Path Of Exile 2 The Last Of The Druids League Ice Shot Amazon Build Guide | Skills, Ascendancy Passives, And Best Item Affixes

Vaal Temple is the core of Fate of the Vaal league mechanic in Path of Exile 2 Patch 0.4.0. Its most innovative aspect is that players need to build and complete their own dungeon. Vaal Temple tests not only players' combat abilities but also their planning and spatial awareness.

While this new mechanic presents a challenge, mastering its operation allows you to acquire abundant resources and exclusive rewards. Therefore, I will introduce you to all the important information about Vaal Temple, teaching you how to successfully operate it from unlocking methods, design, completion, and management.

What Is Vaal Temple?

A Vaal Temple is a player-customizable dungeon, or you can call it a Vaal Ruins. Players enter by activating Vaal Beacons scattered throughout the world. Unlike ordinary areas, it allows players to construct their own dungeon layout using room tiles unlocked through exploration and combat.

Then you'll need to experience the temple dungeon you built yourself, battling through numerous obstacles to finally find and defeat the final boss – Atziri, the Red Queen.

How To Unlock Vaal Ruins?

To enter the temple, you first need to create a character choosing Fate of the Vaal. You'll then see Vaal Beacons in some normal areas of PoE 2; these are circular areas glowing with a dark red light, where many ferocious monsters gather. Clearing Vaal Beacons is necessary to unlock Vaal Temple.

Players need to clear a total of 6 Vaal Beacons. Each major area on the map has at least one Vaal Beacon, so you'll have plenty of opportunities. Simply kill nearby enemies and successfully step into the circular area within the beacon to unlock it. Sometimes, valuable items may drop during the monster-killing process.

Successfully clearing six Vaal Beacons will unlock Vaal Ruins. Once unlocked, the ruins will be permanently open, accessible via teleportation points until you complete a full temple challenge.

Vaal Temple Core Mechanics

Central Area

Upon entering Vaal Temple, you'll arrive at a safe starting area. This area includes:

• A teleportation point;
• Your storage;
• Temple Console (the core system for dungeon creation).

Temple Console is the most important. All dungeon planning, upgrades, and saving are done through it. Use Temple Console to create your own dungeons.

Layout Rules

In Temple Console, you'll see a grid map. You can place room tiles connected by corridors on the map. These tiles represent combat, reward, boss, and support spaces. When building your map, make sure to connect the different rooms in a logical and reasonable way, as you'll later need to enter your own dungeon and explore it independently.

Key Layout Rules:

• Rooms must be connected by effective corridors to avoid dead ends;
• Paths only need to lead to rooms;
• Routes must be continuous. You can plan a main path leading to the boss room first and then expand from there.

Room Types

Each room in the temple is different, and the types of items dropped will also vary, including equipment, POE 2 currency and certain rare items. As you progress through the story and complete Vaal Temple challenges, you'll gradually unlock more powerful room sections. Each room also has a corresponding card that clearly shows the enemy type, reward category, and special mechanics or dangers.

The specific rooms are as follows:

• Commander's Chamber
• Sealed Vault
• Bronzeworks
• Workshop
• Dynamo
• Prosthetic Research
• Thaumaturge's Laboratory
• Chamber of Souls
• Guardhouse
• Spymaster's Study
• Surgeon's Ward
• Depot
• Ancient Reliquary Vault
• Kishara's Vault
• Jiquani's Vault
• Extraction Chamber

Room Upgrades

As the challenge progresses, you can upgrade rooms. By fulfilling the conditions specified on the room card, you can increase the loot drops within, but the potential danger level will also increase.

If the room outline on the panel glows green when you place a room, it means that when you confirm its placement, one of the adjacent rooms will be upgraded.

Therefore, you should pay attention to balancing the challenge difficulty of each room. Over-upgrading in the early stages will make later challenges increasingly difficult.

Challenging Vaal Temple

After completing the dungeon layout, select "Run Temple" from Temple Console to start the challenge. Before entering, remember to bring your best gear, empty your inventory, and prepare Portal Scrolls.

