Path of Exile general

Heard they are horrible because you need to farm for correct monsters on high enough level for few hours.

Farm for correct monsters? How does that work?

Probably raising spectres

>spend coins to get prophecies that are like fixed events that are bound to happen

I had to stop playing this because of my shitty internet. A shame because the servers are RIGHT FUCKING THERE (im in aus) but i still can't get a decent fucking internet connection that goes over 4mbit and doesn't shit the bed a million times a day. fuck this country

Ok first of I wasted 200h with bad internet connection solely on HC and never got into late game so I won't confirm it myself but:

So you start playing and get some spectres like this which are on lv 80. They are essentially caring your army so now you can do 85lv maps and raise 85lv spectres, repeat 5 times and now you finally have 95 level spectres in your army and you are finally have what your build can do, after 3 h of gameplay, enjoy any disconnect and losing it.

I would really love some user to confirm it but it was huge problem and I never heard about it being fixed.

ouch

and then 1 lag box and you're dead

I want to get back into this.

But making new characters is grating.

I also really dislike the last half of Act 4.
That piety fight is shit, that fat blob that slows you down is just annoying, and the 2nd phase of Malachai is a pain but only because of the shitty arena you fight him in.

Maybe they fixed it but I remember that it almost became like strategy to use portal scrolls to get out of his room when you literally had no where else to go.

Does it affect strongboxes/sideareas? Getting a 20q vaal gem would be pretty sweet.

Your army actually should still be active during lag or dc so no worries here but you were losing your army on logout.

They fixed that you lost your maps if you logged out and now they still stay 15 mins. like you were still online, but never heard any change to raised creatures.
I also fucking dropped any idea of making this build because when you only HC you only use reliable builds aka firestorm spellcaster so I never actually tested it.

Any softcore or badass HC user how is summoner right now?

Say what you want I managed to play act 4 about 4 times before I dropped PoE and I must say these bosses aren't bad.
First time I fought Piety I died, second time I shit my pants but killed the bitch and every another fight was quite normal in terms of difficulty, same for mala faggot.
His arena is all in AOE but nothing will do more damage then you are able to heal with the flasks.

I stopped the game after I lost my level 90 ranger, who just got a boss ass high dps high crit bow to the map act 4 piety with shitty mods no damage mods or anything.

I got staggered by one of her whirlwinds and then before I could move again, I got lasered.

Also it depends on what skills you use that make Malachia more tolerable. Its not even that he is hard, its just grueling to me, probably because I'm so neurotic about not dying while leveling up a character.

I do still have a cycloner in HC, I'll probably use it a bit to warm up.

If you want to go RF totem build, Chieftain Marauder is a better bet.

Spectres are damn good although people are still flipping their shit that it's really annoying to have to search for the same dead mob for Spectre builds. I kinda agree but I typically found Spectres overkill and usually just summon them as portable curse delivery devices.

In this way I can understand why you don't like Mala.

Also I don't know how about you but if I will ever get again to this shit I am dropping HC that is useless on always online and getting most unreliable build ever.
Like Flickering strike this shit was awesome. With some builds in PoE you can literally be some anime character I am trying it next time.

I really need to get my dex in line

There is a guild, technically, I havent seen the leader on in months v3lbi or something like that maybe you should get off your ass and make another one? :^)

Damn my hideout still looking good.

And holy shit, I just checked my stash and I have an Astramentis that I never sold.

Also when did they change the maps to "Tier X", I dont like that change at all.
Cleared a Tier 2 just for old times sake as well.

fuck australia.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1G07r3gFM5rbLhbQaAV5bo5Fe0xU8yB41PwtXnsc9-qo/htmlview?pref=2&pli=1&sle=true#gid=541105606

Buildlist floating around. still undecided on what i'll be playing, myself. kinda like the idea of the southpaw reave build.

