Really needing some help

Played a witch got to level 12 no issues casting spells at a distance and with mana regen never ran out of mana and with energy shield was easy too survive.

However in this kinda game I prefer melee. Going melee I was constantly dying going with sword and shield build, and my mana was always drained.

I was curious how to survive going in melee, do I ignore all passive for offense and only go defense? I noticed a lot of life leech skills and was curious if these builds are any good? Do I go all heavy armor or medium for evade?

Any tips playing melee would be very very helpful for me. Is there a better starting class as well compared to others for melee only focused builds?

This game requires that you learn it. It's not a pick a class and go. It's not follow a build and you'll win. You need to learn how and when to move. You need to learn how to manage downsides of each character type.

It's way too early in your development to start comparing different playstyles.

Melee is fine for what it does. You'll learn the game by playing it. You wont get to the end game on your first try... somewhere along the way you'll want to restart. Normal.

Play the game for fun at this point... not to find what's best.

You will find that the duelist starts strong in melee... and the marauder too. Less so with the Templar, but he works fine too. Once you've learned to play, any class can play melee.

This is not so easy.
Maintaining mana will get easier as you get mana on kill, mana leech, higher mana regeneration, reduced mana cost of skills or rings/ amulets from Elreon with -x to mana cost of skills (this is huge especially at lower levels).

As to surviving... many people go the rout of maxing damage so that nothing can kill them because they die first. This works for most things except bosses, which usually take more than one hit.
A valuable lesson to learn is that even with a tanky character you're not supposed to tank indefinitely, but reposition often and dodge manually whenever you can. Especially hits that have a long animation before they actually hit are often one-hitters. You get enough time to dodge them, so do so.
Armour is good for smaller hits, not so much for bigger ones. Having a basalt flask, endurance charges and fortify will help you a lot (and immortal call).
Go to youtube and search for a beginner's guide for a melee skill (cyclone for example), this will cover all the basics.

You can read up on armour, endurance charges etc. here: pathofexile.gamepedia.com

Have fun.

Thank you so much for the tips!! I'll give it another go

Bit of advice... don't use support gems too much at first. 3L should get you through normal. Most mana problems come from players overkill on damage supports.

"

Shagsbeard wrote:

Bit of advice... don't use support gems too much at first. 3L should get you through normal. Most mana problems come from players overkill on damage supports.

that or run a few mana potions

I know some people hate to run them but on some builds I use as many as 2 and its basically unlimited mana