This is the leveling half of the Trinity Martial Artist line: the part that takes you from act one to the point where the endgame build takes over. You commit to fighting unarmed early — Hollow Palm, weapon off — and run Storm Wave as your main while you build the Power-Charge economy the whole build leans on.
It is built to be outgrown. Storm Wave is the popular unarmed campaign main precisely because it carries the acts without much investment, and this guide treats it as a means to an end: get to maps alive and charged, then swap. When you are ready for Whirling Assault and Tempest Bell, follow the Early Endgame guide — it picks up exactly where this one stops.
Generate and spend. Killing Palm executes and feeds Power Charges, Charged Staff and Falling Thunder spend them, and Storm Wave is your bread-and-butter clear in between. Keep your resistances climbing as you go — each act chips them, and an under-capped character is the most common way a campaign run stalls.
Lean on Killing Palm as your early execute and charge-generator, and bring in Herald of Ash once you can reserve the Spirit for it. Take life and resistances wherever the tree offers them; you are not unarmed yet, so just play clean and survive.
Allocate Hollow Palm Technique, drop your weapon, and switch your main to Storm Wave. This is the build's identity moment. Charged Staff follows shortly after as a clear-and-burst layer that spends the charges you are banking.
Keep scaling Storm Wave and your charge sustain through the back half of the campaign. The endgame transition to Whirling Assault is a real swap — different main, different links — so finish the campaign on Storm Wave and make the change with intent, not mid-act.
Your campaign main. Unarmed (Hollow Palm), it scales off your attack bonuses and clears the acts comfortably — the consensus leveling main for this line. Treat it as temporary: it carries you to the endgame swap and then retires in favor of Whirling Assault.
Your spend-side clear and burst. It consumes the Power Charges your loop generates and layers lightning onto your damage, smoothing the campaign and seeding the lightning component the Trinity wants later.
Your early reserved clear-booster: fire explosions that chain through packs as things die. A small, honest divergence from the more common cold Herald — run it if you like the fire layer for where the build is heading.
The engine. It executes low-life enemies and generates Power Charges, which is what keeps Charged Staff and Falling Thunder firing. It never tops the damage tooltip, but the build stalls without it — keep it on your bar from level one.
A Power-Charge spender for tougher targets — bank charges, then unload. It is spice rather than a meta staple, a burst tool you layer on top of the core campaign package.
Read honestly, this half is on-trend where it should be and intentionally incomplete everywhere else. Storm Wave and Charged Staff are popular, on-meta picks for the campaign. The meta skills you are NOT running yet — Ice Strike, Whirling Assault, Tempest Bell — are missing on purpose: Ice Strike is the safer leaguestarter you are passing on to go unarmed, and Whirling Assault and Tempest Bell belong to the endgame guide. If you want the full endgame core, that is where it lives.
Capped resistances are your leveling objective. The acts steadily chip your resistances, so treat hitting the cap as something you chase the whole way, not at the end. The Martial Artist's rune slots are the cleanest place to patch resistances and attributes once you reach them.