There will be some resources and regular monsters in the corridors. Your map will mark the rooms you named during setup; these are your main objectives. You must clear all rooms to successfully complete Vaal Temple challenge.

Once you enter a room, the door will automatically lock until you fulfill the room's requirements, such as killing all enemies and opening the chest. If you are killed or teleported away for any reason, you will need to re-enter from the temple entrance, so be sure to unlock available checkpoints to reduce travel time.

You will need to fight your way through, searching for powerful equipment and weapons. The final objective is the boss room at the far end of the map, where the powerful boss Atziri resides-the strongest boss in the entire dungeon. Defeating her will reward you with many unique items, such as Atziri's Contempt, Atziri's Rule, or Vaal Siphoner.

Completing all of the above will complete Vaal Ruins. If you wish to challenge it again, you will need to clear six Vaal Beacons before you can re-enter.

Vaal Temple Decay Management

After completing your exploration of Vaal Temple, you need to use Temple Console to close the temple and save your progress. This is necessary after completing each new map, allowing you to continue your exploration the next time you return.

Each time you return to Ruins, you will find your temple Decay and destroyed, with some rooms randomly becoming corrupted, unstable, or even inaccessible. This can ruin your carefully crafted dungeon map, so you need to collect Vaal Medallions dropped by defeating bosses in different rooms. These medallions not only provide substantial rewards but also protect rooms from Decay.

Vaal Temple in Path of Exile 2 Patch 0.4.0 is a highly replayable dungeon mechanic, catering to whether you're seeking rare items and gear, testing your character build, or challenging Atziri.

Don't be afraid of death, create your own Vaal Temple, and bravely launch your attack!

Path of Exile 2 Patch 0.4.0 has been out for a while now. For the first three days after release, players could enjoy the game for free, and everyone was racing to complete it, hoping to unlock all the new content during those days.

Most players have already experienced all the new content. If you find the later content a bit repetitive, perhaps you can try some characters and builds you haven't used before to give the game a fresh feel.

The most popular features of Path of Exile 2 are the various classes and different builds. The diversity of choices allows players to experience different ways of playing the same game content. In particular, Druid class, which was added in patch 0.4.0, is the most popular class, and most players are trying to use it to complete the game.

Druid is a hybrid intelligence class that combines spell-casting abilities with shapeshifting combat. It can be a ranged mage or transform into a beast for melee attacks. Among its many forms, Wolf Druid stands out for its swift frost melee capabilities, freezing hordes of enemies before tearing them to shreds with lightning speed.

Next, I'll teach you how to build a high-damage Wolf Druid in PoE 2.

Build Overview

Druid's wolf form sacrifices some survivability, prioritizing speed and mana consumption over its more tank-oriented bear form. Its extremely high burst damage allows Wolf Druid to quickly eliminate opponents in melee combat.

Advantages:

• Extremely high movement and attack speed;
• Powerful crowd control;
• Extremely high frost burst damage.

Disadvantages:

• Consumes more mana than other Druid forms;
• Relatively low tankiness.

Why Choose Wolf Druid?

Early in The Last of the Druids campaign, Druid gains an Animal Talisman, which allows it to switch between bear and wolf forms.

• Bear Form: Slower, tankier, higher base damage;
• Wolf Form: Agile, lower base damage, but higher attack frequency.

If you prefer fast-paced hacking, freezing enemies, and aggressive offense, Wolf Druid is the best choice. Its core gameplay revolves around a simple yet deadly combat cycle.

You can use Lunar Assault to freeze enemies (single-target or area-of-effect), then quickly unleash melee attacks to shatter the frozen enemy. Simultaneously, your human form can apply frost powers and debuffs, cycling through this process until you transform into a wolf and charge into battle to finish the fight.

Best Ascendancy

While Druid has two Ascendancy classes to choose from, Oracle is the best option for Wolf Druid.

