Path of Exile

Actually other difference is the spells you get from the quest rewards. While you can trade for whatever you want and use whatever you want, some classes have direct access to certain skills via rewards while others have to trade(or find the drops).

Btw the Turbo race was rough. I was doing alright(like top 50ish or so) I think until I decided to go poke Brutus, asshole doesn't kid on Turbo. Sadly I hadn't really planned for it, I thought I'd still have time to burning arrow between hooks since I had very high attackspeed(10% from passive, 8% on bow, 8%quiver and using a shortbow) but the Turbo seems to reduce the entire spell animation/cast/backswing so basically he hooks almost instantly but starts hooking again almost right away which I didn't expect. After a few hooks he finally crit me on first hit after a hook and I died. Should have just went and made a new char for Fire trap and spammed that.

Game on Turbo reminded me a bit of D3 Inferno at release, it was a lot of completely bullshit stuff. Fun though. Some guy killed Vaal too, which is pretty fucking impressive I think.

Melees have fairly terrible aoe. Your best bet is to go for a Lightning Strike build, which is kinda melee but more like a ranged attack. Cleave is an ok spell(with a 2H or DW though, not with a 1H) but the area is very small, Sweep can be pretty decent but again the area is fairly small and you need a 2H. Ground Slam is good but only if you run a 2H build, which have some issues later on due to the lack of defenses. You could use a staff though which has block and as long as you start templar or marauder, you have a fairly easy access to the 13%block passive node which would be quite helpful.

You can check the official forums for various ideas of builds, check the ones with a lot of posts though those are generally the functionning builds. There's quite a few variations of lightning strike builds for basically every class other than witch(and even witch you could make one I'm sure but it might not be quite as good).

Overall though the popular opinion among people who make builds and theorycraft a lot is that melees are inherently weaker than ranged at the moment, for various issues, lack of proper aoe, desync issues on fast movement skills, tanking stats being a bit weird to really maximize and requiring a lot of effort to do so(as well as combining multiple type together along with high health pool which severely limits builds).

You can sell armored scraps or whetstones for 2-3 ID scrolls each, those aren't useful until lategame and they're worth peanuts anyway because they're only useful on perfect gear and only barely so. So selling them early lets you get a nice amount of wisdom scrolls. With wisdoms you can buy TPs if you need to, but you shouldn't need to TP often, if you do you're probably doing it wrong. Similarily, you shouldn't need too many wisdoms, because you shouldn't be identifying everything. On race chars(which start with nothing), I only pick up blue boots(if they have move speed% it's really nice) and weapons and rares. Everything else I leave on the ground. Once you start dropping 3 socket items, you need to loot the ones with 3 different colors linked, they sell for a chromatic orb which you'll use later on to craft good gear. You also always need to keep an eye out for whites with good sockets, to be honest they're worth more than pretty much any blue and even most rares unless those also have good sockets. Good sockets starting at 3links and higher, lower lvl it doesn't quite matter too much.

Looting everything, identifying everything and recalling to sell is the newb trap in this game. It is actually extremely inefficient, because one TP scroll is worth 3 wisdoms, that means you need 15whites(5whites per wisdom) to get even. If you loot blues, you need to ID them to get better orbs but then you run out of wisdoms and it sucks. I did it early on but I saw people on streams and stuff leave everything but rares and tried it and it's actually much much better. I mean, do loot blues if they go in a slot you have a white in, but generally replacing a blue by a blue is pointless as fuck unless it has sockets you need.

Sockets is the most important part of the gear, armor type is second if you have specific build. Say you find a white with really good sockets, you pop an alchemy orb on it and it becomes a rare but still has the good sockets. Or if it's decent sockets but not great, you pop a transmutation orb and it becomes a magic. Don't like the stats? Use an alteration orb to change them. It's easier to find a white with good sockets and make it into a good item than find a good item that also happen to have good sockets, and later on sockets are more important than stats due to linking supports to your spells.


As for Merveil, the #1 thing is getting cold resist, and this is done with rings mainly. Check Nessa in town, she sells rings, see if she has Sapphire rings. She might not have them, and vendors only change their inventories when you lvl up, so if she doesn't, you will have to craft your own. Buy an iron ring from her(if she doesn't have any, make a new char, these sell even at lvl 1) then "sell" her the iron ring+any blue skill gem. She will trade that for a sapphire ring. If you don't have blue gems, make a Witch, run to town, get the quest reward spell+starting fireball, that's 2 blue gems.

Once you have resist, Merveil should be pretty easy. And yes summoner suck dicks early on. Especially first act, it blows. Act2 it gets slightly better especially near the end, but it's still not great. By lvl 35 or so though it's like super strong and it never becomes worse, mostly better plus the builds offers a lot of freedom. I wrote a super long summoner guide on the official witch forums if you want to check out early game tips or build and stuff like that.