Tips for Improving Melee Experience for POE 3.25 league.

Path of Exile 3.25: Constantly upgrade gear to keep up with damage output in Path of Exile's melee builds, essential for improved gameplay.

### 20 Tips for Improving Your Path of Exile Melee Experience
* ⚔️  Continually upgrade your gear to keep up with **damage output requirements** for melee builds.
* ⚔️  Use **Smite**, **Ancestral Call**, and **Ruthless** as early gem combinations for **quick clear** in Act One.
* 🛡️  Prioritize **Blood and Sand, Precision, and Clarity** for early resistances, accuracy, and mana sustain.
* 🦾  Incorporate **Leap Slam** early on for **faster traversal through terrain**.
* 🎯  Stack up accuracy, as it's crucial for melee builds, unless using **Resolute Technique**.
* 🛡️  Consider adding **fortification to your build** for extra defense.
* 🚩  Include **War Banner for damage buffs** and **Mark on Hit for various benefits against rare/unique enemies**.
* 🔮  Utilize Automation Support for **Blood Rage sustain** and **easy frenzy charge generation**.
* 🔋  Use **Arrogance Gem** and **Syndicate craft** to improve **early mana sustain**.
* 🔋  Optimize your passive tree for **mana sustain**, including Syndicate crafts and specific nodes.
* 🛡️  Focus on building a strong defensive setup with specific items and **chaos resistance**.
* 🚀  Don't forget to optimize your flasks for **additional damage** or **survivability**.
* 🧊  Consider using Brittle for **increased critical strike chance** against enemies.
* 🎯  Utilize Focus for various buffs, such as **attack speed** or **increased damage**.
* ⚡️  Use **Smite as an aura skill** for **added lightning damage** and **shock chance**.
* 🛡️  Address **stun locking issues** with Pantheon powers or **Unwavering Stance** on the passive tree.
* 🎮  Remember to have fun and play the **melee skill that suits your playstyle**, despite meta recommendations.

Welcome back, you filthy Exiles. So we're coming up to the league start, and people are cooking their own builds. I thought I would give you guys some tips on how I cook my PO. So obviously the last few nights I've been basically putting together some pretty wild PS. It's very lucrative now because of all the Buffs and the changes to the game. A lot of the melee skills will work, um, or at least on paper will work. But if you are cooking a build, or if you're just sort of, uh, figuring out how to get melee to work, and it doesn't feel good throughout the campaign when you do start on League start, I've got some tips that you can use to actually be able to get yourself out of your hole that you might find yourself in if you're starting to really struggle really badly and the build's not feeling good. There's always things that you can do to course correct early on and get different skills to work and or merely to just sort of pump in the right direction.

anyway, let's get into 20 tips that you can use to be able to improve your melee experience. When you play a melee build, okay, so the first thing to remember is as you're playing through the campaign, one thing a lot of people do is they don't continually upgrade their gear. You need to constantly upgrade your gear. Whether it's shield crush, you need a better shield. Whether it's like lightning strike, you need a better claw or a better one-handed weapon. If you don't continually upgrade your gear, your character is going to bottom out, and you're not going to keep up with the damage output that you need. The same applies, for example, slam builds, right? Get a better axe, move to V axe, move to something fles Ripper axe later on. If you're not upgrading these things, your character is going to feel bad. Melee is very tied to the weapon that you're using or the gear that procs up your damage, unlike spells that scale a little differently. M does

really require itemization to be on point. Okay, so the second thing I do when I play melee is void of popular belief. Smite, Ancestral Call, and Ruthless as in the support gems are probably one of the best early combinations to run for early quick clear in Act One. It's basically how I start all my melee builds, in particular on the Juggernaut. You do need to complete Tidal Island to get access to Ancestral Call, so some guides might call for you to skip that component. But if you want to have a clean run, this will get you to like Act Three pretty cleanly. And you just need to keep scaling up your weapons. You can actually run a sword and board combo when you do this, so you can be a bit more defensive earlier on with this type of early game setup. I have tried things like Ground Slam and whatnot. I did find Smite was significantly better early on. Okay, so early RS to take usually when I play melee. Blood and Sand's fantastic. Precision is excellent. The reason why