This provides a stable attack damage bonus, synergizes well with fast-attack skills for high damage output, and combined with the passive skill bonuses from Passives Tree and Foresight power of Oracle, Wolf Druid gains a significant advantage in combat.

Build Tips

Skill Setup And Corresponding Support Gems

Human Form

• Frost Bomb: Magnified Area, Spell Cascade, Deep Freeze;
• Thunderstorm: Magnified Area, Prolonged Duration;
• Herald of Ice: Magnified Area, Deep Freeze;
• Overwhelming Presence: Precision.

Wolf Form

• Shred: Cold Attunement, Rage, Rapid Attacks;
• Lunar Assault: Ice Bite, Elemental Armament, Rapid Attacks;
• Cross-Slash: Close Combat, Execute, Magnified Area;
• Pounce: Freezing Mark, Mark for Death, Mark of Siphoning.

Unlike Bear Druid in Path of Exile 2, the wolf form build focuses more on speed and frost power. While the wolf's damage isn't as high, its fast attack speed and numerous attacks compensate for this.

The human form is best suited for ranged spell attacks and can be used before entering combat. Leave the melee combat to Wolf Druid in the later stages of the battle.

Passive Tree Optimization Choices

Wolf Druid's build emphasizes a balanced combination of physical and elemental damage, so you can't focus solely on one. Increasing physical attack will help with the wolf form's finishing move, while increasing spell power or speed will make you more powerful and agile in combat.

Besides maximizing spell and physical attack, we also need to pay attention to defensive and HP regeneration bonuses. Increasing your armor thickness is also important, and you should stack elemental shields as much as possible, as this is Wolf Druid's primary defensive method.

In other words, if you see terms like melee attack speed, increased frost damage, freeze, and elemental damage in Passive Tree, prioritize unlocking them.

Gear Selection

Regardless of which Druid form you choose in PoE 2 patch 0.4.0, you'll obtain many powerful staves as your weapons. For example, Taryn's Shiver Gelid Staff and The Whispering Ice Permafrost Staff are both well-suited for Wolf Druids. Each staff offers different abilities and attribute bonuses, so careful comparison is essential.

In addition, don't forget to upgrade your Animal Talisman. You can obtain higher-level Talismans by defeating certain monsters or by getting them at Currency Exchange using PoE 2 currency, ensuring deals significant damage.

Meanwhile, you can further enhance your weapon's damage output by socketing runes into it. With luck, you might even gain additional buffs or elemental abilities.

Overall, the ultimate goal of all your gear is to increase your attack power, speed, and HP. The focus should be on upgrading melee capabilities and spell damage, as Wolf Druids rely on a combination of these to unleash their full potential in combat. Therefore, any trinket that increases Frost Power and Attack Power is a good choice.

The above is the key information for Wolf Druid build in Path of Exile 2 patch 0.4.0. If you prefer a smooth combat style and high-speed burst damage, you should definitely try this build.

If you want to quickly complete Path of Exile 2 Patch 0.4.0 during the free weekend, a proper character build is essential.

A good character build can help you establish a significant advantage at the start, accumulating sufficient gear and Path of Exile 2 currency. Below, I'll introduce a Lich build perfectly suited for the early game, including all the detailed information you need.

Skills

Main Skills

To master Lich, you must understand her most effective skill combo: Essence Drain + Contagion.

Essence Drain is a Projectile Spell that deals continuous Chaos damage to hit enemies; Contagion is an Area of Effect Spell that distributes all Chaos damage over time as a debuff to nearby enemies.

This combo can help you clear large areas of enemies. It's not only surprisingly effective in the early stages of PoE 2, but you'll also use it throughout the game, including the late game.

Late Game Skills

In the late game, we need to unlock other skills, namely Dark Effigy and Sigil of Power. Dark Effigy, as a totem, fires Chaos Projectiles at enemies with Chaos buff, dealing extra damage. Sigil of Power generates a Sigil on the ground; when you and your teammates are within its range, you gain a powerful spell damage buff.

This combo greatly maximizes our damage output, helping us fight the final boss in the late game.

