Any advice on choosing devotions?

[mainer]

I didn't have time to play GD when it first came out, but now that I've started, I'm just totally addicted to GD. This has to be the most intricate ARPG ever made. So many builds, so many choices, so much equipment, I love it.

On choosing devotions from the constelations, I feel like I'm kind of guessing and working in the dark, without much focus on what I'm actually doing. I'm still early game, level 14 (on normal for first time play through), and have cleansed 3 shrines. I've chosen to go with devotions/constelations that buff up defense or resistances, as that seems to be the weakest area of my character which is a Purifier (Demolisonist & Inquisitor).

So just looking for some advice/ideas that others have used, some kind of focus rather that stumbling about blindly.

[Le Deflagosseur]

Depends on your class and playstyle you like I guess, I'm fairly new too so my advices probably wont be that good but here's one I'm sure of, you can unlearn devotion and skill points at anytime at small cost, 25 iron and eather crystal(s) If a constellation skill is level 10, if you unlearn it, it will still be level 10if you decide to pick that skill again later so my advice would be: just try everything that "sounds" nice to you

[Matthew]

This is my own bias in a somewhat priority list of important to not so important:

Pretty much always try to pick up the resist reduction devotion of your damage type, if there is one. There are some times when it isn't important, depending on gear, class, and damage type, but generally you will never go wrong getting resist reduction.

Devotions which add %OA or %DA are good. Since they affect your base OA/DA values, they tend to scale better than flat OA/DA devotions. It is also important to reach certain OA/DA benchmarks. For example, getting to no-crit range with DA has more impact than getting an extra 100% damage modifier of your type when you already have 2000% stacked.

Weapon-based builds get a ton of value from attack-damage-converted-to-health devotions.

Casters, not having that option, can get a lot of value from restoration procs like Tree of Life. I find it easy to go this route anyway, as casters also rarely benefit from flat damage devotions. This makes their devotion paths naturally focused towards defense.

As an aside and probably a bit obvious--pet builds will want devotions which also benefit pets.

While the general trend is the farther from the center you go, the more powerful the devotion, the order of priority I put here overrides that idea. A lot of the more powerful devotions are around the middle range, like Hawk, Ghoul, Rhowhan's, Manticore. Due to being resist reductions, ATDCH, %OA/DA, etc.