New to game - questions - overwhelmed by ability to customize

So while I'm downloading the client I was looking at the p(m)assive skill tree. Obviously it's a bit overwhelming to a new player.

I started with the duelist and was thinking about going with along the dual wield route.

It seems that I can spend at least 50-60 points just stacking sword damage / attack speed / dual wield.

Is this a common noob mistake? Are there any resources for "getting started" builds or templates?

I saw some "advice" in a post that templates should be available to noobs (which I am at the moment) so I'm not sure that many exist.

Thanks for any help!

what you can do is look at the list of skills and try to figure out which skills you want your duelist to use. what i do is try to find some skill that i want most of my damage to come from and look for other skills, supports, and abilities that work well with this skill. then i look for a class that can utilize this in some way.

in your case, i would just reverse the process. look at the big nodes/keystones near the duelist and decide which ones you think would be useful in addition to checking out the compiled list of skills in the skills forum or by going here:

http://en.pathofexilewiki.com/wiki/Skills

once you've got those figured out, you're good to go. since you are a duelist, you will probably want to focus on the strength and dexterity skills and pick 1-2 that you want to focus on the most. when you find a skill that you really think would be fun to use, come up with the best ways to use this skill from your current tree position.

hoped that helped, it was overwhelming for me too at first but once i started inspecting what abilities were available, i quickly began to figure out what i would want to do and with what character this could best be done with.

Thank you very much! That's a great help!

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Lordofknight99 wrote:

It seems that I can spend at least 50-60 points just stacking sword damage / attack speed / dual wield.

Is this a common noob mistake?

Yes :) Dont forget to spend some points for defensive passives like life, +armour/evasion, block, resistances and so on... you will need them.

And have a look at the class-specific forums for advice (they are hidden down at the bottom of the forum index. For duelist: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-forum/40). But have a look at the date of the posts - some builds may be outdated by recent patches.

basically, for a good solid build, you want to spend as few "connecting" points as possible. Find nearby skillclusters that you will make good use of, rather than spending lots of points connecting to all the sword/dual wield clusters.

You need defenses.