Best Class Pick for PoE 3.29 Curse of the Allflame (2026)

If you are staring at seven classes and roughly twenty ascendancy options wondering where to put your first fifty hours, the math changed this league. Curse of the Allflame launched on 24 July with a brand-new Scion ascendancy built around a mechanic nobody has ever had permanent access to before. Picking a class this season is less about chasing the top DPS row on a spreadsheet and more about deciding whether you want a second character fighting next to you.

The standout new pick is the Luminary, Scion’s third ascendancy, because it is the only class in 3.29 that lets you permanently hire and gear a Mercenary instead of dueling one for a temporary buff. That said, it is not automatically the correct pick for everyone — it asks for extra loot management and warrant-trading that a first-time player might not want to deal with during a stressful league start.

If you just want a smooth campaign and reliable mapping, the classic starters — Chieftain, Elementalist, Necromancer, and Berserker — are all still perfectly good picks this season and arguably safer than committing to a brand-new system on day one.

Every other class in the game can still duel a wandering Mercenary and get a temporary ally for a stretch of map, but that helper eventually leaves. The Luminary ascendancy guide covers this in detail, but the short version is that Luminary is the only class that turns that temporary encounter into a permanent hire.

Noble Blood and Permanent Hires

The starting node of the Luminary’s ascendancy tree, Noble Blood, is what flips the word “limited” off the mechanic. To master Luminary, you must first unlock the starting node of the ascendancy skill tree, Noble Blood — only with this node can players permanently hire mercenaries encountered in the wild, and without it, mercenaries are merely temporary regional allies. Without that node taken, you’re playing the same limited-duration Mercenary system as every other class.

Gearing a Mercenary Like a Second Character

Once hired, a Mercenary is not just a stat stick. The Luminary has only eight points like the rest of the ascendancy classes, so Legendary Arms is a popular choice because the ability to equip Mercenaries with unique weapons is hard to pass up. There’s a specific unique that plays well with a wagered-duel merc build too — handing a Mercenary something like Kingmaker can grant bonuses such as extra critical strike multiplier, Fortification, and culling strike. If the RNG of finding a strong wild Mercenary is grinding you down, players have found a shortcut worth knowing: since Warrants are tradable, you can skip the RNG entirely by buying the Warrant of a strong Mercenary instead of dueling for one yourself. That one detail alone saves a frustrating night of re-rolling map layouts hoping for the right encounter.

Luminary is the headline, but it is genuinely not the only good answer, and the reworked Reliquarian deserves a mention before it gets buried under Luminary hype. Reliquarian, introduced in a previous patch, underwent a massive rework for 3.29 due to its unique mechanics, positioning it as a potential top-tier class for the new league. That said, most tier breakdowns still rank it behind the new kid.

Melee, Caster, and Minion Starters

Outside the Scion tree, the same handful of classes keep showing up as reliable league starters. Winter Orb Elementalist is a strong mapping-focused breakout build, Righteous Fire Chieftain is the safest beginner option, and Earthshatter Berserker offers the fastest low-budget melee progression. On the minion side, Holy Absolution Guardian benefits heavily from recent buffs to both Absolution and Guardian ascendancy mechanics, offering durable minions, regeneration, block, and strong elemental defenses.

Reddit threads and YouTube tier lists will tell you to just pick whatever tops the DPS chart, but those numbers, like an Earthshatter Berserker reaching 30+ million DPS much earlier than before, assume the build has already found or bought the specific helmet that got easier to acquire once Mercenaries returned to the core game. A day-one character without that item is not doing anywhere near that number, so treat those clips as an endgame ceiling, not a league-start reality.

New or Returning Players Who Want a Smooth Campaign

Go with Chieftain or Berserker. Righteous Fire and Earthshatter both clear the campaign without demanding rare gear, and neither one asks you to learn a brand-new resource system on top of relearning the game.

Players Who Want to Try the New Mercenary System

Pick Luminary, but start it as an Ascendant hybrid first. One well-known approach is to start as Scion Ascendant with a Necromancer plus Elementalist combo running minions, then respec into Luminary once you find or buy a good Mercenary — that way you’re not stuck relying on a lucky duel encounter during the early campaign.

Minion Enthusiasts

Guardian and Necromancer both scale better this patch than they did before. Necromancer-style minion setups pair naturally with the reworked Abyss covered in the Curse of the Allflame mechanics guide, since the pits now feed loot directly instead of forcing you to chase a crack across the map.

Most bad class picks this league come from the same handful of habits.

• Committing to Luminary before you’ve actually found a Mercenary worth keeping
• Assuming Ascendant still plays like a flexible hybrid — it’s now the weakest Scion path with no exclusive scaling
• Copying a tier-list DPS number without checking what item investment it assumes
• Ignoring the socket rework, which makes early gearing far more forgiving than past leagues
• Skipping the patch notes and missing which skills got nerfed out of viability

That last one matters more than people expect. Anyone leaning on Spell Totem, Ballista Totem, or mines as their main damage source should check the 3.29 patch notes breakdown before committing currency to a build that got quietly gutted.

Both approaches put something else between you and the enemy, but they scale differently. A Necromancer’s minions are numerous, expendable, and resummon instantly when they die. A Luminary’s Mercenary is a single, gear-dependent unit that you lose real progress on if it dies and needs re-hiring — though duplicating that investment across up to three reserve Mercenaries softens the risk once you’ve unlocked the later ascendancy nodes.

Necromancer has the resilience, Luminary has the ceiling. If you want a build that never really fails, run minions. If you want a build that feels like commanding a small squad, gear up a Mercenary instead.

If you enjoy min-maxing a second character’s gear on top of your own, Luminary is the most rewarding class this league by a clear margin. If you’d rather not juggle Warrants, duels, and a Mercenary’s death timer while relearning a new league mechanic, a proven starter like Chieftain or Berserker gets you through the campaign with far less friction.

It’s a strong new class, not a mandatory one — good, not universally best.

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