Why do classes matter?

New player here. So far I like what I see with this game. The way that you can customize your character seems to be nearly limitless.

However, considering how much customization there is, why do classes even matter? You can build a witch and level up the strength passive and use all strength items, or take a maurader and level up all intelligence passives and use int items, correct?

If that is correct, how are the classes anything more than a visual addition?

Or am I missing something?

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PootieTang wrote:

New player here. So far I like what I see with this game. The way that you can customize your character seems to be nearly limitless.

However, considering how much customization there is, why do classes even matter? You can build a witch and level up the strength passive and use all strength items, or take a maurader and level up all intelligence passives and use int items, correct?

If that is correct, how are the classes anything more than a visual addition?

Or am I missing something?

Quest rewards are dependant on you class as well as your starting location on the passive tree. The starting location is very important to ensure your character has the most effcient passives pathing.

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Cruxation wrote:

Quest rewards are dependant on you class as well as your starting location on the passive tree. The starting location is very important to ensure your character has the most effcient passives pathing.

Ok so, classes are a mildly important, or a very important determining factor in the long term development of your character?

Depends on your build. Some skills and builds can perform well in many different looking passive trees and starting locations. Other skills are not capable of such diversity. To answer your question more directly and simply. Choosing the best chracter and starting location for your build is important of the long term success of that character.

To take an example, summoner nodes are on the upper part of the skill tree. So a witch will have easy early access to them. Now a duelist starts on the other side of the skill tree, so he'll need quite more levels to get to those nodes.

And in that case, a duelist doesn't have anything in his starting area that would help a classic summoner build, making him a bad choice in that situation.

Quest rewards and your starting point on the passive tree

Don't think of them as "classes". They are characters.
And the only way it matters is where you want to start in the passive skill tree, and your quest rewards.

Even for the builds that can work from several different class, each class will have a slightly different levelling experience. For example, I have made a forked crit spark build from both the Witch and Shadow starting locations. The Witch has much better mana sustainability, but takes longer to stack up enough crit chance to crit consistently, and cannot tank as effectively due to not having much evasion. The Shadow has easy access to crit chance early on, and is more tanky due to having evasion, but has poor mana sustainability.

Because if you skip them you'll never finish college and...


The PoE equivalent, of course, is not getting every life node you possibly can. That'll get you rolling doobies for sure. Which means, ironically, that classes do matter: marauder or fail.

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PootieTang wrote:

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Cruxation wrote:

Quest rewards are dependant on you class as well as your starting location on the passive tree. The starting location is very important to ensure your character has the most effcient passives pathing.

Ok so, classes are a mildly important, or a very important determining factor in the long term development of your character?

I would say class/character is extremely important, based on the overall concept of your character. Say for example you're playing a witch and want to build her as a 2handed weapon melee damage dealer similar to how a Marauder 2 hander would work. It'll take you many levels to get to the 2 handed weapon abilities and armor bonuses to play a 2 hander melee witch like a Marauder, and in doing so your initial levels would be unsupportive; you'd be taking a lot of +Int and mana and spell mod nodes that would do very little for your concept of a 2 handed melee witch, whereas the Marauder would be able to take those abilities at an earlier level, and therefore would be able to take more into the higher levels, all of which would compliment each other. You have to look at it as a series of abilities and how they compliment each other as you level up; not just passives but skills and equipment too; they all add little bits and as long as they're adding in the same direction and compliment each other then you'll do fine, but what you're describing is non-complimentary and therefore will ultimately be gimped at higher levels.