A beginner's help guide to Path of Exile, a dense, complicated, but rewarding ARPG

POE Currency is going to be celebrating its 10th anniversary this season. For me, despite Diablo 4 just a couple of months away, it reigns supreme as one of many contenders towards the crown Diablo 2 crafted—the best action RPG available on the market if you’re searching for hordes of isometric monsters and loot explosions.

However, despite clocking an escalating number of hours onto it, I rarely recommend it to individuals. It’s dense and complicated, and death may come quickly and repeatedly. With ten years of challenge leagues leaving indelible footprints of monsters, items, and mechanics, just starting out can be… a great deal.

Hopefully, this helps. This guide will require you through all you need to know to obtain yourself smoothly to PoE’s endgame. For many, the Atlas of Worlds is exactly what separates Path of Exile from the competitors—a sprawling, labyrinthine system of randomly generated levels that build on each other in a glorious cacophony. Let’s begin.

The first step and selecting a build

Every 3 months or so, Grinding Gear Games releases a brand new patch, with it, a brand new challenge league. All existing characters are gone to live in legacy servers called Standard, and everyone starts fresh without a penny. When that occurs, the web gets lit up with every PoE content creator as well as their cute dog-creating guides for league starter builds, which is where I recommend new players start.

League starter builds generally are focused on 2 things—the capability to clear content reliably into the endgame, and the capability to do so with few resources. At the start of the league, the currency is going to be scarce. Items are going to be expensive, plus some stuff won’t be accessible. I could recommend a build for you now, like Toxic Rain Trickster or Righteous Fire Inquisitor, but sometimes a patch will be sending a build screaming into the stone age, so it’s better to find the new tech.

To make parsing your development a little easier, I suggest downloading Path of Building. It’s an amazing utility that provides a kind of talent calculator on steroids, with the capability to simulate your whole build offline. With it, you are able to tweak your skill gems, and test new bits of gear, along with a million other activities (without spending your precious currency to respec). Good league starter build guides may have a pastebin link where you are able to load the entire build into the program and employ it as a roadmap.

You’ll likewise want a loot filter. It doesn’t take very long before the bajillions of things that drop in PoE become overwhelming, but a loot filter might help tremendously. By hiding the majority of the useless chaff, it might help you zero in on the useful stuff and help you save a bunch of time. I recommend syncing your bank account with FilterBlade, which takes a great deal of the busywork from the equation.

Finally, let’s talk a little about microtransactions. Path of Exile is free of charge to play, but when you want to invest any serious amount of time in Oriath, you’ll desire a few basic things in the online shop. At the very least you need to get yourself a currency stash tab along with a couple of premium tabs. These can help you organize all of the little bits and bobs you choose up along your trip and keep the large number of different currency items you choose up from cluttering your stash. Premium tabs may also be made public,’ which is required to list your items available, which is going to be important afterward. As you receive toward the endgame think about a map tab along with a fragment tab, which can be purchased for around $30 (less for advantage from the sale they put on around each league start). These things aren’t technically required and can make inventory management substantially less cumbersome.

The first five acts

OK, we’re here! As you start the sport, watching that good ole zombie consume the dude around the beach the very first time (ah, to become young again), you’ll notice something right off the bat. There’s no such thing as a gold piece. No Gil, no penny, no credits. Currency in Path of Exile is available in the type of orbs, plus they all make a move. This is among the truly innovative things PoE did, and a part of why the endgame is really robust and fascinating. More than every other action RPG, its crafting product is intrinsically related to the in-game economy. With a transmutation you are able to make a normal item magical, adding an affix or two. With a fusing, you are able to attempt to link its sockets. Each of these orbs is valuable in its very own way and worth obtaining.

How valuable, you may ask? Head to Poe. ninja to discover. Because the economy is player-driven there’s no in-game auction house, and the need for things fluctuates quickly. This site provides you with a pretty good concept of the basics, though. The main thing to consider is that the chaos orb may be the closest thing to some standard currency PoE has.

Items may also be useful to sell to the many vendors you’ll find in the sport. Run out of scrolls of wisdom? Sell some transmutations. Need a chrome? Sell a product with a socket of every color. There are tons of vendor recipes that may get you great early items, so take the time to understand them.

