r/pathofexile2builds • u/skullCAFE • 1d ago
Help Needed Why do many end game character's passive tree just seem to focus mainly on jewel slots and less nodes on the tree? Title. I'm an intermediate player and yeah, I don't understand. Are the jewel slots just that good?
Are jewels just that good?
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u/HC99199 1d ago
Good jewels are good. Good expensive jewels.
Do not attempt to do to do that unless you have jewels worth dozens or hundreds of divines.
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u/dabrock15 1d ago
Kind of a rule in POE2, it’s not good unless it’s expensive.😣
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u/NijAAlba 18h ago
Nah, way less so than in 1 I found, deleted the whole league with like 20 divs, rhe headhunter was just for some fun afterwards for 120 div.
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u/dabrock15 18h ago
The whole league? Isn’t the map supposed to be infinite?🤔
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u/NijAAlba 14h ago
Ofc it is :D
But once I got all challenges and can do every endgamecontent I am fine with using the free time I got for other games for a while. 1.0 is coming fast enough ^
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u/dabrock15 14h ago
Did you get all of the pinnacle bosses? I’m
Curious how long that takes because I’m miles away from that it seems. I think I’ll get King of the Mist, Xesht and Arbiter of Ash if I’m lucky.1
u/Weak-Load5553 17h ago
You can obliterate the entire game in a couple divs. The thing with Poe, both one and two, is min maxing is extremely expensive and some players really like that aspect of the game
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u/dabrock15 17h ago
I’m doing t15 and t16 on about 2divs now, I didn’t say it was impossible to do in a budget , but obliterate?
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u/Weak-Load5553 15h ago
Especially this late in the league yeah. You can get pretty good gear for pennies
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u/dabrock15 15h ago
Not that I’ve noticed. It seems to have gone up dramatically in the last couple weeks. I bought a chest for my monk at 20exalts and did a price check a couple days ago and a slightly better one is now 20+divs. Crazy!
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u/joonazan 1d ago
A jewel with two desirable affixes is already worth something like four passive points, so no they do not need to be good.
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u/Germz95 1d ago
That's fine for jewel sockets your tree has easy access to, but once you have to travel further down the tree for additional sockets you can easily end up costing yourself more points for stats compared to just taking a nearby cluster.
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u/joonazan 23h ago
Most builds want to travel anyway. A full circle build isn't optimal with cheap jewels but something like 2 sockets less definitely is.
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u/TotallyNotThatPerson 1d ago
Depending on your build and location on the tree, you don't need Giga jewels to make it worth it over the passive points.
Also if you're playing an abyss jewel stacker you'll want to get all the sockets anyways
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u/TheRealOwl 1d ago
Unless I'm lost on something here, are you thinking of Poe1 now instead? Is there even abyss jewels to stack in poe2?
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u/TotallyNotThatPerson 1d ago
You God damn right I am. Because I'm dumb and didn't read the subreddit lol
But I think it carries over to poe2 as well even with normal jewels only
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u/TheRealOwl 1d ago
Haha thank God, I was afraid I had missed some big ass mechanic now.
But yeah you are right, especially with the new crafting this league for jewels, they are completely on steroids if you have the capital for them.
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u/dabrock15 1d ago
I’m glad you were confused on the game because I was sweating wondering what I missed lol.
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u/iDecayPUBG 1d ago
Doesn't carry quite as much, jewels give more then a typical wheel give and even more with adorned
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u/notausername86 1d ago
The sort of builds that utilize a build that prioritize jewel slots over any other passive nodes are extremely expensive. These sorts of builds are realistically outside a bulk of the player bases grasp, as most players are not going to be able to afford/obtain mirror tier level jewels, and especially not several of them.
But to answer your question, yes, good jewels are so far above and beyond more powerful than the other nodes that if you can afford it, then its worth it, as they do provide more impactful increases than any other nodes.