How To Unlock Basic Skills?

When you choose the Witch class at the start, our basic setup is relatively easy to obtain. Initially, we need to survive using health, Energy Shield, and strong positioning. Successfully killing some regular monsters or completing quests will earn you Uncut Skill Gems, which can be used to unlock the skills we want.

First, we should unlock Unearth skill, a directional area-of-effect skill that deals damage and creates temporary skeletal structures (essentially your Minion) if it passes over a corpse.

After unlocking useful skills, we can farm higher-level gems. Once we obtain the level 3 Uncut Skill Gem, we can unlock Essence Drain Gem. Simply insert the skill gem into our skill bar to use the corresponding skill in combat.

Support Skill Gems

Level 1

Our first support skill doesn't need to be powerful; a basic one will suffice. For Essence Drain, we can choose Swift Affliction. Although it shortens the duration of Essence Drain's damage on enemies, it increases continuous non-elemental damage, significantly boosting our single-target damage.

Our second support skill targets Contagion: Magnified Area, which improves the efficiency of Contagion skills.

These two support skills are essential. For the remaining slots, we can choose Rapid Casting, Unleash, or Zenith I. The first two gems also support Contagion, greatly improving our monster-clearing efficiency. Zenith supports Essence Drain, increasing our damage by 30%.

However, this skill is relatively difficult to use, requiring constant mana maintenance, so we rarely use it. If you feel you can maintain mana for a long time, then you can use Zenith.

Level 2

When we feel that Tier 1 skill support is no longer sufficient to meet our damage needs in the game, you can equip Tier 2 skill gems.

We can prioritize using Considered Casting, which increases spell damage by approximately 30%. The downside is sacrificing casting speed. If you enjoy the feeling of high damage output, you can prioritize Considered Casting.

If you feel your damage is already sufficient, you can equip Chain Support Gems to expand our skill range, thereby increasing our monster-clearing speed.

In addition, the following options are available:

• Zenith
• Rapid Casting

Equipment Stats

Core Equipment

As a witch, the most important weapon is Wand, which requires Intelligence to use. Unlike traditional weapons, it doesn't deal direct damage; instead, it inflicts damage through spells.

If you can find a wand in Path of Exile 2 0.4.0 that grants +1 to spell skill level, that would be ideal, as it's crucial for increasing damage. The wand should ideally include the following attributes:

• + Chaos Skill Levels;
• Spell Damage;
• Chaos Damage.

Others

If possible, you should also acquire some good rings or other items that increase casting speed, such as: Sapphire Ring, Amethyst Ring, Lunar Amulet, etc. For boots, we only need to focus on movement speed; other attributes are not important.

In other words, for other equipment, we mainly need to focus on these key attributes:

• Spell Damage;
• Chaos Damage;
• Cast Speed.

Chaos Lich Ascendancy Nodes

• Node 1: Soulless Form. This node fixes your mana, making management very simple and also making your second ascendancy choice easier to manage;
• Node 2: Eternal Life. Increases your tankiness;
• Node 3: Eldritch Empowerment. Increases energy damage by 30% when sacrificing Energy Shield.

The main choices are these three. Of course, you can also choose Rupture the Soul, which can improve our monster-clearing speed. Crystalline Phylactery is also a good choice, providing buffs to the character while also dealing damage to enemies.

All of these mechanisms work together to make this Chaos Lich build very powerful and expandable. You can use it in Path of Exile 2 0.4.0 to create distance between yourself and other players from the start. Good luck with your new league start!

As the release of Path of Exile 2’s new The Last of the Druids league approaches, players in the community are searching for leveling strategies and guides that suit their playstyle, such as league starting build types and a list of currently more effective build options, etc.

However, in this PvE-focused ARPG, the most important item determining whether you defeat an enemy in 10 seconds or 5 minutes is your weapon, regardless of whether you choose a melee or ranged class. Unfortunately, many players tend to overlook this.

Therefore, we will disregard the differences between each build type and provide you with guidance on how to create a near-perfect weapon at the start of the league to help you progress through the main campaign and successfully complete the endgame content.