Precision is really good, accuracy in particular, which we'll talk about very shortly, and clarity. Surprisingly, is really good. Now, if you are running a LIF tap setup, vitality from Level one's also really useful as well. Okay, so as far as if you're starting to die from Elemental damage, damage in particular, from Act 2 and moving into like Act 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, res capping is one of the most important things that you can also do. So when you get to things like the brine King, that tends to be a bit of a pain in the butt if your lightning and your cold caps are not at least progressing. So always look to try and add as much Elemental resistance into your character as you can. One thing I like to do is run early Elemental Rings like your sapphire rings or your ruby rings. This will significantly push your element resistances up, especially on a League start scenario without having to like try and put in any WID or whack GE wacky.

gear they're going to have built-in resistances of about 30% at the high point, which is pretty useful for early, uh, early game characters to get your resistances up, and that'll stop your death a hell of a lot more, especially by about act six when you have to take on like Abarath and things like that. You want a decent amount of fire R; otherwise, you're going to have a bad and very uncomfortable time. Okay, the next one's one that I always forget to do: leap slam, and if you can afford it, attack speed support, and also life tap early on for your setup. This is way better than running things like Shield charge and whatnot. The reason why I don't like Shield charge or even like, well, what was it, the knife skill whirling blades, is because you can't go over walls with Shield charge or whirling blades, uh, but with things like Dash or with Leap slam, you can, which means it's going to be a lot quicker to get through things like act two where you have to go and find.

the encampments, or any other part of the campaign, it's going to be a lot quicker to actually Traverse topographic to domain or terrain. Sorry, um, so I would recommend getting Leaf slam early on if you can. Okay, so for the next one, it's imperative that you stack up accuracy on melee builds. And let me give you a really simple example. This is my shield crush tree. So undeniable gives you an absolutely insane amount of accuracy right on The Jug. So, all right, now I've got a chance to hit at about 95%, right, which isn't ideal. We would spec this up and fix this in the build. Anyway, we use a replica dream feather, we get accuracy from that, so that fixes this problem. However, if I wasn't to take undeniable right for any particular reason, and I left it out of the build, we would see the DPS go from 248 to 143 with a chance to hit of 67%. This same problem applies to almost every melee build. So, if you are cooking your build and you haven't actually got

accuracy in your build basically look for accuracy easy nodes here getting things like Eagle Eye. This early versatility node here is really useful as well especially when you're first leveling up. That's why you'll notice in all my builds, I pretty much take it in every build. It's 15% Global accuracy which may not seem like a lot but it's a huge amount. You can get accuracy on your rings. I think it's a prefix and you can also get accuracy on your weapons, things like that. But if you haven't got accuracy in your build, make sure you aim to get accuracy in your build. It's a significant attribute to doing a lot of damage. The same applies to slam skills, same applies to everything. The only exception to this rule is where you're running Resolute technique, which you're more so going to do with things like, for example, bleed builds. You're going to run Resolute technique. The downside to this is you're not going to be playing a crit build if you are.

playing crit build you don't want to run Resolute technique. Other things that you can get is like HOSA day, which is a shield that means uh that has an attribute, which means that you cannot enemies cannot evade your attacks. Uh, if you are playing things like face breaker, yeah, I also use this on my face Breer builds. So, for example, if I was to look at a build that we were looking at the other day, which is my face breaker Max block, right. So the liosa day is this Shield here, right. So basically gives you uh your hits can't be evaded. The other thing that you can also do is once you get into The Syndicate encounters, you can get this craft and you can put it on your weapons as well. So that's basically the next Point accuracy or hits cannot be evaded is almost the most important thing that you can get when scaling up your damage in melee builds. Okay. So the next thing to keep in mind when playing melee is if you can get fortification into your

build even better. So, fortification provides a pretty good decent buff to your character. There's a few ways to get it. There is a set of gloves that gives you fortification, which they haven't updated on the PO Wiki yet. You can use the fortify support gem. You can use, well, you can get increased fortification from the Sor mask, different items in the game such as Advancing Fortress and Willow gift. Actually, Celestial Embrace are the gloves I was talking about. Or King maker. You could run an AG on your build, basically buff the AG up and have it basically giving you free fortify and C perseverance generally is used on things like Champions with hybrid evasion and armor defenses. But what I'm getting at is fortify is really useful. Another couple of ways you can get fortifi, well, you can get it on the tree itself. So, if you're in PO, for example, you can get it on specific nodes. So, if we were to find fortification node, which is steadfast, you can get it on the Mastery, which means M hits fortify.

