TIL the passive tree nodes change depending on the class you’re starting with
Was theorycrafting in POB2 and noticed that a few nodes near the start of the Sorceress/Witch starting point change depending on which one you started with
Sorc gets elemental damage and more energy shield
Witch gets chaos, physical damage and minion nodes
Bruh that’s why I couldn’t find those chaos nodes on my monk. That’s fucking wild
Anointments!
Yeah, that’s part of the effort to limit the build complexity, combined with other changes like more punishing stat requirements and skills being tied to weapon types.
Yes! And I’ve seen some people wishing they had those elemental damage options when they choose witch. There’s elemental witch builds and the chaos nodes aren’t useful for them.
I think a nice way to solve this would be to have those nodes that change for each class to have the little drop down menu like that primary stat nodes do that let you select the variant of that node you want.
True. In the new update, they added a bunch of new node trees and re-arranged the existing ones as well. So, I think they’ll have something sorted out for it by full release
I mean, to me the tree still feels half baked. Templar area being massively placeholder for an extreme example. Definatly needs major improvements every single patch to get it in a good state.
That’s probably their plan. Again, the game is not technically out yet.
The tree is just rough. Feels like the pathing moves you so much less, nodes in general feel like they have less value, are too conditional or have downsides.
The tree is larger than 1. Connecting pathways are less direct. AND the entire center wheel (Scion area) is gone (but again, the tree is still larger despite that).
Add it up and the passive tree feels much more restrictive.
Then on top of that, I feel like all the cutesy little “Spear cluster looks like a spear,” type shit is a really, really dumb decision in practice and one that will be internally (inside GGG dev rooms) frustrating for years to come by restricting passive tree decisions around maintaining those constellations.
We’re missing both str/int classes so yeah, that entire corner is basically nothing
Oh look ea game not finished. Huntress area was placeholder too.
IMO the trees sorta need to be “inverted” in a way that puts weapon nodes closer and the “specialization” nodes further out so early game progression naturally allows players to pick up survivability and plan out their “path” towards the endgame build…
Right now everything feels hodge-podge scattered, forcing you to branch across obtuse filler nodes to get focused damage nodes and you don’t “specialize” into your weapon until the outermost circle… This means that “classes” get funneled into specific builds simply because competitive options are out of reach; you can’t easily make a Witch-Ranger because you can’t properly hit important nodes for both classes and with abilities being hard-locked to weapons that means you basically only have a narrow band of viable builds that are able to scale because the nodes are close enough to reach.
My “vision” would be inner pathing that has more options to move between the “class pie” before specializing into a weapon “tree” that branches into the nodes that further specialize across the skills and damage types available to those weapons… You could just go straight out toward wands as Witch/Sorcerer or you could take a circuitous path around the inner circle to go into a weird Bow build while still having some options from the Witch/Sorc area… You could start Merc and specialize into Xbow or cross over to be a beefy Spellcaster slinging elemental grenades…
I think some elements of the current passive tree are good, but could be better - such as putting STR/DEX/INT nodes back to +10 and reducing how many it takes to move along the horizontal paths would help make it easier to transition around the circle and open up more build options… As it stands the big circle only serves to further isolate build-defining nodes because it takes so many points to navigate towards the big weapon specialization and “key” perks while there’s a thousand “+% defense” fillers… if the tree was a bit easier to circumnavigate, the defense pickups along the way could be fewer in number because you wouldn’t need to put so many within reach of each class’ starting point.
Just some thoughts.
They could just do the either/or node like they have already for some ascendancy node and on the atlas tree
Perfect!
That would be a game changer.
Yeah seems like a unnecessary restriction to build diversity
Would be cool to have a jewel that changes the nodes in range of it to the different ones.
The heroic ones do this IIRC
If they change the theme of passives there wouldn’t be much difference between sorceress and witch. They would only have different char. models and different starting weapons/skills.
And… ascendancies? Pretty big fucking difference imo lol
Ascendancies are a big difference yes, but they are built on base differences too. If people want elemental passives with both sorceress and witch, then they will also want elemental based ascendancy nodes for witch because there is no end to what people want. So there won’t be much difference left between classes imo.
I think it’d be neat to have options that aren’t just “chaos witch” or “minion witch” (or infernalist fire-witch)… The nodes to make those “interesting” or “unique” builds outside of the Ascendancy identities are too far apart so you just get funneled into optimizing specific builds for each class since any “cross-class” experimentation is discouraged by the excessive filler points wasted on trying to navigate around the passive tree to reach key nodes to make those unique builds work.
