A complete beginner's guide to Path of Exile 2
The first Path of Exile is notorious for being a complex web of mechanics and stat calculations that repel beginners. While Path of Exile 2 is mechanically more challenging, the developers have made some effort to make it a little more accessible in other ways. As a game unburdened by layers of seasonal mechanics and feature bloat, Path of Exile 2 Early Access is the best-case entry point into the franchise for a newcomer.
Yet, if you have never played ARPGs before, Path of Exile 2 can be quite overwhelming. For such beginners, this guide attempts to simplify and explain what it's all about and how to get started with your baby steps in Wraeclast.
Path of Exile 2 beginners' guide: All the basics, simplified
Once you pick a class to play, you'll be greeted with the League selection screen. There's only the Standard League at Early Access release, and you have the option to pick Hardcore or SSF. The latter essentially means this character is locked out of trading, so do it on your first character if you must since the first playthrough is meant to be the rite of passage by learning through making mistakes.
The HUD
To start with, here's a quick rundown of all the UI elements. Path of Exile 2 follows the time-honored ARPG tradition of having two resources to manage (at least initially): Life (HP) and Mana. For an ARPG greenhorn, your character's Life is gauged by the red orb to the bottom left, while Mana is the blue one to the bottom right. Mana is for casting Skills, which we'll discuss later.
If you're more used to HP and Mana bars being visible on top of the character, you can get just that by ticking the Display Player Life and Mana option in the Interface menu under Settings. We also recommend enabling the same for enemies.
In the beginning, the only way you can replenish health and mana is by chugging the red and blue Flasks, visible to the right of the Life meter. Flasks come with a few charges, which restore gradually as you kill enemies.
To the right of the Flasks panel are the buttons for Menu and Cosmetics, as well as the Charms panel. Charms are trinkets that can give you specific buffs to break out of perilous situations — but those unlock later in the game, so don't worry about it yet.
On the other side, the Mana meter has an adjacent panel to its left. This is where your Skills go as you unlock them, and next to the skill panel is a button with an O-shaped icon. The button lets you a portal to the closest safe hub area, which is different in each campaign Act.
Spirit, another resource that you'll get if you started with the Witch, is found in a golden semi-circular bar to the left of your Mana orb. It is necessary to spawn persistent minions, among other things.
Later on, you'll get Energy Shield, indicated by a blue semi-circular bar to the right of your Life orb. This is somewhat self-explanatory: it's a protective layer that automatically regenerates if you haven't taken damage in a while.
To the top right of your HUD is the minimap. Maps in Path of Exile 2 are randomized, so not all of them are worth exploring thoroughly. Once you get to the town area, you can open the world map (U) to see which maps have additional hidden caches, treasures, and minibosses worth exploring for.
Basic Movement and combat
Once you start, you can select between WASD and Mouse-guided movement if you're playing on a PC. It's recommended you go with WASD, as maneuvering around attacks and enemy movement is necessary to stay alive in this game.
Your movement is only slightly faster than the average enemy grunt, and you do not have any mobility skills for a big chunk of the game unlike Path of Exile 1. Your only option for fast mobility is the dodge roll, so let's talk about that.
The dodge roll in Path of Exile 2 (Space/Circle) lasts for one second, and you only gain invulnerability during the first few frames of the animation. There's no internal cooldown before you can dodge again, but the recovery frames are long enough that spam-dodging is slower than moving regularly. You cannot dodge through almost any area damage since the damage application frames last longer than the i-frames.
The main thing you need to use dodge and movement for is:
- Avoiding enemy projectiles. Specific ones can poison, deal high damage, or cover a large area.
- Preventing getting flanked by enemies. Enemies can body-block you by default because you cannot walk through them, so getting surrounded is a surefire way to die.
Combat in Path of Exile 2 is a bit different from what one would expect of an ARPG. There's no way to reliably do a stand-and-deliver playstyle for long, and there's a big emphasis on staying on the run to kite enemies.