Focus On DPS

First and foremost, the point you need to focus on is Damage Per Second (DPS) of each weapon, as it is the best indicator of your combat performance. 

Taking Warden Bow as an example, the common has no modifiers, the magic adds a high-quality affix that provides a 2-6 point physical damage bonus, while the rare features two rune slots and several damage-enhancing affixes.

At common, DPS is 23; at magic, DPS is 33; and at rare, DPS is 81. Although the increase in damage output isn’t very significant, when combined with the faster kill speed, it might surprise you. 

Through actual testing, the results of using these three weapons of different rarities to kill The Devourer were also different: common weapon took 26.4 seconds, magic weapon took 13.4 seconds, and rare weapon took 2.7 seconds.

Therefore, you can see that at higher rarity levels with damage output and kill speed increasing exponentially, so that you can farm loot and experience points very efficiently in the early stages of the league, especially if your build includes items that increase base physical damage, such as Iron Ring and Northpaw Suede Bracers.

Incidentally, you also need to pay attention to the quality of the weapons you possess. This can be improved with Blacksmith’s Whetstone, which you can obtain by salvaging useless gear. This will further multiply any base attribute improvements from specific affixes by the quality improvement.

Enhance Specific Affixes

After selecting a high-rarity weapon that you will use long term, you should think about how to craft it, which means selecting some special affixes to enhance it or directly removing some unnecessary affixes. Here we mainly introduce the former.

Affixes that can upgrade the level of important skill gems are what you should focus on first. They will greatly increase your skill damage and reduce casting cooldowns, regardless of whether you focus on projectiles, melee, or spell-casting.

In addition, you will need to make corresponding enhancements based on your fighting style. For example, for Martial Weapon, you need affixes that specifically enhance percentage physical damage and fixed numerical bonuses, such as those that increase physical damage, fire damage, or lightning damage.

As for the suffixes on melee weapons, you could consider those that increase projectile skill level, attack speed, and the number of slots. For spell-casting weapons focused on ranged kills, affixes related to spell damage, elemental damage, and casting speed are your priority for enhancement.

Reasonable Allocation Of Currency

Crafting your complete weapon requires various types of currency, so it’s important to allocate your currency wisely to maximize its effectiveness. While Orbs of Transmutation and Orbs of Augmentation are relatively easy to cultivate and are readily available, they shouldn’t be wasted excessively. 

After all, you can’t precisely add a high-quality affix to a weapon by themselves, so you should focus more on PoE 2 Regal Orbs, which can provide both rarity and affix enhancements. There’s also the Orb of Alchemy, which can upgrade an item into a rare item with four affixes, and can also be used in weapon crafting.

If you have a limited amount of either of these two currencies, you might consider using Artificer Orbs to add more sockets to your weapons, which is a good option for gaining an advantage early in the league. Alternatively, you could use Essences with specific buffs, which can effectively increase your damage output.

As for the gold that can be used for gambling in the game, it also should not be wasted carelessly. It should only be considered as a last resort for obtaining an item when its drop rate is extremely low and it’s not available from vendors. This is a last-ditch effort; please do not rely on it excessively.

In summary, by following the strategies above to select and upgrade your weapons, you will have approximately five times more damage than other players using similar build options in the early stages of Path of Exile 2: The Last of the Druids league. This is a huge advantage for early game progression and leveling up.

While PoE 2 didn’t undergo a major overhaul of its crafting system in its latest patch like its longtime rival Diablo 4, the developers have significantly reworked existing crafting options, including gems, items, and crafting currencies. Therefore, this new league is definitely something to look forward to. Enjoy the game!

Recently, Path of Exile 2 released patch 0.4.0 for The Last of the Druids league notes, which will be coming into the game on December 12th. These notes include a general overview of the new league mechanics, an introduction to the new Druid class, and details on several significant changes to existing content, which can give all players a new game experience.

