getting started

The launch of Diablo IV was a huge event, and it brought a lot of players who latently enjoy the ARPG genre out of the woodwork. Unfortunately, this mishandling of the game leading up to the launch of the first season has created a bit of a vacuum. If you survey the ARPG landscape you find many options with various benefits. Last Epoch, for example, shows a lot of promise but is still very much “in development” and lacks a lot of excitement regarding its endgame options. Grim Dawn feels a little dated, and while Wolcen has a great campaign it lacks a bit once you wrap things up. Path of Exile is by far the most complete package out there, but it has an extremely steep learning curve in order to get to the point where you feel comfortable with all of the concepts. For example, I am well over 1200 hours into the game and I still feel like I am just getting started.

The popular logic within the Path of Exile community is that new players should follow a build guide. I have done this thing… but quite honestly the “newbie” focused content isn’t quite “newbie enough” for someone just getting started with this game. The thing is Path of Exile has a lot of concepts that are fairly unique to this game. The problem is that a veteran of this game will just accept as common knowledge a number of concepts that you may have never experienced before. I feel like I am setting myself up for failure, but my hope is that I can help to bridge that gap. I do feel like the best way to play this game IS to follow a guide, but my goal will be to fill in some of the necessary 100-level coursework required to make it so that you CAN realistically hop into the game and follow a guide.

What is a League?

I am going to be addressing the new character creation process, but I am going to go a bit out of order. One of the first screens that can throw a player for a loop is this one, which asks you to make some decisions about your characters. Many ARPGs have the concept of a season and Path of Exile refers to this as a “League”. Essentially this is how the game adds new content, and there will be some form of a seasonal mechanic that lasts for somewhere in the neighborhood of three months before being replaced by another “league”. Currently, we are in the Crucible League and this adds a weird mechanic where you can add randomly generated talent trees to your weapons. When a specific league is over, everything migrates to the Standard league where your characters will reside from that point forward.

Path of Exile has a wide variety of different game modes, and all of these started out at one point as “League” mechanics. If for example, Crucible was well enough received, it might at some point get reworked slightly and brought into the Standard league and as such become a permanent part of the game going forward. There are a number of optional challenges that make content more difficult. Hardcore for example is treated as a separate league where you only have one life, and if you die your character can migrate to either the Standard or current League mechanic. “Solo Self Found” or SSF is a special challenge that makes it so that you cannot trade items with players or have access to your guild’s shared stash. Ruthless is a relatively new mode where you have extreme item scarcity in your drops and player skills are not available on vendors and have to be found either from quests or drops.

Generally speaking, I recommend players start characters in whatever League happens to be going on at the time and without any optional difficulty settings. Right now the Crucible League is taking place, and on the 18th of August, the next league will start. We find out this Friday what those league mechanics are going to look like. When a League ends, all of your characters are migrated to Standard and all of your stash tabs will be migrated intact as special “remove-only” tabs that allow you to withdraw items but not store new items.

What Class Should I Play?

This is the screen that allows you to choose what character class you want to play. This screen is a bit of a trap because if you are used to playing games like Diablo… your character class means something very specific. You might see the big beefy Marauder and think, that I need to choose this class in order to play a melee character. You might see the Templar aka the Old Man… and think this is going to be a cleric class and will heal people. You would be wrong, and I feel like this sets players up to make some wildly incorrect assumptions about the game. All classes in Path of Exile can essentially use every single skill available in the game. You can make a spell-slinging Marauder or a two-handed weapon melee-focused Witch. There are no hard lines drawn in the sand about what each of these can do other than the ascendancies… which is a rabbit hole we will talk about later.

Instead, it is best to think about the different classes in Path of Exile based on where they start on the passive tree. Please note… this is a wildly truncated version of the passive tree because I cannot really get a screenshot that has ALL of it in the same 16:9 aspect ratio image. There are six sectors to the passive tree and these are labelled based on the core stats that they tend to focus on. Often times these are referred to as “Pure Characters” and “Hybrid Characters”.