the other way you can also get it would be uh if you corrupted your weapon. For example, and things like replica dream feather or other uniques have an implicit corrupt that says basically fortify on hit chance to fortify on hit and whatever that percentage is. There is another way to get it as well, and it's probably going to be expensive, but you could also get tahama warrior tattoos, and you could get a 5% chance of fortify if you're running a build that can have a chance to stun, which slam builds could probably do. So this would be a really easy way to get Fortify into your slam builds if I was going to be inclined to play a slam build this league. Okay, so the next thing is consider adding War Banner into your build moving forward. So basically, these are the new totems, and you place War banners down right. So you notice the damage drop if I take away the war Banner. It provides a significant buff. The other thing in your PO you would have War Banner is planted if you

have War Banner in your build and War Banner Valor. However, this works. We had a discussion about it on stream. Basically, if we set it to one, does absolutely minimal. But we're going to have a chance to basically have up to 50 Valor. What you'll see in a lot of builds right now is people just going no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, reoccurring, because apparently that math just breaks it or whatever. But you have the effect or whatever. Anyway, that's also something to look out for in builds where they might be trying to mislead the DPS. But that being said, it's basically the new totems of the game. So if you're dropping back in DPS, you need a bit of a buff. War Banner might be something that you need to add into your build as an active skill to drop on the ground when you're about to smash away at an enemy with your hammer or your gloves. Okay, so the next thing to also include in your builds is Mark on hits. So the way that Mark on hit works is

it's when you verse like rare packs or unique bosses. For example, so it procs Mark on hit with slam builds, all merely everything. They all proc mark on hit. There's a few that won't though. I can't remember those of the top of my head, but things like splitting seal, I'm pretty sure do as well. So basically, mark on hit in this case. If it's a crit-based build, you'll have assassins Mark. You might have poaches Mark, snipers Mark for things that, um, have, uh, projectiles. And then basically, I run it with Mark on hit, so it automates. You don't need to think about it. And if you got enough regeneration or Lee, you just run it on on a basic life tap setup, and you shouldn't notice chunk your health, uh, too badly when you're playing. If you got enough, uh, Leal life reg generation, it's not noticeable at all, but it's a great way to get your DPS up a little bit because it's just a buff that's there. It's like a free buff, almost a free buff.

that just goes off without you having to think about it in your builds. But if you're getting stuck and your DPS is a little low, Mark on hits are also really good at things like, in this case, power charge generation. Warlords Mark is good for rage generation as well, something to consider for your melee builds. Okay, so Automation Support is really useful for a couple of things, but it's also really useful for Blood Rage. So, if you haven't got it set up in your Blood Rage, you can use it to automatically proc Blood Rage. But it's really annoying constantly keeps going off because this is an instant cast skill. And this will give you attack speed, it will have a bit of Life burn, but it'll also give you the ability to easily generate frenzy charges without having to think about it too much. You could also couple this with phase run and you'd have a really fast character running through maps and attacking really quickly, but exceptionally useful on melee builds as it stands. Okay, so this next one assist

with Mana problems. So, if you're noticing early on that you've got Mana problems, you can get to act three when you can get into the library and farm Socia. And basically, you can get the arrogance Gem. And the reason why this is really important is because it increases your Oro effect by 17%. And you append this with the clarity gem. So then you reserve a little bit of hot life, just a touch of life. And this basically gives you the ability to juice your Mana pool up really quickly and regenerate Mana at a pretty elevated rate. And in a lot of instances, this can fix a lot of your problems with early Mana sustain until you can put in better Solutions, which we'll talk about in the next few steps of this video. The one thing to remember is make sure that when you do this, arrogance is not attached or linked into any other aors. Otherwise, it will Reserve Life and it won't be workable. So usually what you want to have, what you want to do is break the links in the item so you