HOLY SHIT THE GAME GETS TO LOGIN SCREEN IN LIKE 2 SECONDS WITHOUT AN SSD, FUCK, it's like a normal game now!

lel, just ask for advice here, if I'm around I'll help you with tree planning.

pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAMDAN-KR4WbiuyDFSfpAtOPjLFLrhslIvTZW2wLbRmTJ8k9fRgRUL6Kf8a_l-yKa9s1uaEvytMnqX5ZwcXyHkyzpysdT7QM7BgEB-q6RnFwux8CDXw0CuGI2RM2xVfJN2Yvb4t6KPo3gyymAW-nCILHpuvi949G2Qvr7tP7hEgdFDLRqH0TbPfXXGv60kVHWpEGScy8w20WbxcviEBqrEQEqsQkquNqZOemrBCXhWA26VXWgKSQM025Harw1UlRlS4HHu-I-TfXz0mx_kkqmPqA2CQRlg==

I'm using this build someone posted in one of the old PoE threads. Maybe you guy can give me some more advice while giving me some feedback on my build(s): Skill-wise I think I'm going with some kind of curse-zombie-skeleton build.

I should probably look into totems that shit out skeletons with my build. Color-wise what should I aim for on each piece of gear as I level and grab uniques?

Skill-wise, I'm considering:
Contagion
Totem with skeletons
Zombies with all buff links
Resistance aura
Defense aura

Any help would be great.

no more "checking resources" for minutes?

also this new league looks fucking lame compared to perandus

No, or at least not for me.
Also, it doesn't have perandus packs lagging me the fuck out, so that's a big plus for me, but yeah, it's all optional content gated by silver coins, you could get a cool prophecy, or you could get a shitty one, and either have to clear it to free up space for more prophecies or blow 3 silver on sealing it into an item to free up said space.

eternal reminder

I like the perandus league since I could get my hands on some decent uniques without having a character mapping capable

Oh yeah, that dan faggot is a cunt, said James Bond being a misogynist was somehow bad, and should be rewritten, lel.

Alright then, nerdlinger.
I'm planning to use the Southpaw reave build, any experience or levelling tips to share, if possible?

There's a reason why i don't buy a single thing from the microtransaction store.

An addendum;
has anything major in the tree been changed since the last?

I kinda like the lion and skull icon tbh (the change is still bullshit).

What's with the first picture?

I want that black kitty cat though. With a good armor set, my witches would finally look like the evil bitches they're suppose to be.

That said, fuck the microtransaction prices. I'm not paying $15 for a kitty nor am I paying $50 for a cosmetic skin.

WEW

Here's what I got so far

pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAUAAASzBg4J9hDMFy8dFCftK7Y62DwFPQ9DyE8EVdZY5VugZOdmVGaeaPJyD3wOfLt99YCkgpuFe4xGlG-aO5_fogCnVa-nwGbEFcT2xq7UfOw473zwH_iT-tI=

I've got RF+totem+conc+burning, with searing bond+burning+duration, and for auras I use either purity of fire+generosity+vitality to keep my RF totem alive longer, or else Anger+Herald of Thunder

Alright, first of all, don't level with reave, use earthquake while leveling until you can get yourself a nice 1h foil or dagger, which will probably be a bino's. Also I don't think ranger is optimal if you want to dw reave with an offhand death's hand, I guess raider and pathfinder would kind of work, but assassin (shadow) or slayer (duelist) would be better.

that depends on when the last time you played was, if it was in perandus, not much, except buffs to ascendancies, it it was before that, well ascendancies got introduced.
here's the offline tree planner, by the way
github.com/EmmittJ/PoESkillTree/releases

I would really advice you to not play rf totems at all, they're just shittier shockwave totems with smaller aoes, less damage, and harder to scale.

the old orbs do sexualize women actually.
and while it is the artists vision, they ought to stick with it or not had it in the first place

It's act 3, Golden Statue mobs with glorious vag are common. I'm surprised they never removed it after the SJW takeover, but i suppose it plays into the whole "no oppressive clothes lmao" routine.

jesus christ

Who gives a fuck if it "sexualizes women", the whole game has a very gritty adult theme to it, and it somewhat symbolizes the fact that every character is an ex-prisoner. It's not innately telling players to chain up sex slaves, nor is it glorifying it.

