Honest Question from a Newbie...

So I started a shadow as you can see this past week. New to PoE, tired/burned out of dull D3. Even donated to the cause, just based on principle as you'll observe.

I look at the build page and it looks amazing. All sorts of choices to make. Here's my concern:

Why is it that with all of these choices, you still more or less 'have' to pick an existing proven spec in order to do end game content?

I can understand fundamentally stupid choices making a terrible build (you all get what I mean), but I'm really concerned about the fact that a) there's no respecs really, that I know of and b) if you don't seemingly pick an existing build (none of which I really like, that I can tell) then you are gimping yourself.

I want to be able to make reasonably intelligent decisions on my character's development, but not feel like the entire experience was a waste of time. I'm not a powergamer, I have maybe 10-12 hours a week to play. Leveling takes time, a lot of time in order to ultimately find out you just completely wasted 3-4 weeks of your gaming life...



Second question: How critical is gear for a spec? The other thing is how can I know what I will want to look like at 90? It's seemingly impossible. Makes me almost not want to spend skill points at all. Perhaps only as few as necessary to level...

Thoughts?

You don't have to pick a build someone created a guide for. However, those are usually among the strongest play styles available. I play a build all my own, but it's loosely based on an existing one. It's not as strong as the build in the guide, but it still works. This game is really good at making you believe you NEED to min/max, when that's not always the case.

As for uniques, some are very strong and can build changers (Voltaxic, Shav's); others serve to compliment builds (Call of the Brotherhood), while the rest are either garbage or good for leveling (Lifesprig, Tabula). Only a few are required for certain builds, but many more can be "best in slot" type items for builds.

You don't have to follow a build gude to do endgame content. Those guide usually contain discussions about different aspects of the build and often show how others have done things differently. I glance over build guides just so I can see how others have made builds using the skills I think I want to try. But I never follow the guides that closely. Most of them are trying to max dps and I prefer to be more defensive in my builds.

Don't be afraid to allocate passives. You'll make some bad choices and learn from them. You'll make some good choices and learn from them too. You can hold off on allocating points though until you figure out what you want to do. Often times while I'm leveling early I don't stop to allocate passives. Before I know it, I have a dozen passive points built up. I think my record was 24 unused passives.

And every 3 months they start a new league and always give existing characters an optional reset. So even if you screw up your character, you'll get a second chance. There's a new league starting in a couple days. So you'll get that respec that soon if you mess up your character today.

I am a relative newbie and have few characters to my name, but what I've found is that the interaction between the passive tree, gear, and gems is very complex. Existing builds are the best guides to seeing what those interactions are and the many ways things can be combined to be successful in killing things and not dying. It is frustrating to build a character that gets you through Merciless and then fails when its 70+ and mostly dies in lower tier maps. Using the guides for a foundation in the character type you like will make it easier to tune your character with gear and as you move from the 70s into the 80s and beyond. This community is a huge resource that will make playing this game much less frustrating as you grind away.

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mark1030 wrote:

You don't have to follow a build gude to do endgame content. Those guide usually contain discussions about different aspects of the build and often show how others have done things differently. I glance over build guides just so I can see how others have made builds using the skills I think I want to try. But I never follow the guides that closely. Most of them are trying to max dps and I prefer to be more defensive in my builds.

Don't be afraid to allocate passives. You'll make some bad choices and learn from them. You'll make some good choices and learn from them too. You can hold off on allocating points though until you figure out what you want to do. Often times while I'm leveling early I don't stop to allocate passives. Before I know it, I have a dozen passive points built up. I think my record was 24 unused passives.

And every 3 months they start a new league and always give existing characters an optional reset. So even if you screw up your character, you'll get a second chance. There's a new league starting in a couple days. So you'll get that respec that soon if you mess up your character today.

What do you mean by allocate passives?

What a coincidence! I had some thoughts about this recently, but didn't reply have any reason to share my opinions until now.