have like a two-link and a two-link setup like in this Helm, for example, and then basically have Clarity and arrogance linked. And this solves a lot of problems in builds. If you're really struggling to get your Mana sustain working, it you just regenerate it really quickly until such time you can fix your pooling problem. Okay, Mana sustain tip number two, uh, Syn Syndicate craft non-channeling skills have -7 Mana cost, uh, in total on your skill. So I've got a suer of Earth breaking setup here that's operating at five Mana cost, and it's split between a couple of different ways. And I'll show you the next thing I did to do this. Basically, you can stack this up, and I believe this was in prefix that you would Craft on your ring. You get this from, I think, Elon, and yeah, it's just a Syndicate boss encounter. So if you farm Syndicate early on or if you buy unveiled items Elon rings, you should be able to, uh, unlock this craft and then

that's going to make your Mana sustain pretty significantly easier on uh melee builds. Okay, so what I found from playing with PS for the past few days has been there are a couple of ways to get your Mana sustain fixed, and this is the third tip for Mana sustain. If you're still struggling, you need Cannibalistic right, and you also need Spirit of War, which are pretty accessible in this lower area on the left. And then, basically, you also want to go Mana Mastery, which is 10% reduced Mana cost of skills. So, this takes off four Mana, takes off five Mana, takes off three Mana, this takes off uh six Mana, this takes off eight Mana. And just for good measure, we also use the Life Mastery wheel and we do skills cost instead of 15 uh skills cost life instead of 15% of Mana, which gives you another I think was that one Mana that you save as well and 1.45 Mana per second, which essentially fixes your Mana problems. And in combination, if you do Clarity and arrogance, you could do do.

that or if you had negative Mana cost on your ring, you could get the Mana cost down to Net Zero basically, and that's one really easy way to fix your Mana Problem by just setting your tree up properly in the first place. Okay, so as you're progressing into the more late game sort of area, or you're Theory crafting your tree or whatnot, having a really good defensive setup is excellent. So in this case, this is my mid tier SC jug. It's at 187 effective hit pull, and the reason for this is a combination of two two very specific items, and also making sure that you cap your chaos resistances. And it's using a glorious vanity and divine flesh. Basically what this does is 50% of Elemental damage is taken as chaos damage, and then you get plus five maximum chaos resistance. In combination, you use the fourth Val chest armor, which basically gives you chaos resistance, but armor also applies to chaos damage taken from hits. Essentially this then means armor applies to the Elemental damage taken.

which is the old like um unbreakable node configuration. And this is also what they were trying to do with the ascendency change to allow for this to basically build this into the build. This is further exacerbated by the fact that unbreakable now does that also. So basically, in combination with the fourth Val, you get 15% of your armor applies to chaos damage taken as from hits, for example. And then you also get the fourth Val uh configuration, which also means that armor applies. Now, I'm not entirely sure if there's crossover or whatnot here. This sort of appears like there could be a double up, and there is. So that means you can take unflinching and then throttle up your um your defenses even more so. Uh, ignore the taking unbreakable node, just take unflinching. Stack up urance charges and be a God. Okay, so if you're being a Po warrior like me at the moment, and you're trying to figure out how to buff up your damages, sometimes we forget the simplest

things are the simplest ways to buff off damage in this case lion raw gives my slam build my Sund of Earth breaking build an extra 1.7 mil DPS and just a diamond flask with a critical roll on it right gets about 3.4 million DPS so the moral of the story here don't forget to tune your flas for your build another way to get really easy attack speed as well is attack speed on your FL. I'm not sure if yet I've got that in here too so these are all really simple ways to uh to get your damage increases going and because now we have auto trigger Flash and if you're running like a crit build you could just have blasts that regenerate from critting uh this is pretty easy to um to basically you know automate your FL system so you don't really have to think too much about uh the extra buffing that you get from FL but it's a really good source of extra damage in your build or survivability take your pick either way okay so the

next thing you can do in Min and maxing is brittle. So, brittle was added into the game a little while ago. You could also get this through secrets of suffering, but basically if you got brittle, you can drop this on the ground really easily. And basically, it's from just itemization and it comes from, I think it's alrich or X. It's either xar or Aldrich. I can never remember. I think it might be xar. Basically, you can craft this on your boots with just like your lesser iers or whatnot and get drops brittle ground while moving lasts for 3 seconds. Basically, if you're standing on the enemy and you will be if you're playing a slam character, you would be able to drop brittle ground and you'll do a ton of damage. Just make sure you've got your configuration then ticked on that you drop brittle ground and you'll see your damage go up pretty significantly. Basically, what brittle does is it increases the amount of Critical Strike chance on your enemy. So you see my crit

