Looking for gearing guidance

Hey guys,

I'm hoping to get some advice or guidance from the more experience players about how to go about gearing / equipping my character. My group has finally just beaten the game on Merciless, and about to start looking into maps. This has been pretty much my first 'real' character (I'm not really counting my farm character, since I knowingly chose to give up pretty much any defense for more MF) and so I'm not exactly sure how to go about my gear.

Since it has been my first character, it's basically using a hodgepodge of random gear that I found while going through the game. I feel it's about time I tried to replace them with some decent gear. In particular, I feel like I'm really suffering being limited to a 4L for my (intended) primary skill.

I usually have large walls of text explaining in detail everything I have, my rationale, and what I'm looking for, but I think this time I'll hold off on that so as to not scare everyone away immediately. I can provide details when requested, instead.

In essence, I've built my current Witch to be based on the idea of being 'nimble' and 'quick' so her defenses primarily rely on (being a primarily Cold Witch, with a secondary focus on Lightning) freezing/chilling enemies, and physically walking around quickly and teleporting with Lightning Warp to avoid damage. Beyond all that, the final lines of defense would be what little block chance I have with a Spirit Shield, and evasion. My witch is also running Eldritch Battery, so ES functions as mana for me, although MoM helps a little bit defensively, still.

It's probably not optimal at all, and I'll admit I'm juggling way more skills than most experienced players would probably even consider, but it is my first character after all, and to know which skill I'd like to use, I need to actually try them first. My intention was to make Glacial Cascade my primary, with Freezing Pulse as a secondary, and Cold Snap as utility (Vaal Ice Nova as one of my panic buttons.)

However, that typically only happens in solo play, or when fighting bosses. In party play, I tend to have to use Arc in order to be able to do anything, as otherwise everything I have is too slow next to a Tornado Shot Ranger and a Leap Slam/Whirlwinding Marauder.

With that out of the way (I guess it's getting long again, anyway..) I am trying to figure out how to gear myself appropriately. In particular, I'm finding that I am having a lot of trouble keeping up my damage to compete with the other two, but I also don't want to discount my own survivability. As of right now, I have just under 4000 life. I imagine I need to update my gear so that more pieces of gear come with Life rolls on them at least.

My first question, though, is... what kind of gear should I be looking for?

Being that I want to be 'quick' I had initially thought the hybrid Evasion / ES gear would work, but I am also wondering if that's recommended, or if I would be better off getting two pieces of specialized gear -- one full evasion piece, and one full ES piece, instead of two Eva/ES pieces.

Beyond those two stats, I suppose I would be looking for Life and Resists, of course. I'm not sure if there's anything else I need to look out for. For the shield, I'm not sure if I should use a Spirit Shield, or a Buckler. The Spirit Shield could come with a +2 to spell gems (I have Cold Snap and Ball Lightning attached to them right now) as well as +Spell Damage (since I'm having trouble keeping my damage up.) On the other hand, a Buckler could give me a large evasion boost.

As I have Zealot's Oath, I also have no idea if I should be looking for Life Regen on gear to help expedite the in-combat regeneration of my energy shield. My current tactic is to summon a Rejuvenation Totem whenever I'm in a position where I have to fight/cast for a while in order to keep my ES up.

Finally, for weapons, I imagine I'll simply use Wands (not a crit build) since I'm definitely looking for the +2 to spell gems on those. Currently I have my 'secondary' skills (Freezing Pulse and Arc) on my Wands, so I felt that the +2 to gem level would help mitigate somewhat the fact that I'm limited to a 3L for them. But if I had to pick, is +2 to gem level better than a high +Spell Damage roll? What about +Spell Damage vs. a flat +X Cold Damage to Spells (since I have, or will have, plenty of Cold bonuses.)

Damn, this turned out to be a decent wall of text anyway. But at least it wasn't longer. Haha.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Whoops, I was just notified of an issue with my account profile thing. Turns out the characters on my profile were hidden for some reason. I'm not sure why, since I don't recall changing any settings, but I think I've set the account to show the Characters tab and such now.

Hopefully it did the trick, and is helpful for anyone looking to help me out here.