Among these notes, what interested players the most was the inclusion of Druid class, because its tough gameplay style in the original game made players feel it would be very suitable for the higher difficulty challenges in the sequel. And the developers have promised that the favoritism shown during the initial launch of Huntress will not happen again, so players have very high expectations.

If your preferred playstyle involves relentlessly pushing forward with superior tankiness and damage output, then this ultimate guide to the new character is something you’ll definitely want to keep handy, which includes the shapeshifting mechanics, known skills, and Ascendancy Classes found in Druid class.

Druid Overview

According to the developers, Druid in POE 2 is a class that combines the characteristics of both Strength and Intelligence. It can harness the power of nature and transform into three different animal forms: Bear, Wolf, or Wyvern, as well as human. In these forms, not only does your character’s appearance change, but your skills and gameplay also change accordingly.

To ensure this mechanism works smoothly, Path of Exile 2 has added a new weapon type for this class, Talismans, which grant you the basic attack skills of your chosen animal simply by performing a basic attack. You don’t need to worry about getting hurt during the transformation process, as all transformations are instantaneous.

Next, the 4 forms of Druid will be introduced in turn.

Human Form

In this human form, Druid needs to combine the elemental effects available in your build to enhance his animal form. For example, Small Volcano will erupt in a limited area, spraying fragments that deal damage in a chaotic pattern, which can farm POE 2 currency fast.

Bear Form

In this form, you need to continuously cast skills to accumulate Rage in order to gain maximum damage and survival benefits, and then consume this resource to activate more powerful skills. According to the leaked information, this bear form possesses the following skills:

• Rampage: Allows you to charge forward with immense force, shattering the ground beneath your feet. At the same time, your physical damage will receive some buffs.
• Ferocious Roar: Grants you a buff that allows subsequent attacks to penetrate enemy armor. You can also use any Warcry by socketing the corresponding gem into this skill.
• Walking Calamity: This ultimate skill generates a firestorm around you, which increases your Rage generation rate. However, activating it requires a significant amount of Rage itself.

Although these skills are exclusive to the bear form, they all work perfectly in conjunction with the skills of other forms. Furthermore, some skills provide additional benefits even when you are not in that form, such as increasing your total damage or health.

Wolf Form

Compared to the heavy attacks in bear form, the wolf form grants you incredibly high attack speed and mobility. In this form, your basic attack will cause you to leap forward, performing a series of rapid strikes, and the corresponding skills are centered on cold damage and freezing mechanics.

• Lunar Assault: Allows your attacks to instantly freeze enemies.
• Pounce: Allows you to quickly leap to a selected target and apply a mark. Once the marked enemy dies, a small summoned wolf will appear to assist you in subsequent battles. You can have multiple summoned wolves at the same time.
• Cross-slash: This ultimate skill is perfect for boss encounters because it detonates all marks on the enemy, allowing you to summon a pack of wolves without having to kill the target.

Based on the skill options above, it can be inferred that when POE 2 The Last of the Druids league goes live, the most popular skill rotation will be to first freeze enemies with Lunar Assault, then use the following two skills to inflict more damage; or follow up with a basic attack to shatter the ice, the resulting ice shards damaging nearby enemies.

Wyvern Form

The last one is Wyvern Form, which provides you with a basic skill: a forward-thrusting melee attack. After defeating an enemy, you can consume their flesh to gain extra energy, which strengthens your wings, increasing your damage and adding extra lightning damage. The specific form-specific skills are as follows:

• Rolling Magma: It releases bouncing lava balls and triggers the Volcano skill in human form, dealing additional damage.
• Oil Barrage: Sprays fuel at enemies, making them more susceptible to ignition. When you consume Power Charges, it will cast a continuous channeled barrage.

In addition to these specific abilities mentioned above, Wyvern form also allows you to fly through the air and burn everything to ashes, although this will slightly reduce your movement speed. Given the increased difficulty of the new league challenges in Path of Exile 2, it’s speculated that this particular form is the weakest because it’s difficult to make it effective.

