Glad you’re enjoying the game! To get right into it:

Your main goal should be to get through the campaign and into maps.

For the skill tree, you can typically focus on damage throughout the campaign. That being said, depending on what skills you use there are QoL nodes that can help a lot. For crossbows that might mean stuff related to reload speed or grenade aoe/detonation.

Gear wise, your crossbow is gonna be your most important item. You mentioned following Fubgun’s guide, but your weapons are different. I’m not 100% sure what you mean by that. My recommendation would be to follow build guides exactly, if you’re going to follow them. Fubgun is an excellent build creator, so you’re in good hands following his lead.

Going back to your crossbow, you usually want % increased phys and/or flat damage. This combo is typically the way to go for most martial weapons. This isn’t guaranteed, so you want to check weapon vendors often and gamble for some if needed. Sometimes a good weapon can last awhile, but typically I’d aim to upgrade it at least once per act.

Finally, for gear you want to stick to a specific types. Armour, Evasion, Energy Shield, or any of the hybrids. While you technically can wear anything, I would either follow the guide or just stick to armour and evasion hybrid pieces. The only reason I recommend it is because there are supporting nodes in the mercenary section of the passive tree, so it keeps it simple for new players. You’ll often see people talk about how strong energy shield is, and it is, but you want some of the support nodes on the tree to help. No need to pick up gear you’re not using, unless you want to sell it. Boots with movement speed are also a fairly high priority. Rings and gloves with flat damage on them are also very nice.

One other thing to keep in mind is that you want to try to keep your resistances capped. It’s not really feasible to do that in acts one or two, but as you get into act 4 and the interludes you’ll want to be keeping an eye on it.

I won’t say to not follow a build, because I did and it can be very overwhelming for new players. BUT you do only have 1 blind first time play through. Do not stress too much about total optimization of everything in especially when in act 1. The town vendor changes you level up so check there for better weapon. The guide you are using fubgun has the regex and what stats that are prio. I kinda had to stop and do something in middle of typing this so it’s probably all over the place. Long story short your build will change a lot from where you are at now, don’t get decision paralysis (yet) and if you feel like you’re struggling to kill things check the vendor for new weapon (and rings)

Can’t go wrong following a guide like that. But also the biggest rule is have fun, try out different things, and see what clicks with you.

Only ‘downside’ as a first character with Flameblast Gemling is that it takes awhile to ‘come online’ as Flameblast you don’t get until like level 52. That and it’s very OP compared to a lot of other builds in the game so it might spoil you if you try another character.

Though, crossbow and grenades are fun to play, can’t go wrong there.

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When I start up a new league or SSF i pick up and vendor everything just to make some gold for buying upgrades if i see them.

For loot, virtually everyone (that visit this Reddit) uses additional filter, (filterblade). You can use default one, or customize it, but the main thing it does - highlight more rare drops, even if you choose to hide literally nothing. This helps with sorting loot a bit. “Tinks” are the filterblade thing.

Following perspective is from non “meta” player, who doesn’t follow builds, and love making his own choices.

My main advice would be to read every tooltip, if you want to understand game more. Your character screen and gem details screen are all dynamic, and change based on current equipment and buffs, so you can just equip items and see what they do for you. This is especially true for weaponry, if you don’t go deep into damage types and way your particular build deals with enemy defense layers.

On passive skill tree, I would always try to prioritize not conditional stuff, even if it is lower total number. If your full damage is only available, when x, y and z, most of the time you are fine (because base enemies die to anything), but when stugglebus hits, it hits hard. Better to have 100% uptime on everything possible, including recovery, defense, immunities and damage. At least in my opinion.

There is no “one true build”, instead there is a deep customization for your own preference for gameplay. GGG trying to develop the game with many tradeoffs, where every single choice of passive or gear stat can matter, depending on character and player preference.

For example many unique items are only ever good for some things, and loose to rare items, that rolled well. Not all, some are just relevant in very thin level bracket, for a particular skill.

Some stats are so good, that many think they are the only relevant ones on this gear slot, and refuse to even entertain the opportunity costs.

Here some examples of what you may want to prioritize to have on your gear.

On weapon and amulet this is + level to relevant skills. This is mostly due to how damage calculations interact with the rest of the build, especially on spellcasters. In practice prioritysing this can kill your mana cost, but some players prefer to “solve” mana, depending on build, or just don’t mind to spam mana pot every few seconds.

Movement speed on boots. It is just nice, and can be relevant to some boss mechanics.

Your main damage pool (be that life, energy shield, or mana), and modifiers for incoming damage types. (Armor, evasion, resistance and so on).

Currently you will find most success by focusing on one thing, with relevant additional stats.

Armor let’s you take more physical damage, but scales in such way, that you need exponentially more for harder hits. Almost mandatory additional stats: armor also applied for elemental damage (or chaos, which is more rare stat), this stacks. Armor can be “broken” by some rare modifiers and you will be left with just 0 defence base layer of your health/energy shield pool.

Evasion let’s you to just ignore some of the more common attacks, because enemy will need to roll their accuracy compared to you evasion. Eventually they will hit. Some attacks ignore evasion completely and always hit.

Relevant additional stats - deflection and blind status effect on enemy. Deflect chance let’s you just take less damage from hits, and mainly scales with evasion number. Sadly can’t reach 100℅. Blind stats effect lowers enemy accuracy, so your evasion is more effective.

Energy shield gives an additional “life pool”, with some different conditions of how it is functioning. The main thing - by base it doesn’t start recovering, until some time have passed, from getting hit. Also it does take double damage from chaos type damage.

Relevant stats: Chaos Inoculation (CI) keystone on passive tree. Energy recharge, energy recharge delay, stun threshold based on energy shield.

CI allows you to just ignore all incoming chaos damage, including poisons (and bleeding for some reason in poe2), which allows you to get “free suffix” on half of your gear, where life build are forced to take chaos resistance.

Very very strong, but require you to have enough dps, to not be under assault of enemy perpetually. This can be hard in some types of content.

Hybrid defence layers typically struggle to have big enough pool for almost mandatory additional stats, for example if you try to go armor+evasion, and have both “armor applies to elemental damage” and “deflection chance”, on a gear piece, you will literally have only one possible suffix stat line for resistance. This still can be strong, if you solve all of your resistance problems with a mageblood belt, or some other niche way.

Flipping from defence layers of your own, you will typically want to deal with defence layers of your enemies.

If you deal physical damage as a main type, you will want to break enemy armor.

If you deal elemental damage - lower, bypass or reverse enemy resistance.

Chaos damage have resistance and wither stats effect.

At the base campaign progression level it is hardly relevant, because enemy almost have no defence, but later down the line you will probably want to focus on one thing.

“What should i do as an early gamer before next league?”

Simple, play and finish the campaign. Enjoy it like you would any game. You’re not in a race with anyone.

You’ve probably seen posts and videos about campaign rushing, “investing”, chasing the market, etc. That is all irrelevant to you right now!Fundamentally, enjoy the game, complete the story.If you still want to invest time afterwards, follow the endgame quests.

Next league, that will be enough to prepare you what to expect.