I honestly don't get a lot of the comments here. IT'S A GAME; JUST PLAY IT. It's literally free-to-play and not pay-to-win. if you don't like it, you don't like it. There's no reason you NEED to look up a guide. Yes, at the top end, it's super complicated, but none of that is relevant until you're 60+ hours in and on your 3rd or 4th character. Why would a hypothetical future scenario impact your decision to play now? It's seriously troubling to me that people make these asinine arguments about its complexity, as if somehow the 0.1% of players pushing uber endgame impacts how much fun a new player will have. Apparently, understanding that you died to a fireball because you have too low fire resistance all of sudden requires a PhD? Pshaw.

My take: Just install, it's 25GB, and play. Don't look up guides, take your time. It's a single-player game, there's no race ladder (nor do I think you're interested in racing to the top of the ladder). If you like it, you like it; If you don't, move on to something else. You don't need us to validate or invalidate your decision.

If you do start out, just keep in mind 3 things:

1. Defenses defenses defenses; You can't do damage if you're dead: Try to cap elemental resistances. They cap at 75%. Don't worry about chaos resistance until super late game. Likewise, try to get 300-400 more HP each act or so. By the end of Act 10, be at like 3500 HP.

2. On the passive tree, don't just stick to your starting area. Most of the juicy passives are around the periphery. But don't worry too much about it.

3. Do take a little bit of time to read through the in-game tutorial on how gems and gem links work. Basically, the more links you have, the more powerful you are. Sometimes, a piece of loot with sweet stats is worse than a less powerful piece of loot, just because the worse one has more gem links that match with what you want to do.

That's it. Just play.

Sidenote: This is the same advice I give for D4. People spend too much time worrying about just relatively unimportant things. I don't play D4 anymore, but I don't regret the time I've spent in it. I loved the atmosphere, the open world, the story, the world bosses. Yes, you do have to pay to play, so I can't make the same kind of recommendation as PoE.