First char - reached 50 but need help now

Hello all,

I've been using ZiggyD's beginner guide series to get me started on a Marauder and on PoE in general. His guide only goes up to the beginning of Act 2, but thanks to the general advice I've been able to progress to level 50 and am now in Cruel at the end of Act 2. And I am getting my butt kicked.

I've been able to brute force my way through difficulty spikes so far, but now that death means loss of experience, I am suddenly motivated to put some more thought into improving my toon :-) I'm not quite sure how to go about it so I would love to hear some advice from this community. TIA for any help!

Here are the questions/concerns I have:

- Feel free to look at my character and gear. I am trying to follow ZiggyD's beginner build and will probably go the mace/tank route.
- I don't seem to be getting any drop that would improve my char, or, more likely, I'm not sure what to look for. At this point my character is squishy so I need more life/armor and whatnot, but at the same time I feel I'm starting to lag even in the dps department...
- Trading scares me a bit but I feel it's really too early in the game for that anyway. Plus I probably don't have the currency needed. If I'm wrong about that let me know!
- Crafting seems even more out of the question... I've used a few chromatic orbs here and there because I've got lots of them but the couple other mats I've used I feel were wasted. Again, I don't know what I'm doing and should probably save the mats for end game.
- I have the feeling that the answer resides in better skills and more linked sockets, but again not certain how to go about obtaining those. (Yes, I know Faster Attack doesn't help with Anger, and I'm not even sure Culling Strike helps with Herald of Ash...)

I know your first char in PoE is supposed to fail to some extent but I'd like to take him at least into the beginnings of Merciless.

The characters tab is private by default. Go here and uncheck the box so we can see your character.

I can give some advice already based on what you've said, but it might as well wait until I can take a look and get everything out of the way at once.

Done, thanks for the tip.

As much as a like ZiggyD, i just don't get it why he recommends 2-hand build as a beginner friendly??
2-hand requires a good weapon/ very good gear and you must know your enemies well or you are going to get rekt.

I guess if you are getting rekt in Cruel it's propably because of enemy curses, roll 1 of your flasks to have curse removel/curse immunity..like this:


The next big thing is enemies that have auras, even white monsters are dangerous when buffed by rares. Best place for learning is Fellshrine, enemies there are slow, so you have the time to read their affixes and see their auras.

I like 2h builds very much.

If you want to go through game easy, then you will have to buy some decent items.
The main part of 2h build is good weapon - you can try to look in http://poe.trade/search/niubanonitetar. There is weapons for less then 1 chaos with 3 times more damage then yours.

The next thing that I'm aiming for is items with life 50+. It's really hard to find decent roll items with life on your own, it is easier to look in poe.trade, there you can find decent items for 1alch/chaos - you just have to invest some time.

You can also check my shop - I have there some nice leveling items, or just add me ingame and if I will see you online, I could offer you some decent items, or just drop some upgrades for free.
I'm just not sure, when I will be online next time (going on vacation).

Okay dokey.

Firstly, you need a better weapon. There are a couple of ways to accomplish this. Firstly, you could buy a cheap unique. The obvious choice at your point would be Terminus Est, which would about treble your damage (although you need one more level to be able to use it), and costs pretty much nothing. Once you hit level 57 you can grab a Marohi Erqi if you want to stick with maces. Alternatively, although this won't be as strong, you can use Vagan (if you've managed to level him a bit so far) to cheaply craft flat physical damage onto the mace you have already.

You could also do with setting your gems up a bit better. I don't know which of those skills you're intending to stick with, but this would be about the time to pick one and get some solid support gems on it. Melee Physical Damage/<Weapon Elemental Damage/Added Fire Damage>/<Multistrike/Faster Attacks> should set you up for a lot more damage. Yeena sells WED if you don't have it handy. You can keep Life Gain on Hit socketed instead of one of the damage gems if you like, I know I usually would in your situation while levelling.

You should also be running Hatred (Clarissa has that one) - it's pretty much the best aura for any build that deals physical damage. Run with that and Herald of Ash, screw Anger. And while we're on the subject, it's generally a bad idea to support any aura or mana-reserving buff unless it's really important, because it increases their mana reservation.

As far as the rest of your items go, it's all about life and resists. Don't worry about much else just yet. In particular, you only need to worry about having one 4L right now. Haku and Elreon can craft resists onto your gear super cheaply if you need that, although life is a bit more expensive. That said, farm a bit and you should find some gear with decent life rolls, maybe a resist or two, and perhaps space to master-craft another resist on.

Also, if you do end up wanting to keep that 4L helmet, there's pretty much no reason not to transmute it and hope for a decent mod or two. Transmutes and augs may as well be free, they're so common.

