This guide provides tips to help make the campaign smoother and faster. We’ll break these down into different categories to keep relevant issues together.
General Campaign Tips
Unlike Path of Exile 1, don’t stress over resistance too heavily. Playing carefully can go a long way, and while there are a few speed bumps along the way, the game is balanced around these not being capped in the early acts. Try to get them capped or as close as possible heading into Acts 3 and 4, though.
Another reason we say this is that Movement Speed is a stronger defense in POE2. Wait, Defense? With a lot of attacks either locking enemies in place or being a fairly slow projectile, Movement Speed helps to avoid a lot of incoming damage.
In addition to this, Movement Speed is crucial to getting through the campaign faster. With the addition of sprinting, as long as we’re not catching stray projectiles with our face, we can speed through many zones with little hassle. Any movement speed we get is also added to our Sprint Speed, making us significantly faster.
Nothing beats dedicated practice. It sounds ridiculous to practice the campaign, but if we’re looking to get into the endgame ASAP after a league launch, it goes a long way.
We don’t need to go to the extent of memorizing layouts, but having a plan to follow from the start is a good thing. This could be a starter build, or just simply pre-planning what to get and when to get through the campaign
Upgrading Gear
If gear is still holding us back, consider hanging out in a zone and farming for upgrades and levels before continuing. While this will slow our overall progress, it will make future parts of our journey easier.
With Update 0.3.0’s changes to the pool of available currency, it’s much easier to find important currencies for both crafting and trading. This makes crafting and trading very viable avenues for progression.
Just keep in mind that the later into a league (time from the launch of the league) that we start, the cheaper it will often be to buy great rare items. Meanwhile, crafting is always best done later into the game (campaign and endgame progression) when stronger modifiers are available.
Our Weapon is the most important piece of gear to constantly update as we progress. Without enough damage, everything will go by much more slowly. All of our Path of Exile 2 Builds detail the most important affixes to go after. Check out our Path of Exile 2 Category for all of these builds.
For all gear, weapons included, Check Vendors for upgrades regularly. Vendors will change out their stock every level or so, so checking their items often can help. Most Acts also contain one-off Vendors that offer a lot of
The Vendors even have a search function that supports Regular Expressions, or regex for short. This powerful tool can help us quickly find useful items in vendors.
Below are some Examples to help with early progression. Include the quotation marks when copying these. If you get familiar with this system, regardless of your actual familiarity with Regex, it can make checking vendors so much faster and easier.
| Item | Regex |
|---|---|
| Weapon with Increased Damage AND Level of Skills | “inc.+dam””to lev” |
| Movement Speed Boots | “(10|15)% i.+mov” |
| Life and Resistance Armours | “resi””m.+life” |
If leveling a second character, consider using Low-level Unique Items. We have a list that contains several of the Best Leveling Uniques, which can greatly speed up the process.
Sidequests
Several optional rewards can be worth going out of the way for that don’t directly contribute to our available Skill Points or base values. These could be bonus pieces of gear to help fill resistances or currencies we can use to craft upgrades to our gear.
We put extra emphasis on our first character for these, as while some offer great rewards like currency, which can help kickstart a character on league start, not all of them will be worth grabbing on a second time through the campaign, as we likely have decent gear to level with leftover from our first character.
Most notable among these are guaranteed Skill and Support Gems. These can offset any bad luck we get with drops or give us a boost in DPS just before a boss, or play with our setup more to try other options.
There are plenty of great skill combinations out there, with many skills being able to provide utility to others.
Leveling Skills
While we can level with any skill we want, some skills are very powerful, either on their own or in combination with other skills. Each Class more or less has its own set of skills that work very well to help early game progress before we get into building around our skill proper.
If we can manage to get the extra Attributes, we can also leverage the fact that POE 2 doesn’t lock a class to any given set of skills. So any build that does Elemental Damage can make use of Frost Bomb for the Exposure it applies.
We can fit in skills with a high Shock Chance, like those from the Ranger, for another damage bonus. Or make use of the Warrior’s Leap Slam or Shield Charge for some extra mobility.
We can make this even easier with the use of Weapon Set Passive Points, which allow us to split some of our points between two weapon sets.
This enables us to pick up the attributes for skills that may not use our specific stat requirements to help our character, as detailed above.
For example, we could allocate some Strength and equip a Shield on our second weapon set just to use Shield Charge.
