There is controversy within the POE community on whether new players should follow a build initially. I am not here to convince you what to do but to present the arguments either way:

To Follow a Build: People will argue to follow a build because it can be considered generally hard to progress in the game without one. There are certain thresholds of stats that you should have at certain times in the game, otherwise, you will die constantly. If it is a good guide, it will tell you where to go, what skills to get and when to get them, what stats to look for, and what points to allocate into your passive tree.

To Not Follow a Build: If you do not follow a build, the general consensus is, yea, you might not be the campaign or get to endgame as fast as one who does follow a build, but it is a better “learning experience”. You will be teaching yourself the game through many hours of trial and error.

My Take: If you could know everything in the game that you had to know to play the game, I would suggest not following a build guide. Unfortunately, POE has a problem of having not enough of the required information to play the game. So my general advice would be to follow a build guide. Enki’s build guide listed in the picture is acknowledged as being one of the best beginner-friendly build guides out there.

• Poebuilds.cc (Gathers builds from forum)

• Forum - Path of Exile