chance at 79%. If we proc brittle, it goes up to 94.4%. Really easy way to get easy early damage. It's really good for melee characters because you're going to be standing on the enemy constantly and it leaves like a trail behind your character. Better roles means it lasts for longer so if you're going through things like delve or whatnot, it's going to do a considerable amount of damage. Or if you're playing Cyclone builds, it's really useful as well. Okay, so another thing that goes unseen many of a time is focus. Okay, so I used to run this on a shield crush build. You can still run it on the shield crush build. It used to be really good 'cause you could automate it on mb1 or Mouse button one. Can't do that anymore. You got to hit it right. But basically what it means, what it is, is a role you can get it on things like devouring diem and things like that. It came in with Syndicate.

veiled roll that you can also craft on your items. You can have items drop with it as well out of syn Syndicate but basically these are all the different rols that you can get from Focus so there's a chance to do double damage while Focus. There's fortification increase while Focus. Your ailment immune increase leech crit strikes are lucky spawns on belts for example. So if you hit your focus button, basically you go to crit strikes are lucky and you almost get 100% crit on most builds if you've got a reasonable amount of crit scaled. You can also have trigger socketed spells when focused and the other one is attack speed which is the one that I usually use which gets like 45 to 50% attack speed while focused on a veiled item and it's like 36 to 30 it's like 34 to 38% if it's crafted off your benchcraft. It's not as powerful but it's a really easy way to get like nearly 40%.

attack speed and basically Focus has no cost so the cost is cool down so potentially you could proc with more cool down recovery this to cool down quicker. I'm not entirely sure if it works like that but there's so many different things that you can do with Focus. There's so many roles that you can get on Focus um you know just something to consider and the way that you get focus is strictly just have an item with Focus rolled onto it and you'll get a button on your skill menu which basically you little skill bar that says you can focus and you just hit the button and I think it's like a buff for a few seconds it's enough sometimes to give you that edge in a fight if you're playing like a slam build you could hit Focus do damage and then rock your slam and just absolutely hit like a truck but just another Avenue you can go to buff up your damage. Base duration 4 seconds with an 8C cool down okay so I made a touch of God build today which

I'll put up if you guys want me to in the next evening after I get the Dell video done tonight. Basically, I use Smite, right? But I don't use it as an attack skill. I use it as an aura skill. So basically, it gives you an aura which grants increased grants 19% chance to shock and grants 12 to 120 added lightning damage. So it actually buffs up your damage quite significantly. In this case, it's about 2 million. And all you have to do is walk up to the enemy and go Boop or walk up to a pack and go Boop. And if you're proing lightning damage like playing lightning strike character or something like that, you should get an added benefit just by having Smite and using it as a bit of a buffing skill. But just want to keep in mind, they're a little bit useful, good for life, lightning, lightning me, builds. Okay, so the next one is if you're getting stun locked a lot, there's two ways to get around that.

number one you could run Bri King on your configuration setup so major guard Bri King. And this is going to give you stun immunity for a little bit or stop you from getting stunned if you've already been stunned. However, there's a better way to do this on the tree, which is unwavering STS. If you're not running unwavering St so we can't get um stun immunity any other way, this is a really good way to evade stuns but it means your evasion no longer works in most cases with a lot of melee builds unless you're actually running an evasive setup. This is pretty useful just want to keep in mind so if you are getting stun locked constantly this is really good to get around that finally have fun and play whatever melee skill that you want to play based on your play Style and what you are feeling for the league uh a lot of people will say a lot of about what you should and shouldn't play in League my stance is they've done a pretty

blanket buff across the board. It's pretty easy to sort of work around trees and whatnot, but have a look around and play what you want to play. Not always do you get the perfect League starter off the rung, but quite often if you're having fun and enjoying the game and enjoying the skill and the play style, that's the only thing that really matters at the end of the day. And that's the last point that I'll leave you as far as Mee also. Mee is way more fun than spellcasters, as far as I'm concerned with my opinion of it. But anyway, that's my tip 20. Okay, so I hope this video gave you some ideas if you were running into brick walls with your Mee build or didn't know certain mechanics. These are some ways that you can sort of get around po your way out of some issues with your build or troubleshoot your build in any which way. I've been playing mely for a very long time, and I've run

