Can somebody explain the "big picture" with the passive skill tree?

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mibuwolf wrote:

It was the best advice I could give him. It is not a stupid suggestion at all.

But the way you said it was dickish.

"Just play the damn game"

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jimi89 wrote:

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mibuwolf wrote:

It was the best advice I could give him. It is not a stupid suggestion at all.

But the way you said it was dickish.

"Just play the damn game"

Depends. It's hard to tell what my emotions were and how I said it over the internet. I meant it with good intentions. I could've said it more 'mellow' and been like "Play the game dood", "You'll get the hang of it". I mean that's pretty much what I said, but adding the use of 'damn' to my sentence seemed appropriate. I only use curse words to emphasize.

The passive tree is like the icing the cake, with skill gems being the real substance. The best way I have found to learn the passive tree is to use the website, or the offline tool, and just search for things like 'Bow', or 'Cold', or 'Critical Strike', 'Life Regen', etc.

This will highlight the nodes with these stats, and you can see the 'area' you might like to focus on. The other tip, is don't be afraid to spread out in the tree if there are good things you want that you cannot get elsewhere, Blood Magic for example.

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mibuwolf wrote:

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Artaniz wrote:

Ohh try not to be bothered by postings like the guy above me a lot of the forum respondents seem to have no patience for anyone new. Comments like just play the damn game are the height of stupidity.

It was the best advice I could give him. It is not a stupid suggestion at all. When you are new to playing a game you either A. research heavily into it before playing to understand how everything works, or B. play it and it'll all come naturally.

I'm typically in favor of B. The game encourages you to just try builds out on your first character. GGG doesn't expect you to know how to build your first character right off the bat. You telling the dude to roll a summoner does not help things. Let the dude build how he wants and learn the game on his own like he really should.

Now... keep your insults to yourself.

I agree with what you're saying. Best way to start the game is to just play a character. When you get around 50 or so, you'll have enough gear to plan out your next character.

Making a pure class for your first choice is easier. Also, you can skirt around specific weapons talents, etc, until you have a clear choice about what you want to do.

For your first character, I'd definitely recommend making a pure character. Before you make that character though, I'd suggest looking at the list of skills available to you and picking one that you like the look/feel of, and then centering your passive build around that one skill, and build defensively as well.

Remember, you can't just stack armor/evasion/ES anymore with normal builds. You need to take +max hp% nodes to survive end-game. Health is your primary defense. Armor/Evasion/ES is secondary.

After you get a good feel for how the tree works, you can start getting creative and thinking of different ways to accomplish things like surviving or dealing damage. I find that looking through the list of uniques can spark an idea for me which leads me to theorycraft a build centered around a skill and the unique. Of course, this isn't a requirement to enjoy the game, but if you like theorycrafting and thinking outside the box, then you may like this aspect of the game.

Other than that, feel free to send me a PM or contact me in-game if you have any questions or want to bounce some creative ideas around! (Mostly on Shaelzod for now)

-Shaeltal

IGN: Shaeltal/Shaelzod/Shaelthul/Shaeltali

Get the unofficial offline skill tree!

http://poetools.com/

Screw around with this, type things like "life" and "crit" into the search bar and see where things are, and see how things total up. This is a MUST HAVE program imo.

The map metaphor works very well. Basically planning a build involves choosing several "destinations" that complement the skill gems you want to use, and pathing towards them. This video by TheFifeNation takes you through the process of making a build.

Plan out which keystones you will use, and plan the route there to pass through other nodes that is beneficial to your build.
And this is the most important step now:

**Always take as many HP nodes as possible (or energy shield nodes if your going to use chaos inoculation).**

End game is designed around having 4000+ (HP+Energy Shield)
If your going melee, 90% of your nodes should be about getting more HP.
If your ranged, you can get away with 70%.
Armour is useless, evasion needs the keystone acrobatics to work optimally.
Energy shield is the best defence as it extends your HP (but not against chaos damage, unless you pick chaos inoculation in which case your HP becomes 1 and your immune to chaos damage).

So in short: aim for a few powerful nodes and keystones and maximize HP gain.
HP is the only good defence value in PoE right now.