There’s no need for theme if you have a choice. We also don’t have masteries which were like one of my favorite parts of poe 1 tree (actually the whole tree there is perfect)
I miss cluster jewels yallah
Yep. I hate this about PoE2, because sometimes I want to grab another class’s starting nodes.
For example, the build I’m playing right now has grabbed a bunch of early Monk nodes. What would happen if Shadow existed? Which starting nodes would I get?
Monk start is really cluttered right now. I wonder if half of them are meant for monk, and half of them are meant for shadow.
Yeah, they have more nodes at the start than anyone. And a lot of them are good, too.
monk starting skill tree area is pretty insane to be honest.. my first char last season was mercenary and took my a while to understand the skill tree and by the time I saw what the monk start looks like I was mad :D
My first character was a blood mage and I was excited to try a bleed spell build, since that wasn’t a thing in PoE1.
I was mad when I realized that all of the bleed/leech nodes (except a couple spell related ones) were on the other side of the tree.
It really is amazing, so much power packed in that area. I could see it getting a little off the top in the near future, but hopefully not too much. I hope they never touch that skill speed or ES recharge
If feels lick such a dumb hack.
Just put both sets of nodes on the tree.
Every starting area has 3 layouts. 1 for each class that starts there and 1 for all other classes. You don’t get the Monk or the Shadow version of the starting area. You get the 3rd one made for choosing a different class. This currently isn’t in the game, but they have announced that this is how it will be. They want the starting areas to be strong for the chosen class, but they don’t want the starting area of other classes to be as strong for off-classes.
Ah, ok good to know.
this certainly explains why they removed the ability to put starter notables on an amulet!
Yeah their idea was that they can make the starting nodes powerful without them being mandatory for other builds as well
That’s the one major issue i have with poe2s power fantasy, everything feels so much more restricted/bottle-necked
The main reason I love poe1/2 over other arpgs is how crazy u can go with builds, where classes are more of a suggestion rather than a restriction, hoping they slowly work in that kind of stuff as the game progresses
Classes are mostly a suggestion in PoE 2, just like in PoE 1.
The “bottle-necked” aspects I think were added to make the new player experience easier, since new players can find a natural build for each class that works decently, and more experienced players can ignore those natural builds and do what they want instead.
They probably should make it less difficult to cross the tree tho, at least imo. As mentioned above, Blood Mage witch has bleed synergies, but all the bleed passive nodes are nigh unreachable from the witch start.
The entire tree is definitely just a placeholder. POE1 went through MANY total rewrites of the passive tree.
GGG BARELY put any new functionality into 0.2, it was more or less just a new class. I think they are overwhelmed. It will take them a long time to reach v1.0, but when they do, I think the tree will be totally different by then.
Oh I totally get that. I am sure it will get far better over time, I was just saying that as it currently stands its very very expensive points wise to try to cross class more than like half a step
I can’t wait to see how crazy the builds/tree/skill gems get as they keep adding more and more
Agree, it seems that most players still think that this is a fully-released game and nothing is going to change at all before full release.
I feel like the more restricted/stream-lined/bottle-necked design is intentional. GGG’s overarching goal with PoE2 is to keep combat meaningful. To accomplish that, they have to limit the amount of crazy interactions and flatten the scaling curves of skills and passives.
Makes no Sense. One outstanding thing in POE is: one tree for all classes. Why change that?
They seem to view most of the awesome things POE1 did as mistakes, unfortunately.
There’s a lot more classes in poe2 vs 1. The tree would become gigantic and cluttered. Also, the game isn’t out yet. So things can change
Why do we need more classes? It is dumb IMO. Just make more ascendancies. We don’t need Huntress AND Ranger. Pick one and have 6 ascendancies. Same with Witch and Sorceress. This design decision is bananas.
would become gigantic and cluttered
As it isn’t already lmao, for a 1k+ passive tree it sure as hell feels boring and streamlined.
How many hours do you have in the game? Do you really think they can make a skill tree that you’ll be discovering new things in for hundreds of hours??
Have you done a totem buffing build? Have you done a shield build? Have you done an ally buffing build? Have you done a thorns build? Have you done a build with a class, but used a different weapon? C’mon man. I think you think it’s streamlined because you only want meta builds… am I wrong?
