Am I a bad person for wanting to group with Homerboy just to show off now? >_>
Please don't take this the wrong way, but if you're not in merciless and you're already struggling, you basically need to start over.
ANY character can clear normal.
A character that is more-or-less the right idea, but probably has too little defenses can eventually clear cruel.
only well-built characters can clear merciless.
General things to focus on that newer/inexperienced players never do right:
1) FOCUS ON DEFENSE. Path of Exile is a game about STAYING ALIVE. There is no threshhold where you are "tanky enough". You absolutely can "do enough damage". This means past normal you need to maintain maximum elemental resistances to every element, and you need to have as much life as possible (don't play Chaos Inoculation below level 60, and only then if you have good gear for it - ES builds are expensive/harder than life builds). You want >1000hp before normal is over, almost 2000hp for cruel, and the sky is the limit for merciless.
2) LAYER those defenses. Big life pool isn't enough. Think about how to reduce/avoid the hits you take so that your big life pool can go farther. Are you going to use armor? Maybe spend some mana reserving Arctic Armor? Maybe use a Cloak of Flames chest to convert some physical damage to fire or a lightning coil to do the same to lightning (where you have 75%+ resist!)? Maybe you want to run Mind over Matter? The more different ways you have to reduce/avoid/mitigate damage, the more likely you will survive.
3) Smart Support Gems. Support gems are how you make your skills not suck. To use a summoner, where your minions do the damage, as an example, you would want support gems such as Minion Damage, Minion Life, but you would also want things such as Melee Physical Damage, Multistrike, etc, depending on the minion. Fortify also works on melee minions and can be huge for their survival.
4) FOCUS your build. Every successful build picks a specific skill/skill interaction and builds around it. For example, one of my characters (
https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/JaxOmen/characters) "Voltits" is a witch built around casting the spell Arc. I have a herald of thunder that applies curses for me via the Curse on Hit support, so I can keep casting Arc, I have a "Cast When Stunned" set of gems to keep me alive when random enemies actually make it to me (via passives I can generally keep casting even while stunned
). And because of the high mana costs, right now I have to run Reduced Mana in my links to be able to afford the spell (I can regen the entire cost during the cast, but my pool isn't big enough to cast with Empower, my preferred link!) Basically, All of your gem links should be for either passive effects, movement, or augmenting your main skill via curses/mob control/etc.
Dried Lake is the single best farming zone pre-maps, it has great mob density (many enemies per screen) and is generally easy to navigate (no mazes), plus Voll has a pretty decent rarity modifier on his drops.
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