passive tree QoL

Because the passive tree in PoE 2 doesn’t follow regular lines, there’s a mess with how skill points connect — you need to find the optimal path to reach certain nodes. For example, some nodes that look close to your starting point actually require a huge number of points to reach, while others that seem far away are spread out but take fewer points. It makes no sense.

Another thing is that there’s an artificially large number of nodes you have to take to reach a different starting area — for example, if you want to begin on the tree of a different archetype. Is that intentional? It feels like a huge obstacle (for example) - a Dexterity-based archetype to transition into a Strength build and take Strength nodes.

I think the deroutes, weird paths, and so on, are really an explicit design choice, based on balancing (sometimes two nodes together are very strong, and you increase the investment needed by making the path between them be long), on aesthetics (looks cooler with all them curves and stuff), and on the fact that a part of the playerbase draws enjoyment from optimizing the skill tree (I know I do and most of my friends also like that aspect).

For the distances between starting areas - it seems to take 21 nodes for both blue (i.e. sorceress) and green (i.e. ranger) starts to reach the red start.

If you meant strength nodes in specific, to me, sort of seems like the green area has more strength available than the blue area.

The fact that you often want to have a separate leveling build focusing on nodes that are quick to take, and a separate end-game build where you use an optimized path that has long sections of mostly traveling between clusters, can be a bit annoying. I am not sure how that could be elegantly fixed, as it is a pretty deep part of balancing and of general game design at this point.

I found that the whole "make a leveling build, respec into more power later when you can afford the travel points" thing is kind of cool. It makes me build multiple versions of every character which I find fun to "theory craft" and I get to use some interim skills which I ditch once I don't need them anymore (like killing palm, for generating pc, once I got a better way, when I was playing a monk).

This probably comes down to the fact that I play ssf so I can't just trade for a "final" set of gear.

I felt that this idea revolved around the fact that the tree mostly scales gear prefixes, so if your gear has shitty prefixes - usually because you have been trying to balance your attributes/resists, but also, sometimes that's just how the dice lands at first in ssf - you have the option to supplement your shitty prefixes with passive points if you need to.

It will not generally be in an optimal manner, but it is available to you nonetheless in order to get you through the content and able to farm at an appropriate level while you improve your gear.

It is also sometimes cleverly behind things like "gain 12% of damage as fire" when even though you plan on using gear with pure physical damage prefixes, throughout the campaign most mobs don't have fire resistance like they do in endgame where your "12% gained" gets reduced to "3% gained" in practice without fire pen, so using that with something like herald of ash to benefit off the "increased damage to burning enemies" leading up to that node will do quite a bit to help with clearing monsters on the way to campaign bosses, but it typically falls off in relative-utility once you can reach nodes that more efficiently scale your physical prefixes.

I find once you start getting into level 75+, the larger point pool allows you to allocate a larger number of passive points to attributes through pathing points and it takes some heat off your gear to provide attributes for you, in turn, easing suffix pressure to meet minimum res thresholds, and you can start using gear that has GOOD prefixes, and you can finally meet the nodes in the tree which scale your prefixes more efficiently, for both weapons and defensive gear.

It's like a progressive mountain you climb where your ability to scale your gear affixes has more and more options available to you, in order for you to address an appropriate level of content while balancing resistances and attributes, and things like life regen and leech.

You might say that +levels as a suffix is better to have over prefixes but that's only true once you have your prefixes somewhat figured out across your gear, otherwise you'll be running out of mana or you will take huge hits to your life pool for the cost of your skills - unless you use a lower level gem with less mana cost, which also requires less attributes to use (+lvl and +attributes are competing suffixes), or start switching passive points that would otherwise scale damage into choices that deal with life/mana recovery.

It really changes the whole game up when you build this way and I'm a big fan of it - the whole journey is a problem-solving puzzle.

I can see why it's not immediately obvious to a lot of trade-based players who follow builds or plan 1 version of an endgame build which is just basically picking an endgame tree and endgame gear affix setups, and then just plowing through to it - especially when it's done in a softcore context, which doesn't really punish you for plowing through with sub-optimal build/gear until the late game.

However, a lot of the "beginning" and even "middle" areas in the tree are quite good for getting you through and being well-rounded within mid-tier endgame content with pretty mediocre gear, even if it means you won't be scaling something as efficiently as you can in the meantime.

Perhaps GGG can put in some nodes that Transport/Teleport you to another part of the tree.

For example, each area has 1 of these "transport/teleport nodes" that links it to 1, and I mean only 1, other node. This would cut down some of the distance needed. If that would be too broken, then perhaps players can only use a certain amount of points around the newly 'linked node'.

My first thought is maybe they are fixed into the passive tree. My second thought is perhaps it can be a modifier on a Jewel, and then it can link to the middle emoty Jewel node each area has. So players would need either 1 or 2 of these to be able to do it. Perhaps players get one from a Quest in Act 5 or Act 6.