I mean, the framework isn’t there yet I think to fully experiment… which is fair at this point, we’re missing a better support gem system and affixes. I’ve actually been trying some off meta stuff with things like mana flare, ele discharge, chronomancer xbow shenanigans etc…
What I meant by a streamlined tree is that for that amount of passive nodes all you really get are different variations of the same 5⁄10% increased x or y.
The poe1 skill tree is 10x more interesting and I’ve spent years looking at it, Poe 2 tree is new and not exciting to build around
10+ years of POE1 while POE2 has been out for 5+ months. It’s also Early Access. Things will change. We still have 5 more classes. To be fair, the passive tree right now is more restrictive than what POE1 has. That’s certainly subject to change.
you’d think the 10+ years of poe1 experience would help them make the tree for 2 MORE interesting, not less. Every node is just + - damage with some downsides attached, theres no conversion, no masteries, nothing that changes the way something normally works. They added an absolutely massive amount of travel nodes which locks you into your starting area more, and also removed life nodes so you dont even have to think about that either. This isnt a beta issue its a design thing
That makes no sense in the context of PoE1 skill tree. The whole point was a learnable sandbox skill tree and having “dynamic” components doesn’t add more flavor, it just reduces your ability to craft characters using your knowledge of other builds. I’d be all for having the tree be static for all classes.
The context of poe1 skill tree makes no sense. This isn’t poe1. Also it’s only the starting area that changes. It isn’t affecting your ability to craft characters at all.
Okay so say they add a character like sion to the game that starts at any point, how do you determine which skill tree pathing to do if there is a different skill tree start for every class? How does that NOT affect your ability to craft characters.
They aren’t adding a character like scion, this is directly confirmed. We know all classes and they have said scion makes no sense in poe2. There isn’t even a different skill tree for all classes. It’s not that serious. You’re mad at nothing. It’s just a different starting area.
/edit: But lets pretend they added a scion. All this would do is change the starting areas from 3 different layouts to 4. The way the starting layouts works is that there are 3 layouts: 1 for each class that can start that area and then 1 for when you choose a class that doesn’t start there. So for Dex/Int you have Monk, Shadow, Neither layouts. If you added a scion character that could choose the starting layout it would be come Monk, Shadow, Scion, or none of those. And specifically for the Scion, once you chose a starting area, the other starting areas you didn’t choose would become the “none” option version of those layouts. That is because they don’t want the starting layout of other classes to be as strong for other classes.
And yes, all 3 layouts aren’t currently in the game, but that is the announced system on how it will work in the end. Currently you just get the sorc tree if you choose non-witch. But in the future there will be a new 3rd Int starting area when you choose non-sorc/witch.
This has no affect on your ability to craft characters because it’s literally just the starting area which you can get out of in 5 points. It’s literally no different in poe1. You can make a build on a class with a useless starting area for your build.
also happens with ranger and huntress starting nodes, guessing it will happen with every class that starts on the same side of the tree
Yes it will. Classes sharing a start node will have minor changes in the early clusters.
Yeah, this was announced over a year ago. There will be 3 different layouts for each starting area. 1 for each class starting it and 1 for every other class. The 3rd layout currently isn’t in the game, but it was announced to be there when the full game is live.
this is such an anti-poe decision, it boggles my mind
Yeah it’s awful if you want to do for example elemental damage on witch lmao, you should be able to choose which nodes you get with a toggle or something. It’s kinda disappointing how much railroading there is in this game compared to POE1
whoa i didn’t know that!
Me too, this is kfing wild, and I hate it.
And I wonder if pob2 has this logical.
I also just discovered this the other day, even those starter nodes are different, on sorc it’s 10% spell damage and in witch it’s 8% damage/8% minion damage
Thought process behind this was spoken about here: https://www.pcgamesn.com/path-of-exile-2/early-access-interview
One other slight adjustment from the original game is that the starting area for each class is different for each of the two classes that start there (The Witch and Sorceress, for example, both begin at the heart of the Intelligence section). “There are actually three versions of the starting areas,” Rogers remarks, one for each subtype plus “a third version that you get if you’re neither of those two classes and coming from another side of the tree.” The reason for this, he explains, is that the team found an interesting trend among players. “If you have stats that a player doesn’t need on a node, even if it contains stats that they do need, then they won’t pick it because they don’t want to ‘waste’ the fact that the other stats are there. You could make a ‘minion and spell damage’ node and a spellcaster won’t take it because it’s got ‘minion’ on it. So we found that we had to split those out.”
