Passive tree and melee/armour
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I have a question about some design decisions.
For example, Blood Magic: PoE 2: You have no Mana Skill Mana Costs are converted to Life Costs PoE 1: Removes all Mana 10% more maximum Life Skills cost Life instead of Mana Skills reserve Life instead of Mana Why is the 10% more maximum Life bonus not present in PoE 2? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I have a feeling that the passive tree in PoE 1 is more rewarding. Another example is right at the start of the tree: in PoE 1 we can get Life + Armour, while in PoE 2 we get things like stun threshold or regeneration instead. My question is: does anybody know why it is designed this way? Last bumped on Dec 18, 2025, 1:16:16 PM
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I would assume they're trying to rebalance the relative sources of power.
ARPGs are regarded by many as essentially being item hunts. It's weird that both the passive skill tree and flasks (items, yes - but equipment, no) are as powerful as they are. As a thought experiment - would you prefer to complete the PoE 1 campaign with no equipment, or with no passive skill tree. For the sake of argument, lets say all gear has attribute requirements disabled. Which would you consider more challenging - and do you consider that good or bad? GGG do not offer first-party Technical Support.
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poe2 is a mix of clashing philosophies.
when they removed life from tree, the idea was it gave players the ability to invest in other defensive nodes. the devs could balance the game around players having 3-5k HP at the end game. this is a balance decision with good intentions. if you can expect the players having 4k HP, then you can make regular attacks hit for few hundred while larger hits can hit for 3k. they learned this from poe1 where enemies were rebalanced to hit hard because players with 13k HP exists. they cannot allow these players to trivialize content. 4-5k huge hits can be tanked by these high hp players but could possibly 1hko more casual players. 13k hp builds can exist thanks to life on tree. thus, i actually LIKE the idea of no life nodes on tree. we can get life on gear and we cant push it too far, but GGG has the data on how far we can push it and balance the game accordingly. a very good solution and we no longer have "life passives tax" where we MUST allocate a certain amount of passives to hit what? 100-200% increased life? but the problem is GGG "FORGOT" about ES and let ES exist on tree and allow 1001 ways to give players more ES AND scale off of ES. quite disappointing that it is this way. and ggg has done little to remedy it. [Removed by Support]
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in poe2 you dont reserve mana for auras, you reserve spirit. so in poe1 losing your mana means losing your auras unless you reserve life which means losing a lot of life. so blood magic has a way bigger downside in poe1, i think blood magic is essentially trash in poe1 and probably needs buffed if i were ever going to bother using it again but in poe2 its probably a lot more appealing?
I love all you people on the forums, we can disagree but still be friends and respect each other :)
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" " However, in my opinion—as mentioned in the second post—Energy Shield compared to Life is not balanced. I like playing melee, but for me, playing melee puts too much pressure on gearing just to survive. I mean: +Life, +Armour, +Armour against Elemental Damage, +Resistances, etc. Compare this to a mage character, who mostly needs to care only about +Energy Shield and resistances, because there are many passive nodes that heavily support ES. As Sarno#0493 said, I understand that balancing the sources of power is a good idea, but I have a feeling that this balance philosophy was not fully applied when designing the classes. | |
" That’s a good take I didn’t consider before. Looking at it from this perspective, that node isn’t actually that bad. However, we should also look at how much HP you can get in PoE 1 even after reserving auras, and how hard it is to keep up with Life costs in PoE 2. As I mentioned before, there is a lot of pressure from needing almost all suffixes and prefixes, because you don’t just need +Life, +Armour, +Armour against Elemental Damage, and +Resistances, but also +Life regeneration. | |
" That's not unfair. :) If the current game version is Patch 0.4.0b released on 05 / 12 / 2025, and if Path of Exile 2 released into Steam Early Access with v0.1 on 06 / 12 / 2024, then we can do some quick math and determine the game will leave Early Access... oh. Oh dear. Perhaps that's why Jonathan Rogers has recently start putting out feelers to see whether the official v1.0 launch would be acceptable without all classes being available. Maybe we'll get the last couple of classes around time we get the last couple of Acts from Last Epoch's campaign..? Irrespective of when, exactly, PoE 2 leaves Early Access - Jonathan Rogers is aiming for 2026, but my money's on 2027, personally - they do have a minute between now and then to try to figure out their philosophy and get balance in a better place for the big one point zero. If anything, at the current stage of development I wouldn't be surprised if the live client having a measure of imbalance so they can see which groups provide what feedback on how the game feels would be intentional, just to help them dial in the target that they should seek to balance around. GGG do not offer first-party Technical Support.
Free Technical Support guides are available here: https://www.poecommunity.help No ads, trackers, or other weird stuff. |
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" Blood Magic in PoE1 is busted if you know what you are doing. Reference my Chieftain in Discount Keepers league if you want. You get a free aura via Eternal Blessing. I was able to maintain above low life threshold and still use two 35% auras + level 20 Vitality on top of the Blessing, and I don't have to path for Eldritch Battery. If you want a trash keystone, look no further than Arrow Dancing lmao. The opposite of knowledge is not illiteracy, but the illusion of knowledge.
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" Yes, they are slow… but I still don’t get it. Just looking at the classes, you can see ~10k ES mages, and then there are warrior builds where it’s like, “I don’t care about armour, here is damage.” On the other hand, there are builds with good EHP but lacking damage. And the worst part is that the road to high damage and survivability with a warrior is long, while the path for mages is far more straightforward and, in my opinion, easier. So what feedback do they expect from the left side of the tree compared to the top side, when I think the feedback is still the same: mages are in a far better state. :/ | |
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And for the love of God (Jonathan), when will we have something other than these “amazing” maces?
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