Ascendancy Classes

In Path of Exile 2’s latest league, The Last of the Druids, Druid class has two Ascendancy Classes: Shaman and Oracle, which offer completely different passive skill nodes and playstyles. According to the developers, they could significantly improve this character’s combat and survival abilities.

Shaman

In the background story’s setting, Shaman is an elemental spellcaster who increases their damage by accumulating Rage. Currently, it is known to have two key passive abilities: Druidic Champion and Furious Wellspring.

The former provides a buff that grants a 1% spell damage increase for every 2 points of Rage, while the latter allows you to continuously generate Rage. However, it’s worth noting that Rage rarely decays under this effect, and all buffs and debuffs to mana regeneration speed will also affect your Rage regeneration.

Furthermore, Wisdom of the Maji is another node worth paying attention to, as it grants all your Runes and Idols additional bonus effects; and Apocalypse, which allows you to summon a rain of elemental damage to you after dealing sufficient elemental damage.

Oracle

Path of Exile 2 seems to have a different naming convention compared to other RPGs; Shaman focuses on elemental abilities rather than minions, while Oracle focuses on minions rather than survival. In this new league, Oracle will possess the ability to summon minions and have incredibly powerful damage capabilities.

Fateful Vision is one of the passive skills provided by this Ascendancy. It occasionally displays a phantom of your character, which uses one of your equipped skills but deals no damage. However, if you use the same skill that the phantom used, your next attack will deal increased damage.

Additionally, Converging Paths will create a phantom clone of an enemy when they are affected by freezing, stunning, or electrocution effects. This clone will not pose a threat to you, but it will take damage alongside the real enemy, thus increasing your total damage output.

In summary, this Ascendancy Class is slightly weaker compared to the Shaman, which has a more straightforward combat style, because it has too many combat requirements and prerequisites, making it very unfavorable for exploration in the endgame.

Overall, Druid, with its skills and Ascendancy, is visually stunning in the dark fantasy setting, but it’s still underdeveloped. Even in the early stages, its low damage output is insufficient to handle even lower-level enemies.

Therefore, we are very much looking forward to the developers further refining the skill gems and passive skills of this class in future game updates, so that players can more easily complete all the main campaigns and endgame content. Enjoy the game!

Path of Exile 2 recently released its latest major patch, 0.4.0, which includes a new The Last of the Druids league and a wealth of new content and reworks of existing features. Frankly, the patch notes aren't as long as previous ones, but they demonstrate a greater level of developer commitment, as many of the changes were made in response to player feedback and community suggestions.

However, many people still have doubts about it, mainly because the sequel is still only an early access game, and the release date of the full version is still far off. Therefore, they believe that no matter how good the current content is, it will all disappear when the early access period ends, which will cause players to feel extremely disappointed and leave the game.

However, EZG.com believes that one shouldn't view the development of a game with such a negative attitude, but rather focus on the present. For example, following this guide to break down the significant game content in the latest POE 2 0.4.0 patch and The Last of the Druids League is crucial for getting a head start when it launches on December 12th.

New League Mechanism - Fate Of The Vaal League

In this league, the way Vaal Temple, also known as Vaal Ruins, operates has undergone significant changes. Firstly, you will encounter some Vaal Beacons during your regular exploration, it will apply corrupted effects to nearby enemies. 

After defeating these affected enemies, you can activate the beacons. After activating six of them, you can enter Vaal Temple. To put it simply, this Vaal Temple is very much like a giant modular dungeon, which you need to run through repeatedly to obtain the final rewards. 

Within it, there's a Temple Console that you can interact with to customize the layout of the temple, such as the arrangement of paths and rooms. Some explorable rooms, when adjacent to each other, will provide you with additional bonus effects, which you can utilize to gain more PoE 2 currency and loot.

Please note that, since Vaal Temple is depicted as the residence of Atziri, Queen of the Vaal, in the lore of Path of Exile 2, you need to ensure that when placing all the rooms, the boss's chamber is located on the far right of the entire map, and that one of the room's exits directly faces its entrance. Additionally, you can upgrade each room here simply by providing the corresponding materials.

