Exploring Path of Exile Through a Mediocre Build

build thread
video overview

build thread
video overview

The earliest parts of the game can be the most difficult for a character starting from nothing -- you're strapped for gear, strapped for currency, and you're relatively weak. In the first few areas, progression is slow compared to other builds' early game, and paying attention to how you approach groups of mobs as well as getting a feel for when to just run -- whether forwards or backwards -- is very important.

Once you have summon raging spirits, crafting a +1 to fire gems weapon (a blue weapon, a whetstone, and a ruby ring), provides a noticeable benefit, but you'll still die quickly to groups of mobs if you dash into them, and your zombies are going to need re-summoned often.

Throughout normal difficulty, the different forms of mitigation provided by gear come close to being a hard counter to the enemies you're facing. If you know you're going to be going up against a big hard-hitter like Brutus, a strapped leather makes for a good addition to defense. The resists provided by even white resist rings make fights in zones featuring consistent elemental damage go from seeming dangerous to being mostly trivial. As long as you're paying attention to the zones you're in, and what mobs you're engaging, you should be able to progress fairly smoothly.

Once you get enfeeble and flesh offering, your character starts to play more of a support role for your minions than a direct contributor in battle.

Once you're past normal difficulty, paying attention to what you're facing should be close to second nature, and your minion gems should be of a high enough level that they start to feel like they're holding their own. Throughout cruel and merciless, zones coming close to killing you faster are largely signals that either you haven't been keeping up on having zone-appropriate gear (mostly in terms of resists), that it's about time for you to be grabbing some more life from the tree, or that you're just not paying attention to what you're facing for whatever reason.

As you progress, you should be consistently picking up rare items (and to a lesser extent magic items), id'ing them, and equipping them if you're capable of doing so and they would provide an upgrade for your character, weighting elemental resistances and effective life increases heavier than increases in armour or evasion. Vendor the rest.

The rate at which you replace peices of gear will slow down over the course of your progression through the difficulties, and somewhere around late cruel or merciless you'll probably want to start keeping gear that would be a partial upgrade around until you either find better, or find other peices that would create a complete upgrade. You'll also want to start paying attention to what gear you've had on the longest, and prioritize upgrading it.

If you're doing this consistently as you play, it's likely that the most you'll need to do to a peice of gear is spend a few chromatics on it, and perhaps a few jewelers and fusings. Gearing yourself in this manner works quite well for the majority of the main progression. You'll want to keep your flasks up to date, and once you hit cruel Dominus you'll need to roll a staunching flask, but you should have more then enough alts to do so as long as you've been vendoring rares as you go.

Once you're through most of merciless and are at the point where you could be running low-level maps, you're probably close to being able to spec into CI. You want to make sure you have at least 3500 ES from the combination of gear and discipline, and you'll need to roll new flasks to deal with status ailments, as you'll be particularly vulnerable to them after going CI. The immunity to chaos damage is very nice, but you will need to learn to bolster your defenses pre-emptively when faced with certain situations, and react appropriately when affected by status ailments.

This is also the point in the build where finding gear upgrades starts to become more rare, as well as being around the point where drops can be used consistently for the chaos recipe or be worth a chaos or more to other players. As such, it's a good time to start feeling out item value in the league you're in and getting familiar with how trade works in general if you aren't already. Setting up a shop thread and using tools like poe.xyz.is to price-check items you think are worth something helps with this process, as does getting familiar with the data available at http://www.pathofexile.com/item-data . The rest of progression to end-game mostly consists of getting familiar with maps and their mods and maintaining a map pool, a topic outside of the scope of this posting.

It's worth noting that the extra mitigation provided by minions allows you to be more slack on resists as long as you compensate with careful play. The difference in survivability is noticeable, but being able to stack some rarity increases the rate at which you can generate currency if that's your goal.

It's common for players following another build to hit a wall somewhere in merciless difficulty where they are suddenly finding it very difficult to survive, don't seem to be able to get gear upgrades for their level without trading for them, and don't have the currency to buy gear that would be an upgrade. It's also common for them to be told rather quickly that they don't have enough life from the tree when they ask around for help.

Taking a look at where our character might be on the passive tree around this time , we can use a tool like poebuilder or the offline skill tree planner to see that we only have 126% life from the tree.

If you've been playing a build like the one presented here, it's very clear at this point that without the layer of mitigation provided by having a horde of other stuff on the screen you would be dying very quickly, even with respectable damage output. This makes the importance of prioritizing life on many builds while levelling obvious, and should help a player avoid hitting a wall in progression that is unfixable without a lot of spent currency or a re-roll while levelling characters in the future.