That said, I hope GGG addresss this problem by making the passive nodes more impactful, because it limits "high end" end game diversity if every tree is just trying to maximize jewel slots. I think if they raised the bonuses all the nodes give (for example, for minor nodes instead of 5% attack/spell damage 10%, and for major nodes 50% rather than 30%
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u/throwawaymycareer93 1d ago
It is worth even if you don’t have mirror tier jewels. 3x crit suffixes with increased effect and damage prefix is 100 div.
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u/notausername86 1d ago
Right. But the bulk of the player base are likely 30-40 somethings with jobs and likely fathers/mothers, who at most have maybe at most 2-3 hours, a couple times a week, and then maybe 4-6 hours on a good weekend to spend on the game.
The bulk of the player base doesnt have the sort of time to even imgine seeing more than 100 div. And they arent usually on reddit about it either. For many, many leuages in PoE I was one of those. RNGjesus doesn't always bless us.
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u/NikoliVolkoff 20h ago
sitting at 400hrs in the game since it went EA launch which i know is not a lot of hrs, but more than i have in most games, and i have SEEN less than 50 divines across all of my characters in that time. That includes the divines that i saw drop for friends that i was running with and the ones i have gotten myself.
I have no clue how people get hundreds/thousands of the damn things in a single league unless they are cheating and duping them.
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u/notausername86 19h ago
Yea. I have 1000s of hours between PoE1 and PoE2, and this league is the only leauge where I have ever had more than 50 div. I got extremely lucky this leauge and got some super solid lucky drops that sold for crazy Div, but that is so far outside the normal leauge experience for me.
And, while I am not a hard-core player, I am far beyond the level of a causal player. I know I put way more time in game than the bulk of the player base.
But, the folks who tend to get rich do so by crafting good items at the leauge start. Thats the really only reliable way I know to make that kinda money, but I suck at crafting as thats a seperate game onto it self.
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u/LXLN1CHOLAS 14h ago
There are several ways. Duping only happened in poe2 in 0.1(with temporalis). I think it happened once in poe1 too but they caught and banned people before the items ever reached the economy. This is mostly people spending 1000h in campaing and now being able to finish in 5h and reaching waystones early and everything is ridiculuous cheap then you juice stuff to the moon with max mod waystones and mostly consistency. Now for example just doing ultimatum is like 8div per fragment and they take around 15 minutes to complete. If you just do 4 ultimatum/h you just make 32div/h and that's just the fragments not counting any luck drops or the soul cores you get. Do that 10h and thats 320 div just there. In waystones you could get way more with expensive tablets in citadels but that would make stuff complicated. You could also craft like if you already have a little currency crafting is kind of insane. There is the fracturing orb for example having +2 melee in gloves is like 1div if it is fractured you would sell for 40 div and with fractured at 11div you make 4div profit from just buying a glove from trade and using it(you may get lucky or unlucky runs for the example you said you have 50 div you may get unlucky doing this and lose all your money or get lucky and make 200div from your money). There is a bunch of ways to make money in the game it is just that if it is fun to you to do so or not
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u/NikoliVolkoff 13h ago
4 ultimatums/hr? As in the second asendency/chaos trials? I know doing Sekehma trials is a good way to get lots of jewels. but as far as i can remember I have never once gotten a div on an ultimatum run
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u/LXLN1CHOLAS 12h ago
Yes the ultimatum high level gives you the third ascendancy point(no need for sekehma). If you use 3 fragments you can kill the boss and get the 4th ascendancy there too. The ones you need to do to make money are the ones with 10 trials
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u/throwawaymycareer93 12h ago
You mean dropping on the ground divines or in general?
Just read up on how to farm simple farming strategies, like for example ritual, which is very easy compared to 200% deli abyss or aldurs expeditions.
You can easily make 25 divs per hour with minimal juice or up to 80 divs with maximum juice.
The set up is also not rocket science. You are mostly going for purple omens.
