Guide:Diablo Player's Guide to Path of Exile

Diablo to PoE

Guide compiled by Phlexonance

If you've played a lot of D3 and D2 (or any other ARPG), here's a quick and dirty guide that get you playing in no time!

Beginners Guide to Path of Exile

Paymodel

Path of Exile is free to play and is supported by "ethical" microtransactions, none of which provide a gameplay advantage. The items available in the store almost exclusively cosmetic, the exceptions being purchasable extra character slots (though you start with 24) and additional stash tabs. You can have a “complete, fulfilling gaming experience without spending a penny”. The Grinding Gear developers have repeatedly stated that they are against Pay2Win.

Active Skills

The skills in PoE aren't fixed; any class may use them. Skills take the form of gems which you socket into items. You'll mainly get gems as quest rewards early on, but you'll also find them dropped by monsters, chests and breakable scenery. There are 3 kinds of gems: Red (Str), Green (Dex), Blue (Int).

Attack skills take weapon damage into consideration. Spell, trap, totem, and mine skills do not (like D2).

Gems level up as they are socketed, gaining 10% of your combat XP even if your character isn't gaining XP due to being in an over- or under-level area. Skill gems have level and attribute requirements for equipping and leveling up.

The leveling up of gems is optional for three reasons:

If you cannot support the new mana cost of the gem or the mana reservation.
If you want to pass it on to another character which might be lower level.
If you are gear dependent on the stats required to use the skill gem and don't think you're going to be able to keep up with the stat requirements.

You can use any gem in any class.

There are currently 91 Skill Gems, and more are being added! There are also Support Gems (65 types of them) which alter the behaviour of the active skill gems if you put them into linked sockets (some sockets have links).

Examples:

Put the Life Gain on Hit support gem next to a linked Cleave gem you'll regain life for every enemy hit by Cleave.
Combine Detonate Dead (active) with Spell Totem (support) to have a totem which casts the spell for you so you can focus on other things.
Ice Spear (active) with Greater Multiple Projectiles (support) with Elemental Proliferation (support) to fire multiple ice projectiles which freeze enemies and have the freeze effect jump over to nearby foes.

The maximum number of possible linked sockets is 6 and it's hard to come by such an item. Most support gems raise the mana cost of the active skill.

For future reference: some Keystone Passives are also available as support gems if you want their effect for only some of your skills, for example, Module Error: No skills found with q_where = skill.active_skill_name="Blood Magic".

Classes

The classes in PoE are very liquid.

The only differences are: how your hero looks, what their starting attributes are and their position in the passive skill tree (more on that next up).

For now:

Type	Name	STR	DEX	INT
INT	Witch	14	14	32
STR	Marauder	32	14	14
DEX	Ranger	14	32	14
STR/INT	Templar	23	14	23
DEX/INT	Shadow	14	23	23
STR/DEX	Duelist	23	23	14
STR/DEX/INT	Scion	20	20	20

That said, there's little guidance on how to skill a class and I highly suggest to first try a pure class and dabble with hybrid classes only after some experience. Starting a hybrid can be a bit daunting for new players. The Scion must be unlocked in Act 3 in order to select her during character creation.

Starting (HP, Mana, Evasion Rating) = (50, 40, 50) for all classes.

Each level up gives a passive skill point, +8 Life, +4 Mana, +3 Evasion rating and +2 Accuracy, with some quests also rewarding a passive skill point. Max level is 100, but you can get a maximum of 120 Passive skill points. It is inadvisable to create a build based on 120 points; around 85 is better. Leveling passed the Act content is arduous, and your character will need to be more or less complete to navigate the endgame.

Passive Skills

Check out the passive skill tree

Every class has a specific starting area on the skill tree. Starting at the top and working clockwise, we have the Witch, the Shadow, the Ranger, the Duelist, the Marauder, the Templar, and finally, dead center, the Scion.

The tree may seem a little intimidating at first, but it may make things easier to realize that you can group the nodes into four categories.

Starting Areas: These areas are where you'll be starting your character, but there's absolutely nothing keeping you from heading toward another class's nodes! The nodes where you begin are often very powerful, and it's not a bad idea to scan your neighbors' starting points to see if they've got anything you could... borrow.

Roads: These nodes aren't very exciting, offering just 10 points to a specific attribute, but they go places. You'll carve out the distance between where you are and where you need to be much faster on roads than in the...

Suburbs: These nodes of nodes contain groups of thematic bonuses for your character. They can be as specific as increased spell critical strike chance and multiplier, or as open ended as melee physical damage. Typically, these nodes are more powerful the more specific they are, and they usually contain a Notable Passive that has a high concentration of power. It's often the best choice to carve into a suburb and take the notable passive than to take every node available, since you'll get a much better return on skill point investment that way.

Keystones: These guys are designed to change the way you play the game. Resolute Technique will prevent you from EVER missing again, but it'll cost you every critical strike you will ever land. Elemental Equilibrium will reward you for alternating elemental damage, but punish you for using the same element consistently. These keystones have a major impact on the game, so plan wisely before you take one...

Speaking of thinking wisely, the are no full respecs in Path of Exile. You will get some refund points from quests, and you can even spend an Orb of RegretOrb of RegretStack Size: 40Grants a passive skill refund pointRight click on this item to use it. to get more, but these are designed mostly for when you make mistakes on your character. If you decide that the entire path you chose just isn't for you, prepare to reroll!