• Pure Characters
  • Marauder – Strength – Starts in the South West Sector.
  • Witch – Intelligence – Starts in the North Central Sector
  • Ranger – Dexterity – Starts in the South East Sector
• Hybrid Characters
  • Templar – Strength and Intelligence – Starts in the North West Sector.
  • Shadow – Intelligence and Dexterity – Starts in the North East Sector
  • Duelist – Strength and Dexterity – Starts in the South Central Sector

The Scion is a character class that you cannot start the game with until you have unlocked that character by playing through the campaign on at least one other character. The Scion is a bit of an odd duck in that you start in the dead center of the passive tree. It also has some other weird things going on in that it has a bit of a hybrid ascension path allowing you to choose from traits available of any of the other ascensions.

While your character class does not dictate the type of character you can build, it does however dictate what you have easy access to based upon the starting position. For example, this is my Wintertide Brand Occultist, which is based on the Witch starter class. I have spread out my points all along the top of the passive tree going both into the Templar and Shadow sectors to grab things that made the build work. There are a lot of nodes in the Shadow area that allow you to scale up damage over time, and then nodes in the Templar area that allow me to buff up the brand spells that I am casting. Almost all builds are going to travel around between multiple different regions of the tree as they seek out nodes that specifically bolster whatever build they are trying to accomplish.

What are Ascendancy Classes?

Starting in Act III of the campaign you will gain access to “Ascendancy Classes” which shift your character from the fairly generic starter class to something a bit more focused. Each has its own talent tree that is independent of the rest of the passive skill tree, and over the course of your leveling process, you will be able to choose eight different skill nodes in those ascendancy trees. They tend to lean in a specific direction for example if you really love Totem builds, then you might want to specifically check out the Chieftan Marauder ascendancy or the Hierophant Templar ascendancy. Do you really want to play a super tanky character that has a lot of defensive layers? Then you might want to check out the Juggernaut Marauder ascendancy or the Champion Duelist ascendancy. If you really love Minion builds… then, unfortunately, you are probably going to be pigeonholed into playing a Witch and then ascending into a Necromancer.

While the Ascendency class focuses the character in a more specific direction, it is still important not to try and think of them as being ONLY one type of character. For example, Toxic Rain is a very popular ability that causes poisonous rain to deal chaos damage to everything in an area. There are many ways to build this type of character and currently, there are at least four different meta builds for different ascendency classes. I personally played Toxic Rain Pathfinder which is a ranger ascendency, but Raider is also popular as well as Toxic Rain Trickster in Shadow, and Toxic Rain Champion in Duelist. When someone is building a character they tend to focus more on what ability they want to use and less on which specific character and ascension path that they want to follow. I love Righteous Fire and there are very specific builds for Juggernaut, Inquisitor, and Elementalist… that all have different positives and negatives.

What are Skill Gems?

One of the things that makes Path of Exile different from other ARPGs is the fact that you can socket any skill gem into almost any piece of gear and your character can immediately start using that ability. There are a bunch of caveats around that statement that we will dive into a bit later, but essentially the gems that you socket into your gear are what give your character different abilities. All gems essentially fall into one of two broad categories:

• Active Skill Gems – These are abilities that can be bound to a key and are performed when that key bind is pressed or the skill slot is clicked. These fire off spells, swing weapons, cast buffs, or move players around the screen. They DO things… thus Active Skills.
• Support Gems – These gems specifically modify Active Skill gems and change either how they work or the types and amount of damage that they deal.

Not all support gems can modify all active skill gems, and how this is determined is based on a “tag” system. In the above image, you will notice that there is a comma-delimited list of terms that appear in the first line of the skill. In order to use a Support Gem on Ground Slam for example, that Support Gem must include at least one of the following terms: Attack, AoE, Slam, or Melee. This is going to be true for passive skills and gear as well, but we will get into that a bit further in.

Another key differentiator to get in your head is the type of active ability. Essentially everything is going to be one of the following:

• Attack Skill – This is a physical attack and is the equivalent of swinging a sword, throwing a spear, or some other kinetic physical activity.
• Spell Skill – This is the act of casting a spell or channeling your focus into something mystically.