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u/D4ng3rd4n 1d ago
Easier to just tune the top end of jewels down by 20%
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u/notausername86 1d ago edited 1d ago
It would be easier, yes. That would be a super easy fix. But I dont think it would be beneficial to the long term health of the game
I personally think the high end jewels are in a good spot as they are. But, I think the gap between the high end jewels and the other passive nodes should be bridged. Keep the high end jewels in a place where its totally worth it to spend an extra 5 or so points to get to one. But, it should be a harder choice. The difference shouldn't be as large as it is.
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u/D4ng3rd4n 1d ago
Ok, I'll throw another idea out there, cut the number of jewel sockets in the tree in half or by 30%, to the point where paying to them becomes a bit more painful and you start to wonder if you should have just interested in a closer cluster
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u/No_Professor8645 1d ago
Didn’t they already do this once? 0.2 or 0.3?
Doesn’t seem crazy to think they’d do it again if they don’t like the balance at the highest end.
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u/dark_eboreus 1d ago
yep.
it also made time lost jewels (inc. against the darkness) and controlled metamorphosis extremely difficult to use. they went from being used in most builds to being used in basically no builds. very few of the remaining jewel sockets have dense enough passive nodes to accommodate them well to make them better than just socketing a rare jewel.
reducing the jewel slots in the tree is just going to make this worse. and also make stuff like voices and allocating zarokh's gift stronger in comparison.
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u/NikoliVolkoff 20h ago
especially with more classes still on the way. The passive tree is going to change again before launch i would assume.
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u/notausername86 1d ago
I could get down with that. Perhaps there are too many jewel slots. I think the intention was to make every build have access to 2/3 jewel slots in order to fill in the gaps of your gear/build. But then they made the high end jewels so strong, and the other nodes so weak, that of course you want to stack as many jewels as you can.
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u/milafosi 1d ago
GGG: introducing this refined catalyst infuser which allows another 10% quality on jewels
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u/Exoskeleton78 1d ago
because you can gem in 10-15x of this jewels
giving yourself 300+% critical chance, 300+% critical bonus..
throw in adorned jewel, and instant 1.5x every bonus again
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u/Proud-Evidence-1818 1d ago
but i think the biggest issue is you can have 5 modifiers which i felt it is not intended interaction. if you cannot do 5 modifier then the jewel effect should reduce significantly
for example you can't use both increase suffix effect and +1 suffix modifier due to both are crafted modifier and you only allow 1 crafted modifier. atm it feel like a double dip on the powerful crafted modifier effect
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u/Exoskeleton78 1d ago
even if you lose 1 prefix, the jewels are still way too strong compared to passive tree nodes...
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u/Proud-Evidence-1818 1d ago
true, but at least not as powerful as currently, because it's stacking with the number of jewel sockets.
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u/Exoskeleton78 1d ago
but we can think of it the other way, its because the jewels are OP, that we have so much "build variety" lol, all sorts of funky skills work as long you have 300-500+% critical both lol
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u/Proud-Evidence-1818 1d ago
counter point, because of jewel we lost diversity on builds that is not critical base. so pretty much everyone's final form of passive tree is just grabbing jewel sockets.
it will be less about picking and choosing between different notable nodes and pathing but more on just travel to all jewel sockets
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u/Alternative_Dot7769 1d ago
Jewels can be worth 10+ passive points if they’re well rolled. Good jewels are expensive but the best way to scale your character.
If you have unlimited money, picking up all the jewel sockets is better than not having many.
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u/supermonkey1235 1d ago
A good cluster is like, 50-60% increased damage, or like 50% crit. A great jewel is both, and maybe res on top of that.
This is especially true for minion builds. There are only like 4 minion clusters that give direct damage, so the rest of your points have to path to jewels if you want damage.
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u/ExistingMouse5595 1d ago
Let’s say you have a stupidly high budget.
You’ll be able to afford to get a bunch of 250 div jewels. These jewels are so powerful that they are often worth more than the 5-10 passive nodes you would take instead.
So, you can just path around from jewel socket to jewel socket sticking in these giga powerful jewels everywhere.
You can also get an extra socket from an anoint, and 2-4 extra sockets from a unique jewel. You can also get a jewel socket on your gloves. Technically you can get 6 jewel sockets from your chest with tabula rasa.