After the update, each Locus of Corruption room will provide you with an altar that can be used to further modify the affixes and rarity of corrupted items. There is also a special room called Surgeon's Symphony, where you can interact with a Transcension Device to replace your limbs, each of which will provide you with different beneficial effects.

Given the introduction of this league mechanic, Path of Exile 2 offers many more ways to craft items within Temple, leading to the emergence of new in-game currency types and providing more opportunities to upgrade or improve your gear. 

Finally, after completing the encounter with Queen Atziri, you can obtain a brand new staff, exclusive Vaal items, and high-level crafting materials as loot, laying a solid foundation for your further exploration.

This time, The Fate of the Vaal League still offers players Standard, Hardcore, and Solo Self-Found variations, all featuring the same core mechanics and items, but with differing levels of difficulty.

New Class - Druid

Responding to numerous player requests, the brand new Druid class has been introduced to the game with Path of Exile 2 patch 0.4.0. To accompany its arrival, the developers have added over 20 new skill gems primarily focused on Primal Skills, as well as over 35 support gems.

In addition, over 250 new passive skills and over 10 new unique items have been prepared for this new class. Also, 8 new Lineage Support gems and 4 new Augment items with new modifiers are available for Druids to use in endgame content. 

Furthermore, a new type of melee weapon has been added: Talismans, which can be wielded in both hands and used for shapeshifting attacks. After equipping this type of weapon, you will transform into the corresponding animal form and gain the basic attack abilities of that form.

Regarding Ascendancy Classes available to Druids, the developers revealed them to be Oracle and Shaman. The former can complete all challenges with its powerful damage and defensive capabilities, while the latter can utilize the accumulation of Fury to achieve ultimate damage potential.

Abyss Becomes Permanent Content

After hearing about the player community's positive feedback on Abyss mechanic in the previous league, the developers have incorporated it into the core content of PoE 2. This means that you will be able to encounter Abyss encounters in specific campaign areas starting from Act 2.  Furthermore, these encounters, along with Abyss Tablets and related modifiers, have also been added to the endgame.

Given this, the sequel adds an Atlas Passive Tree specifically for Rise of the Abyssal Content, allowing you to activate passive nodes on the tree to add or modify modifiers to your Abyss encounters, thereby increasing Path of Exile 2 currency and item rewards within them.

However, it’s important to note that while the basic mechanics have been retained, some changes have also been made: Preserved Vertebrae will no longer drop; and The Well of Souls quest has been updated to accommodate the new The Last of the Druids league.

QoL Improvements

Although every major patch update and minor bug fix brings some improvements to the user experience, 0.4.0 patch in PoE 2 is particularly noteworthy because it addresses many issues that players have been complaining about for a long time.

For example, CPU performance has improved by 25%, and frame rate fluctuations are significantly reduced when CPU performance is the limiting factor, which is especially noticeable in high-load gaming scenarios, which will allow you to perform key actions faster when using different gaming devices, and ensure that the game visuals and frame rate remain consistently stable.

However, if your GPU doesn’t meet the game’s requirements, these changes will be ineffective. It’s suggested that you lower the rendering resolution or use dynamic resolution to slightly improve performance, but this is only a temporary solution.

In addition to the changes to CPU performance, which is of most interest to players, the developers have also made some quality-of-life adjustments: compatibility of all equipped support gems on the gemcutting interface, a quick search function in Trade Market, and the display of Rage next to the mana orb, among others.

From the above analysis of the new content and changes in Path of Exile 2’s 0.4.0 patch, released on December 12th, it’s clear that the development team places great importance on this new season, and this time, when adding Druid class, they even avoided the favoritism shown when Huntress class was added previously.

However, it must be pointed out that if this controversial sequel continues to appease players’ demands for the full game by constantly releasing patchwork content, it will probably struggle to compete next year under the pressure of other RPGs or the new expansion of its long-standing rival, Diablo 4. In short, I hope you have fun playing in this league.