-a-percent, Decimating Strike's remove-a-percent-before-the-Hit) — they stack conceptually with Witchbane/No Mercy's Concentration-based damage scaling rather than competing with it, since one triggers off enemy Life and the other off enemy Concentration.
