There are 10 acts in the game in total, and when you finish act 10 you will be roughly level 70. Acts one through five each occur in a different zone, and acts 6 through 10 repeat those zones with the world modified.
Here is some free advice, worth what you paid for:
At Level 42 I’m guessing you’re either right at the end of act 4 or in the early part of act 5, so you have just over half of the storyline left. Once you get used to the zone structure so you can go through the acts pretty quickly. If you’re so inclined.
As far as your survival goes one thing the new players typically don’t do is put points into boosting life. It’s really important to boost your maximum life with skill points. The second thing that is important especially at your level, is to maximize your resistances. You should work as hard as possible to have 75% resistance to fire, cold, and lightning.
Also, I don’t know what skill you’re using for your main damage skill, but make sure you are linking some good support skills to it. You can increase your damage a lot by linking some good support skills to your main ability. You can also run one or more auras… There is one that boosts your energy shield (discipline?), and that will help survivability. As a magic user you might want to think about getting the keystone skill mind over matter, which helps protect you by diverting 30% of the damage youtake to come out of your mana pool. The three nodes just past that boost your mana considerably so it gives you a good buffer.
As a magic user you should not be getting hit that often. Make sure you have a good mobility scale like Flame Dash, to get you out of tough situations.
Yep, just entered Act 5, now level 45. I like to roam entire zones if I can so I tend not to zoom through.
My survival may have been limited by my life, but I had been putting some points into boosting life, so I didn’t neglect it entirely. My resistances are well over 75% (fire was at 122% last I checked, although maxed at 75%). I have a resistance aura going, and my Chaos Golem is adding some physical damage reduction. My death is almost always due to being swarmed with nowhere to go, unfortunately, and only in special situations like boss encounters where I can’t get away due to the limited space. However, in regular gameplay, my skeleton minions lead the way and divert attention long enough for me to fireball most everything. I do have support for all my in-use skills.
I may look into that damage diverting passive. I worry because I’m constantly using my fireball (I never fire my wand) and I don’t want to be running out of mana. On the other hand, my mana rarely drops at all since it regenerates faster than I can use it. So, perhaps a good trade off since I’m not getting hit much aside from bosses nuking the area or spawning groups of minions.
Thanks for -30 penalty tip, @Misguided, for the end of Act V. I was going to give up some resistances since I was over the max, but knowing that a penalty is coming may make me rethink how I manage that.
I hope the stash sale comes soon, so I can toss some money at them (for something other than points). Great game!
That happens a lot early on. I remember my first play-through, way back in beta when there were only three acts. Died all over the place. But then my next character was so much better, largely because I had a good idea of how enemies acted and what boss fights were like. And the next was even better, and once I started reading build guides even more so, and so on. The game really rewards play experience, both in terms of how you gear up and pick skills, and simply knowing the game’s mechanics.
Maybe a bit more than 5%, but not by much. Just about every ARPG has a lot of replay value in terms of trying out different classes/builds, but POE has a bunch of content on top of that. There’s the ten acts, then the map system, and the end-game bosses. I haven’t seen much of the latter myself, as I tend to kinda lose interest by the time I get a character high enough to go after all that end-game stuff.
Well, content wise (tilesets, campaign) he has probably seen a lot more than 5% ;). But there are tons of mechanics that don’t come into play until you finish leveling. The game is like a black hole that you try to fill with knowledge but developers keep coming up with new stuff so it can get a little overwhelming for new players.
So true, without Whirling Blades + Fortify Support I wouldn’t ever survive.
Also, be aware when you pass Act 5 you will start to have experience loss when you die (no more Zerging the bosses). After act 5 you lose 5% of the next level total XP on any death (note: not 5% of your progress, 5% of the next lvl full total). And after Act 10 it is 10%!
Engineering Eternity has been doing a useful series of guides, including each of the acts, describing basic zone layouts and boss fight mechanics. SPOILERS obviously, but if you are having trouble
Have you tried anything like Cast When Damage Taken + Immortal Call and others like Vortex, Summon Skeletons, Convocation, and/or debuff curses? CwDT+IC helps against swarms with fast-hitting physical damage. CwDT+Vortex slows groups hitting you. The other two help automatically protect you with minions. Dedicating a 4-link armor to defensive CwDT can really help at this point in the game. (BTW, it helps to read up on how to not level the gems properly for such setups.)
