POE Currency will be celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. For me, even with Diablo 4 just a few months away, it reigns supreme among the many contenders to the crown Diablo 2 crafted—the best action RPG on the market if you’re looking for hordes of isometric monsters and loot explosions.

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However, despite clocking a truly alarming number of hours on it, I rarely recommend it to people. It’s dense and complicated, and death can come quickly and repeatedly. With 10 years of challenge leagues leaving indelible footprints of monsters, items, and mechanics, just getting started can be… a lot.

Hopefully, this will help. This guide will take you through everything you need to know to get yourself smoothly to PoE’s endgame. For many, the Atlas of Worlds is what separates Path of Exile from its competitors—a sprawling, labyrinthine system of randomly generated levels that all build on one another in a glorious cacophony. Let’s get started.

(Image credit: Grinding Gear)First steps and picking a build Every three months or so, Grinding Gear Games releases a new patch, and with it, a new challenge league. All existing characters are moved to legacy servers called Standard, and everyone starts fresh with nothing. When that happens, the internet gets lit up with every PoE content creator and their cute dog putting out guides for league starter builds, and this is where I recommend new players start.

League starter builds generally are focused around two things—the ability to clear content reliably into the endgame, and the ability to do so with few resources. At the start of the league, the currency will be scarce. Items will be expensive, and some stuff won’t be available. I could recommend a build to you now, like Toxic Rain Trickster or Righteous Fire Inquisitor, but sometimes a patch will send a build screaming into the stone age, so it’s best to find the new tech.

To make parsing your build a little easier, I suggest downloading Path of Building. It’s an incredible utility that acts as a kind of talent calculator on steroids, with the ability to simulate your entire build offline. With it, you can tweak your skill gems, test new pieces of gear, and a million other things (without spending your precious currency to respec). Good league starter build guides will have a paste bin link where you can load the whole build into the program and use it as a roadmap.

You’ll also want a loot filter. It doesn’t take long before the bazillions of items that drop in PoE become overwhelming, but a loot filter can help tremendously. By hiding most of the useless chaff, it can help you zero in on the useful stuff and save you a bunch of time. I recommend syncing your account with FilterBlade, which takes a lot of the busywork out of the equation.

Finally, let’s talk a bit about microtransactions. Path of Exile is free to play, but if you want to spend any serious time in Oriath, you’ll want a few basic things from the online shop. At the very least you should get yourself a currency stash tab and a couple of premium tabs. These will help you organize all the little bits and bobs you pick up along your journey and keep the dozens of different currency items you pick up from cluttering up your stash. Premium tabs can also be made public,’ which is required to list your items for sale, which will be important later on. As you get toward the endgame consider a map tab and a fragment tab, all of which can be purchased for about $30 (less if you take advantage of the sale they put on around each league start). These things aren’t technically required but will make inventory management substantially less cumbersome.