End of Act 5 impossible

Wall of text incoming.

Your weapons are okay, I've done worse in hardcore. Your everything else is letting you down. Go to the armour/weapons vendor in act 5 (I don't remember who) and buy yourself some white gloves and boots, then hit them with an alchemy orb or essence each. The result will probably be better than what you're wearing right now. Same goes for your coral ring, go get a ruby ring from the other vendor and hit that with something similar. Your amulet is also pretty meh, but amulets are so annoying to deal with while levelling that the life roll on it probably makes it good enough.
Also, alch your plate. There's no excuse for wearing white items.


Your flasks could also do with some work. Three life flasks is overkill, you will want to swap one of them for a quicksilver flask. Aug your panicked flask and bismuth flask, and transmute/aug your remaining life flask.


Your tree being pathed out is nice for later, but you're really suffering by not having those points in something more real than attributes. You're missing a lot of life and damage that you would otherwise have, which has started to catch up to you. There are some really powerful nodes like Finesse and Herbalism in the Ranger area that you just went right past.

Your gems are really weird as an experienced player - you have a lot of active skills that you probably aren't using, only Cleave is linked meaningfully so I'm assuming you're using that as your main attack. Double Strike in your rapier, Lacerate in your gloves and Frenzy in your boots can probably all go. With the remaining slots you can get Blood Rage and Herald of Ice from act 2, and an aura from act 3. Grace is the one I'd go for because it looks like you're going to be taking Iron Reflexes, and they work well together, but you might also consider Purity of Elements because your resistances are terrible. Purity of Elements is not a long term solution but it will make the upcoming resistance loss more manageable.

tldr:
-Your resists are shit
-Your life is probably low
-Your equipment is mostly outdated
-Passive tree is stretched too thin
-Your flasks need mods


Edit: Also, ignore anyone who says to save your currency for later. Currency is plentiful later into the game and it helps immensely while levelling. Just don't do something like spam chaos orbs on a single item. Good enough is good enough.

While leveling in the lower acts you can fairly easily cap resists and get health on gear by just rolling a few alteration orbs on already linked white items. Since you'll out level gear pretty quickly and don't want to waste currency perpetually rolling and rerolling items, make sure to use tools like the poe wiki to identify which base items you're interested in. https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Armour_(equipment)

Which is better, buying from players or rolling an item yourself? It depends but usually it will be cheaper to purchase from another player the items you need/want. There are several low level 5 link chests for sale, right now, for a single chaos orb. Alteration Orbs are worth quite a bit less than a chaos, though. So, if you have a 5-link that you've picked up maybe spending a few on rolling just life and resist is worth it... but it's a gamble with no certain outcome.

"

Pangaearocks wrote:

By trading I suppose you mean with people and not in-game vendors, as they basically only have white/plain items.

About trade with people see post above.

You can sometimes get decent magic item from NPC (with life/resist roll) or you can buy 4 link white item and use essence or alchemy orb on it to roll smth.

Have you heard about hideout and crafting possibilities there?

If not check the wiki for more info:

Just focus on life and resist rolls on leveling items (except weapons ofc).


You can also use purity auras to cap your resistances



I see it´s a bit complicated for new players but don´t be in hurry and enjoy the game.
It will get better sooner or later:)

"

Hemmingfish wrote:

Wall of text incoming.

Your weapons are okay, I've done worse in hardcore. Your everything else is letting you down. Go to the armour/weapons vendor in act 5 (I don't remember who) and buy yourself some white gloves and boots, then hit them with an alchemy orb or essence each. The result will probably be better than what you're wearing right now. Same goes for your coral ring, go get a ruby ring from the other vendor and hit that with something similar. Your amulet is also pretty meh, but amulets are so annoying to deal with while levelling that the life roll on it probably makes it good enough.
Also, alch your plate. There's no excuse for wearing white items.

tldr:
-Your resists are shit
-Your life is probably low
-Your equipment is mostly outdated
-Passive tree is stretched too thin
-Your flasks need mods

Thanks for the help. It's great that new clueless players like myself can get valuable input from experts :)

Not sure how you link items in the forum, but I've made some changes. The white armor was just temporary btw. I had a rare 3-link, then saw a red 4L and bought it, but hadn't done anything with the rarity yet as I was unsure what was the best approach. Now I've alchemied it, and think it was a reasonably good roll, with extra life and life/sec. Alchemied a new ring and gloves (sad to lose word of ire from the Lab). Swapped out the 2nd ring too. I valued the life per attack highly, but hopefully the new one is better.

This has increased life to 1400 and currently damage to almost 3000 dps. I'm hoping Ruthless is better than Chance to Bleed, although it doens't show in DPS rating. Does the damage+bleeding stack, so it's around +200% if both apply on the same hit? Fire resistance is capped too, but not lightning.

Wanted to upgrade the boots too, but the vendor didn't have good options right now (poorly linked), and the one I had (unidentified) didn't really turn out very good. I've been trying to get rare items for the full gear recipe, so haven't IDed everything.