That's about all you need to carry you into Merciless, I think.

The good news is there is a lot of nice life nodes close to where you are right now. The bad news is: You gotta farm yourself like 5 or 6 levels.

In the Templer area you want get these very nice life nodes:


Start with Discipline and Training on the right side and then get Devotion. That should already make you a fair bit tankier.

The next question is: How are your elemental resists looking? Open your character with [C] and click on "Defenses" while you are in town in Cruel. You want fire, cold and lightning resist to be as high as possible, preferably capped at 75% (fire 76% in your case).
Fire is at 23%, 28% and lightning at 33% unless I missed something and derped the math. (I only had one coffee...)

Basically, everything that does elemental damage is gonna hurt a lot right now. Better gear would help but you can probably play carefully for a while and farm Fellshrine. If you have an orb of alchemy use it on your helmet.

If you don't find any decent gear with life and resists on it you can spend 2 skill points to get Diamond Skin. That's 15% resists to all 3 elements:


What area specifically gives you trouble and which kind of enemies?


PS: Why the fuck did Ziggy recommend damage nodes instead of life in a new player guide in the Marauder starting area?!? 0_o

Thanks for the answers so far! Looks like I will have to look into trading earlier than I thought.

PyleWarlord: I have one those flasks :-) Been using it mostly to ward off curses from strongboxes, but I will look to use it in other situations. Re: 2 hand thing, it's been fun so far but regardless of gear price the complete lack of range is making it maybe a bit harder to play than it should be, at least for a beginner IMHO. Pretty sure my next character will be either a ranger or a witch.

Gunarsg: thanks for the tips, I will definitely start looking at those. See you online!

Viperesque: learned a lot here, thank you so much. Definitely going to be looking at my options for weapons. Not sure which skill I'm gonna stick with, right now I'm having fun with both Ice Crash and Molten Strike, but it seems Molten Multistrike has the edge in terms of dps thanks to Multistrike. Also makes it really satisfying and fun to use (boom-boom-boom).

Molten Strike definitely has the edge in damage (although I wouldn't overestimate Multistrike - it's about 40% more damage, which is a bit better than your average support gem but not crazy). That said, you'll find that Ice Crash will serve you better as a general-purpose clearing skill because of its massive AoE, particularly if you invest in a bit of increased AoE.

Regarding other classes, I generally feel like melee builds are adequately compensated while levelling in the massive amounts of damage they can deal. It takes most other builds a lot of levels to catch up. That said, I tend to recommend that beginners go with a caster of some sort, for the simple reason that attack-based builds are very, very dependent on having a good weapon, which can be a bit tricky while levelling (particularly in a fresh league, which is at least something you don't have to deal with right now). Spells, on the other hand, have their own base damage and scale mostly with gem levels - your weapon(s) help, but it isn't that big a deal if you don't find a decent one for a few levels.

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Dave_The_Brave wrote:

Hello all,

I've been using ZiggyD's beginner guide series to get me started on a Marauder and on PoE in general. His guide only goes up to the beginning of Act 2, but thanks to the general advice I've been able to progress to level 50 and am now in Cruel at the end of Act 2. And I am getting my butt kicked.

I would say 99% of the time when someone starts running into trouble at this point, it's because of resists. Early on, you can get by with low or no resists for the most part, especially if you're good at manually dodging larger attacks. But the further you progress into the game, the more it becomes ESSENTIAL to have those resists capped. Probably even overcapped. And then eventually even finding some way to increase the max resists as well. For now though, you'll at least want them capped or close to it. And don't forget that in cruel, you get a penalty to all of your resists...and then an even larger penalty in merciless.

Why is this so important? Suppose an attack deals 100 points of elemental damage. If you have your resist to that type of attack at 75%(the default cap), you only take 25 damage. If your resist is 50%, you take 50 damage or twice as much as you would with capped resists. If your resists are at 0, you take the full 100 points - FOUR times as much as you would with capped resists. if your at -60 due to the resist penalty in merciless, you take 160 damage. And guess what? The amount of damage stuff deals will be balanced around the assumption that you do have those resists capped. If you're taking 4 times as much damage(or more) than that, it should be no surprise that you'll be getting your butt kicked.

As for crafting, I'd say you can safely use anything up to jewelers as needed. They're common enough that you won't be losing too much. If you REALLY want to avoid trading, maybe even toss an occasional alchemy orb at something(your helmet right now would be a prime example...there's NO reason to be using a white item at this level. At the very least, transmute and alteration/augment it until you get something halfway decent.) But you'll be much better off if you are willing to trade, since you can probably find an item with exactly the stats you need for an alch or chaos at most.