I want to start this out properly now. Picked it up before a couple of times only for half an hour each time but it seemed decent. I loved Diablo so I think this could be my new addiction if I get into it properly.
What's the most noob-friendly class to start out as? The talent tree looks massive aswell, I'd have no idea where to start with that one.
Marauder. Played straight, it's a heavy melee character so it's the most straightforward class and the most durable in combat.
The talent tree means you don't have to play it straight. Passive skills and equipment play the biggest role in character ability, so you can play a marauder mage if you really want to. You be better off with a mage, since you'd start in a better position in the skill tree for a mage, but there's plenty of scope for cross-skilling builds. For example, there's a very successful marauder using a 1H mace and shield, almost universally seen as a bad move. The player has made it work very well by moving into the mage area of the tree, building intelligence and using auras - one possible warrior mage configuration.
As a rough guide, the skill tree has three areas. The top-middle is witch, emphasising intelligence increases and spell-related skills. Bottom-left is marauder, emphasising strength and damage-per-hit skills. Bottom-right is ranger, emphasising dexterity, attack speed and ranged attacks. Those classes start about in the middle of those areas. The other classes start on the border between two areas (e.g. duelist is on the marauder-ranger border). You can go anywhere in the tree, but you can only select a node that is adjacent to a node you've already got. So the aforementioned maruader mage would have used a fair few skill points to get from their starting point deep in the strength/marauder area into the intelligence/witch area and so they would effectively have fewer skill points than a witch of the same level.
I think that a good starting point is a ground slam marauder. There are various builds for that, but they're all based on a straightforward marauder using two attack skills - ground slam for area effect (
many mobs run in packs) and a single-target skill (usually heavy strike) for single powerful mobs. Bang up your damage output and stunning and you can handle most situations. I'm currently near the end of Act 1 on Merciless difficulty and it's working as long as I pay attention. The difficulty ratings are a huge step up in difficulty, so expect to get your head handed to you when you move from normal to cruel difficulty and again when you move from cruel to merciless. You can be death on legs at the end of one difficulty level and then get slaughtered at the beginning of the next.
Watch out for your elemental resistances. They're a lot more important than I expected, to the extent that if I hadn't maxxed them out I'd give more weight to them than I would to armour value.
Don't pay much attention to most vendor recipes because patches have made them mostly irrelevant. For example, you can trade 3 rare items with the same name for an orb of alchemy, which is quite valuable. So it's well worth buying some extra stash tabs and popping the rares you find and don't want to use in them until you have 3 with the same name to trade...no, it isn't. A patch increased the number of possible names to such an extent that you would need thousands of rare items to have a decent chance of having 3 with the same name. You're actually better off tediously farming low-value items and trading them up as far as alchemy orbs at vendors (Clarissa in Act 3 does all the trades, other vendors do some of them). There's a few recipes to watch out for (e.g. any item with a red, green and blue slot linked together can be traded at any vendor for a chromatic orb and any collection of items with a total of 40% quality can be traded for a relevant equipment-enhancing item) but most of the vendor recipes are next to useless.
You can find a blank skill tree with maximum skill points available here:
http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree
You can use that to plan your build.
Here's the skill tree for my ground slam marauder, level 61:
http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-...vud3E9sbYyZjUj9-y37_k8edS7w7vTvIv9kj3Mve--Os=
I'm currently in the dexterity/ranger part of the tree, working towards Master of the Arena and Acceleration to speed my attacking up a bit because I'm working towards a very heavy, very slow 2H unique mace and I'll need faster attacks to offset that...but I could have gone differently, maybe up into the intellligence/witch area to get better elemental resistances and more intelligence, which would have allowed me to level blue gems higher and maybe used auras all the time, plus increased elemental damage and then used a weapon that did a lot of elemental damage and skill gems that increased elemental damage...there's a lot of flexibility in building characters.
