Hello Everyone, decided to put something together with the recent UPF introduction to Path of Exile I thought I would put something together to introduce people to this seemingly overwhelming game. I will first go over what to look for on gear, why you keep dying, Ascendancy and poe.trade as well as trading etiquette. The basic things you want to look for on gear while leveling is life and elemental resistances as well as a good 4 link piece of gear for your main skill. As long as you can keep getting incremental upgrades of life and resistances it will carry you all the way to act 10. As for dying it can be solved by flasks and resistances. If you are constantly being one-shot you likely dont have enough resistances, if you have enough resistances you likely dont have enough life on your gear or in your tree. I know most people like MOAR damage but getting life on the tree will make leveling feel a lot better. Flasks need to be constantly upgraded either by drops or by purchasing them from the town vendors. You likely only need 1 mana flask and 2 HP flasks for leveling the other two slots should be utility. The best utility is a quicksilver flask and a granite flask. After Act 7 I would swap out the granite flask for a basalt flask or a stibnite flask as that 3k armor becomes pretty underwhelming later on. Ascending is the single biggest damage boost you will get while leveling. You have several trials you need to complete as you level before you can access the labyrinth in Act 3 where you can get your first 2 ascendancy points. I recommend doing this midway through Act 4 the first time and whenever you feel ready after that, I tend to do them after I beat Act 10 but you can do them earlier if you want a better leveling experience. The locations for the trials can be found here: https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Trial_of_Ascendancy

Finally poe.trade, you will see no mention of this on the main game (no idea why) it is ABSOLUTELY INTEGRAL to this game unless you are a Solo Self Found (SSF) player, I would not recommend this until you get some play time and knowledge. As you go throughout the game you will notice you get no gold like in diablo, you instead get items like Chaos Orb or Orb of Fusing, these are the crafting currency that is unique to PoE. As you level you will collect these items and may be tempted to use them, you can but I would highly recommend not doing this. Instead you can go onto poe.trade, select the piece of gear you want to upgrade (ring, gloves, helm, etc) and put mods you are looking for and you can probably find one that is superior to what you have for 1 fuse or 1 chaos. This is very important for a smoother leveling experience. As for how you end up trading, there is a message you can copy and paste into the game chat, this will automatically send the message for what item you want and the price for it, you can also offer a different amount in this initial message. I would not recommend with starting out with "Hi" or "Hello want to buy your ring" as they probably have dozens to hundreds of items for sale and would much prefer the automatic message that poe.trade generates. They will then invite you to their party, right click on their name and select "Visit Hideout" with your currency in your inventory, there you will conduct the trade. It should take less than 30 seconds once you get the hang of it. If you find yourself really liking the game and want to make some HUGE quality of life purchases I highly recommend purchasing a supporter pack, which will give you some MTX points and I would recommend buying a currency and premium stash tab. Premium stash tabs let you post items in game onto poe.trade, if you dont want to spend any money and still want to sell on poe.trade you can use 3rd party app called acquisition, the setup can be found in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeqU9jkWRy0.

As for actually playing the game, not all skills are created equal and there are some absolutely terrible active skills out there that you should really avoid as a new player. The obvious offenders are: glacial hammer, elemental hit, lightning strike, lightning tendrils, bear trap and siege ballista. Its not that these skills are impossible to play with but they are very unpleasant. As for my recommendation I would highly recommend playing a spellcaster for your first ever character. The main reasoning is your damage is based on the levels of your skill gem and not your weapon like it is with a bow/melee build. Flameblast totems is an excellent first character and I have a guide posted here made by another member of the PoE community https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1730745. Now if you really want to play a melee character you have some options, the best I have personally played is using the active skill Sunder or Ancestral Warchief which both have builds here https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1938002 and https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1920845. Of course you can find a number of builds on the PoE website forums and I would recommend looking through ones and pick the ones with "Budget" in their titles.

If you are more of a theorycrafter and want to make your own build I would recommend downloading the 3rd party software path of building https://github.com/Openarl/PathOfBuilding/releases this is a simulation that lets you make whatever build you want, plan out your tree, ascendancy and gear. It will give you breakdowns on res, hp and dps on all your skills and is overall very helpful when planning a new character from scratch or if you are adapting an older build.

I would not call this an all encompassing guide as I skimmed over a lot of things (crafting, maps, endgame bosses, etc) but this is more a starter guide and stuff I wish people had told me when I started 3 years ago. If you have any questions let me know and if you think I missed anything really important post below. Good luck out there guys, this game may seem intimidating but its one of the best games out there and is really worth your time.

Regarding Poe.trade being integral: When following a build guide they don't seem to say where to get the required equipment a lot of the time, are they assuming you are using Poe.trade for this?

Yeah, build guides almost always assume you are going to be using a poe.trade for any vital uniques you might need.

So if I go skipping along picking whatever skill and weapon seems cool, am I going to find myself completely screwed 20 hours later?

@jaycrockett: If you dont go in with a concrete plan for what you want your character to be you will find yourself unable to progress at a certain point. Thats why so many people recommend picking a build you think looks cool and follow a guide. You can go around and find out what works for you, but I wouldnt recommend it until you know a little bit more about the game.

That's probably the biggest problem with the game honestly. The late/end game is balanced around a good build at the very least. Making such a build on your own is a very hard task that requires a deep knowledge of the game mechanics, skills, passives available to your class, etc. I pride myself on being able to figure that sort of stuff out and I bet I could. It would require way too much time and research though. There's just way too many variables for anyone not committing in putting the work to be able to make a half decent build.

Thanks, the game is fun but I have not interest in getting that deep. I'll just play until I get stuck then stop. If I really get into the mechanics I can always roll another character.

Wonder if the build i'm using is bad since lightning strike is one of the skills? Well whatever :-/

Some tips i learned- apparently you can activate your passive skills and swap them out and they will still be active, i was avoiding them because of the 8 hotbar minimum. (Crazy a game that's been out this long still only has 8 ability keys and doesn't even support a gamepad? )

Also read something about putting a golem on your move only key to give you another slot to use.

OP did a good job explaining some of the basics. Also, this video series is widely regarded as the best source for new players:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEZtq6FSebE