New player, need some advice please

Hello everyone, so I just started playing path of exile. What drew me to it is to the insane customization you can do with your characters. I don't mind not playing the meta or having a harder time end-game. (I can make meta characters for all that.)

So all that out of the way I'm wanting to make a character that would kind of fit all these categories and am needing help, lol

-One-handed swordsman (no shield)
-Must have decent life regen
-"medium" armor or cloth, but the point is to be INNIT
-Must have some forms of magic, buffing himself or amplifying himself in some way

You could pretty much all this an RP character and if someone has a build that is somewhat similar to this already on the forums, you can always hit me with the "lern search noob". Thank you!

Hello and welcome to PoE. Firt of all I recommend you abandon all you know about classic character building in other ARPG games. Once you climb over the wall of death that is player unfriendliness in this game you will have load of fun. Now to your build.

You are doing it wrong. Somewhat right. Mostly wrong.

How builds are made in this game:
You pick a skill that will be your main source of damage. Determin will it be physical, elemental (if yes then witch elemenet) and will it be crit or not. After that you figure its supportive gems. After that you go and make a skill tree witch will compliment your skill and take key nodes that will define your character. In that process you decide is it a character built on Life, Energy shiled (or so called CI) or Low Life (a build that uses life to sustain more auras and relies on energy shield). If you decide for Life then you have to chose between Armour or Evasion. After that you will decide what do you want on your gear and what uniques will cover your weaknesses and emphesise your strenghts. Compliment it with auras and other setups to enhance it preformance and it will be a solid build.

Some skills are simply stronger than others and will preform better. Some are dog poo tier until complemented with a unique item to make them good or godly.

But lets go point by point.

One handed swords man is a wide therm. Both swords and rapier like weapons are considered swords. If you do not want a shield i pressume you want to dual wield 2 swords (otherwise it is a major waste for no reason and should not be even considered to drop a piece of gear).

Again builds can be life and Energy shield. Life is more affordable and comfortable for new players. There are alot of nodes on the tree witch provide Life regen but life regen on gear does not exist. There are buffs like Stone golem and Vitality. The most common way of regaining your life is through flask and life leech(life steal).

There is no heavy/medium/cloth armor in this game. There is armor witch gives Energy shield (a form of health that needs to be destroied before health can be damaged), Evasion (chance to completly evade attacks) and Armour (damage taken is first reduced by a % calculated from your armour !!! be ware armour function somewhat different than in other games!!!).

This is not a game where a spell caster builds purely int. You need dex and strenght depending on your gems and requirments. You don't get primary stat on every peace of gear (like in diablo), but you get it when you need it.

There are a few buffs in this game that are widely in use but the base form of buffing is auras. Every build uses auras. Those do come with a price. Unlike other games where a buff is you have to press a button every 60 minutes. Here when an aura is active it will RESERVE a % of your mana. If you have an aura that reserves 50% mana and you have 100 mana together. Activating the aura will let you only use 50 mana and the other 50 mana will be unavailable to you while the aura is active. You can have as much auras as you want as long there is enaugh mana to be reserved. (yes you can reserve 100% of your mana pool, hell you can even reserve your health pool for auras if you want)

Skills in this game are not found of the kill tree. The skill tree gives you purely passive benefits and NOTHING else. Skill are found in form of gems that need to be socketed to your gear. There are support gems that can change the way skill gems work. Like for instance lightning arrow and greater muliple projectiles. Using Lightning Arrow alone will shoot 1 arrow. if you put greater multiple projectiles in a socket that is linked with your Lightning arrow gem you will fire 5 arrows instead of 1 but they will deal less damage.

I suggest you find some build that is cheap and look up some tips for new players. The active patch is 2.6

Oh and there is no gold. Crafting orbs are used as currency. Good luck!

Thank you. :P