The character in question is 'TsukinoFubuki' which is currently a level 76 Witch.

hm neither es or ev gear makes sense since you have no Es or Ev in your tree picked up.
get some sort of defences in the tree, then gear for that. i suggest Armour/Es ;-)


no worries, first chars are always messy.

edit: oh you have at least some ES, just checked your tree with the builder.

definitly get ar/es gear you can get 1500 ES very easy with your 70% increased ES from the tree.

i would aim for 2k ES, then priorise Armour. gear does not have to be pure hybrid, helm pure Ar, chest pure ES etc works too ofc.

with 4,8k Life + 2k ES you are good to go for a while.

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMA37DfioIQ6QKPpkuuRKsbJVWu2VssnG0ZES0I9CL0EVB8g8BUbAs1uevuakOTJ6crHNwy0ZrghTK-in_GL52PGkVHRZ2hLxGWwcUW88BmU1IHHg5IiEImPASzlS5d8oIeogDw1ULD2wvwH-FzSVHfhGjymjsC_q9s7TyCm4w2C2HVpuw4VUvGruQiOtiFe2HiPC0MXxpsJy9mVCaVg8yDXxynNun3wZBVlG8Wv7c-U6Ukqho4cg_-ChZvcYXYveNqVylG1zCX

-10% runspeed but more es + 1 more jewel

Apologies for the delay in response; have gotten a bit preoccupied.

Thanks for jumping in with your advice!

From some reading, it sounds like there's a lot of love for Armor and comparatively little love for Evasion; I wonder why that is? As I understand it, Armor is less good on large hits, and Evasion works on some sort of 'entropy' system, where you're going to get hit at some point no matter what.

On those points, it sounds like both have some downsides, but while Armor reduces the incoming damage of the smaller hits, it basically feels like you're going to take almost every hit, as well as slowing your movement speed down more significantly. Evasion, on the other hand, will force you to eat a full-damage hit every once in a while, but while it works, it will completely avoid all damage -- wouldn't this work out to more damage negated in the end?

I wanted to, as much as I could, remain on the evasion track (again, because my idea for the character was 'quick,' and Armor doesn't give me the vision of such, haha.) I did eventually plan on taking some of the Evasion+ES nodes on the right side down to Nullification. I may create a new character in a little while though, now that Warbands has ended, and see about going the heavily-armored route to compare.

As you noted, I do have a few ES nodes in my tree, and there are two more from the Scion area that I need to pick up, but I didn't want to invest too heavily into it because of Eldritch Battery. On the other hand, because of Mind Over Matter, I do need some more to handle the hits I take, since I'm tying up my mana with Heralds of Ice and Thunder, as well as a Haste Aura, and I can't cast when I run out of shield. A Rejuvenation Totem tends to help me there, though.

I think I'm on track for at least mid-4000's of Life (I'm not sure if I'll hit 4.8k as you cited, though) but I need to redo my gear for that, to make sure more pieces of gear have good Life rolls on them.

I appreciate the skill tree, but I'm getting an error loading that tree, saying it was for a previous version, so I can't see it. As far as the Jewel goes, my plan does already allow for one more (the one right by Mind Over Matter) and will have another 20% ES from the Scion area past Conduit. I'm still not sure about losing more runspeed, though. As well, if it's a large change in the tree, it would have to be on a new character, since it's not exactly convenient to respec in this game.

I should note that this particular character normally plays with my group of friends, so most of the time, I can simply run away and let the monsters target our Marauder instead. His attacks also, very annoyingly, have knockback, so I need to be able to constantly and quickly reposition myself.

In this way, I've found that most of the time my survivability is only necessary against the bigger boss fights. Against any other monster pack so far (with the exception of speed-boosted snakes and those leapers) we tend to have no issue taking them down from range. If anything, I feel that my damage is very lackluster in these instances, as it feels like our Tornado Shot Ranger is doing most of the damage.

Having said all that, though, it sounds like you are saying that mixing Pure Eva/ES gear with the Hybrid gear isn't necessarily a bad idea either, so I may look into that. So far, I've been looking for gear with the +100% or so modifiers to each 'type,' but the Hybrid gear looks like they have about half the stats of similarly-leveled Pure gear. In short, I wasn't certain whether I should get Assassin's Garb + Sorcerer Gloves, Vaal Regalia + Slink Gloves, or Carnal Armor + Murder Mitts, for example.

Any tips on what to look for in weapons?