What do you wish you had known as a new player?

Hi all! Brand new to the game, playing as part of a regular group once everyone can get on board next week. Just seen the character intros so far, leaning towards witch at the moment. One of my favorite ways of playing on a team is as a generator of disposable meatshields!

What do you wish you had known as a new player when you first entered Wraeclast? Items you wish you'd kept or left behind, quests you found you weren't ready to take on, mistakes made while leveling that you wished you could take back, skills you found great or lacking... Our group usually plays regular MMOs, so PoE is a bit of a departure for us. Any bit of newbie advice would be welcome!

Thank you.

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ManySplinters wrote:

Hi all! Brand new to the game, playing as part of a regular group once everyone can get on board next week. Just seen the character intros so far, leaning towards witch at the moment. One of my favorite ways of playing on a team is as a generator of disposable meatshields!

What do you wish you had known as a new player when you first entered Wraeclast? Items you wish you'd kept or left behind, quests you found you weren't ready to take on, mistakes made while leveling that you wished you could take back, skills you found great or lacking... Our group usually plays regular MMOs, so PoE is a bit of a departure for us. Any bit of newbie advice would be welcome!

Thank you.

95% or more of the stuff that drops is pretty much worthless...

I wish I had known the massive difficulty increase once you get into merciless. Especially notable once you get to act 4. Oh, also remember to never, NEVER facetank stuff if you can dodge it manually. NEVER!!!

Capping resists.

No regrets here. Play to learn.

I guess the most important thing I have learned is to be very aware of your character's weaknesses and learn to compensate for them with your skill. Don't simply build a character without weakness or the game gets boring.

I started at the end of 2012 coming from first a bad summer of D3 and then a brief time playing Torchlight II (Sept.21 to end of November).

1. I wish I had known that GGG wouldn't be solving desync for several years.
    PoE: The Desync Years was the worst way that any server/client communication
    coding could have been done. Thankfully you are spared that playing nightmare.

2. I wish I had known that PoE was and is coded as a starvation arpg with 99% endgame
    loot drop garbage. (Perandus League was the only good league for getting endgame gear.)

3. I wish I had known that GGG would never be providing a descent way to trade.
    Trade chat is an abomination and huge disgrace, too bad GGG can't see that or does
    and just doesn't give a damn that everyone suffers from trading nightmares.

4. I wish I had known I'd never ever get a 6L drop and damn too few 5L drops.

5. I wish I had known that GGG never wants anyone to get to level 100.
    Since insane time unlimited racers do then xp nerfs have become the norm.

6. I wish I had known that "crafting" is a hoax and it's almost all RNG gambling.

7. I wish I had known that GGG would never code any other ways to generate XP in the endgame
    and that it was going to be mapping forever until you go insane or bored to tears.


Now you know from a CB starting time player (GGG gifted me a CB key... I actually got good RNG in that lottery... hmm... or was that a cruel trick of GGG to lure me into playing this arpg... I wonder???). The one good thing is that I'm still a PoE loyalist (I couldn't exactly tell you why after reading the above... maybe I'm a secret masochist at heart and love to hate PoE on many levels). I've managed to keep my Kiwi pet alive and that's no small feat what with all the monsters roaming the countryside and death always nipping at my heals.  :)

I wish I had known that for life builds it's pretty important to choose to help Oak in Normal. Lots of my older characters killed all the bandits the first time and now I'm missing some life that would be useful.

You know that you can go back and fix that.

To OP: so many things that I won't even start to list them. Know just that it's a very complex aRPG with a steep learning curve. Your first (few) chars will be your tutorial - unless you follow a good detailed guide...

welcome and GL,HF.

Co-op play is a little weak (very weak, in fact). Don't get your hopes high in that regard.
Global chat is always fun.

A warning thou, this is not too much of a self found friendly loot hunter (it's possible but only if you plan on playing for months and can live with the slow progress, which may only apply to the standard/HC permanent modes and not the timed ladder modes for obvious reasons).

You are supposed (some would say 'forced' and i wouldn't argue) to participate in some 'virtual economy' and very very much discouraged and penalized greatly for trying to achieve self-sustainability by earning *your own* drops and crafting *your own* GG gear by legitimate right and virtue because you feel like doing it yourself instead of feeding who knows whom (again, it's possible, just takes a LOT more). Just a matter of perspective, really. Quite irrelevant, just do what you like doing.

Even then, the tools given for that 'encouraged' trading purpose are obsolete, archaic and stubbornly, purposely cumbersome, irritating and inconvenient (in the name of some 'player interaction' this dev team somehow ended up seeing as something 'positive').
It's strange, a self found standard scrub like myself ranting about the trading system. Yeah, it's *that* bad... virtual trading fans, you have my condolences (not really) :)

In short: focus on the good aspects of this game, which are plenty. Ignore the rest. Is this still the best ARPG these days? Possibly. (well, there's a reason some say this is a dead genre).