Can someone explain bandits?

So I'm rather new and have leveled a character to 85 by now. I'm proud of it. In every guide though, I see how you should be killing the bandits.

Now, I do not have deep knowledge of this game yet. I see +10% all resistances, I think, wow that's a lot of free stats! Especially considering how important all the resistances are. However, I notice that the +40 health from Oak is worth far more. At the same time, I see a lot of builds killing every bandit for the extra skill point.

Can someone explain how and or why a skill point which might end up to be just 6% ES shield, is better then 10% all resist or 8% physical damage etc. For some reason +10% all resist feels more important then 6% ES or 40 health.

First of all: It matters but as Vipermagi described it's not really a big deal. If you make a phys build and help oak on cruel it's not like that 16% increase is wasted.

A few pointers about bandits:

Normal difficulty.

Oak, Kraityn or Kill All.
Oak: (In almost all cases) Gives slightly more hit points than a 5% increased life node. Also you don't have an endless supply of life increase nodes. There is only so many life nodes in the passive tree, which means you won't always be able to swap the 40 hit points for a % increase node.

Kraityn: Many players follow guides and often these guides include fairly good gear. I myself often push for very good gear on my characters, which means they are resistance capped on elemental weakness maps without sacrificing other important stats. If you don't plan on pushing your character to the very endgame (for instance if you are just building a league starter currency builder) I actually think the 10% all res is a fairly good option since it helps you a lot early game at a fairly low cost in you hit points.

Honestly I think it is such an unpopular option because many players follow guides a bit too strictly and don't think for themselves.

Kill All: Flexibility or ES. If your build is starved for skill points, requires a lot of travelling to grab important key nodes the extra flexibility provided by killing bandits can be nice. Also if you are an ES build with good gear this is the way to go.

Cruel difficulty:

How much damage do you need in PoE? The answer is: enough. It's vague and silly answer but think about it - if you are already dealing enough damage (and most builds are these days) why would "waste" more passive tree points into fairly mediocre dps options? (mediocre since they don't double dip).

If you play a build with somewhat low attack speed that cannot fit in the FA gem into your gem setup the extra 8% attack speed from helping Kraityn can be quite good.

So in many cases you are better off with an extra passive points. For instance if you are a Shadow / Ranger going for the Scion Life wheel. If you grab a passive point by killing all instead of helping Kraityn / Oak you will gain an extra 5% increased life for some levels in endgame which makes leveling safer.

A good example of this is the King of the Forest build which is currently a very popular Shadow build.

This is the passive tree: (help oak, kill all, help Alira)


With this setup you are level 92. For your next 7 levels you have life avaible (Scion life wheel, Marauder start and even the Thick skin cluster for the 100th level).

So basically 8% attack would cost you 4 or 5% increased life if you chose that route.

Yeah, in the distant past it was always go Oak or go home. There are a few reasons the Normal Bandit reward is more balanced nowadays. In the past, we literally got half as much Life per Level as we do now. Also, powerful passives were fewer and spread further apart - nowadays they aren't, plus we have Jewel Sockets. On the resistances side - there were only a handful of "overpowered endgame Uniques," which meant that endgame builds tended to be Rare-heavy, and well-rolled Rares grant a craptonne of resistance. Nowadays, there are a lot more endgame-competitive Uniques, which tend to have low or no resistances on them.

For that reason plus cultural inertia, you'll see a lot of people say "take Oak for Normal and if you don't you're stupid."

As for your original question - why not 10% all resists all the time? As previously mentioned, well-rolled Rares grant a craptonne of resistance, and once you reach the cap(s), there's little benefit to getting more resistances beyond that. In contrast, flat Life, physical damage, ES, etc. can go onwards to infinity and still grant benefit (technically). Observe:



In order to be "res-capped" vs elemental weakness in the endgame, you need 169% all elemental resists. As you can see, it's very possible for a "perfect rare" to get 45% all resist. 169/45 = 3.7-something, which means with slightly less than perfect gear pieces, you can have all the resistance you could ever want or need with just 4 gear pieces, leaving the other 4-6 (depending on how you count weapons) for literally anything else. +10% elemental res seems "useless" next to this, doesn't it? :P But like I said, Unique-heavy and/or budget builds can make great use of the 10% all res, so 10% all res is not a bad option either.

Another interesting thing to note, in very recent days, are the new various Breach uniques which reward uncapped (i.e. 'over') resistance scores. These are quite powerful in a number of cases, and reduce the "resistances are only good up to a point" issue with Kraityn resists in Normal.

Generally, the only bandit reward you have to 'get right' is the Merciless reward if you're using a certain type of charge. Otherwise, the 40 health is good but not overpoweringly, build-definingly amazeballs, the 10% allres is not nearly so pants as folks make it out to be, and Mana is...still bad, but who knows if Mind Over Matter will ever make a real comeback and make it relevant again. Unique-heavy builds (i.e. the fun ones) can make quite good use of the resistances to help patch up their gear, life is never wasted on a life build, and skill points are skill points.

They all help one way or another, and none are critical save charges for charge builds (CHARGES FOR THE CHARGE GOD). And besides! We won't have Bandits to help anymore in 3.0.0, so we may as well get used to not having extra charges or healthies or what-have-you now :P