The game has gotten easier than it ever has, thanks to power creep and overall simplification. Perhaps it is still true that most people will fail their first characters and reroll, but nowadays more than ever I see people saying "hi I'm a new and I just started last week and I'm only level 92" (when I started playing this game, 70 was an achievement for me, and a Challenge in the temp leagues, if I recall correctly).

You gain 24 free respec points through quests while building your character, and every 3 months (major patch) for the past couple of years now the developers have given a full free optional passive respec for all permanent league charters.

It may or may not take some time to figure out what counts as "reasonably intelligent" in this game, but actually, there are countless builds out there that can comfortably run the majority of endgame content (at least half of the endgame Maps, Atziri, etc) as long as they are, as you say, reasonably intelligent.

Anything you hear about limited build diversity in the current version of the game is probably coming either from completionists or elitists. The elitist viewpoint is kind of shortsighted, because in a system with this many variables, there will always be one or two builds that excel over all others dramatically. If you are a completionist, though, I could see how you might find builds restricting in this game. I find games where any build can steamroll all content fairly boring in the long run - D3 was fun for a while, but there isn't really any point in playing it for me now.

As for what constitutes reasonably intelligent in this game - it usually takes some experience, but generally, I think you can do very well if you pay very close attention to what things specifically say. Game information is generally worded quite precisely. If you gain a bonus to physical damage, it will affect all physical damage you do whether spell or attack (in this game, Attack refers to an offensive Hit dealt by your Weapon). But melee physical damage will never affect your spells, because melee is always Attack damage. And so on.

I expect you plan on playing long-term, in which case Life and Resists (or ES and Resists, but Life is more new-player friendly) are pretty universally important. Even glass cannons need buffer and resist on gear in the endgame. When you reach endgame Maps, the game expects you to have capped or almost capped Resists, and a reasonable amount of buffer. These are of course also useful for surviving while leveling.

Otherwise it becomes a matter of deduction like I implied two paragraphs up. Suppose you pick the skill Ethereal Knives. You see that it is a Physical Projectile Spell. So you stack cast speed, physical damage, spell damage, projectile damage, and if you desire, spell critical chance/damage and global critical chance/damage.

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GilliesSWTOR wrote:

What do you mean by allocate passives?

The passive skill points you get when you level up. You can spend them as soon as you get them, or you can build up a pool of unspent points to specialize your character at higher levels. As a melee, for instance, you could grab health and melee weapon damage while saving a few points until you decide whether to use axes, swords or maces. Likewise, you could save points until you decide if you want to play your Duelist as evasion/dodge or stack armor.

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Peace_Frog wrote:

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GilliesSWTOR wrote:

What do you mean by allocate passives?

The passive skill points you get when you level up. You can spend them as soon as you get them, or you can build up a pool of unspent points to specialize your character at higher levels. As a melee, for instance, you could grab health and melee weapon damage while saving a few points until you decide whether to use axes, swords or maces. Likewise, you could save points until you decide if you want to play your Duelist as evasion/dodge or stack armor.

Oh, so this is saying the same thing then. The idea being spend as few skill points as possible while leveling, to leave yourself some wiggle room as you get into the upper tier of levels.
Between this and passive rewards giving you refund points, you can have a lot of wiggle room.



To All: I appreciate this conversation. Seriously. I don't want to find myself ambivalent to the game after a few months like D3.

Maybe I need to look into a guild to join to get some more day to day advice on the fly?

You don't "need" to follow a guide to do endgame content, and you "can" just make your build on the run, but for both of them you need some amount of experience if you don't want to end in a horrible mess. In general it is better to plan your entire build before you start playing.

About there being no respecs, well you are supposed to reroll characters continuously, and the free respec points the game gives you is enough for some minor adjustments.

About "wasting your time" well, you are still earning currency, items and experience as a player, allowing you to easily gear a new character if you want, so it is not a complete waste of time even if you screw your character.

About gear, yeah that is quite relevant. The drops you get and some crafting/master crafting should allow you to get up to maps with no problem, but if you are feeling a bit underpowered you can check some items to buy at http://poe.trade/ the main trading plataform in PoE.