This largely matters because the items you pick up out in the world will give you bonuses for different sorts of skills. For example, the Sceptre on the left says that it increases the Elemental Damage of the player by 40% so that specifically means that the tags of the skill have to have Fire, Cold, Lightning, or Elemental in order to benefit from that bonus. Similarly the Gauntlets on the right show that they add 11 to 17 Cold Damage to Attacks. In order for the player to receive this bonus, they have to be using a Skill that has the tag “Attack” in it. So scrolling back up in this case the gauntlets would give that bonus to someone using Ground Slam, but not someone using Holy Flame Totem. Often times you end up with gear with stats that you can’t necessarily use… because it is extremely rare that an item roll is perfectly applicable to whatever build you are trying to create.

What are Item Links?

The items that you pick up are going to have a number of sockets available, each of them with a specific color, and the possibility of having those sockets linked. There are also white sockets that allow you to put any color gem in them, but they are a bit rare so we are not going to get into them. In order for a support gem to apply to a specific skill, it needs to be “linked” to the socket that the active skill gem is in. Now this link does not have to be direct… for example, in the above image I have a chest with six links, and the very last green socket is still applying to the active skill gem which happens to be the green gem in the first socket. The order of the sockets does not matter in a link, only that they are linked. Folks tend to refer to items based on the color of sockets that are available. So in the above sequence of items, I would refer to them as RRRB, RRGB, and GGGBBR. More correctly folks often refer to things with a dash indicating the links so since the gloves above have two different two-links they would be referred to as R-R B-R.

You can change the color and links of an item but for the sake of being the most basic of primers… I am not going to dive into that at all. On the Scion that I have been leveling recently, I am using Armageddon Brand as my primary skill, and as such I am using it as my six-link. Essentially there are only two pieces of gear that can have six links. The most common of these is your chestpiece, but if your build can use a two-handed weapon you can have a second six-link there. Let’s dive into the chain of skills that I am specifically using with that ability and I will explain a little bit of the logic behind them.

• Armageddon Brand – A brand is a type of spell that is fairly unique to Path of Exile, but essentially it is a magical disease that can spread between enemies. There are lots of different kinds, but this one in particular calls down a meteor from above that smashes into the enemy and deals area-of-effect damage. As such this spell has these tags: Spell, AOE, Fire, Duration, Brand
  • Swiftbrand Support – This skill essentially makes it so that brands apply their effect faster and then fizzle out faster as well. Essentially imagine dealing more damage over a shorter period of time.
  • Increased Critical Damage Support – Pretty self-explanatory, it increases the Critical Damage Multiplier for the spell. This bends the rules a bit because Arma Brand does not specifically have a tag that says “Critical” but it does have verbiage down in the body of the spell.
  • Concentrated Effect Support – This support gem makes it so Armageddon Brand deals more area damage, but makes the total radius where the damage is applied a bit smaller.
  • Elemental Focus Support – This will make it so Arma Brand deals more elemental damage, but can’t apply any elemental ailments. This is fine because most of our damage is coming from the meteor strike so that is what we want to increase the damage of.
  • Lifetap – This is a utility gem that makes it so any active skill in the link will cost life instead of mana. This is a common tactic that allows you to reserve your mana for other purposes and has the nice side benefit of giving you a buff to total damage after you have effectively damaged yourself to cast the spell. We won’t necessarily go into this… but you can also use Lifetap to give any Active Skill Gem the “duration” tag.

It is around this point that you are thinking to yourself “Gee Bel, that is a lot of nonsense to keep straight in my head” and you would be correct. Thankfully there is a faster way in the game to see what support gems work with which active skills. There will be a vendor in every act that sells skill gems that you have unlocked, as well as one in Act III in the Library that sells all gems that you have access to, and another one much later that does the same role. When you mouse over a support gem in the vendor inventory, it will tell you which skills you have actively slotted into your gear that it will be capable of supporting. For example, Generosity Support makes it so that Auras no longer benefit you, but instead affect your allies… which are anyone in your party or your minions. If you notice it tells me with a green checkmark that Defiance Banner, Determination, and Vitality can use this support gem… aka all of my Aura-based buffs.

