POE Passive System

I just felt I needed to go more in depth with the passive system. It's very in depth deep and daunting if you take it all in. But once you get used to it and try it out here

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree

You soon understand just how much fun it is. For starters you can easily tread inside of your classes area of skills. Or you can venture out into the other classes and make something totally unique and fun.

Some ideas maybe bad ideas but that's the beauty of growing and learning everything you need to do.

The passive system is far less complex that it appears should be the first bit of advice.

They make it seem epic stating over 1000 skills.  Its a handfull of actual game changing passives and about 950 minor stat boosts.  With this in mind, your first goal with the passive system is to seek out the major skills you want.  Theres an option on the planner for the shortest route, and it will connect the dots for you.  Let it do this, see whats near.  See what will aid you most.

The forums are a hot mess with builds, with most asking for advice on their builds a few, if any giving real pointers. So its going to be a lot of rerolling down the road, as respecs allow for small changes.

These small changes do help, and its best advised to wait on using them untill your stuck in game.

Range is far better right now in terms of efficiancy and gameplay overall.  Youll notice this when you roll a new range character and a melee just how tedious melee is compared, and how difficult.  Not to say down the road that melee doesnt preform better, its just much more difficult.

Most will be a witch magic caster with minions, or an elemental damage bow, unfortunately.  Now the skill system does give you some options as to where you start these builds, what character you choose, and slight variations on each of the two builds.  More often your choice will come down to "do i add more life, get some phyical damage, try to hit that next elemental damage boost, or go for some evade"

Also, the active skill system is a bit rough.  You might go a large portion of the game just looking for a skill gem you need to drop.  I know i went about 50 levels without ever getting lightning shot, the foundation of my build, and early on in game dont expect people to be bartering as a lot will be hording for rerolls and alts (though there will be some bartering).  Havent decided if i like this all yet.  It was incredibly irritating to have more than one skill gems that were the foundation of my build never drop and never an option for reward.  In fact now that i think about it, i only had a few really usefull active skills that i used, and a ton of the same 5-8 skill gems everyone else already had..

I might sound a bit nagative with this, but its very obvious theres some major balance issues in the game, somewhat defeating the possibilities created with this passive system.  Hopefully they get addressed, however, dont be intimidated by the passive system sounding overly complex, or fear youll be rerolling too much...just find a good magic casting with minions build, or elemental bow build, tweak it to how you play and run with it...and hope they make some other options not only more viable, but more entertaining to play.

They do need to add better routes for getting specific skill gems you need.

I rolled the standard summoner witch, I opted to not get the skelly gem when you can select it as a reward (I wasn't going to be using skelly for a while)... Ended up going 30 some levels and never seeing it drop!