Hi all,new player need help

Hi as title says im prety new in PoE,

i have lvl 20 withch doing ok till i hit the final act boss wall and die several times and cant et trough so i decided to farm some EQ and try again.

This time i made templar lvl 15 now and it was amazingly easy to lvl with yellow gear at hand and few skills i had from my withch...

I then decided to try and get close and do some melee and i died very easy:(
SO my question is,can you play melee later on in game and feel as godly as with range dmg?

I have done same map with same templar with ranged/elemental dmg as easy as pie,but when i switch to melee i hardly do it.
At lvl 15 my passives hardly make a difference(life regen path and ele dmg path) and my weapons and armors are equal quality.
As melee i tried to get as much crit and phy dmg on equipment and as ranged spell power and ES

Only notable difference is, as magic i have this amazing lightning skill that kill everything in cone in front of me, and if i have decoy totem i never get hit at all ,and i have cold snap and rain of fire

As melee i use cleave and other skill that builds up aoe more you kill(think that name is reave or somthingf), and light and ice 360 aoe around caster,
my ES how ever dissapears as soon as i att with melee while it still holds while ranged is this a rule, no ES for melee?

Am i missing some crucial part of the game and doing it wrong?

Tnx all in advance

You can try and post your skill tree and gears. So that people would know what to advise. There are a lot of ways to play your char, and you may knock yourself silly with so many options available. Worry not. It happens to everyone in this game. You may find Noperative's guide for beginners, that is stickied to this section, very useful. This guide by KorgothBG is also very thorough. Then you can head to Natharias' build guideto get hold of finer aspects of building a char.

As for melee char, I have 2 melee chars doing end-game maps. One as a Duelist, and another a Marauder. It's always fun to fight mobs toe-to-toe, and their DPS is in the vicinity of 30k. Lots of people have also reach max level with melee chars.

For melee leveling, having a good weapon is very important. Melee skills are a bit stronger in damage, if you have a good weapon. This allows you to get more defenses from your passive tree and gear. Life on the passive tree and gear is important. Use your flasks and don't be scared to run out of melee to let them heal you up, or even portal back to town to fill up your potions.

melee can be extremely strong, youve always got to walk up to mobs and hit them, this is going to be somewhat slower than just nuking them for a distance. that is the the downside, the upside is ridiculous damage and a lot more tanky, and ull need to be more tanky cause ull take more damage being up close to mobs.

honestly, you are very early in the game still, lvl1 - lvl20, a lot of things that apply to a lvl40 or a lvl80 character are not going to apply that early. Energy shield melee chars can be ridiculously powerful, but dont tend to become that way until quite late in the game. By level 80 to 90 they can end up with 10,000 to 14,000 energy shield with over 100,000 dps crit attacks that can take down endgame bosses in seconds, at lvl 1-20 energy shield melee isnt really a done thing, they would tend to level as purely life based characters and evolve into using shield much later.


If you want an effective melee at that stage I would suggest maybe rolling a Ranger or a Duelist and use the Reave skill with Claw weapons. They naturally have 'Life On Hit' built into the weapon, so every time you hit a monster you get life back. This will allow you to constantly regain life just by attacking, the more aggressive and forward attacking you play the more safe you are. That is how all melee later in the game plays, but that early on Claws are the only weapon that will enable that side of melee right from level 1. I think a 'nailed fist' is the lowest level of claw

http://www.pathofexile.com/item-data/weapon

thats the item list so you can see what the next levels of claw to look out for will be. At very high levels claws are outshined by Swords and Daggers, but early game Claws are king for melee. Later in the game melee will leech a % of their damage back as life, energy shield melee really becomes a thing when you can get a node on the tree called 'Ghost Reaver' which allows you to leech a % of your damage to your energy shield rather than life. Honestly though es melee is a very complex area of builds and I wouldnt recommend getting into that side of things until you have some good experience with purely life based melee first.

For a player starting out, ranged is probably better than melee because ranged have more defensive options and can flee easier if things aren't working out, whereas melee tends to be a bit faster/higher damage but less safe to play.

Boss battles can reverse this because suddenly the ranged player can't flee or avoid damage as well, and suddenly the melee characters toughness becomes important but they kill slower because they might need to do more moving and less hitting.

For ES: At low levels, a ranged character who mostly tries to avoid being hit will benefit greatly from ES as it will recharge between hits, but that won't work for someone who is constantly taking lots of small hits On the other hand armour, life on hit, life regen will work better than ES.

When starting, leveling a few different characters at the same time can be a good way to learn how different mechanics work, while finding gear/gems for each other. It also might allow one character to move on while another is stuck at a boss, and hopefully find some gear upgrades to help the other one past.