Following a Guide or Yoloing It

Essentially there are two ways to play Path of Exile. The first is following a guide and trying to understand the thought processes that led to the creation of that guide. The second is to just get into the game and start making choices, knowing that eventually you will probably hit a wall and need to start over from scratch. I did not really come to love this game until I followed a guide… and even then it took me three leagues of semi-serious play before I felt like I really got a handle on how exactly this game works. Before then I made a lot of failed attempts to get into the game and created some pretty crappy characters in the process. This guide is less a guide trying to tell you how you should be playing, and more an attempt at helping you across the chasm of knowledge between where the guide creators think you are… and where you actually are as a brand-new player.

Like I said before, I am over 1200 hours into this game and there are still segments of the game that I have never experienced… and honestly may never experience. The depth is a huge factor for why I keep recommending this game in spite of the fact that it is so easy for a new player to completely drown in it. Having played and knowing what I know now… I do find a certain amount of merit in the “fuck around and find out” school of thought when it comes to a game like this. I think ultimately which path I would suggest you take, entirely depends upon you as a player. Are you easily frustrated when the journey comes to a hard impassible wall? If so then you would likely have a much better experience following a guide from someone like Zizaran or Pohx. However, if you are someone who loves to experiment and can accept failure and start over from scratch several times… then maybe your best option is just to roll something and go with it until you hit a wall.

But Can’t I Just Respec?

Technically the only decision that you cannot undo in Path of Exile is your starter class. You can respec your entire passive tree… all 124 points of it and even respec your Ascendency to choose another one. However, this is not as easy a thing as that sounds. During the course of the campaign, pending you do all of the side quests, your character will gain 20 Passive Skill Refund points. Generally speaking in order to do a full respec you are going to need to lean on Orbs of Regret that drop randomly in the wild. By the end of a league I have more of these than I can use, but before you get up and running… and can successfully farm content you will be strapped to get enough of these to reasonably change up a character. This is why the common logic is that if you hit a wall, and need to do more than minor tweaks to your character… you are just better off starting from scratch and carrying with your the knowledge of where you strayed from your objectives.

The world record for leveling through the campaign and getting to level 100 is roughly an hour. This is not something I could ever accomplish, but I can zip through the campaign and get to maps in about five hours. I’ve gotten to that point after playing many characters and realizing the flow of zones and some improved questing tips. Your first time through the ten acts of Path of Exile is likely going to take you multiple days. However, every time you do it… you get faster and I think before long I will probably be able to do it in around three hours. I’ve reached the point where I find leveling a new character to be one of my most relaxing activities, but it took me a while to get there. I know it seems daunting to start over, but the more often you do it… the faster you will get at zipping through all of the early activities.

Sometimes your accidents just lead you down paths you didn’t think to go… if you are willing to keep poking at it. For example, I started this dumb Scion character entirely for the purpose of beating Act III so I could get that achievement. I had no real plan for that character and am not following any sort of a build guide, and have already pivoted hard away from the skill that I was originally intending to follow. It has introduced me to Armageddon Brand, a skill I had never used and now like enough to consider properly designing a character around it. I consider that extremely valuable experience that came only because I gave myself the leverage to just start fucking around until I found a path to move forward. It took me a long time before I was willing to let go of the ladder and accept the possibility of a failed state. I am having a heck of a lot of fun, with a character that I never planned on caring about and gave the truly dumb name of “BelGlamRock”.

Barely Scratched the Surface

This is already a massive post… so I am going to wrap things up. As the heading says, I have barely scratched the surface of this game. I am not sure how many more guides like this I intend to create. The goal here is just to throw some terms out, explain them a bit, and give players a bit of an easier time starting the game. There are a slew of way more qualified guide makers out there that can pick up where I left off. I am looking forward to the announcements from ExileCon this Friday and the start of whatever the new league is on August 18th. I hope something I said helps you in your journey, and feel free to reach out to me if you have any specific questions. That is one positive about the Path of Exile community, is that generally speaking, most players are happy to help new folks get started.