Exploring Path of Exile Through a Mediocre Ranger

In the very early parts of the game, split arrow should be used as opposed to RoA, possibly through mid-cruel. Switch over to RoA when you feel comfortable enough in terms of mana management to sustain it well. You can get devouring totem from the library quest in act 3 normal, and I recommend you do so -- it helps immensely with keeping both your mana and life up as you progress through cruel. I never removed it from my bar, although I utilized it less once I had progressed through most of act 3 merciless.

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. Once you take acrobatics, you'll need to prioritize evasion a bit higher, as armour and ES both have their efficiency reduced.

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. Once you're in zones that are level 60+, you can start keeping rare pieces of gear that you can't use for the chaos recipe, which is worth doing even if you don't intend on trading -- spending a few chaos on a rare with a better base than your current equipment is a fine way of getting a gear upgrade in a pinch.

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 an eye on the pages linked from the main PoE item-data page, particularly for bows to look out for, and good evasion bases for armour. You may find that a slower bow with a higher base damage makes it easier to sustain your mana throughout cruel difficulty, and you'll find that your damage drops off later in the game unless you stay on top of upgrading your weapon. Don't be afraid to pick up white gear with decent links and a base that could be an upgrade for you in terms of evasion or weaponry, putting quality on it, and spending transmutes / alts on it or even an alch and some chaos later on. It's also likely going to be worth it to pick up and id magic and rare jewelry with decent bases, as well as quivvers.

When engaging mobs, you'll want to use poison arrow on a pack you're about to engage, followed by a stream of RoA. This should take care of most packs of mobs. Use puncture on rares and bosses, and kite them around, supplementing with poison arrow and frenzy to keep your charges up (particularly after you take the 4% evasion per frenzy charge node, assuming you do). Getting surrounded is a bad thing for this character -- you want to try to at least have enough room to kite large packs around while keeping them in your poison arrow clouds, particularly while progressing through cruel and merciless. Since the build is "pure" evasion, being surrounded for any significant period of time can be a major issue -- you will get hit at some point, and even though we should have a fairly large health pool, we can still be taken down if we're not taking care to avoid being surrounded.

Partially due to the above, I found it more efficient to run crypt and city of sarn once I hit the point in merciless where you might otherwise be running docks. Crypt has a lot of slow-moving mobs, and you won't have a problem focusing down necro's with RoA, plus it's easy to fill a room with poison clouds. City of sarn has a lot of lower-hp mobs that don't hit too hard (with the exception of perpetus), and it's short. In docks, I found it a bit hard to avoid getting surrounded by dock workers, and a bit hard to engage mobs in areas that were good for kiting things around. Lunaris two and three are also good places to farm in for this character as we will rarely get hit by tentacle miscreations.

You'll want to keep your flasks up to date for the most part, but you'll want to consider using hybrid flasks (I ran one life, one hybrid, a quicksilver and 2 manas through much of cruel), and you may want to delay upgrading your mana flasks until you need to -- you want to have slow mana pots that allow you to have your mana refreshed while you're casting RoA or other skills, and you won't have a large enough mana pool to justify larger flasks until later. In other words, upgrading your mana flasks too early can leave you starved for charges as they may fill your mana up to max while you're still using skills, while a smaller mana flask may last throughout your skill usage.

You'll need to have a staunching flask before Cruel Dominous, and you should ideally have a granite flask before (or shortly after) taking acrobatics. You can get a granite from the fairgraves quest in act 3 merciless, or by vendoring a ruby, sapphire, and topaz flask that all have the "iron skin" suffix. With any luck, one will drop before you're in a3m, or before you feel the need to roll three flasks for a specific suffix. You can progress without one, but having the ability to use one enables you to play much less cautiously -- at level 70, a normal granite flask gives my character 19% damage reduction as opposed to zero. It may not seem like a lot, but it's very noticeable. Another option would be to run determination as an aura, if one drops for you or you feel like muling a marauder, templar, duelist, or scion into cruel difficulty.

You'll also need to have a curse removal/immunity flask, as projectile weakness can absolutely ruin your day. It'd be preferable to have this on one of your slow mana pots or utility pots, to maximize the amount of use you get out of it.

If you find one, a quartz flask could come in very handy for getting yourself out of a particularly hairy situation. I didn't feel the need to run one, but could definitely see one being useful.

You should be aiming to keep your chance to evade around 40% once you take acrobatics. You can run grace if you need a boost to evasion, but it's strongly preferable to be getting your evasion from gear. Taking acrobatics does mean that you're much more gear-dependent than a build not taking acrobatics, but the boost in survivability you receive from acro is worth it as long as you're keeping a fairly consistent "ranged" playstyle.