Also, maybe try using a different mana reservation setup like Arctic Armor and maybe Clarity to feed mana for Mind Over Matter. Losing resists down to a bit under 75% isn’t a bad thing at mid-levels if it gains you enough life or general mitigation or shores you up when you’re weak against physical damage. Act 5 can be brutal if you can’t handle physical damage.
Putting Summon Skeletons on a Spell Totem link can also be nice to free up casting time for offensive spells, debuffs, minion buffs (are you using Offerings?) and movement spells (have you tried Flame Dash to escape swarms?)
Running some of the Vaal side areas and slotting a vaal skill gem for those ‘oh shit, I’m surrounded’ moments can really help too. Vaal skill gems are special very powerful gems that charge up on monster kill for a single use. They are all based on regular skill gem, but with the ability amplified in some way. Some of them are very good defensively.
Lightning Warp needs Faster Casting and Less Duration supports to make it usable - both reduce the actual time it takes for the TP to take effect. Been running it on the Hierophant. Still not my favorite movement skill, but it is serviceable. I should probably try Flame Dash as an alternative and see if I prefer it. LW does have a range advantage though, I think and is very handy doing trials/lab.
My current toon is using Whirling Blades but has an unadorned Flame Dash slotted kfor those times when you need to get across a narrow ravine or up/down and you don’t want to run over to the stairs. Of course, the only reason I do that is because I have a spare blue socket. But it’s definitely handy having a Flame Dash available.
@Romalar your advice about the Cast When Damage taken setups is good (I didn’t talk about that because I didn’t want to overwhelm the poor guy!). Regarding resistances, I found (through painful experience… or should I say painful experience LOSS) that not having maxed fire resistance in Act 6 is a death sentence - those guys who throw down the fire totems with the tracking laser beams… yikes! My lazy tanky Paladin guy suffered so much trying to kill those dudes.
Of course my current character simply kills them fast enough that it doesn’t matter. Which is another valid strategy!
Thanks for the polite ways of saying: You’re doing it wrong. Ha!
I have absolutely none of the skills mentioned above that everyone is saying you need to survive, so I’ll have to look at whether I want to respec her and switch up skills to match. I’m not fond of making every build the same as everyone else’s because that’s optimum (I don’t do that in any game) but I’m also not fond of being flattened like so much animated butter. Well, hey, I made it this far without needing to do things ‘the right way’ so I guess that’s something.
How much effort do people put into increasing the secondary stat for your class? I have very little str & dex, for instance, but found I had to give up some gems because I couldn’t level/use them anymore. Is it important to grab those +10 and +30 passives in the tree (I have a one each of the +10s right now)?
If a +30 is right next to your path you probably want to take it, at least while leveling. You can spec out of it later if you don’t need it. It all depends just what skills you’re using though; some melee types can get by with very little if any int for example.
Actually melees are the most likely to take INT nodes, especially classes on the left side of the tree. Increased Area of Effect is a very popular gem and it has pretty steep int requirements.
I feel the same way about following cookie-cutter style builds, but I’ve learned that POE is both very good and very bad in this respect. In the early game, say the first 40 levels or so, you can make pretty much anything work, so there’s a lot of freedom to do whatever you like…very good. But after that, things get so much harder (tougher enemies, resistance penalties, some really rough boss battles, map mods) that you really need to optimize, and there’s only a limited number of ways to do that. So you end up with builds that are very similar to what you’ll find on the POE forums, whether you get there through trial and error or follow someone else’s plan.
Now, once you’re highly experienced and very rich in whatever league you’re playing, you might find some more freedom in the ability to combine various uniques and passive tree choices into a new and interesting build. Usually you have to get a character up into the 70s to be able to use all the fancy items and have enough passive points for something like that. But that’s mostly for top-level folks like @Bateau, not the likes of me. :)
