Newbie ranger startup guide

[TREE UPDATED FOR 1.0 - minor changes to adjust for new passive tree]
I'm sitting down to write up a startup guide for folks creating new rangers. It's intent is to help you through some of the speed bumps on the way to building a solid ranger. I'm going to include a fair bit of information which I regard as helpful for new players, along with tips that are specific to levelling up a ranger. This guide assumes you're planning on using blood magic, which is a very popular choice for a reason.


Starting out:

Gearing:
Bow - ideally you're looking for 1.3 attacks/sec or faster, and +damage mods. Base bows types to be on the lookout for: short bow, bone bow, royal bow.
Beyond a good bow, be on the lookout for jewelry and gear which add elemental damage.
Some helpful uniques are:
Wanderlust slippers - don't underestimate the ability to ignore being frozen, even if it's just for the fight with Merveil. Add +movement, and they're winners.
The Peregrine (helmet) - 10% movement, increased rarity, +accuracy, it's a generally nice low level helmet
Sadima's Touch (gloves) - increased item drops and adds elemental damage. Just a nice-to-have, and a good piece of farming gear later on.

Skills:
Split arrow & Poison arrow should be very effective at low levels. Poison arrow is nice because you can toss one in a crowd and follow it up with split arrows to get better DPS.


Bandits:
Normal mode: help Oak! 40 base HP is incredible, far more than you can get from any node on the passive tree.

Skills:
I like the following path for getting started. Note there are a lot of useful nodes this goes past, but I haven't selected; I've highlighted the nodes I regarded as "pick them up as soon as you can", but the point here is to get over to blood magic. You should be able to get it by mid to late 20s. Once you've helped Oak, you'll want to get a "life on hit" support gem, link it with split arrow, and pick up blood magic. At this point, a rejuvenation totem becomes very helpful, both as a decoy, and as an extra boost to your life regeneration. Note that in this tree I did pick up iron reflexes. I think Iron Reflexes helps a great deal, by evening out the damage you take, and it pairs very well with unwavering stance, which allows you to forgo stun recovery. Those skills may not be endgame skills for you, but they make mid-level gearing simpler. Look into the discussions on defense, and make your own decision- Caveat Emptor.


Level 32:
Get yourself a Death's Harp. Depending on current market, it should run 2-5 chaos. Welcome to your bow for a substantial period. Spend a few jeweler's orbs, fusing orbs, and/or chromatic orbs getting it at least 4S 3L, if not 4L.

Time to slot in some new skills! Frenzy and Lightning arrow are what you're looking for. You can drop both poison arrow and split arrow, they have served their purpose. If you can swing a 4L item with 3 green and 1 red, a very nice setup is Lightning arrow, Frenzy, Life on Hit, and Faster Attacks. If you can only manage a 3L, just drop the faster attacks. You should be able to clear normal and well into Cruel with this. Also at this point, a Broadstroke unique quiver should boost your damage considerably, and they're VERY cheap. Not an endgame quiver, but plenty useful.

At this point, you should start looking at picking up additional passives to boost both your life and your damage. There's 2 nodes along the bottom which will grant you an extra frenzy charge and longer duration for your frenzy charges- those are both nice to have.

When you deal with the bandits in Cruel, you can choose to help Kraityn, for 6% attack speed, or go for a skill point. The attack speed is as good as most nodes, so it's not a bad choice. When dealing with the bandits in Merciless you will absolutely, positively want to help Kraityn in order to pick up an extra frenzy charge.

Additional skills:
Spell Totem + Summon skeletons is absolutely invaluable; they provide a respawning shield to keep enemies away from you.
Projectile weakness is very nice for levelling, especially the built-in piercing debuff portion- helps get more AoE. Towards the endgame, you'll probably move to something else once you've specialized your build.

The death's harp should probably last you through level 56, at which point you'll be able to pick up a thicket bow. Thicket bows can roll up with terrific damage, either physical or elemental, so it shouldn't be hard to find one which gives you the type of damage you're looking for.

Useful sources of information:
Quest rewards (so you can see what skills can be pulled via quest rewards):
http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Quest_Rewards

Currency exchange rates:
http://poeex.info/


I've got a level 76 ranger, so feel free to post any questions, I'm happy to help. Cheers!


[More to follow]

Thanks. Very nice guide to start cleverly (as a newbie who knows nothing but FB-Marauder) a new class without following blindly a "perfect build" ^^

Thank you very much. Just returned to the game and the passive skill tree seemed even more frightening than before.

This helps out alot and still leaves room for personalization. :)

would you recommend getting Iron grip sometime after blood magic?

edit: nevermind, did some math and that's clearly a good investment for 1 point

OK, so I've got to do some new updates to the prior tree in light of the 1.0 changes (pretty much all the same key nodes, except for Berserking (15% speed) which they moved out of reach.

On the question about iron grip- it depends. Prior to the 1.0 changes, I'd have said no. Now, it's a definite possibility. Previously, you had to go a good way out of most "sane" build paths to pick it up. Now, it's a key node available on the path nearly any build will take. I'd say it's probably a good pick, depending on how many str nodes you pick up; if you keep going past blood magic to pick up heavy elemental damage and such, probably yes. If your sole dive into the strength side of things is for Blood Magic, and the rest of your build goes phys/crit in the dex areas.... maybe, maybe not. Depends on what else you're trying to reach. I wouldn't give it a high priority in the latter case.

OK, Updated the skill tree, it's now 1.0 ready. Added iron reflexes as its now directly along the path, and it really does help early on.

So Blood Magic is still viable ? No Blood Magic gem instead ? (Not sure I understand but I read somewhere that changes in the patch made it less viable...)

Also (as a newbie) I'd like to understand more "Unwavering stance" and "Iron reflexes". With them we are suppose to aim for evasion stuff and passive nods to turn it into armor ? And then the additional dexterity points automatically add armor instead of evasion ?

Thanks for your time.

Well, the primary issue with blood magic post 1.0 is auras, and it's going to take a bit to see how that really shakes out. Blood magic is still 100% viable for skills, but you're going to need a bigger health pool (very possible, as health got bumped), and you'll really need some mana reservation nodes + reduced mana gem to even run one aura, as most auras are now a substantial % of health. Using blood magic gems is a substantial hit, as it takes away a gem slot we could previously use for other supports.

Newb here. Could you explain why many ranger builds take Iron Reflexes? Seems we've got good Dex and you lose out entirely on the defensive bonus from that stat. Is evasion just that crappy?

OK, so evasion is a chance to avoid physical attacks, armor is a direct reduction to damage taken from physical attacks. The problem with evasion is that it isn't very reliable until you've stacked up a good portion of it. If I evade 2 in 10 attacks, I'm still taking full damage from 8 of them. If I convert evasion to armor, I'm taking less damage from each attack. Iron Reflexes smooths out the damage I take over time, and it also gives me more flexibility in using gear that has both evasion and armor; it will all be converted to armor. The other allure of iron reflexes is "Unwavering Stance" - which makes it so you cannot be stunned, but you also cannot evade enemy attacks. Those two nodes synergize pretty nicely. I regard Iron Reflexes as a great skill to have through the mid-game, but a node you may want to drop heading into the endgame, depending on how you decide to build your defenses. As you're reaching the endgame, you choose how you're going to specialize defensively, and you can either stick with iron reflexes or drop it and go a different route, but you'll want to pull together more specialized gear when you take that plunge than you're likely to have access to during the mid game.