Whatever you do, don't ignore health/energy shield and sustainability points as you level. If you want to pave your own road, picking a few skills or broad stroke archetypes can work too, like a necromancer or elementalist. You don't have to use an actual guide - but you can, and there are great ones on the official Path of Exile forums, Reddit, and elsewhere. But there's nothing worse than getting to endgame and realizing that your build maybe isn't up to par and then spending a few days rerolling a new character. While 'respeccing' in Path of Exile is doable, it's fairly expensive in terms of resources and you're going to want to save your orbs of regret for fine-tuning instead of a full revamp. I know, it sucks to get committed to a build before you even start playing. You can grab it here and then rest easy that you won't have to try to dig through hundreds of drops on a single screen. My choice for easy and painless is the core version of Filterblades, just pop it in your folder and select it from your UI options. So the first thing you need to do is get a loot filter - it's pretty easy. Screen after screen of stuff that is going to bury anything of interest under a tide of garbage, you won't even be able to find the good stuff under all that noise. If you try to play without a filter, you're going to spend a lot of time just looking through endless trash - and I do mean endless. Path of Exile is loaded with loot, especially as you rise in levels and start doing endgame map content. While the systems can be complex, they don't have to be complicated to get into - so let's get started!

That said, getting into Path of Exile can seem like an incredibly intimidating prospect, with its giant passive skill tree, ascendancy choices, and the map-centric endgame atlas to navigate. Path of Exile plays fantastically whether you want to go completely solo, with a friend network to share loot with, or in groups for bigger and better rewards.

Path of Exile has been around for quite some time, but with the release of another giant content chunk and a new league where you can build your own big baddies to beat for massive swathes of loot, it's a fantastic time to jump into the action.

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