It's certainly not impossible to play through other builds with similarily low life at this point, grabbing it later, but it requires good play, a firm grasp of the game on a deeper level, and some pretty good gear doesn't hurt.

For all difficulties other than normal, I recommend taking the passive point for this build. In normal, I recommend helping Oak as it's a difficult fight at this point, and the +40 to base life is a pretty big help up to the point that you would be capable of re-speccing into CI, at which point making at most 20 chaos to buy the regrets necessary to buy the respec book doesn't take very much time.

Some people object pretty strongly to doing this, and they're not necessarily wrong. It's a choice that makes progression much easier early in the game at the cost of a chunk of money / time once you're later on in the game. Do whatever you feel is best.

If a quest doesn't offer one of these, or you already have one, take your choice of what's available. Since your offensive capability is largely determined by gem level, it's a good idea to grab and equip any gem that allows you to summon minions as early as possible.

Normal:
1. raise zombie
2. summon raging spirit
3. summon skeletons
4. minion life
5. enfeeble
6. raise spectre
7. minion damage
8. flesh offering

Cruel:
1. discipline
2. clarity
3. item rarity
4. inc. aoe
5. purity of elements

Merciless:
1. conc. effect

A desecrate gem is a nice convenience to have, but isn't strictly necessary.

I reccommend using this as a rough guide instead of a by-the-letter guide, taking nodes and pathing as you see fit or feel that you need them. You may want to get aura nodes at different points or forgo them, or take some life later, but still follow the general theme of spreading out for minion and life nodes, connecting paths in preparation for a re-spec, and then speccing out of life nodes when prepared to take CI.


1. 10 points: minion support and a little life

2. 28 points: more life and minions. I went for the life cluster first. We pass by a 30 dex node that can be taken whenever if needed.

3. 39 points: charisma. I come down here and grab this now because it's a pain to travel to later on. Passing through Harrier doesn't hurt either. If you want to save a few points for now, consider traveling down but not grabbing the cluster until later on.

4. 49 points: harrier and most of a minion cluster I don't find the attack and cast speed nodes quite worth the two points, ymmv.

5. 59 points: more minions and purity of flesh. We pass by both a 30 str and 30 dex node which can be taken if necessary, and you might consider spending another two points to grab minion instability -- it's not a bad boost at this point in the game, but is something you'd spec out of later on as the rate at which your minions die decreases.

6. 69 points: more life, more minions, and elemental adaptation

7. 87 points: aura and buff effect nodes, and mana geyser

8. 94 points: preparing to spec into CI. Two int nodes to connect paths and unnatural calm on the right side of the tree, ES nodes by the starting area, and one int node to connect paths on the left side of the tree

9. 83 points: specced into CI with points to spare.

You'll probably need one or more of the 30 str/dex nodes, and you could keep the 6% mana/life node in the witch start if you wanted to. what to do with the rest of your skill points and your character past here is up to you.

Past this point, there are quite a few ways you could go on the tree, depending on what you feel like doing. this is where I ended up at level 89.

Until later on in act 3 merciless, I pretty much used whatever seemed like a good idea at the time, grabbing a spectre from whatever zone I was in when one died, or just not grabbing them at all if there wasn't anything that seemed useful in the area.

I used the flame sentinels from the eternal lab until I hit the point where I felt able to get to the waypoint in the sceptre of god, at which point I changed over to using evangelists with my raise spectre gem linked to both concentrated effect and increased area of effect.

Assuming you decided to head up the tree to grab the additional spectre passive, they seem to work extremely well as offensive spectres, even after the changes to their defensive capabilities and changes to smoke mine.

This type of build -- which is a very straightforward "pure" summoner build, little more than "GRAB ZE MINION AND ZE AURA NODES" -- sets the player up in a position where reasons for player death, particularly repeated player death, are capable of being learned from and adapted to with immediate positive feedback in terms of the ability of the character to survive.

Adding another layer of mitigation in the form of minions lessens the necessity of paying close attention to having appropriate levels of other forms of mitigation without removing it entirely. Playing a build like this through to "end-game" solo requires gaining an understanding of what could be called the "main" forms of mitigation while minimizing the probability of the character hitting a progression wall erected from poor passive choices that won't be hit until it's "too late" to effectively modify those choices without significant time or currency investment.

The main theme here has been about mitigation and survivability in path of exile, and how in-game knowledge of what's needed where and why will enable you to progress easier than following a guide point-by-point without gaining that sort of understanding will. Survival-related difficulties that appear for players attempting to follow builds that have obviously been successfully followed largely cease to appear once the player has a more internalized understanding of the way the game works.