The Path of Exile Forum has a Class Discussion section at the bottom which can be very helpful for getting ideas for builds. Even if you don't want to pull a cookie cutter build from there, using the guides to help you understand the layout of the skill tree is a great first step to making your own builds.

Resource management

There are Flasks which are refillable potions which you can drink from a couple of times before they are empty. The come in all colors and sizes and have their own affixes (e.g. double armor while the flask fills you up). They refill when you kill enemies.

There's also regular Mana and Life regeneration, life on hit, life on kill, life leech, mana leech etc.

You start with some mana reg and no life reg. Life leech has a rate cap, which prevents you from healing more than 20% of your maximum health per second.

Currency Items

There's no gold in PoE. You buy items from NPCs by trading for so called Currency Items.

You can vendor white items for different amounts of scroll fragments (5 make a scroll). You can vendor unidentified blue items for fragments of Orbs of Transmutation which make a white item blue (20 make an orb) and you can vendor identified blue items for fragments of Orb of Alteration which rerolls a blue item's affixes!

All currency items drop as loot.

There are also: Orb of Augmentation, adds another affix to Magic Items with only one prefix/suffix; Orb of Chance, white to random (blue,yellow,unique); Chromatic Orb, change color of sockets; Jeweler's Orb, change number of sockets. There are many more Currency items, and you can reroll almost anything on an item.

The best weapons are often crafted with the use of orbs. Example: find high base quality type white weapon, heighten quality to the max of +20% with Blacksmith's Whetstone, make rare with Orb of Alchemy, BAM! high DPS weapon.

Orbs of Alchemy are rare and so are Blacksmith's Whetstones, but it's possible and you don't have to rely on RNG (Random Number Generator) as much as in Diablo 3.

Stuns

Stuns are handled differently from other ARPGs. They depend on the damage dealt compared to the recipients total life pool.

When you play you’ll notice that your attacks interrupt enemies, that’s actually considered a stun; the default duration is 350 ms.

Check out the Stun page for more information.

Attributes and Stats

You only gain attribute points from passives and items, not from leveling up per se.

Each additional 10 attribute points give:

10 STR = +5 HP, +2% Melee Physical Dmg (or even ranged physical with a passive)
10 INT = +5 Mana, +2% Energy Shield
10 DEX = +20 Accuracy, +2% Evasion

The defensive stats are Armour which reduces physical damage (like D3 but only for physical); Evasion which lets you dodge attacks (like Armour behaved in D2); Elemental Resistances which have one cap at 75% (max which you can achieve with items+passives+quest rewards).

Accuracy calculates against the enemies’ Evasion rating to calculate your hitchance, just like in D2. Chance to hit can never be lower than 5%, nor higher than 95% (except with a certain passive).

Chest Armor and Shields can have movement penalties (typically the heavier ones).

Dual wielding grants +10% Attack Speed and 15% Block Chance.

A block results in no damage taken, there's no block amount. Max block is capped at 75%.

If you would've been stunned, there's a blocking animation, else the block is "free".

Only Attacks can be blocked or evaded, unless you have Spell Block from some source, or Phase Acrobatics.

Most item types have an innate bonus, i.e. more accuracy with Swords, more stun with Hammers, and such.

Instances

All areas in Path of Exile are instanced. When you enter an area, a new instance is created. Once you leave the area, the instance will remain in its current state for 15 minutes for main areas - if 15 minutes passes with no players entering the instance, it will be closed. Entering the same area again will create a new instance with a new randomly generated map. Areas without side areas attached (any area with two or less exits) has a shorter timer, and will only last 8 minutes while empty.

Instances you create are private, and cannot be entered by other players unless they join your party. However, once a player has entered an instance, that instance remains associated with the player even if they leave the party. So it is possible to share an instance with non-party members in some circumstances. The exception to this is towns, which are always public, and cut-throat leagues, where all instances are public - meaning anyone can enter your instances at any time.

Those 15m/8m timers are subject to technical limitations. Those times may be lower on open weekends when the servers are rushed by more players than usual.

You can force the creation of a new instance by ctrl+clicking on the entrance. This will eventually be removed, it is currently in use for testing.

Game modes and endgame content

There are currently 3 acts with 3 difficulty types in the game.

Whenever you create a new character, you specify what League you want them to join, which is essentially the game type. Currently there are four leagues: Standard, Hardcore, Domination and Nemesis. Characters can be moved between leagues (usually towards the Standard league) when certain events happen. Usually at the end of a ladder race/reset, characters are moved back to Standard so they can keep being played after the event. There are prizes for events, usually ingame currency.

There are also map items which open a high level map with rare mobs. You can customize Maps just like you can any other item in PoE, making it more difficult and rewarding. Maps drop as loot.

Hotkeys and GUI tips

Ctrl+click to move an item into the selling window or stash.
Ctrl+Alt+click to post an item into chat. (Open chat window by pressing enter to mouse over linked items).
Get a minimap in the options menu. (map transparency adjustable)
Shift+enter or a “#” for global chat.
Ctrl+enter for a whisper reply.
“%” for party chat.
“@” followed by a character name for whisper.
You can hide global chat by an option box on the top left of the chat window.
/itemlevel will show the item level of the item you’re holding in your mouse pointer.
/online will show how many people are globally online in both regions and on all leagues.
Holding Control and clicking on an instance will give you the option to reset the zone. Use this sparingly as it increases the server load.
Holding Alt while mousing over an item in chat will display its corresponding item level.
Hold shift to attack in place.
X to switch between two weapon presets.