What it is
Path of Building Community (PoB) is a DPS calculator and build planner for Path of Exile that runs offline on your computer. It lets you fully simulate a character — from the passive tree to every item, skill gem, and aura — and see exactly how much damage it does, how much life and energy shield it has, what resistances are missing, and practically any stat the game calculates internally.
It's a community-driven fork of the original Path of Building, actively maintained by a team that updates the tool with every game patch.
What problem it solves
Path of Exile doesn't display most of its real stats in-game. Things like effective DPS against specific bosses, damage with all flasks active, survivability against different damage types, or how much difference swapping one item for another makes — all of that stays hidden from the player.
PoB makes all those calculations visible. It shows you the real damage you'll deal, tells you if you'll survive against Sirus, and lets you compare two versions of your build without having to test each one in-game spending currency on real items.
Who it's for
Intermediate players who want to understand why their build doesn't scale as expected. PoB shows them the bottlenecks mathematically: whether they're missing crit chance, accuracy, or that extra 30% damage they thought they had.
Advanced players designing builds from scratch. PoB is the lab where hypotheses get tested before investing dozens of divine orbs in items. Any serious PoE theory-crafter spends hours tweaking builds in PoB before touching the game.
Anyone following a build guide. Most content creators publish their builds in PoB-exportable format. Importing it shows you exactly how the build is constructed, without ambiguity or intermediate translations.
How it's used in practice
The typical workflow goes like this. You import your character from the official PoE site by pasting your profile link — PoB connects and automatically pulls all your items and passive tree. Once imported, you can see your real stats in the left panel, modify anything to experiment, and compare variations side by side.
To design builds from scratch, you start with an empty character and plan: which class, which passive tree nodes to take, target items, skill gem setup. PoB instantly calculates damage and survivability resulting from each decision.
Honest limitations
The interface is functional but not pretty. It's a tool made by players for players, without visual polish. The initial learning curve is steep: there are many tabs and options that can overwhelm at first.
Only available in English. There's no localization to other languages, which can be a barrier for players who don't handle PoE technical terms in English.
When GGG launches a new league with completely new mechanics or items, PoB can take days or weeks to implement them correctly. Usually the basics work from day one, but fine details arrive progressively.
Some very specific mechanics (like certain legacy item effects or rare interactions) might not be perfectly modeled. For extremely niche builds it's worth verifying manually.
How to get started
Download the installer from the official site. It's a Windows program, also available for macOS and Linux. Installation is straightforward.
Once installed, the fastest way to learn isn't reading documentation, it's importing a build from a content creator you follow. Seeing how a real build is constructed teaches you where everything is and what each tab does.
The videos in the Videos section of this page cover step-by-step learning, from first install to advanced usage.