One other slight adjustment from the original game is that the starting area for each class is different for each of the two classes that start there (The Witch and Sorceress, for example, both begin at the heart of the Intelligence section). “There are actually three versions of the starting areas,” Rogers remarks, one for each subtype plus “a third version that you get if you’re neither of those two classes and coming from another side of the tree.”
The reason for this, he explains, is that the team found an interesting trend among players. “If you have stats that a player doesn’t need on a node, even if it contains stats that they do need, then they won’t pick it because they don’t want to ‘waste’ the fact that the other stats are there. You could make a ‘minion and spell damage’ node and a spellcaster won’t take it because it’s got ‘minion’ on it. So we found that we had to split those out.”
Oh, didn’t know that. And that answers my question of what happens when you path to that area from another class, seems like it’ll have a little mix of both starting classes
now THAT is the thing to complain about. This is against the spirit of path of exile in its core
Probably because PoE2 will have more classes than 1. So rather than creating more starting points for each class you get different nodes depending on your starting class.
But why are there more classes? Its just superficial cheesewiz to make the game look cooler.
Are you asking me why does the game give us more options?
LOL makes literally no sense…… how bad can it be
We are given the illusion of choice.
Yup, yet another way they’re trying to force us to play witch for minion builds.
Maybe they will add every passive node when all of the classes are released?
The classic dilemma of class identity and build diversity.
And also interesting is that this isn’t a thing for Huntress/Ranger…
It’s a bit half baked at the moment.
It is, there is a set of parry nodes that change for ranger/huntress
Oh really? I must’ve overlooked those.
Someone here suggested turning the nodes into one of those “pick your node” things. That would be a cool idea imo.
Wish you could pick which direction you start on the tree. Seems harmless to me.
It’s like this with huntress and Deadeye too.
Yea Jonathan confirmed awhile back that the there are 3 versions of the nodes right near where any class starts. 1 for each of the 2 classes that start there and 1 for any other class
I thought this was common knowledge, but then again I have played both witch and sorcerer or whatever its called. They start at the same spot but have different nodes.
This may be a dumb question but can’t you play a witch and use sorc gear/gems and vice versa? I know my merc can carry melee weapons.
Yes you can, as long as you meet the requirements for the gear and gems you use whatever you want. But POE2 heavily pushes each class into certain playstyles by the nodes that can be reached from the starting point.
For example, if you’d want to play a fire monk, the travel would be crazy since most of the fire nodes are on the oposite side of the passive tree
I really dont like it. Limiting for no reason.
I don’t like it. Either don’t do it at all or let me choose between them.
Want to make a Fire Witch? Too bad you get minion and physical spells. Oh I’m sorry I thought this was POE where I can make my own build.
this is also the same for amazon/hunter starter builds change
I did know about this. It was mentioned before. On the other hand, it would be nice to have elemental options for the Witch as well. In POE, I always enjoyed having minions that could do elemental damage. It’s restrictive in POE2. Although one would assume that the Witch is the only option to use minions. Especially those playing POE2 for the first time. I might have to try a Sorceress that uses minions (other than Summon Raging Spirits) that could do Elemental damage. I think it’s possible. Downside, though, is that the Infernalist Ascendancy for Witch has areas for fire damage. Infernal Hound etc. That kind of works with a fire-focused minion build, but what about cold/lightning? Elementalist for the Sorceress ascendancy could work.
I thought of a build in POE2 where my minions could focus on certain elemental damage. Like my skeleton warriors can do fire/cold/shock, yet, with the restrictions of one support gem allowed, that would be hard to do. The Witch starting area doesn’t have any elemental nodes. Only spell damage. If I wanted to do Elemental damage, it would be further up in the outer edges of the tree. Again, Sorceress could be a better choice if minions are affected by elemental damage while having support gems with elemental damage.
POE1 has more options in this regard, which is why many are complaining about the Build Diversity. Sure, POE2 might not have that kind of variability now, but it could be when we get the full game in our hands.
Really? That’s a crap design. How am I supposed to remember the tree and it’s rules if they do this kind of things?
wtf
oh my fucking god…