When you boot up Path of Exile 2 on Patch 0.4.0 and land on that character screen, it is pretty hard to ignore the Druid. You look at the forms, you see Bear, Wolf, Wyvern, and it hits you that this is not just another melee guy in a different coat of paint, especially once you start thinking about how it might work with PoE 2 Currency and the new item rules. Bear form lets you just plant your feet and soak hits in a way that feels stubborn rather than clumsy. Swap to Wolf and suddenly you are darting between packs, snapping off quick skills, barely standing still. Then you hit Wyvern, jump into the air, and the whole fight changes because you are attacking from above, lining up angles you do not get with the other two. The best part is it all flows together way better than you would expect from a game that usually punishes you for trying to do too many things at once. Leaning Into Going Blind Most people are used to opening a build site on a second monitor before they even click “Create”. With this patch, you really do not need to. The Druid’s skill tree is built around how and when you shift, so it feels like the game is almost daring you to just try stuff. You might end up running a mostly Bear setup but with a couple of key Wolf skills just to get in and out of danger faster. Or you start messing with Wyvern early for fun and then realise one specific node suddenly makes that form your main damage. Because the devs reworked Uniques and shook up weapon mods, old rules like “always grab this low-level unique” do not hold in the same way, and you actually catch yourself reading lines on items again instead of auto-vendoring based on habit. Loot, Gear And Moment-To-Moment Play Once you are out in the story zones, the changes to drops hit pretty quick. There is less obvious trash on the ground, so you are not spending half your time clicking and then instantly dropping things. When a rare or unique pops, it feels like it might matter, so you slow down just a bit, check the mods, and start thinking about how it plugs into your current form setup. Performance holds up better too; big pulls that used to give a little hitch now run smoother, which is huge when you are swapping between Bear for survival and Wolf or Wyvern for damage. The UI tweaks are the kind you notice after an hour, not in the first five minutes: buff icons easier to read, cooldowns clearer, so you stop squinting at the bottom of the screen and can actually follow what is happening when the screen is a mess of enemies and spell effects. Experimenting With Control And Forms If you are worried about messing up your character, you probably do not need to be. The current setup is pretty forgiving if you are willing to move some points around and test different combos. A lot of players are finding it works well to build around crowd control first and damage second. You start a fight in Wyvern, drop some area skills or slow effects, then dive back down and shift into Bear when the return fire starts to hurt. Or you use Wolf for quick engages and get-outs, then let Bear tank while your cooldowns come back. The reworked support gems push you to try odd links you might normally ignore, and when you layer that on top of the transformations and the updated loot system, it ends up feeling like one of those rare patches where you actually want to reroll just to see what else you can do, especially once you start planning how to stretch your cheap poe 2 currency across multiple experimental setups.