Other stuff that is valuable is gear pieces with life, resistances, move speed, and whatever type of damage your build is applying. Try and your life, resistance, and damage high and you’ll cruise with the first five acts. One thing to look out for is Trials of Ascendancy, which will unlock your class’s three specializations (if you don’t play a Scion, but that’s an entire another kettle of fish). Complete the trials while you go through the sport, and once you finish act 4 head towards the aspirant’s plaza. By completing the labyrinth you unlock your Ascendancy, which is usually a huge power spike. You’ll do that again around levels 55, 68, and 75.

Shopping! And acts six through 10

After you defeat Kitava and visit act 6, you’ll observe that your resistances have a big hit. Unless you’ve been very lucky, it’s likely that the few of your merchandise is, well, hot garbage. Now’s a great time to learn to do business with other players.

Head to Path of Exile trade to obtain started. Here you are able to search for what to try and shore your resists and enhance your damage for that push through to maps. Try and get an elemental resist near to capped (75) so that as much chaos res as you are able to manage. Hopefully, you found a few alchemy orbs and perhaps chaos or two to assist you here, but when you didn’t, don’t panic. People are often prepared to negotiate prices on items, especially if you’re only starting out. Use this being an opportunity to make a brand new friend!

Now that you’ve got your gear sorted, you are able to cruise with the last five acts. You’ll unlock Pantheons while you defeat various bosses—look at your league starter help guide to see which of them you should use. There’s some flexibility here, if you find yourself feeling like you will find others who are more useful, you can experiment. I more often than not use Brine King to begin with, as getting chain-stunned is indeed a good way to obtain yourself killed in the early stages.

The Atlas of Worlds

You’ll be introduced to the concept of maps in act 7, but won’t join in fully before you defeat Kitava again after act 10. Maps are items, able to become crafted, that generate a game title level whenever you put them inside a map device. They come in 16 tiers and contain within their procedurally generated gullets the space and breadth of the items PoE provides. You’ll likely spend much of your time here, consider getting cozy.

As you complete atlas objectives (usually by completing maps of a certain rarity), you’ll unlock points to invest in your atlas tree and improve your chance to drop better maps. When you’re first starting out, check to ensure your gear continues to be in good shape. You’ll take another hit for your resistance after act 10, to need to do some home cleaning.

If you end up short on currency, head towards the Blood Aqueducts. This humble zone is linear, with monsters that don’t pose much of a threat, and maybe the perfect spot to farm up if you end up lacking some punch. The Humility card drops here, which may be turned in for any Tabula Rasa, a remarkably useful starting item that has no stats but always includes six linked sockets. In addition, items drop listed here are the right level for that chaos recipe—sell an uncommon (yellow) item of every slot to some vendor, and you receive chaos. If they’re unidentified, you receive two. An hour or two farming here should provide you with plenty of chaos orbs to head towards the trade site and get resistances sorted and perhaps purchase your first big damage item.

Walls and conclusions

Sometimes whenever you're playing Path of Exile, you hit a wall. You don’t do enough damage, don’t possess the currency to have to change your build, and end up dying towards the same boss over and over. Here are some reasons that may happen, and how to handle them.

If you’re dying a great deal, everywhere, look at your life and resistances. Try and your resists capped and obtain as much life as you are able to.

If you aren’t doing any damage, look at your gem links. Every additionally linked socket increases your damage exponentially, so sometimes it’s worth having crummy stats in your body armor if you are able to go from 4 links to five.

Bleed damage stops should you stop moving. The tooltips for debuffs are useless, and you will find many more types of this, but that one gets new players probably the most, particularly in the lab.

If you’re dying to the green stuff, it’s probably your chaos resistance.

Make sure you've got a movement skill. The non-damage links are simple to overlook in the early stages, but getting flame dash or blink arrow online helps you to save your bacon.

Try and wean yourself off life and mana flasks as quickly as you are able to. I’ll often use two life, and two mana, along with a quicksilver flask to begin with, but every one of those you are able to replace having a damage or defense flask is a huge deal. Keep your eyes peeled for mana on hit or leech inside your passive tree.

There is really a ton more I could discuss here, but I’m already concerned my editor will shoot me into the sun. League mechanics, master missions, pinnacle bosses, and much more await you. Hopefully, this informative guide can be a springboard to obtaining you were only available in Path of Exile, and perhaps just die under Zizaran.