Thanks, m8. the advice is much appreciated.

they changed the orbs because of the new act, when they change them again for act 5 it won't be because of peta asking them to remove the lion and chinks being offended by skeletons or some shit, also.

i didn't say sexualizing = bad
I just said it really does sexualize and that blizzard should've just stuck with the original or not have had it in at all if they were gonna change it anyway.

they changed the orbs because they're changed every new act, no reason to stick with them, I do wish they had been better though, lion and skull suck dick.

If you really want to level with reave just get Lakishu's Blade also Dareso's Defiance is pretty fucking awesome with this build granted if you are playing hardcore you are better off with Lightning coil

Also MFW I will never see this kind of good rng on the normal leagues

What totem should I use to make sure I shit out skeletons?

spell totem

only totem that can cast shit is spell totem

Are there any Merciless-viable builds that are non-specific enough to allow for found-gear without grinding or trading for uniques/gems?
All of the builds I see are require highly specific combinations of 10 uniques you'll never see even with a thousand hours of grinding, so I decided fuck 'em.

lel.

Playing HC.
pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAQBAJstXzmK8OlGxIKwq76nZU1gQb02Y3ALwUd-V5eE2UMxwzPawUz_Whp07U4qBS1bryPTeu8NjW8nFfb8xYd2mmpiee4O458ABqOKSn0j9rGzTZKNfRutDHMwfASxlWZRR3sUA4eNv-dU034FtdQjJP0AXujWMHEZjpsm53TdqO2DMgFtbEt4CC6yGTY9tUg6Qs96VYWdqtRCYeuly2yMhG96U2Ksdf0WvyaVYeJVS4w2idNwUioLXfLUUsv1MbDcvecPAydE0qPnAhFW-nfXdKBYdQYgfXX-uqU1DHA7tvVhsoCGtIWnJ58=
Thoughts on this? anything i should be going into specifically for levelling?

That's actually a pretty good tree, I just changed some thing that are, to my taste, better.
First of all I dropped brutal fervour, and would advice you to get endless hunger only as 8th point, since you're not grabbing aoe from the tree, the 20% from impact is actually pretty good, but it's mostly because you want instant leech with vaal pact, and brutal fervour only works with non instant leech, also dropped the block shit, block needs a huge point investment to work, you can't just half ass it, I also took the mana leech to sustain reave, and the 2 point jewel sockets, those are always worth it. Oh I took the sword crit multi too.
poeurl.com/FEf

cheers, definitely looks better.

You kinda deserve it tbh

Contagion without essence drain is fairly meh. I mean, it can still do shit and I get why you would combine it with minions, but the damage is pretty lame for it on its own even with a shitload of spell damage.

MF builds want an assload of survival because the biggest MF items usually come at the price of the stats that keep you alive.

No thanks!

I bet you believe everything you're told huh?

They're not. GGG was BSing you, and the global mods can get pretty SJWy up in PoE.

Do the characters in this game wear pants yet or are they all still in skirts?

There was a statement by GGG, I'd sooner believe them than some paranoid fucks the see SJW manipulating everything

But they are, this vid is from before a3 was released, during closed beta, maybe alpha.
And yes the chat mods are complete cucks, I've gotten muted by them several times for shitposting on global 1.

The old man doesn't wear pants.

Holy shit my fucking sides!

So how is it now? I played a long time ago and had a lot of fun with my summoner witch, tried playing it again a few months ago but gave up when I found out my whole talent tree got reset and changed

Okay, in all seriousness, are they making another act for this game? I know it'll never happen, but I would love to see a summon style that doesn't use the Undead (I could see Scion use the elements).

