Struggling After 750+ Hours — Need Real Guidance

PoE2 is my very first Path of Exile experience. I’ve never touched PoE1 before, and I came into this game completely blind. Now, after 750+ hours, I feel like I’ve learned almost nothing about how it actually works. There have been moments where I really enjoyed it, but also moments of pure frustration — I’ve rage-deleted characters before, and most recently I even rage-uninstalled the game entirely.

The breaking point for me came after watching some streams. It honestly felt like I was a frog stuck in a tiny pond, suddenly realizing there’s an entire ocean outside I know nothing about. The knowledge gap is crushing. I understand the absolute basics (like resistance caps), but when it comes to damage scaling, synergies, or actually building a character properly, I’m completely lost. My entire “strategy” has basically been: take every damage node for my Ice Strike. And now I realize that’s not how the game is meant to be played at all.

What makes it worse is the amount of misleading or half-baked guides out there. For someone like me, it’s almost impossible to tell what’s good advice and what’s just noise. I don’t want to waste more time following bad builds, dying endlessly, rage-quitting, and feeling like all those hours mean nothing. (In this league alone, my character has already died more than 350 times.)

All I want is to step up my game, but I desperately want a proper foundation so I can stop running in circles. I mostly play Monk, but I’ve also tried Invoker and AoC — and no matter what I pick, it always feels like I’m missing the core knowledge that makes everything click.

So here’s my desperate request:
Can anyone please point me toward creators or resources that actually provide reliable, fundamental knowledge? Something that can finally bridge this painful gap and help me understand instead of just flailing around.

I really do love this game — otherwise I wouldn’t have put in 750+ hours already — but right now it feels like I’m failing it, and it’s crushing my enjoyment. I don’t want to keep rage-quitting. I want to finally “get it.”

Thanks for taking the time to read this. Any help or direction would mean a lot.

death is just part of the game honestly.
lots of builds feel clunky until they're fully up and running

my general goals regardless of what I play are as follows

1. res cap (cold/light/fire), some chaos is nice but not needed until endgame
2. build towards 1 shotting all white mobs if I don't already
3. focus on ES/EV/Armor stacking (throwing in as much movespeed as I can)

Getting a couple nodes here and there for stun/ailment threshold in your passive tree is a must as well

other than that, damage + whatever armor you need all the way through the tree (you don't need LOADS of damage to 1 shot bosses like streamers, you just need to 1 shot whites and get as close as possible to 1 shotting rares).

Pretty much it if you don't want to follow a guide.


(also I could be wrong about all of this, this is just how I play the game :))


0.1 - spark stormweaver
0.2 - lightning spear amazon
0.3 - arc stormweaver

Use Maxroll or mobalytics to find builds for the class you like.
The best way is to either experiment with your passive tree or use a build guide. You can learn both ways.

If you're dying a lot, you need more resist/evasion/armor/es. Use spirit gems to get defensive aura buffs like ghostdance or convalescence.

I mained Monk on launch day, it was painful until I got a better quarterstaff. Ice has better clear than lightning imo.

Now I play Witch (summoner clear speed sucks, but has good single target), I rerolled Blood Mage and can clear the whole screen in one button and nuke bosses, but it costs like 40 div in gear to get to this level.

I still concider myself a Teen-Player as I have only 2k hours, so not all of what I say may be correct.

What I would suggest is this,

First Play a meta build that has a build guide that takes you from L1 through to endgame. To start with try FubGuns Deadeye as its the favourite build at the moment, and Fubgun has 10s of k hours in PoE1 and 2.

Then as you go, look carefully at how he has selected noded on the passive tree, to understand why he had selected that node ah that time, and especially look at attribute nodes to understand what attribute he has selected. A good guide will have detailed explanations of the whys of various stage choices. Bad guides will have no explanation and often only show the endgame build - Ignore these guides.

Also look carefully at the gear selection for the defence type (EV/ES/Arm or combos of) again to understand why he has selected those.

During this stage, if a concept is unclear, google YouTube videos on the topic to help understand these principles. There are tons out there.

Your gear will rarely have the same stat sets as the guide. The important stats are the defence, attributes (enough to cover your skills) and resistances. Then look at things like life/mana regen. Lastly look for damage modifiers.

And DON'T STRESS. A few errors or difference will not matter too much.

After you have achieved this, play around a bit and change things around, just to see what affect it has. A great tood to try the impact of changes WITHOUT affecting the online build is Path of Building 2 (PoB2) where you can make the changes, see the impact etc, with no actual cost or impact on the game build itself.

First time experience POE and you chose melee lol, that's where all your problem started. This game hates melee players so if you are frustrated then better play ranger next time.

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XxxPssySlayerxxX#5201 написал:

First time experience POE and you chose melee lol, that's where all your problem started. This game hates melee players so if you are frustrated then better play ranger next time.

Monks are still very strong tho.

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TheUrge#6622 написал:

Can anyone please point me toward creators or resources that actually provide reliable, fundamental knowledge? Something that can finally bridge this painful gap and help me understand instead of just flailing around.

I don't do streamers and whatnot, but way back when I watched a ziggyD video when I first got to maps. AFAIK he still does foundational guides and takes the extra step to "over" explain.

Other than that I doubt there's any one resource for PoE. There's a lot of mechanics, most explained poorly, and this is an EA so it's all shifting.

https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Path_of_Exile_2

Start there. Look at the skill you want to use and read every mechanic. Where's the damage come from, a weapon or it's own base? How does it scale? Increased elemental? Attack? Melee? Is it crit viable? Can charges help? Infusions? Remnants? Where's the best location on the tree to start for it?

Same with defenses. Stuck on a boss? What's his damage type? Does your defense provide mitigation? Is he armoured and you're doing phys? Can you mitigate CC? What counts as a slow?

Lots of mechanics. Lots of variables. Dunno if anything comprehensive exists.

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TheUrge#6622 написал:

My entire “strategy” has basically been: take every damage node for my Ice Strike. And now I realize that’s not how the game is meant to be played at all.

That's most softcore builds to be honest. Hard to get the whole picture from those guides. Find a HC player maybe. They're better rounded in terms of builds.

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XxxPssySlayerxxX#5201 написал:

First time experience POE and you chose melee lol, that's where all your problem started. This game hates melee players so if you are frustrated then better play ranger next time.

My first character in 0.1 was Warrior and I had a (molten) blast! It's just alot harder to make it work than ranged but it's definitely not weaker.

Here's what I suggest for every new player if they want external inspiration.

Go to poe2.ninja and go to the hardcore solo-self found build section.

Pick a class you're interested in.

Look at the various builds and try to understand the reasons, the commonalities, the how's and why's surrounding their ability to progress to high levels without dying, and the divergences from your own builds.

It helps if you go there with some context - perhaps you are playing Ice Strike Invoker, go ahead and look at other Invokers using Ice Strike. What are they doing differently than you? Why do you think this is? Why did you pick your method? Are they achieving what you initially wanted to achieve, just in a different way? Would doing it a similar way work for you? What are the trade-offs between the different variances you can see, including your own?

You can import them into path of building if you want to do number comparisons. The numbers ON the ninja site are usually off by a lot so don't rely on them, but a rule of thumb is that the presence of something just on the list in the first place on a hcssf ladder is an inherent vouch for the class/skill viability. There's exceptions, but it's a good place to start.

understanding POE is like getting a bachelor degree.... It will take thousands of hours and tons of reading. Like most people have been playing this for more than 10 years sure it's a new game but the basics are the same. We know you need to read everything the game says about a skill/passive/mod to understand it. We know when to care about resists or more dmg, we understand crafting, and how skills should interact. That just comes with time