There are 12 Classes in Path of Exile 2, including The Assassin, Druid, Gladiator, Warrior, Sorceress, Ranger, Monk, Mercenary, Witch, Huntress, Marauder, and Templar. GGG will launch 6 Classes of these for exiles to experience, including The Monk, Warrior, Ranger, Mercenary, Witch, and Sorceress. Now, I will show you the beginner guide to the six classes.
The Monk
The Monk is a fast and furious melee fighter. He dashes in and out of combat and has mechanics that involve building up and keeping momentum. Like all classes in PoE 2, you will want to use various skills to mix and match different combos.
To get new Skills, you will first need to find Skill Gems. Using a skill gem will open the Gemcutting menu, which shows all the active skills available in PoE 2. You can choose an existing skill to level up or engrave a new one. Since this is a level 7 Skill Gem, even if you pick a new skill, it will immediately be level 7, so there is no harm in trying something new.
The Monk primarily uses the Quarterstaff. There are three schools of martial arts: Lightning, Ice, and Wind, but don't think you have to stick to just one. The best combos are going to involve mixing elements of all three.
Let's try Killing Palm. Like many Monk skills, this can be used to take advantage of a specific situation quickly. If an enemy is on low life, we can use Killing Palm to dash to them and kill them instantly. This will provide a power charge. Then, we can use a different skill to consume that power charge for a much more devastating attack.
The Monk also has powerful combo skills. Tempest Bell, for example, is a skill that places a giant resonating bell. Hitting the bell causes it to ring, dealing damage to all enemies around it. You can also do things like freeze or shock the bell, which will add elemental damage to the strikes.
The Monk also has a variety of abilities to empower his staff. If an enemy is close to being stunned, you can use Staggering Palm to punch them down. After that, any attack you do will shoot out wind projectiles.
There are 21 active skills for Quarterstaves, so this scratches the surface of your options. By endgame, you will be dashing from pack to pack, spewing projectiles, and obliterating enemies' screens with huge combo attacks.
The Warrior
If you like a style of melee that is a little slower but hits much harder, then the Warrior is for you. He pounds the ground with big, chunky attacks and can shrug off the hits of smaller enemies with large amounts of armour. Even though mace slams are slow, you never lose control. Longer attacks can be retargeted as you go, and if you do find yourself committed to a long attack, you can dodge roll out of it at any time.
Among the skill options for maces, you will find a variety of slams, fire attacks, warcries, and shield skills. Here I'm going to slam the ground, rending it apart with lines of fire. Any slam skill will then cause these fissures to erupt with lava. I can even run through them with a skill like Stampede to do a huge amount of damage.
The Warrior can also use Warcries, which can empower your next skill. A seismic cry, for example, will double any slams from your next attack. The Stampede counts as a slam, so that I can double that for even more craziness.
If you want to go a little faster and be a little more defensive, equip a shield. In PoE 2, you can raise your shield at any time to block all damage from the front, even spells. While holding up your shield, your stun meter will build up as you take damage. So be careful. If it reaches 100%, your stance will break, and you will be vulnerable.
Some enemies also have unblockable attacks, as indicated by this red flash. If you see one of these coming, make sure you dodge out of the way.
Using a shield also gives you access to shield skills like shield charge, which allows you to Charge toward enemies and stun them. While charging, you are also blocking the whole time, so you have full damage immunity from the front.
The Warrior also has access to totems. Some totems have built-in abilities, like the shockwave totem, which can be used to stun nearby enemies and trigger aftershocks like those from Earthquake. But you can also get Ancestral Warrior totems, which allow you to use any other slam skill in your repertoire. This is a meta-skill, meaning it's a skill you can put other skills into. I can take a Slam like Sunder and socket it into my Ancestral Warrior totem. Now, when I summon him, he will sit there and slam the monsters from a distance.
There are 20 active skills for Maces, so there is a lot more to try out. By endgame, you will be dropping hammers from the sky, leaping fearlessly into combat, and separating the earth you stand on.
The Ranger
The Ranger is primarily about the bow, but we wanted to ensure that she also feels agile. In PoE 2, you can shoot while moving. Combined with all the skills the Ranger has that allow you to jump around, you will have a lot of mobility in combat.
Bow skills have a variety of Lightning, Poison, Ice, and Physical attacks. Lightning attacks bounce around between targets. You can also stick lightning arrows in the ground, which explode when hit by the bounces, or electrocute enemies to take them out of combat.
Ice attacks allow you to slow and freeze enemies to keep them away from you. Using poison, you cannot only slowly damage your enemies from afar but also grow some interesting plants.
With 21 bow skills and all Ranger's mobility and combo tools, you can take advantage of every situation. By endgame, you will be creating hundreds of arrows, be they falling from the sky, bouncing around between enemies, or spraying out from Tornados.