I think this was the spell I forgot about. It makes Contagion pretty useful. I need something to whittle the mobs down while my minions try to kill them off.

One thing I noticed on my last summon build was that bosses will destroy zombies, which is why I want to focus on skeletons (raging spirits kinda suck unless I'm doing something wrong with them). Even with talents and support gems, my zombies would get wasted (lacking minion-oriented gear didn't help me either).

What about the rest of the skills?

Act 5? Maybe next expansion, which is in around 3 months, but probably 2 leagues after that, which would be in around 9 months if there's no 1 month league in between.
There's already minion users that don't use undead, animated weapons, dominating blow (these may count as undead) and multigolem summoners (these might not be very good at the moment). Also, zombies are nigh indestructible late game, with resistances and scaling minion life in tree, raging spirits don't suck, or at least they're ok, since the ai change made them retarded. What I think you were doing wrong is scaling both your own damage and your minions', only dominating blow gets to do that, with regular summons you want to focus on minion life and damage, (or in srs and animate weapon just minion damage).

Shit gets reset every big patch when there's changes in the tree, you get all your points back though, so you can just assign them again, it gets new content consistently, so if you liked it back then you'll probably like it now, except for being a bit overwhelmed by the new stuff.

I know I get all my points back but he talent tree was completely different, there were hardly any summoning related things left. I also couldnt be bothered to make up a whole new build, that shit would take too long. I just wanted to summon and wreck shit

Hint: They didn't change the orbs when Act 3 was released.

They full of shit, user.

How's that one ballista(?) attack totem? Any good?

Why are you fags wanting to hand ggg shekels to get guild stuff when you can just grab a global chat like 333 or something.

It's workable, has a unique called Iron Commander which you might want to take a look at if you're interested in it. Also a new quiver aimed for it on this latest content update.

The funny thing is, we already had an Holla Forums guild, someone even bought a guild stash tab for it, but the guild leader never logged back in after the first week, I just hightailed it out of there when I suspected the guild owner wasn't coming back.

Alright, I'll look more into it.

is it better to go 2 wands or 1 axe 1 dagger as crit spark

i mean 1 mace 1 dagger

Okay so I made a Ranger this time

pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAIAAAHRBiMKmxn-GwEbrUkPVP5W-nfXeOt7FH11lLihIqJAp9Sooqr4r-u7473mwdjEotN-1y3YYOcK7g7vevT4-WP-uv7I

Not sure what I'm doing. I'm stacking up lots of +phys and going for evasion gear. Right now I'm levelling with the bow that does 1-75 lightning damage, plus lightning arrow+LMP and heralds.

I have death's harp, infractem, chin sol, and voltaxic rift, not sure what to do, but I have a lot of move speed and phys

It really depends on what you want and what shit you have available to you.

By your description I think you're using an old storm cloud, which does no physical damage, which is useless to scale if you're planning on eventually using a voltaxic, or some other elemental scaling bow. The projectile damage on the tree does scale your damage, but not the phys damage with bows. So if you switch to the death's harp or the infractem your damage will increase by a lot, don't use chin sol though, it's for trap and mine memes.
Also you have 0 life, this is very wrong, respec the evasion nodes with the respec points you get from quests and get life, or just get the life on your next few levels.

Thinking of getting into this. Do you have to keep clicking to kill like in diablo and stuff, because I really don't see the point to shit like that.

Feeding into that, minionmaster possible? Ideally animals, I like hippy-druid-animal-beastmaster shit thematically.

You can have zombies, skeletons, spectres, totems and one golem (more if you have a certain unique). There's also a skill that makes an enemy one of your minions if you kill him with it and another slightly less useful skill that temporarily converts one to your side. So no, nothing to do with animals.

Clicking on shit? you can press q-t, and with some builds you only have to click/press movement button and everything dies.

