
While we’re on the subject of glittering, shiny things, Path of Exile's skill gems are one of its most subversive designs. Path of Exile is a laboratory where you create terrifyingly powerful heroes before unleashing them on unsuspecting packs of monsters. A single jewel can make a whole class come together, and you’ll be able to unlock slots and get your hands on them very early on. Jewel slots play a big part in this, allowing you to add physical jewels to specific nodes on the tree, conferring powerful bonuses. It never feels like a powerful skill that could dramatically change your character is too far away, and there are countless opportunities to tweak a build to significant effect. Once you do get to grips with it, you might find yourself cooling on every other RPG’s character progression. Path of Exile could maintain its openness while still nudging new players down a safe direction.
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Other players do a fantastic job of serving as guides, but a lot of advice ends up conflicting, and even starter builds come full of jargon and the expectation that the reader has a decent handle on the basics. With the scope of the classes and subclasses being so huge, some suggestions or a recommended path would be valuable for new players. Steven has also put together a great list of starter builds created by Path of Exile boffins, which includes the the Hierophant build I’ve been using. While this does make an already daunting skill tree even more complicated, there are plenty of builds for new players, along with build walkthroughs, which go a long way to explaining Path of Exile’s elaborate but hard-to-parse progression systems.

There are even AFK builds that rely on damage reflection, letting you just stand there and watch enemies crumble. There are countless builds to suit just about every playstyle, whether you want the simple pleasure of making shit explode with a hammer or the more abstract pleasure of raising an army of skeleton mages who obliterate everything in your path. I suspect the novelty will wear off, but fooling around with builds and trying to find one that fits you, if only temporarily, is one of Path of Exile’s great joys.

It’s bizarre essentially being a bystander in these fights. I get to just run around like a headless chicken, avoiding projectiles or getting swarmed by enemies, while my totems and the occasional summon do absolutely all the work. It’s been a game-changer, letting me play with an almost pure-totem build. In my current run, I’ve been playing with a Hierophant, one of the Templar’s Ascendancy classes. While the Ascendancy skill trees are much smaller than the mind-bogglingly huge passive skill tree you’ll normally use, they still offer up a multitude of paths for you to go down, even within a single subclass. These Ascendancy classes create focal points in an otherwise almost classless system, but they still maintain the level of freedom that makes creating an Exile so compelling.
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To get access to these high-tier powers, you’ll need to tackle a series of trials and dungeons that dole out Ascendancy points across the game. The builds have only gotten wilder since the introduction of Ascendancy classes: Every class gets three subclass options, aside from the Scion, who gets a special class that lets her draw from the skills of all the others. My Marauder might be a duel-wielding whirlwind of destruction, while yours could be an elemental shaman who uses magic more than brute strength, seeing you travelling across the skill tree in the opposite direction.Įxotic builds are Path of Exile’s bread and butter, and even after four years theorycrafters show no signs of slowing down. While you can pick from seven classes, like the tough Marauder or the hexy Witch, these determine where you begin on the web, not where you go once you start gaining new skill points. It’s a complicated web of passive abilities and stats that buff your Exile with additional dexterity, intelligence, weapon proficiencies, spell damage and countless other modifiers, broad and situational.

It can be a lot to take in, but the heart of Path of Exile remains its character progression-that journey from nobody to cosmic superhero-and the absurdly huge passive skill tree that represents that growth.
