Act 4

.. I recommend following this skill tree path which was explicitly designed to make the gaming experience as pleasant as possible for new players. That being said, it focuses more on survivability and comfort than damage since these are way more important at the beginning, but the guide will elaborate on options to adjust the skill tree in order to be more damage centric for the endgame later.

Resistances affect the amount of damage taken of specific damage types. By default, you can get a maximum of 75% resistances. For now, you should focus on capping Fire Resistance, Cold Resistance and Lightning Resistance. Not capping elemental resistances is without a doubt the most common reason why new players struggle to progress through the campaign.

You can use the Crafting Bench in your hideout to add elemental resistances to your items. Whether or not you can craft elemental resistances on an item depends on several things, but to go into that at this point would be an overload of information. So for now, just put an item into the crafting bench and check if you can craft additional elemental resistances on it.

If you want to know more about crafting now, check out this video guide by Zizaran.

At this point of the game, you will face strong enemies who might deal a lot of damage in a very short period of time. To prevent you from dying from multiple strong hits, you want to have a life flask which immediately restores some of your health. You can get this by having the following modifier on your life flask: ‚Instant Recovery‘ (this modifer always comes along with ‚#% recuded amount recovered‘ which basically is a tradeoff). For now, there are 3 ways to get this modifier:

  1. Loot and identify a magic life flask and hope it has the specific modifier (uncommon).
  2. Use an Orb of Transmutation on a normal flask to make it magic and hope it gets the specific modifier (uncommon).
  3. Use Orbs of Alteration on a magic flask to change the modifiers until you hit the desired modifier (the outcome is still heavily rng-based, but it’s the most reliable way to get this modifier). Important: Only use these methods on flasks with an itemlevel of 7 or higher (you can see the itemlevel by pressing ALT when you mouse over the item).

At this point of the game, you will face enemies who apply a bleeding debuff (which is an ailment) which deals physical damage over time to you. In order to remove this ailment, you have to use a flask which has the modifier ‚Grants Immunity to Bleeding for X seconds if used while bleeding‘. For now, there are 3 ways to get this modifier:

  1. Loot and identify a magic flask and hope it has the specific modifier (uncommon).
  2. Use an Orb of Transmutation on a normal flask to make it magic and hope it gets the specific modifier (uncommon).
  3. Use Orbs of Alteration on a magic flask to change the modifiers until you hit the desired modifier (the outcome is still heavily rng-based, but it’s the most reliable way to get this modifier). Important: Only use these methods on flasks with an itemlevel of 7 or higher (you can see the itemlevel by pressing ALT when you mouse over the item).

Your Ballista Totem Support setup now should look like this from here on as soon as possible (gems listed in order of importance):

Note: As soon as you use Multiple Totems Support, you can summon more than two totems in total, but using the skill will still only summon two of them. Therefore, you now have to press the skill multiple times to get the most out of it. The total amount of totems you can summon depends on the level of the gem while the maximum amount with this build is 5.