Path of Exile: Beginner Guide- 3. Starting Out

Path Exile is an attribute-based game. It isn’t like Diablo 3 where your character scales with the level of armor they have on them.

Path of Exile has over 1500 passive attributes. The class you choose determines which abilities you will have access to during the course of the game. Therefore it is extremely important to learn more about the skill tree before you jump into the game.

It’s rare for a free-to-play game to have this deep of mechanic. You can spend money to buy inventory stacks to store your gears(a necessity if you intend play for a year or two). The in-game PoE currency is measured by item drops such as chaos orbs, exalted orbs, etc. and you cannot buy them with real money.

If you’re a casual player and want to enjoy the game at your pace and don’t want to bother with all this garbage, can go ahead and do whatever you want. However, sooner or later when the enemies start scaling, you will have a hard time killing them if you haven’t built your exile in a particular way. Most players leave the game at that point in time and I for one don’t want you undergo that frustration.

Instead, just spend some time learning the essentials of the skill tree and consult build guides create your first, second and third characters. By the third one, you should have a decent idea how the skill tree operates and what staple nodes to choose when your planning for a specific build.

Now before you start up the game, download a software by the Path of Building. What it does is emulate the entire the skill tree in Path of Exile, giving you an idea of how to build your characters. You can practice here and jump into the game once you have a clear idea of you want be or want to play as during the campaign of the game.

We discussed classes in previous articles, how many there are to choose from and their attributes. The latest Exilecon revealed gameplay trailer for Path of Exile 2 which is set to introduce even more classes, but that’s a topic for another day.

What are you looking for?

You must have a vision of the character you want to play. Maybe you want to play as a spell caster, or a berserker, or as a paladin type character, or someone who is in tune with the elements in nature. Whatever you have in mind, visualize it and think of the attributes that best suits that type of playstyle.

For the sake of this guide, let’s consider a dual-wielding character with lots of survivability, health, and who can dish out a ton of damage. So your attributes of interest would be strength, damage and health and dual wielding.

Making a selection

Since we are building a tanky character, the witch, archer and the assassin are ruled out immoderately. The Scion is tricky and complicated. We’ll talk about her in a later video.

That leaves us with the Marauder, Templar and the Duelist. In our next guide, we will take a look at the decision making process of choosing a character and shadow building them, just to get an idea of you want within the game. See you in the next episode!