There's also animated weapons and animated guardian, which is made by pieces of armor and weapons and follows you around. Also some unique that summons wolves sometimes, but that's not reliable and hard to obtain.

There's also Raging Spirits and then there are abilities like Blade Vortex that circle around you and do damage to nearby enemies.

Is animated weapons even useful? I know you can craft a mod onto your gear that causes it to not consume the items you use the skill on but is it decent?

Raging Spirits counts as skellingtons and blade vortex isn't really something that would meet the definition of "minionmaster"

oh yes, see embed, also that craft is for animate guardian which as far as I know is not all that useful except for having a couple of extra auras that affect you and your minions.

So you can feed it gear with gems and it will use them?

Would love to play but got too much shit to do. Whats Prophecy about? More grind? Something interesting?

No, you can give it items with built in auras like pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Leer_Cast and
pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Dying_Breath
It is generally hard to kill if you cap its resistances but even if it does these are 1c items.

Basically the purple karui bitch gives you random quests, go "here, and these will happen", with some you can upgrade old unique items into usefulness, like this upgraded limbsplit. There are also some prophecies that affect crafting, like "the next 5 socket item you use a fusing orb on will 5link", most are filler but the interesting ones are fun.

Okay, prophecies have completely broken the rare drop rate. Not that I'm complaining, because god damn, but god damn.

stupid orb change still bothers me
bring our brave girls home

I know storm cloud doesn't do any phys damage right now, and that's fine. I'm just looking at phys options for later levels. So I suppose that I'd want to go with Death's Harp or Infractem then.

I don't want evasion? I want life instead?

use poesmoother

It's not that you don't want evasion, it's just that life is much more important, you shouldn't go out of your way for evasion clusters, and if you do go for evasion, you also want acrobatics.

I grabbed those bottom evasion groups because of Onslaught and movespeed, respectively. At the time, the evasion was just gravy.

The thing I don't like about the ranger is that she has SO MANY bow-specific damage passives (attack, crit, KotH notable, etc) that you can't really specialize into without being a glass cannon.

Every damn time.

When are there gonna be good modern-day iso-dungeon crawlers???

gitgud

Unless you are going straight for hardcore, the passive tree shouldn't really cause you that much frustration.

You can get through normal and cruel easily just winging it and not really thinking about builds or synergies.
Merciless will start to give you some problems if your tree is crap and your shit's all retarded, but you can still muddle through.

It's really just the endless map grinding post-merciless metagame that requires autismal-to-the-max builds.

and if you're melee you really that autism game on

...

Earthquake is so fucking strong and easy to play, I'm going to be disappointing when I transition into my actual build.

If only devs were not incompetent jews…

How do I stop dying in HC pls send halp a blue lava underground faggot just one-shot me with his tentacles off 1k hp 600? armor in normal kaom
ONE
FUCKING
SHOT

HE WAS BLUE
REEEEEEE

Dont fight strong faggots, just ran past them. And you need 75 alres and 2k hp.

blue as in magic or blue as in the unique rakango that appears in kaom's path?, if it's the latter just skip that thing every time, try to run past it, try to have capped fire res for kaom's dream

If you're talking about that unique super rakango just run away from that guy he murders everyone.

4 act is harder than nm1-2 acts.

unless you have good leveling gear and a lot of life on tree, you won't have 2k life at any point in normal, nor do you need that amount, to be honest.

...

I literally didn't even have time to get out of my attack animation (I was killing the last strongbox mob), tentacle just pops up and bam, dead.

How do I even get 2k ehp in normal without grinding dry lake for 20 levels? I could get maybe 1.3k, 1.5k if really pushing it.

Unless the unique now has a blue glow, it was literally just a magic one, but I didn't experience any survivability issue until now so it was probably the unique.

I did have capped fire res. I usually do daresso first because he's usually harder to beat but his level is easier, but I didn't expect to be one-fucking-shot. Feels like I'm definitely missing something.