I basically just use Cleave, and Whirling Blades when it gets too hot and I need to get away, so many of the skills gems are inactive, and I've just put them in because I have some and dislike having empty sockets. Unfortunately it looks like they fetch sod all at vendors. Others, such as Main is intended to be used later, but I don't have the sockets now and I guess what I have on the Armor is better right now?

Will normal areas be much tougher in Act 6+ as well, or mainly just the bosses?

Taking sockets is not worth picking without having good jewels. You should rather take more life nodes as we have suggested before such as Constitution and Herbalism.

Things will get more complicated in act 6 but I won´t spoil you much. Keep your resistances as high as possible and take more life nodes you will need them:)

"

Rakiii wrote:

Taking sockets is not worth picking without having good jewels. You should rather take more life nodes as we have suggested before such as Constitution and Herbalism.

Things will get more complicated in act 6 but I won´t spoil you much. Keep your resistances as high as possible and take more life nodes you will need them:)

True, I shouldn't have picked all those sockets so early. Would have been better to wait.

Since I struggled so fiercely with that Duelist, I've leveled up another guy now, a Marauder (Juggernaut) named Praenor_Styx. About to head into the same area. Hopefully this guy looks better. Have used Sunder up to now despite it being a sword build. Was hard to drop Sunder (not used it before) because it was frickin' brutal! Mowing down people like nothing. Have set up with Double Strike now, intended for single targets, and Cleave for groups. None of those are very high level (Double strike due to struggle with Dexterity), but hopefully it will work out okay. If not I can pick up a mace again and go back to Sunder. Once I start pathing out towards the other sword node I should pick up enough Dexterity to be okay for Double Strike moving forward. Intelligence is low, especially after changing some gear, so I had to take out the Critical damage gem.

Should get to leve 46 moving up to Avarius, which will grab Constitution and more hitpoints. Would think I should get over 2000 then (1884 currently). Chest armour is only a 3L for now because I haven't found any better. Do have a plain 4L I can try my luck on, but it's only item level 30, so may not work out too great. Not sure how much it affects things.

All other armour except the helmet has a good deal of +life, so hopefully I'm good on that front.

Fire resistance is way up there now, cold almost topped up, but lightning is on the low side with 52%.

I fear that boss after getting mopped up so badly earlier, but I do hope this guy will stand a better chance.

YES! Got in an hour's play before work, and got the bastard! :)

Still died twice with 2100 hitpoints as they hit preposterously hard, and it is tough (for me) when the whole screen is filled with enemies and various highly deadly effects. But I got him and that's what matters.

The Jewel rewards weren't all that fitting as they were targeted for certain skills, so I went with Overwhelming Odds since I atm am using Cleave. Don't think it was as fast as Sunder, and obviously not ranged, but it worked well enough going through the temple.

Still need a better body armour for a more deadly Cleave, but the helmet is 4L for Double Strike. Think Cleave did better tbh, even against single foes, but the guide I'm following is intended for Double Strike, so hopefully it will start to shine more eventually.

mate, I feel your pain

same thing happened to me, I am playing an Arc Witch, end of Act5 and beginning of Act6 were brutal.

everyone gave me same advice, gear was crap and health n resists were terrible. So I went back and farmed some gear and a couple of levels in The Torched Courts.

It all sorted itself out and I'm flying again, you will too

"

spine_iv wrote:

mate, I feel your pain

same thing happened to me, I am playing an Arc Witch, end of Act5 and beginning of Act6 were brutal.

everyone gave me same advice, gear was crap and health n resists were terrible. So I went back and farmed some gear and a couple of levels in The Torched Courts.

It all sorted itself out and I'm flying again, you will too

Thanks. It has been going well most of the time now, just finished Act 7. But the bosses really do my head in. Just feels stupidly cheap when they keep one-shotting me, and for Arakaali I had almost 3000 HP.

Not sure what those attacks were, but *poof* and "Resurrect at Checkpoint" shows up.

Guess it just dawns on me more and more that this game is made for very heavy min-maxers, and it will keep getting more frustrating.

Cleave does 12500 dps according to the game, so I doubt the weapons are crap right now.

"

Ludvator wrote:

weapons. are trash. you need solid phys damage weapons. your main hand is good for nothing and offhand is solid roll but on very low base. farm/buy better one(s).. It could help using a different skill where you dont need two good weapons for dw, like sunder for example

Correcting this, to avoid confusion: double strike uses main hand weapon only. Weapons are trash, but don't need two good ones. Dual strike uses both weapons.

If skill uses main hand weapon only, you get as good weapon as you can (highest DPS), and then some utility in your off-hand (global stats like resists, bonus damage scaling, some uniques and so on).

Some examples of off-hand weapons for fake dual wield:



These should be very cheap. A more expensive example:



That said, you also could use some AoE (area of effect) skills/support to deal better with regular monster mobs. Could use Ancestral Call (and/or melee splash) on your Double Strike setup.