At higher levels, you need to invest in multiple strategies of defense, and for end game you really have to have a survival strategy based on a knowledge of game mechanics. Endgame melee can definitely work, but the most common method is to reduce incoming hits and damage as much as you can, then still assume a certain remaining rate of incoming damage that your life leech / life on hit / life regen will need to keep up with. Whether to use Ghost Reaver and ES for this or something else is a question for a later date.

Thank you all for help that was what i needed to know,melee can be good.

I didnt post my tree and gear for a simple reason that at lvl 15 there is no great difference ,i have rare set for ranged and for melee( melee i have orange chest armor with 40% reflection on phy dmg ,rest is rare armor, and i dual wield swords with something over 60% phy dmg multiliers), yet somehow my ranged was uber ( whole armor set is rare ,and only orange quality is staff(makes my cold snap a trap with 3 charges) and great skills on it, while melee died pretty easily even tho my passives are same life/mana and ele dmg.

It seams trick is ES. While in melee i have an impression that i dont have any ES what so ever while in range it helps a lot.

BTW for last act 1 boss Marviel(not sure name is correct) i found very hard to kill, advice on forums are -
get as much cold res as you can,then there is strange advice to get 2.5k HP,how?

On my lvl 20 witch i have 400 hp and on lvl 15 templar 370 how are ppl able to get 2k so early,and with cold res as well?

Tnx again all

Those values are meant when killing her again in the higher difficulty levels. In normal difficulty you will generally only have a few hundred life at this point so that's fine.

The trick to the fight is learning her abilities. Try to avoid that barrage of ice spears and don't stand in the AoE of her stationary skills. With melee chars, you can do basically hit and run tactics and although it isn't really necessary to do so at the beginning, it will greatly help you in finding the right rythm for this char and boss fight, which will help you later on.
Oh, and make sure you have some cold resistance! 30-40% is generally enough when facing her the first time in Normal but with 60%+, the fight becomes extremely easy ;)

ya ignore people saying 2.5k hp etc, they probably thought you were in merciless difficulty on a level 56 character or something.

Resist is very important in this game, most mobs that deal elemental damage are usually dealing 1 specific element, and resisting that element is key to surviving getting hit.

Heres a general tactic that you should try out, I dunno if youve played many arpgs before but if you are coming from say a diablo 3 background etc this tactic is much more a thing in this game, and that is circling enemies. What I mean by this is attack, then circle around the enemy a little, say 90 degrees, then attack again from the side, circle to the back, attack again, keep going round and round. you can try it out on white mobs or even packs of white mobs like zombies in the first zone, maybe dont attack at first just try circling around them at a slow and steady pace, youll find its very hard for them to hit you.

A boss like merviel has that ice spear barrage, she shoots a stream of ice projectiles forward at you. Now, when she decides to do this, she aims for where you are, takes a tiny moment to 'charge up' if you like then lets lose. She wont change where she is aiming, she wont track you with the attack, so if you have circled around her 90 degrees between the time where she starts to charge up the attack and when she starts shooting she will completely miss you and be locked into her attack for its duration which gives you time to attack her from the side before she finishes and retargets you at your new location. This game is all about kiting like that, circling enemies, manually avoiding damage and then finding windows to apply the dps. As you get further into the game you will leech damage back as life, an attack build will usually leech damage back as mana also meaning you survive + fuel your attacks infinitely and only against very dangerous monsters will you actually need to 'play' the fight that much, so to speak, against the hordes of white mobs you will just be obliterating them head on at a rapid pace. Like Vargorn says youll find the rhythm of each mob, get a feel for the animations that signal an attack is brewing, the frequency of the attacks and hence the size of the windows of opportunity you have to facetank between them.

Thank you ,circle tactics work great ,i had some 50% res and done it at first try after your advice:)
tnx a lot

And for those starting PoE as i did, decoy totem, fire trap, and fire storm help a lot fighting her,and she is immune to cold dmg.

Hello!

I created a video titled, "How to Build" to cover how to think about building your character. I've also go two other videos for beginners that, after viewing, will help you progress -

how to build -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FfvogWqQig&list=PLA7erk0oNe2rybFwr-X5O7wjDBkdkUcOB&index=10

beginners guide -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG73UvVXFUw&index=9&list=PLA7erk0oNe2rybFwr-X5O7wjDBkdkUcOB

advanced leveling techniques -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR8Kl7Gy_3k&index=16&list=PLA7erk0oNe2rybFwr-X5O7wjDBkdkUcOB

Please leave your questions. If you're a seasoned POE player and you think i've left something important out of the videos, let me know and I'll make adjustments to add in the topics you think I've missed!

Best of luck!