Why are you nerds posting here? I bet you're all shitcrows lmao nerds

meant to

But I dont play anymore.

Goddamn it. Ah, whatever.

No, not really, just skip him. Generally you should have no problems avoiding him if you simply avoid any small sideareas that are next to stairs, if you are unlucky then you might get an instance where he is right in your path without it being able to tell that he spawned elsewhere.

I've never done maps before at the laboratory, and I just got my first map drop in A2 Cruel.
How do these work, specifically? Info online doesn't really go into detail.

I know I take them to the map room and then it'll give me 6 portals to enter, which basically means 6 attempts to siphon as much loot out as possible, but that's all it says.

What about map difficulty? If I'm playing on Cruel difficulty, but I take the map to the lab in Normal to use it, does that give me a Normal map? Or is the map always going to be a Cruel map because it dropped in Cruel?

Why did I even get hard

Here's the thing with evasion: you can never get evasion chance to 100%. Even with max evasion + max block + max dodge, eventually you'll get hit - just one time.
And that one single hit will fucking end you, because you stacked avoidance without mitigation.

As far as I can tell, Evasion is the only defense type that you absolutely must run in hybrid with Armor or ES if you want to survive.

I've realized this game is a thousand times more fun with people, but if I want the skill point from killing all the bandits (they suck), do I need to kill them before I join a multiplayer game?

You fight anybody on your team who chooses a different option to the death, right there on the spot.
Best to just do that solo, yeah.

RIP Deadeye Scion

It was fun while it lasted.

And so I learned about ascendancy classes.

So far it is awesome for sole reason I can level with firestorm, which is easily one of more enjoyable skills in game. My only worry is the chance of me staying with it instead of going flicker are too high.

More stuff to play around, less trading.
Let it be broken.

Just copy first build you find to not worry about you wasting your skills and go and play it.
You can even just look around the tree and decide where to go on the go and be absolutely fine with build you will end up with.
For good 100h I had no idea how half of the tree looked like because I only played Templar or Witch.

The problem I have with copying any builds, is that they all seem to require at least one unique to actually work, so unless you get that one in a million drop, you're basically building a delorean without a flux capacitor.

I only play found-gear, so trading is off-limits, and I find it next to impossible to find builds focused on merciless/high maps viability with purely found gear.
It really makes me wish PoE had a cube and runes, so I could craft most of the useful uniques myself.

Vendor recipes are PoE's form of Horadric Cube.

pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Vendor_recipe_system

...

I get that, but there's only a couple of uniques that can be vendor-crafted, and most of those require other uniques as part of the recipe.

I'm saying I'd like to see dozens if not most of the uniques in the game able to be crafted by vendoring various combinations of rare equipment and skill gems.

You can purchase uniques by grinding Masters up to a really high level.

By default, you can summon 3 zombies, 4 skeletons, 1 spectre, 1 golem, 1 animated guardian, 50 raging spirits, and "unlimited" animated weapons.

After leveling up, Zombies typically have a lot of life and physical damage with a slow attack speed. They are a permanent minion that persists through areas, and will only disappear when they die or you log out. You can raise the zombie cap from 3 to 8 through the skill tree alone, not including gear. Zombies can be somewhat controlled, as they will always focus on an area you are focusing at - if you swing a weapon or cast a spell, they will move toward and target everything where you clicked. Otherwise, they will just follow you.

Skeletons are slow, temporary minions that summon in pairs. They do less damage and have less health than zombies. You can get 4 skeletons at a time using a low level version of the skill, and it raises to 6 by level 20. You can unlock an extra 6 skeletons on the tree alone. Vaal Summon Skeletons is a special skill that has to be charged before using, but summons actual dozens of skeletons at a time, including archers, mages, and a general. There is a jewel that lets you summon skeleton mages normally, as well. Skeletons do not follow you, and acquire targets and attack on their own decisions.