Generally, this will mean casting Skills as much as possible while dodging enemy attacks. If there's a big enemy horde approaching, you must run away from them while picking them off one by one. Specific classes come with different tools for softening up a horde with area damage, and their playstyle varies greatly depending on the Skills at their disposal.
Skills and Skill Gems
Skills are the bread-and-butter of your playstyle, and you only gain access to them after you slot in Skill Gems. Uncut Gems can be found as drops from all over the world, which allows you to Engrave (i.e. obtain) a Skill Gem of your choosing.
Press G to open the Skill menu and place a Gem in one of the open slots. You can slot nine total Gems in Path of Exile 2 (excluding the basic attack/spells you get from your weapon/shield). Gems can be unslotted and swapped around at any time — this does not cost anything.
Once you have slotted the skill, click on any of the eight slots in the spell hotbar (next to the Mana orb at the bottom right) to place and bind the spell to a specific key.
Inventory management
The Inventory (press I to open) in Path of Exile 2 is largely the same as in the first game. Based on equipment type, gear can take anything from one singular grid (such as an amulet) to one-fourth of your entire inventory (tower shields and chest pieces). Inventory management is something you learn through trial and error as you play the game, but the one tip we can start you off with is to stop picking up common-rarity (white) gear once you get your first set of blues.
You can also set up two different weapon sets (which doubles as free inventory space). Click on the "II" over the main hand/off-hand weapon slot, and slot in a weapon here to set up the second weapon set. You can switch between sets by pressing X.
Bloated Miller: The first boss
Bloated Miller is the tutorial boss of Path of Exile 2, found in the Riverbanks area. This is essentially the target dummy to learn and practice your basic mechanical skills: when to attack, when to time your dodge, and when to kite mobs.
Bloated Miller has two attacks to look out for if you're a ranged class: a charge attack, and an area-of-effect slam attack that sends out a shockwave. The main thing to get used to here is the stinger that plays when he telegraphs the slam attack. This stinger will play in almost all the "perilous moves" of this game, so the main takeaway is to dodge laterally or away from the boss whenever you hear this noise.
Item rarity and affixes
Items in Path of Exile 2 come in four rarity tiers: basic (white), rare (blue), magic (gold), and Unique (orange). Uniques, as the term dictates, will have potentially build-defining passives you cannot get elsewhere. The difference between the other tiers of items is affixes. Each item can have a randomized set of affixes — Rare items up to two, and Magic items up to six.
These offer all sorts of stat padding, which are generally defensive ones on armor items (Health, Evasion, Armor, resistances, and so on), and offensive ones (such as added Elemental damage or extra percentage of a damage type) on armaments. As you progress, you'll figure out what stats you need offensively and defensively, but other than that, you want to lug around Rare and Magic items to sell to vendors for Gold.
Leveling up and Passives
The bar at the bottom of your screen tracks your total XP progress to the next level. XP is gained, as one would expect, from killing enemies. Each level increases your max Life and max Mana and gives you one Passive point to spend.
The Passive tree in Path of Exile 2 is a gargantuan web of perks, and each class starts at a different point in this web. Passives are possibly the hardest part of Path of Exile 2 to come to terms with, the same as the first game. Thankfully, respeccing Passives is much cheaper and easier than it was in the first game, so you can just pick whatever seems good to you for the time being.
Your build in Path of Exile 2 is an amalgamation of many things: itemization, spell interactions, game-changing Ascendancy passives, and Keystone passives to name a few. Much of this is from break-points that won't materialize until quite late into the campaign or endgame.
It's hard to get things right the first time, doubly so if this is your first ARPG. If you haven't played the first game, your first playthrough will likely be a learning exercise on things not to do rather than what to do to succeed — but the game is meant to be learned this way.
The first playthrough is, therefore, best savored by playing the game for what it is. If you're keen on coming through the basics, here's a guide on character stats in Path of Exile 2.
Stay tuned for more Path of Exile 2 guides and news on Sportskeeda.