Ritual of Awakening, which summons two totems when a skill would nomrally summon 1 on a cast, is chef’s kiss
Yes. It’s a deep game, and the sheer number of systems can be intimidating. A lot of people, myselfincluded, will suggest following a build guide of some sort to get started. It helps alleviate the “oh my god so many choices how does everything even” aspect.
There are a billion build guides out there, per league. Great content to look for on Youtube:
ZiggyD
TheUberElite
Mathil
EngineeringEternity
LiftingNerdBro
I’m forgetting some right now. There are plenty of “league starter builds” guides out there. E.g. EE’s, Mathil’s. Watch videos, find something that looks fun within any desires you think you have (e.g. ranged versus melee). Don’t worry as much about the mechanics they discuss, just find something that looks fun and pretty and choose that!
Now, how to go about applying your guide to your experience:
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Download Path Of Building.
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Go to your build of choice, follow links as needed, until you find the written guide and go look at it. To use my living example for this league, I looked at EE’s starter video and decided I wanted to play ARc Totems. Down under “Heirophant Totems” is “Bourgee’s Arc”, a link to Bourgee’s written guide for the same. If you go to that link thre will be an expandable area (la the folded up spoiler tag one can use at Qt3) that says “Path of Building”. That is a link to a code you can use to import the build into Path of Building. Once you import the guide it gives you everything you need, right there in POB. I like EE a lot because he fully utilizes POB’s features. E.g. you can view the skill tree at different points during the leveling process which “leads” you through it.
Outside of that, ask questions!
A few worthwhile points:
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Generally speaking your biggest power spikes come from how many gems you have linked. Most builds get modest to major spikes at 3, 4, and 5 linked skill gems. Getting a proper 3L, then 4L piece of gear should be your highest priority. A white 4L item is more important than some nice rare you just found if it allows you to run your main skill at 4L.
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Flasks are hugely important. Upgrade your healing flasks (as in, swap out for one that heals more) as frequently as you can. you don’t really need to worry about enchanting them until well into the game. However, that eventually becomes supremely important.
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Everything in Pathof Exile keys off of keywords. E.g. my arc spell has “spell, chaining, and lightning”.
So if you find an item that says something like "25% increased lightning damage’, wearing it boosts my arc damage. “25% increased magic damage” would do the same. But so would “25% increased spell damage”, and “25% increased elemental damage”. You’ll see enchantments on items and nodes on the passive tree that do all of these things. A proper build is matching the right nodes with those keywords a specific gem has. And chosing the right Keystones (these are the biggest nodes on the tree, visually, signifying their importance). It’s a simple system on the surface but it gets deep.
Lastly, designations like “I want to play a caster” versus “I want to play melee” don’t quite work the same way in PoE as they typically do in ARPGs. To wit:
Double Strike is a melee skill gem. It’s classically melee in the ARPG sense.
But you can also play a melee character who uses the Ancestral Warchief support totem. These totems attack whatrever is nearby with a phantom copy of your melee weapon (which is hugely important in a build like this; it’s not simply stat boosting item but it’s actual dps matters). Totem placement rage is quite generous. This is melee at range!
Elemental Hit is an attack skill that can be used as Melee or Ranged. Your choice. Both are popular, and very different.
Lightning Tendrils is a spell but it has a short AOE, making this something of a “melee caster” build. Of course you could instead run LT totems. Or use stuff to increase the AOE to make it “safer” to use.
That’s POE. It’s a game with incredible build flexibility.