Spectres are ghosts of enemies that you can revive, using their skills and stats. Low level spectres have worse stats than the enemy you revived, but at higher levels, spectres are significantly stronger than other minions when it comes to killing monsters quickly. You can only have 1 spectre at a time, but you can lift it to 2 on the skill tree, or equip gear that also raises your limit. They control similarly to zombies, depending on the monster you turned into a spectre.

Golems are a single minion that you can only own one of without special gear (or being an elementalist). They grant a buff to the player depending on the type of golem. Flame golems grant damage, ice golems grant crit, stone golems grant life regen, and chaos golems grant damage reduction. Golems have multiple abilities they will cycle through, depending on the golem.

Animated Guardians are a minion that you can only ever have one of, no exception. You equip the guardian with gear by casting the summon spell on any equipment laying on the ground. The guardian gains all stats from the equipment you put on him, including any bonuses from unique equipment. The downside is that if the guardian dies, all of the gear he was equipped with is permanently destroyed. Because of this, they're not a common minion. Other than equipment, they're similar to a zombie.

Animated weapons are weapons on the ground that you animate to fight for you for a short duration. Doing so destroys the weapon and gives you a temporary minion. The only real cap to how many you can summon is how many weapons you have on the ground.

Raging Spirits are basically fireballs given life. They're flaming skulls that repeatedly ram into nearby enemies, dealing both physical and fire damage. Enemies ignore them, as they are flying creatures, so don't expect them to tank anything for you. They only last a very short 5 second duration by default, but you can have up to 50 of them if you have a clever way of spamming them.

For 8 chaos orbs, you can enchant a body armor to have it drop its gear on death. I believe that you wear the armor yourself.

Also, Witches have an ascendancy class that lets them have two golems at a time (but that's for elemental damage, not summoning)

Oh shit, I had no idea about that.
I'm hoping you mean 10 or something. I have most of them at 4 now, almost 5, and their XP bars are already crawling.

The big skill chart is an illusion.
Half your points are going into health and you know it.

Why aren't you playing as a summoner, Holla Forums?

I enjoy ridiculous combinations of multiple projectiles and spell echo. If the entire screen isn't exploding with multi-layered explosions of color and death, I'm not truly having fun.

More like 75%, honestly.

Nah, only half. Half of what remains is spent pathing to the health clusters.

Oh, of course. Correct you are.

Good writeup there. Might add, that raging spirits actually get in the way of projectiles. Comfy when shavy cant lightningball you like at all.

The guys making buildguides always want to make something special but you can fare pretty well without them, just stick to the basics.

Just got this game, never played an arpg before. Should I be doing the prophecy league or the standard one? How much of this trash loot should I be collecting? This skill tree is fucking ridiculous .

Prophecy because you have nothing to gain from playing the same thing but with less features. Also don't go with hardcore just yet unless you want to be robbed of the joy of playing standard.
At the start of a league I generally just collect whatever I find and sell it to get enough scrolls of wisdom for identifying/buying items but you should lean towards collecting and vendoring blue and yellow gear that you aren't going to use. You won't really NEED to collect trash loot but the inventory space you aren't using can always be more useful with shit you are going to sell.
You aren't really going to have too many difficult choices because you simply can't pick and choose whatever you want, you start from a certain area in the tree based on your class and then just go point-by-point to where you want to be at the end.

Do whatever you like, you will faill anyways so just have fun while it lasts.

Wrong, or at least partially, yes, you will need another layer of defenses, but that goes for every defense type, if you walk around with only lots of armor you'll eventually get oneshot too, because armor has diminishing returns on larger hits, with armor you need endurance charges, arctic armor, chaos golem, stuff like that, because armor alone will not save you from a large physical crit attack, actually evasion alone has a better chance at that because crits are rolled again against evasion. You will probably need a basalt flask with both, and going melee + evasion is generally a bad idea, since you get attacked more often.