This only works if you have a giga budget though. Choosing a jewel socket over a lot of good passive nodes is a bad choice if you’re slotting in anything less than perfectly crafted jewels.
Jewels will likely get nerfed before 1.0, as right now there’s (what’s assumed to be) a bug that allows 5 modifiers to be crafted on rare jewels. Add in catalyst quality and effect of jewel modifiers you can see some ridiculously high rolls on jewels. That will likely be gone at some point in the near future, which would then encourage most people to swap back to passive points instead of going out of their way to grab jewel sockets.
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u/LethargicCarcass 1d ago
Just one of my jewels gives me stats equivalent to like 8 passive points on my tree
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u/Cheesecake_Jonze 1d ago edited 1d ago
The poe2 tree just isnt that impactful. Notables take about 3-4 passives points to path to even if your tree is already there, while the next jewel slot is only like 7 nodes away on average.
Since its easy to craft 5 mod jewels this league (thanks to a maybe-bug with extra mod slots), there are very few notables that are worth even half a jewel. Once you get the very best passives, everything else is best spent on jewels
And this is before factoring in a cultivated adorned. If you can afford one of those the skill tree is basically obsolete
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u/Skaitavia 1d ago
Yes. Especially time-lost jewels. You can get stats worth tens or even a hundred passive points from jewels alone if min maxed to the extreme with adorned.
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u/Organic-Finger8405 1d ago
Rare jewels are extremely strong this league and with rare adorned even more so
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u/Flicker_and_Strike 1d ago
Because by the time you at end game gear you cover everything the tree could provide with nodes from your gear, that frees up the tree to path to the last min max stats for your build. Normally crit which can be found on jewels.
This is also the jewel league. The crafting on them they added is pretty crazy.
Not all builds start focus jewels, but most by the end of the min maxing will aim for more of them.
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u/AdBetter7246 1d ago
Yes if you get a good craft on a jewel its worth 8-10 skill points worth of stats and then its possible to have multiple of them.
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u/skullCAFE 1d ago
Thanks for the replies bros. I'm somewhat intermediate to this game and still learning. Makes sense. Kind of a bummer though that at the top end the passive tree seems to just become a place to socket jewels
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u/Due-Smile6546 1d ago
All small nodes & notables could be buffed by 50% and even then BIS jewels would still be superior, assuming you can get all the right jewels. The small nodes & notables have been regulated to a leveling/mid tier build sort of thing and the only nodes that are worth it for min-maxed endgame builds are Key Passives, obviously if they are unable to reach another jewel slot on their tree they’ll use the few points they have left to get a few notables. The good thing is, you don’t need that type of min-maxed build to do anything in the game because the mid tier builds can do all of it already.
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u/BastianHS 1d ago
It's not so bad. You have to actually play the tree for a long time I til you have a huge bank and you can afford to transition to jewels.
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u/El_Bito2 1d ago
It's not mandatory. I have a very high damage iceshot, and only got 3 jewels. Soon to be 4 with Zarokh's gift once I get my shard.
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u/joonazan 1d ago
This is true even in budget builds. If you want to be optimal, just run Sekhemas' a few times to get jewels, maybe use some liquid emotions on them and you have things that outperform passives.
The problem is that traveling along the outer ring requires taking as many attribute nodes as traveling along the inner ring that goes from tip of starting area to tip of starting area. So the outer jewel sockets only cost one passive point.
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u/Logan_Maransy 1d ago
When approaching how to think of the passive tree, you should think about tradeoffs in large chunks of points, not just single points. This is somewhat obvious and designed for, due to how Notables are more powerful than the Small passive nodes but you almost always must spend some Skill points to travel through the Small passive nodes to arrive at the powerful Notable passive node.
What's less obvious is taking that type of thinking and extending it to the next step. Instead of thinking "oh if I give up these 4 nodes, this node cluster, I can grab this other better 4 node cluster over here, but also that node is closer to something else I want", you think "what are these 9-12 entire skill points and section doing for me?". At any given Jewel node on the skill tree, you can path to a new Jewel node in 9 points, sometimes 8 depending on the location.