You might have noticed in the bottom left of the screen that the flask slots look a little different. In PoE 2, you have one dedicated life flask slot and one mana flask slot. Flasks gain charges as you kill enemies and typically allow you to heal 6 or 7 times if they are full. But that's not the only thing you can use charges for. Charms are a new item type that will automatically defend you from various debuffs or damage types. Have trouble with getting frozen? Equip a Thawing charm.
When fully charged, it will make you immune to freeze for 3 seconds if you get frozen. To recharge them, just kill more monsters. You can gain more slots for charms by upgrading your belt.
The Mercenary
The Mercenary wields a crossbow that can be loaded with different ammo types, offering versatility, power, and mobility. All classes in Path of Exile 2 can be controlled with WASD, which makes this class play exactly like a shooter. For the crossbow, you will find skills that work like Shotguns, Sniper Rifles, Assault Rifles, and even Grenade Launchers. Not only that but there is a wide variety of more interesting elemental ammos, too. It's very fast to switch between ammo types so long as you already have them loaded, which makes the Mercenary able to combo abilities together to devastating effect.
Use Glacial Bolt to create walls of ice to separate enemies, then switch to fragmentation rounds to explode the ice, dealing massive AoE damage. If I come across an armoured enemy, I could use Armour Piercing rounds to break their armour, and then High Velocity rounds to take them down. Or perhaps I could fire a gas grenade to poison enemies before detonating the cloud with an Explosive Shot for massive damage.
If you want to call in some suppressing fire, you can summon Artillery Ballistas. These have a minimum range, so you will want to prepare your position carefully before moving in.
There are 22 active skills for crossbows. By endgame, you will be calling destruction down from the sky as you litter the battlefield with grenades and pepper your enemies with your automatic shotgun.
The Witch
If you are looking to take a back seat and let your minions do the work, then the Witch should be your choice. She can call forth hordes of undead monsters to fight for her while casting powerful chaos spells that debilitate her enemies. Occult skills are some of the most varied in the game, with skeletons, noxious spells, specialty minions, curses, and sacrificial magic.
Before we talk about minions, we will talk about a new resource in Path of Exile 2 called Spirit. This is a Spirit Gem, which allows you to pick from a range of persistent skills. All classes have a variety of these skills which can add some very interesting effects, like arctic armour, which does cold damage to enemies that hit you, or Raging Spirits, which summons fiery skulls each time you cast a fire spell.
For the Witch, though, we will want to use our Spirit to create permanent minions. When they die, these minions will be revived automatically, so you don't have to worry about resummoning all the time.
I'm using the skill screen to allocate which minions I would like in my horde. You can see the Spirit cost of each one. Skeletal Warriors are cheap but weak. It is useful for tanking damage and distracting enemies. But I want more heavy hitters in my army, so I'm going to unsummon some warriors and instead add Skeletal Arsonists.
Permanent minions come with special active abilities called command skills. You can order these guys to detonate your own minions for even more damage and area of effect. If you want a bigger army, you'll need a Sceptre. This new weapon type is imbued with even more Spirit, allowing you to summon even more friends. And if you want an even bigger army than that, you can take advantage of corpses to summon true hordes of minions.
But what can a Witch do while her army is at work? She has a range of chaos spells to spread disease amongst your enemies or bone skills to impale them. Or, you could curse them to make them weaker so your horde can take them down.
There are 25 active Occult skills. By the endgame, you will be the leader of a fearsome army of the dead, consuming everything in its path.
The Sorceress
The Sorceress bends the elements to her will, using them to unleash devastation on her foes. This classic Spellcaster weaves a flurry of elemental magic from afar.
The Elemental Skills have everything you might expect and more. Fireballs, icy explosions, lightning storms, you get the idea. Each spell is unique and has many different ways to build and combo with others, even between different elements. For example, Flame Wall conjures a burning line that damages enemies and empowers all projectiles that pass through it. If you place a wall and fire lightning sparks through it, they will gain extra fire damage.
It's a good idea to take advantage of the ability to swap weapons when you use certain skills automatically. Having a special staff with bonuses to fire skills and another with bonuses to lightning skills can really power up a combo like this.
The Sorceress can also take advantage of powerful trigger-gems. For example, you could grab the Cast on Ignite gem and use it with Firestorm. A counter will go up in the top left corner as you ignite enemies. When it's full, a firestorm will automatically cast at the enemy that was ignited.
There are 25 active Elemental Skills. By endgame, you will be firing off projectiles left and right as you rain down elemental storms on your foes.
Conclusion
There's one more important thing to mention about skills. Even though we talk about them as belonging to each class, there are no restrictions in reality. You can use all these skills in any class, so long as you have the attributes. For example, a poison ranger might want to try using Occult curses to increase her poison damage. Or a monk might want to trigger elemental ice walls with his glacial cascade combo. The possibilities for cross-class combos are practically unlimited.
