Path of Exile

ShakyJake said:

God dammit, man. I'd like to play this game but I'm getting absolute information overload on what to do for a beginner. Sure, I've found "beginner builds", but I can't find a clear step-by-step guide on what gear and gems to go for from the very start. Guides are loaded with broken English and acronyms so I don't know WTF is going on.

I mean, sure, I could create something random (which is what I did before) but eventually will hit a brick wall. So I want to create something viable from the start.

Click to expand...

Any decent guide is going to have the gear you need to look for. Everything else, especially while lvling before the build is actually working, is just life+resist gear. There isn't any reason to get any damage gear while lvling(although once you know what you're doing you'll optimize that). Weapons you'll roll with vendor recipes(caster stuff you do blue wand+orb of alt+resist ring, the resist type gives buff for that damage type, phys you do good base weapon+rare rustic sash+whetstone for %added phys, then roll flat phys via crafting mod once you have that).

There's some builds specifically aimed at starters that have a ton of detail, look for these if you really want to be handheld for your first build, other builds generally assume you kinda know the game at least a bit even if they're newbie friendly. Example of a very detailed guide for Arc Witch: Forum - Witch - [3.8] Enki's Arc Witch - a beginner & SSF-friendly Lightning Caster - All Content & Mapmods - Path of Exile It's one of the most popular starting build because it scales very well lategame if you want to, and while not "the best" skill, arc still performs more than adequately and can clear all content in the game, and it's simple to use and understand.

Chersk said:

I’ve played PoE quite a bit off and on but never been really serious about it and I don’t think I have any characters over 75 or so.
I’m winging it right now with an assassin/crit build and it’s going very smooth. Everything seems pretty self explanatory (once you have the basics down) ...obviously I want crit multiplier nodes, crit chance, etc. So why is it so mandatory to follow guides? Is there a point where the literal 8 million dps some of the builds boast is required?

Click to expand...

Mostly guides are for people to reach endgame with more than 30% life on the tree, getting one shot by every trash mobs sneezing their way, at least new player ones. It's like, eh, this is how you should build stuff in PoE, put points into the life shit cause you need it to survive, and don't just grab every DPS node, grab the better ones to balance it out. And then to show off some basic build setups, building for crit or building for non crit or building conversion or full phys or chaos or whatever and so on.

As for the high DPS builds, the point is doing some of the endgame content, notably shit like Delve and Synthesis bosses. Uber Elder caps out pretty early and most builds that aren't completely fucking ass will have enough DPS to kill it so it's mostly about learning the fight, but for Delve bosses and Synthesis boss the hp scaling can get pretty nuts so you need high dmg.

But you don't actually have to follow guides to the letter or at all, really depends on how much you like experimenting and how much you like learning about things before playing.

Buying regrets to fully respec is fairly expensive and not something you can freely do at say, lvl 60. But you do get the 20ish free respec points from quests, which should be enough to fix any glaring problem, and the rest you can fix over time spending some currency on it yeah. Ultimately you can respec out of everything besides your starting class if you really want, although in a bunch of cases it's just faster/more efficient to just reroll, throw some good lvling uniques on the char and just blaze though the lvling stuff up to 75 or whatever. But if it's small mistakes, they're easily fixed. Also powercreep is such that even if you were to spec like a complete idiot, you could do most of the stuff as long as you have enough life. Like you can probably just decide to switch to a fire spell after specing all in lightning and it'll still work alright until you reach high tier maps/endgame content.

Caeden said:

I completely respecced my duelist like 4 times this league including two that were ground up.

Regrets are plentiful. Deathwing gave me 40 at one point but the rest I found or bought. I swear they’ve upped the drop on them.

Click to expand...

Eventually yes, but not early on unless you dump a fair bit of currency into it, which you don't have until you've done some mapping. As I said if you get to Kitava then decide "oh I'm gonna respec my character", you're gonna have a bad time cause at this point you have like 5chaos and a vaal. If you're into late yellow/early red, you're probably a few exalts in and you can just buy 80regrets and fix all your shit if you want for sure. It's a bit costly and it's not money going towards your actual gear but if it's not too gear reliant it's not a huge setback. Basically it's a matter of when you do it. Obviously if you're playing late/on standard you can also just ask for someone to give you a bunch but no one's giving you 40regrets 2days into a new league for example.

New Shaper/Elder-like mod, seems melee isn't entirely dead just yet.