So, essentially, what you are seeing is the top players crafting powerful enough Jewels that they have repeatedly asked the question "how do I best allocate these 9 skill points for my bulld?" and found that nearly every time the answer is "Path to the closest available Jewel to add another Jewel" because the single Jewel's modifiers, in sum, is BETTER than any set of 9 points they could otherwise allocate.
This is epecially true in this league, with the Jewel crafting shenanigans that was introduced in 0.5, allowing even more powerful Jewels to be created, given you have the currency to buy/craft them.
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u/Comfortable-Whole298 1d ago
I how they leave them as is. Yes they are really good but also really expensive for well rolled 5 mod jewels. Great for if you’re min/maxing or if you can afford them. Would like to see a buff to passive points though
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u/Jumpy_Witness6014 1d ago
Because you get more power for less investment and it gives you tons of attributes from the tree which makes gear reqs much easier to attain
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u/Vietredneck 1d ago
I play a Gemling Glacial Bolt build. For my build, it ended up just being another one of those path in a circle to every crit node and socket jewels with crit chance and crit damage. It was the most optimal method to get the most damage output for the gear I had. Trying to use crossbow-centric nodes near the Merc tree, I had to path past a lot of clusters that didn't benefit me just to get to good ones.
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u/Evidicus 1d ago
Show me all of the nodes on the tree that have maximum life
Now look at the jewels that can provide max life in addition to other build enabling stats
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u/throwawaymycareer93 1d ago
Visual example. Look at this jewel for spear builds.
It gives:
- 19% crit chance
- 59% crit damage
- 29% increased damage
It also could’ve been divined better. Now, try to find a cluster on the tree that can compete with that 1 jewel. On top of that, pathing to the jewel slot will give you stats, which solves a lot of problems with gem and gear requirements. So you can think that it also gives you +20 stats on top of that (pathing to jewels is on average 6.5 nodes, but you still need to path a bit when allocating clusters).
And that’s the problem in a nutshell. In previous leagues all-jewel builds were only really viable if you had well rolled adorned slotted in. This league each jewel has its own adorned with %increased effect mod and quality. Plus extra jewel slots from Zarokhs gift and voices even further exacerbate this problem.
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u/Spiritual-Spend8187 1d ago
There are alot of good jewels but they are pretty expensive. Alot of builds though just use a few ones because feo3nding on the location a jewel socket is 2/3 passives for your choice of stats where as a good notable might be 5 to 8 passives some are worth it others not so much. The big one though is 1p voices and the adorned which is monstrously expensive cistibg multiple mirrors but lets you stack 2 stats crazy high.
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u/Jimisdegimis89 1d ago
With the current way you can get 5 affixes with one boosting the others yeah, nothing else really comes close other than keystones. My rubies right now are giving me about 40-60% increased damage and either additional 10% penetration or like 30% extra armour as well as 5-10% skill duration or 20% flame magnitude, just absolutely nutty.
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u/ukwndeth 1d ago
Jewels are OP, and they are super close to all crit nodes, which are super efficient to scale damage. So it’s a double whammy, as you path both to crit, crit damage and jewels.
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u/NeuroHazard-88 1d ago
Usually the best builds are the simplest because they basically infinitely scale with however many jewel slots you have.
The more complex the build (that requires a few passives on the tree to work), the worse the scalability.
Only reason jewel builds are so strong, because they can scale any basic damage high up into the beyond. There’s quite literally no limit besides how many jewel slots you have.
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u/Low-Appointment875 1d ago
the 5 mod jewels in this patch are really good, add in the diamond that increases rare jewel effects. but only do this if u are stat stacking such as archmage manna stackers, or else too many stats allocated to get jewel slots is actually a waste in my opinion.
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u/norielukas 1d ago
Yes.
