I admit it: I’m a coward. The first time I fired up Path of Exile 1, accidentally tabbing over to its sprawling passive skill tree filled me with an instinctual dread, like I was coming face to face with some ancestral human enemy. How could my frail, mortal mind ever hope to make sense of it? Dejected, scared, defeated, I slinked off back to more understandable videogames.
I was determined not to do the same thing when I got into Path of Exile 2. I failed. Mostly. I have to be honest, seeing the approximately 8 billion winding nodes in PoE2’s passive tree was no less intimidating than seeing them in the first game. It just fits badly into my brain: What if I make a mistake? What if I embark down a road that completely stunts my character, dooming me in the long run? There are a thousand different commitments to make and they all seem vital and irreversible—the skill tree looks like a maze, and I feared that taking a wrong turn could lead me to some inescapable dead end.
But I stuck at it, and I’ve finally overcome my hesitation. In fact, my Witch is bristling with passives, chosen gaily and without fear. Why? Because I’ve convinced myself that PoE2’s passive skill tree isn’t a maze, it’s an open world.
Free roam
I think so, anyway. As you can probably tell, I’m a total neophyte when it comes to PoE, and it could well be the case that I actually am totally hamstringing myself with my free and easy attitude to its skill system. But by treating the level up process as one of free-ranging exploration rather than meticulous build-crafting, I’ve managed to finally deactivate the mental brakes that had previously stopped me from getting into the series.
So I’m treating the whole thing as a process of exploration. A jaunt into the Ranger’s skill tree here, a sojourn over to Sorceress there—it’s all just a number-crunchy version of taking a detour into an appetising-looking cave in Skyrim on the way to a main objective, at least in my mind. I’m not making irreversible and devastating decisions, I’m meandering down forks in the road, or sampling from a beautiful smorgasbord of delicious seasonings.
In other words, I’ve attained a level of self-delusion about the decisions I’m making to free myself from choice paralysis, but don’t knock it: it works, and it means I’ve been able to get deeper into PoE2 than I ever got into its predecessor. It also means I’ve actually come to appreciate what this thick forest of options allows—builds that are actually your own, unique admixtures of traits that create characters no one else (or well, relatively no one, there are like millions of people playing this thing) has.
Where Diablo 4 leant hard into aesthetic customisation—easily beating out PoE2 on that front—Grinding Gear Games lets me spin up little violent guys who feel mechanically my own instead. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there are all sorts of build takes out there, and probably one that the current meta dictates is ‘the best,’ but now I’ve gotten over my fear of making a bad decision, I’m enjoying the liberating feeling of picking out passives that seem interesting and seeing what happens. I’m creating my own meta, free from the narrow confines that searching out the ‘right build’ imposes on me. And hey, if I do screw up too badly, respecs are cheaper now.
So if, like me, you’re the kind of person who freezes up when confronted with all the choices that Path of Exile 2 frontloads you with, maybe try treating the whole thing like a walk in the woods rather than a climb up a sheer cliff. Sure, you might make some less than optimal turns, but you’ll blaze a trail all your own.
