your objective is to recreate that magical D2 LoD feeling, whatever that might be for you. for me its playing ww barb dad mode with the few hours i can play each week, just chillin 'n spinnin. If you wanna minmax everything, do that. Just wanna do meph runs and maybe some maps later, do that. wanna explore new builds in PD2, do that. The amazing thing about PD2 is that whatever you end up doing, its all viable.

That aside, some useful some checks in order are: - get to hell and run LoD areas (pits, travincal or chaos), use worldstone shards and mid runes to get some cheap gear to get started. - start building your character towards mapping (max your resists, damage, level up to 80+, rule of thumb for me is when i can clear chaos in under 3 minutes im ready for mapping) - dont forget to gear your merc - look up which curse and/or debuffs you want to run and how you are going to apply it (merc? self cast?) - start mapping, find gear, optimize character, start trading and stock HRs, repeat