I Have No Idea What I Am Doing (Help With Shadow)

Hey all,

So I've got about 60 hours dumped in within the past few weeks and I'm finally starting to understand how everything works. However, I'm having trouble with character builds at this point and I'm getting my ass handed to me in an Act 4 Standard League. My gear is pretty decent (all rare with affixes tying into my character's specialties). I've been trying to build a quick and nimble Ice-style Rogue so that way I can freeze enemies and finish them off with a critical hit. I've been using daggers and all of my passives are dedicated to daggers, ice damage, critical damage, attack speed, movement speed, and dexterity/evasion. I've got all of my support gems linked with my skills.

I've tried reading through builds, but I have no idea what all the letters and numbers mean (it is all gibberish to me). I don't know what "10k+ CRIT COC DPS WIP CI 2.0 XXX" and all that stuff means, I just want to not die as much. I also can't follow along with builds because they are using skills and acquiring gear that I do not have.

I feel like my character attacks way too slow and needs to be able to throw viper strikes a lot quicker. I'd also like to improve my movement speed. My casting speeds for area-of-effect spells (such as Ice Nova and Glacial Cascasde) are fine, but my physical attacks are lacking the speed. I'm sure I can work on not dying as much by using my flasks a little smarter. I just need to be able to kill a little quicker. 3-4 seconds for a common monster is not normal.

Looking through your skill tree and gear these are the biggest problems:

1) You try to do a bit of everything, multiple freeze skills and then viper strike. Try to focus on one skill and make that as powerful as possible. Take frost nova for example, all the damage nodes you take should increase your main spell so only take spell damage, cold damage, spell crit, cast speed, etc. No chaos damage, no physical melee damage. Focus on one thing.

2) This game is sometimes called "path of health nodes". In your skill tree you have not taken a single defensive node. Excluding the +10 stat nodes, around 50% of your skill points should go toward +healh/+ energy shield/+resistances nodes.
This is also a problem with your gear. Weapons excluded, health and elemental resistances are the most important stats to have on your gear.

3) Aside for herald of ice you all have active damage skills in your sockets. As said in 1), one AoE damage skill is enough. You can have a seperate single target damage skill for bosses but a lot of builds do fine without even that.
All other skills should either support your main spell or increase your survivability. Curses like elemental weakness make your ice nova a lot stronger. Herald of ice increase the damage of your frost nova. Arctic armour can maybe be used as a defensive skill.

I would suggest a new character, I think that'll be better than trying to fix this one.

Okay, so what if I only wanted to have Ice Nova as my AoE and then have the rest of my skills as fast dagger attacks, what skills would be best for this? I don't have many Skill Gems that are good for my character to be honest. 75% of them are support. The rest are elemental spells or necromancer spells. The only good rogue skills I have are whirling blades and viper strike. I also refunded 7 passives that I put towards cold damage, where should I try to add them?

I like playing as Shadow, but having an entire page of gems for a Witch is annoying.

To be exact, this is what I have for skill gems. Some of them I have duplicates of as well (I don't know if I should just sell them or what). No idea if any of these will even work for how I want to build my character. Quick to move/strike, critical hits, and a good AoE so I don't get annihilated in Daresso's Dream.

BLUE:
-Discharge
-Spark
-Tempest Shield
-Bone Offering
-Summon Skeletons
-Summon Chaos Golem
-Magma Orb
-Clarity
-Righteous Fire
-Purity of Elements
-Conversion Trap
-Raise Zombie
-Arc
-Minion Speed
-Faster Casting
-Minion/Totem Elemental Resistance
-Ball Lightning
-Increased Critical Strikes
-Raise Spectre
-Frost Wall
-Conversion Trap
-Flameblast
-Lightning Warp

RED:
-Stun
-Warlord's Mark
-Rejuvenation Totem
-Ground Slam
-Iron Grip
-Glacial Hammer
-Molten Strike
-Melee Splash
-Punishment
-Iron Will
-Shockwave Totem
-Static Strike
-Less Duration
-Reduced Mana
-Life Gain on Hit
-Leap Slam
-Cast on Melee Kill

GREEN:
-Frost Blades
-Added Cold Damage
-Point Blank
-Burning Arrow
-Detonate Dead
-Physical Projectile Attack Damage
-Elemental Hit
-Ethereal Knives
-Trap
-Fork
-Animate Weapon
-Freeze Mine
-Multiple Traps
-Hatred
-Fire Trap
-Chance to Flee
-Tornado Shot
-Slower Projectile
-Lightning Arrow
-Faster Projectiles
-Barrage
-Blind
-Haste
-Frenzy

"

UglyStru wrote:

Okay, so what if I only wanted to have Ice Nova as my AoE and then have the rest of my skills as fast dagger attacks, what skills would be best for this? I don't have many Skill Gems that are good for my character to be honest. 75% of them are support. The rest are elemental spells or necromancer spells. The only good rogue skills I have are whirling blades and viper strike. I also refunded 7 passives that I put towards cold damage, where should I try to add them?

I like playing as Shadow, but having an entire page of gems for a Witch is annoying.

You can buy skill gems from Nessa (A1), Yeena (A2), Clarissa (A3) and Petarus and vanja (A4).

If you really want to do both dagger attacks and ice nove then maybe you should try a cast on crit build. I never tried a cast on crit build so I can't give you much advice about that.

But what your plan is, using melee attack for single target and ice nova for aoe that will just never work well in this game. You need completely different skill trees for a melee physical build and a spell caster build.
Reave, wild strike, cyclone. Those might be good skills if you want to with melee.

Use those passives for more survivability. More HP.

Also remove vaal pact, you have barely any life leech and not having life regen is really bad.

edit: noticed that i copied wrong link, to lazy to make skill tree again :p

"

Sisaroth wrote:

You can buy skill gems from Nessa (A1), Yeena (A2), Clarissa (A3) and Petarus and vanja (A4).

If you really want to do both dagger attacks and ice nove then maybe you should try a cast on crit build. I never tried a cast on crit build so I can't give you much advice about that.

But what your plan is, using melee attack for single target and ice nova for aoe that will just never work well in this game. You need completely different skill trees for a melee physical build and a spell caster build.
Reave, wild strike, cyclone. Those might be good skills if you want to with melee.

Use those passives for more survivability. More HP.

Also remove vaal pact, you have barely any life leech and not having life regen is really bad.

Here is an example of a slightly better skill tree for dual wield daggers:
https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/UglyStru/characters

Alright well you mentioned before that I need a good AoE, but are there any good ones for a Shadow without any elemental damage? All the AoEs I've seen consist of fire, lightning, or ice. I will take your advice though and apply my passives to more life, and I will get rid of Vaal Pact.

So with my refunded passives, need more life regen and more HP?

Welcome to PoE!

I would advise you to follow a build guide for your first few characters, that allows you to gain some insight of how things work in this game.

If you want to stick with the Melee+Cold theme, i would advise you to look into skills like Frost Blades or maybe Wild Strike.

As other have mentioned before, taking lifenodes on your tree is quite important. You usually dont need to grab any damage nodes before you venture into cruel difficulty. Also make sure to prioritise HP and + Elemental Resistances on your gear.

A lot of builds require you to transition into them once you are higher level, so having good leveling skills helps alot.
Good leveling skill would be:

Firetrap
Flame Totem (booooring)
Firestorm linked with Trap+Multitrap


Feel free to add me as a friend if you want any questions answered, my IGN is: BigCoC_HugeBalls