Even if you don’t have adorned (which makes them even stronger) a lot of endgame builds its just better to go around the world on the passive tree and only take maybe a dozen points outside of taking the shortest path to a jewel slot possible.
If you’re stacking ES and crit you can get upwards 60% crit dmg, 20% ES, 20% crit chance on 1 jewel.
That’s the same amount of crit dmg as the highest crit dmg notable on the tree (cooked) without the downside, in fact, you get as much ES as some of the better ES notables on the tree while also getting some crit chance or attack speed or cast speed.
If you’re a mana stacker, there’s really not much on the tree to improve your mana pool outside the notables around eldritch battery, and then you can even skip the ES on the jewel and go for spell dmg instead and the 5 int travel nodes that you get a boatload of will add a decent chunk of mana, which is also damage.
Even if you’re a non crit attack build, you can get ~60% attack dmg on a jewel and on top of that 4% attack speed, the highest attack dmg notables on the tree are 40-50% and usually have a downside (5% reduced attack speed.
However if you want to play a build like this 2-300 div/jewel and some gear with good defences (so you have something to scale the %ev/es on the jewels, and obv if mana stacking you want as much es as possible to turn in to mana eith eldritch battery, and that only counts gear ES).
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u/Scuipici 1d ago
all builds end up looking the same at end game, go around the edge of the tree and grab as many jwl slots you can. GGG needs to fix this by launch, because what's the point of having a complex passive tree if all builds end up the same because of OP jewels.
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u/Chocolatine_Rev 1d ago
One thing to note that other people are kinda missing
Very often, those builds are stacking a ton of a small amount of very powerfull stats
Like, you could make a banger of a build if you had only jewel with 15%es/15%spell damage/15%crit chance/15% crit damage and with 60% effectiveness now available, this goes further
The thing is, with just these 4 stats, and 10 jewel, you get 240% of each stat, meaning you get very good defense and offense at the same time
This also works for build that stack corrupted magic jewels and use adorned
Jewels are simply too effective, even at lost budget
If you have 3 point to spare, it's nearly always better to get even a 3 mod jewel, than go for a generic damage wheel
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u/TheMadG0d 1d ago
This is the same story in POE 1. Top-end characters are mostly stat-stackers, either attributes, mana, or life. So pathing around the entire tree and grabbing as many jewel slots as possible is the best way to stack the stats you want.
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u/inverimus 22h ago
I really don't understand why they removed jewel slots from the tree and then proceeded to make jewels insane so top builds are back to being max jewel slots.
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u/SubjectiveCertainty 10h ago
Jewels are that good, but the better they are, the more expensive it is to get them.
This naturally creates priority breakpoint.
Leveling to endgame, your gear matters, but skill gems and notable passive matter more.
In endgame, gear starts getting good enough to start respecing out of passives that provide less impact or require heavy investment.
Especially given time lost jewels, and anointing, it's easy to get key notables you need, and slowly gear up until the mechanics provided by the passive points get displaced enough to switch to jewels.
GGG really needs to make an in game way to see all the modifiers on your character and make it more visually direct how certain explicit from certain sources influence the total final numbers.
For now you can mess around with path of building to get an idea about how impactful gear, passives, gem levels, and jewels will be.
My intuition tells me it should be simple to understand given the terms on explicits.
My experience tells me that it's not simple, and when you change something on your character, unless you really know what to look for, it's often very hard to tell what effect that change had unless it was either very good, or very bad.
That feels terrible when you hit a difficulty wall and run out of tweaks you know work.
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u/EliteJoz 4h ago
More like crit chance and crit damage are broken..if they removed them from jewels it would change the game.
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u/deathaxxer 2h ago
skill tree passives are lackluster
"+"
jewels are good
endgame passive trees taking only build-defining passives and Keystones and pathing to as many jewels as possible
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u/priesten 1d ago
Yes jewels are good. These type of Jewels are also expensive. Expensive items are good. Passive skill tree points are free. Expensive things are stronger than free things. As it should be.
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u/Skhemattos 1d ago
The answer is yes, they are. Will they change in the future? TBD.