The Martial Artist is the Monk's third ascendancy, added in Path of Exile 2's 0.5 update, Return of the Ancients, which went live on 29 May 2026. It is built around illusions: clones that attack for you, ghostly bells that punish enemies, and runes tattooed straight into your body. Despite the name, it is not a pure unarmed fighter. It works just as well with a melee weapon as it does with the Hollow Palm playstyle.
Martial Artist granted skills (the three Hollow techniques)
Three nodes each grant a full Skill via a metagem rather than just a passive bonus. These define the class.
Hollow Form is the signature offensive tool. You channel to create astral images of yourself near a target location, and each image performs one socketed melee attack before vanishing. The images target the nearest enemy and run at 70% of your base attack speed with 80% of your damage. Without charges you get one image per channel tick, and each Power Charge you spend creates two extra images. Creating an image spends 80% of the socketed skill's cost, the images can be made within a 6m radius, and they cannot use channelled or conditional skills. It needs a melee martial weapon or unarmed to function. Skills with long attack times benefit most, since the clones skip the slow animation. Whirling Assault, Vaulting Impact, Stampede, Rolling Slam, and Sunder are strong candidates.
Hollow Focus spawns a ghostly bell near you roughly every few seconds. The bell is Primed for Stun and Cullable, and shattering it triggers socketed skills, sends out a shockwave that Heavy-Stuns enemies primed for stun, and grants Power Charges. Those charges feed directly into Hollow Form, creating a self-sustaining loop that reduces your reliance on other charge generators.
Hollow Resonance attaches a permanent bell to your back. Any critical hit from your other attacks rings it, dealing 224% attack damage to nearby enemies with about a 0.5 second cooldown and up to 3 stored charges. It needs a non-Talisman melee martial weapon and does not work while shapeshifted. Because it triggers on any crit, it functions like a universal area-damage buff for crit builds, and it pairs naturally with Hollow Focus, since those bells always deal critical hits.
Martial Artist notable passives
The remaining notables shape your defenses, gear, and combo generation rather than granting new active skills.
| Notable | Effect |
|---|---|
| Runic Meridians | Tattoo runes onto your body for five extra Rune-only sockets: 1 Helmet, 2 Body Armour, 1 Gloves, and 1 Boots, on top of your gear's normal sockets. |
| Way of the Stonefist | Transforms equipped gloves into the Fists of Stone base type. Prefixes and suffixes become more powerful related modifiers, and the gloves gain Evasion Rating and Energy Shield per level. |
| Way of the Mountain | Gain Mountain's Teachings stacks (up to 30) when immobilising enemies. While you have any stack, attacks deal more damage, small-to-medium hits are heavily reduced, and your stun threshold rises. Stacks fall off after a short window without gaining new ones. |
| Martial Adept | When you gain Combo, gain an additional Combo. Reduces current Energy Shield Recharge delay by 0.2 seconds per Combo expended when using skills. |
| Martial Master | Skills can build and retain Combo regardless of Weapon Set. You gain Combo from all Attack Hits, not just strikes. |
Way of the Stonefist glove transformation
This is the most distinctive passive. Instead of treating gloves as a normal slot, it converts them into Fists of Stone and upgrades every modifier into a stronger martial version. As an example shown at reveal, flat added elemental damage was reworked into "gain a percentage of damage as extra element" rolls. The base also scales with you, adding Evasion Rating and Energy Shield per character level, so around level 90 to 100, you get roughly 270 to 300 Evasion and 90 to 100 Energy Shield before any affixes.
The Evasion and Energy Shield feed directly into Hollow Palm scaling, while the upgraded affixes boost offense. The transformation also applies to unique gloves, including Facebreaker, so it works for both unarmed and weapon-based builds.
Way of the Mountain stacking defense
Way of the Mountain turns crowd control into both protection and damage. You build Mountain's Teachings stacks whenever you immobilise an enemy, up to a cap of 30. While at least one stack is active, your attacks (and attacks from your Hollow Form images) deal 20% more damage, hits that would deal 30% or less of your maximum life after mitigation deal 70% less damage, and you gain a higher stun threshold. Stacks drop if you go too long without gaining new ones, so you need a steady source of immobilisation. Hollow Focus helps here, since its bells stun on destruction.
Martial Artist minor passives
The smaller nodes between notables provide stat support that lines up with the class's evasion, energy shield, and charge focus.
| Minor passive | Effect |
|---|---|
| Additional Power Charge Stance | 10% chance to gain an extra Power Charge when you gain one |
| Attack Speed | 4% increased Attack Speed |
| Attributes | +5 to all Attributes |
| Area of Effect | 8% increased Area of Effect |
| Evasion and Energy Shield | 15% increased Evasion Rating and 15% increased maximum Energy Shield |
| Immobilisation Buildup | 20% increased Immobilisation Buildup |
How the pieces combine
The class loops together cleanly. Hollow Focus drops bells that grant Power Charges, those charges let Hollow Form spawn three clones instead of one, and the clones hammer slow, high-impact attacks while you stay mobile. Bell destruction stuns enemies, which feeds Mountain's Teachings for extra damage and a strong defensive layer. If you stack crit, Hollow Resonance adds an area pulse on every critical hit, smoothing out single-target weaknesses on skills like Flicker Strike.
Combo-focused builds lean on Martial Adept and Martial Master instead. Doubling Combo gain and pulling Combo from every attack hit, across both weapon sets, makes skills that spend Combo, such as Tempest Bell, far more frequent. The extra Energy Shield recharge from spending Combo also keeps your shield topped off during constant skill use.
To unlock the ascendancy, you complete an Ascension Trial starting in Act 2, like every other subclass. From there, the choice of which Hollow techniques and notables to prioritise depends on whether you want a clone-burst boss killer, a crit Hollow Resonance mapper, or a Combo-driven Tempest Bell build.