As you complete atlas objectives (usually by completing maps of a certain rarity), you’ll unlock points to spend on your atlas tree and increase your chance to drop better maps. When you’re first getting started, check to make sure your gear is still in good shape. You’ll take another hit to your resistances after act 10, so you may need to do some house cleaning POE currency trade .

If you find yourself short on currency, head to the Blood Aqueducts. This humble zone is linear, with monsters that don’t pose much of a threat, and is the perfect place to farm up if you find yourself lacking some punch. The Humility card drops here, which can be turned in for a Tabula Rasa, an incredibly useful starting item that has no stats, but always comes with six linked sockets. In addition, items that drop here are the right ilvl for the chaos recipe—sell a rare (yellow) item of each slot to a vendor, you get a chaos. If they’re unidentified, you get two. An hour or two farming here should give you plenty of chaos orbs to head to the trade site and get your resistances sorted and maybe purchase your first big damage item.

Walls and final thoughts
Sometimes when you're playing Path of Exile, you hit a wall. You don’t do enough damage, don’t have the currency you need to change your build, find yourself dying to the same boss again and again. Here are some reasons that might happen, and what to do about them.

If you’re dying a lot, everywhere, check your life and resistances. Try and keep your resists capped and get as much life as you can.If you aren’t doing any damage, check your gem links. Every additional linked socket increases your damage exponentially, so sometimes it’s worth having crummy stats on your body armor if you can go from 4 links to 5.Bleed damage stops if you stop moving. The tooltips for debuffs are useless, and there are many more examples of this, but this one gets new players the most, especially in the lab.If you’re dying to green stuff, it’s probably your chaos resist.Make sure you have a movement skill. The non-damage links are easy to overlook early on, but getting flame dash or blink arrow online will save your bacon.Try and wean yourself off life and mana flasks as quickly as you can. I’ll often use two life, two mana, and a quicksilver flask to start with, but each one of those you can replace with a damage or defense flask is a big deal. Keep your eyes peeled for mana on hit or leech in your passive tree.
There is a ton more I could talk about here, but I’m already concerned my editor is going to shoot me into the sun. League mechanics, master missions, pinnacle bosses, and more await you. Hopefully this guide can be a springboard to get you started in Path of Exile, and maybe just die less than Zizaran POE orbs .

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