into almost every brick wall under the sun. In particular, trying to play Meely when me is not cool or wasn't cool sucked. So, we had to find different ways to get around things. Anyway, if you like this video, don't forget to like and sub to the channel. Don't forget to follow the Twitch. And there's an ex or Twitter account hovering around there somewhere. Uh, but anyway, I will see you guys later. I'll have the delve build gu or delve guide hopefully out a little bit later. And then we'll probably just look at theory building tomorrow night. I've got a few that are backed up, and we might just do it in like one video and then a live stream or something like that. Anyway, I'll see you guys on leag start morning and have a good one.

20 Useful Melee League Start Tips (From A Shield Crush League Start Player Lol) | Path of Exile 3.25

Jorgen

Tips for Improving Your Path of Exile Melee Experience

Constantly upgrade your gear to keep up with the damage output needed for your melee build.

Use the combination of Smite, Ancestral Call, and Ruthless for early quick clear in Act One, and consider a sword and board combo for a more defensive early game setup.

Prioritize skills like Blood and Sand, Precision, and Clarity, as well as capping your Elemental resistances to survive Elemental damage in Acts 2 through 8.

Tips for Playing Melee Builds in Path of Exile

Building in resistances is crucial, especially for facing tough enemies like Abarath.

Using Leap Slam with attack speed support is more effective than Shield Charge or Whirling Blades for quick traversal.

Stack up on accuracy for melee builds to significantly increase damage output, unless running a Resolute Technique or using specific items like Housa Day for hit evasion.

Ways to Enhance Your Character Build in PO

Fortification can be obtained through gloves, the fortify support gem, certain items like Advancing Fortress and Willow Gift, as well as specific nodes on the skill tree or corrupted weapons.

War Banner provides a significant damage buff and is recommended to be included as an active skill in your build.

Mark on Hit is a great way to enhance DPS, especially for crit-based builds, and can be automated for ease of use during gameplay.

Tips for Improving Your Build in Path of Exile

Using Mark on Hit can help with power charge and rage generation, especially for melee builds, providing an easy way to generate frenzy charges.

The Arrogance Gem combined with the Clarity gem can quickly increase and regenerate your Mana pool, solving early Mana sustain problems.

Syndicate craft non-channeling skills can reduce the total Mana cost on your skill, which, when stacked, can significantly help with Mana sustain for your build.

Tips for Improving Mana Sustain and Defensive Setup in Path of Exile

Playing with Primitive Soul for a few days revealed key ways to fix Mana sustain: using Cannibalistic, Spirit of War, and Mana Mastery in the skill tree, along with Life Mastery wheel and specific jewels.

For a strong defensive setup in the late game, the mid-tier SC jug build effectively combines specific items, caps chaos resistances, and utilizes the Fourth Valley chest armor to apply armor to chaos damage taken from hits.

As a PoE warrior, don't overlook the simple but effective ways to boost your damage output while focusing on your defensive strategy.

Simple Ways to Increase Damage in Your Build

7 million DPS boost to the Slam build, while a diamond flask with a critical roll provides about 3.

Adding attack speed on your FL is another easy way to increase damage.

Brittle, obtained through itemization, can significantly increase Critical Strike chance on enemies, providing an easy way to boost damage, especially for melee characters.

Using focus, which can be obtained on items like Devouring Diem, is another often overlooked method to enhance your build and increase damage.

The Versatility of Focus in Path of Exile

Focus offers a variety of useful roles, including double damage, fortification increase, ailment immunity, and trigger socketed spells.

It has no cost except for cooldown, allowing for potential cooldown recovery to proc more frequently.

Using Smite as an aura skill can significantly buff damage, especially for lightning-based characters.

Focus can also be used to avoid getting stun locked in the game.

Tips for Improving Your Melee Build in the Game

Consider using Bri King for stun immunity, or the unwavering STS node on the tree.

Focus on playing a melee skill that you enjoy, despite others' opinions on the matter.

Remember that the most important thing is to have fun and enjoy your playstyle in the game.