Normal -- Oak

Cruel -- Your choice of Kraityn, Oak, or a passive point. I took Oak, but mostly because I didn't feel like fighting the dude at the time.

Merciless -- Kraityn or another passive point. I took Kraityn.

Roughly in order of when they're offered to you:

Normal:
1. Split Arrow
2. Poison Arrow
3. Rain of Arrows
4. Puncture
5. Faster Projectiles
6. Frenzy
7. Lesser Multiple Projectiles
8. Devouring Totem

Cruel:
1. Increased Duration
2. Clarity
3. Faster Attacks
4. Mana Leech

Merciless:
1. Either chain or concentrated effect from library.


You may want to pick up projectile weakness and a physical projectile attack damage at some point. Added chaos damage can be gotten from cruel library, which can be worth socketing. Blood magic may be picked up from the medicine chest in merciless if you feel the need for it.

One notable gem that makes progression a lot easier for this character but isn't available to the ranger as a quest reward is life gain on hit. Socketing this with RoA can provide you with the ability to stand in the middle of a larger pack of mobs and spam RoA instead of needing to kite like a madman. I got lucky in my run, and had one drop for me early on -- but if you don't get it as a drop and want to stick to self-found, it's available to the marauder and duelist when you hit the waypoint in merveil's place on normal, which should take at most an hour to mule.

I reccommend using this as a rough guide instead of a by-the-letter guide, taking nodes and pathing as you see fit.

1. 12 points, ballistic mastery, primal spirit, and finesse

2. 20 points, down through the attack speed nodes and into thick skin

3. 36 points, life nodes, gymnastics, and revenge of the hunted

4. 34 points, one dex node and spec out of the attack speed nodes.

At this point, you have a choice to make -- you can either push for the acrobatics cluster and ondar's guile, or head up into the shadow tree. Pushing for acrobatics early means that you won't have to spend a long time grabbing levels when you want to get them later, as we're still fairly early in the game, but does mean you'll have to manage your mana carefully up until around the end of act 2 cruel when we start hitting the shadow area. It also means that you'll be more limited in your gear choices earlier. I chose to go for acrobatics here, and the rest of the point progression reflects that, but feel free to swap things around as you see fit.

5. 43 points, acrobatics and phase acrobatics

6. 51 points, life nodes and ondar's guile

7. 56 points, bow damage and life

8. 67 points, into shadow for life, mental acuity, and mind drinker

9. 72 points, more life and conditioning

10. 72 points, evasion per frenzy charge and +1 frenzy charge, speccing out of 2 dex nodes

11. 84 points, more life nodes

At this point, you should be in act 3 merciless, and more or less ready to start mapping. There are plenty of ways to continue progression on the skill tree, including picking up influence and the other aura nodes we pass by, grabbing the other frenzy charges, and going through the bow damage cluster with aspect of the eagle in it by the ranger start. The aura cluster with charisma is also close by, and we pass by some DoT nodes if you wanted to try buffing PA.

If I were to continue this character, I'd likely end up right around here at 95 points, picking up more life and mana, and life and bow damage, leaving the character with 296% increased life in total from the tree, and then I'd either pick up some aura and DoT nodes, or go through the aspect of the eagle cluster.

These may not all be verified by the time you read this, as I'll likely be clearing out the tabs used by the character, but I figured it'd be worth it to take a little time to look at the gear I ended up with, as well as currency and uniques that dropped while levelling this character.

This type of build -- a fairly straightforward "pure evasion" ranger using RoA and PA as it's primary sources of offence -- shows the strengths of evasion, and emphasizes the need to round out the defences used by an evasion character through other means like utility flasks. The playstyle of this character requires that a fair amount of attention is payed to using single-target skills when necessary, and to staying aware enough of your surroundings to ensure you don't get trapped by mobs.

While the character is more limited in gearing choices, staying on top of checking for gear upgrades while progressing through the game, and some smart currency usage should allow for the character to go through the levelling process without much pain.

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgIBAdEEfgW1BfkM8g5ID6sVIBXwGbQZ_hsBI_YmlSzpMHEwfDKUNj06QjpYPs9Hfkp9S3hRR1VLVvpaSF_hYeJirGVNZ6BrJGwWbWxte25pd9d9dX8CfyuD24TZhxmHdohrjX2Nv5AKlQWV6Z2qoSKiQKXLpuCnNKfUqn-quK_rtUi7473mvqfEosaiytPNmM5x037UI9aK1p3ZxtwV3Q3dqN7G44TndOpi7g7veu_w8EL0-Plj-rH8S_zF_rr-yA==