Path of Exile 2’s 0.4.0 “Last of the Druids” patch really punishes anyone who tries to rush it like the first game, and you feel that from the first few zones, especially if you are not planning your XP curve or spending a bit on poe 2 cheap currency to smooth out early gear spikes. The big rule now is simple: stay roughly three to four levels within the area level. If you open the waypoint and see you are five levels under, stop forcing progress. Drop back to an earlier act, clear a couple of dense zones, ding once or twice, then return. Running through red-skull areas with half‑starved packs, missing hits and eating the XP penalty, just burns time and feels awful.
Early Gear And Damage First
Most players still overvalue defence in the first two acts. Do not do that here. Early on, clear speed is your defence. If you can one‑tap packs, they cannot hit you. That means your gold goes into weapons and flat damage, not armour. Magic crossbows, decent physical bases, and simple things like iron rings or a strong rustic sash are massive early bumps. Use your Blacksmith’s Whetstones on the weapon you are actually using; the quality helps more now than the vague idea of a future craft. If you replace the weapon later, you can vendor for shards anyway. For Artificer’s Orbs, try to hold them for rings, amulets or a solid belt, since those pieces do not get swapped out every ten minutes and can carry you for several acts.
Routing Through Acts 1 And 2
Act 1 feels slower if you do all the side areas, but skipping the permanent bonuses is usually a mistake. Grab Crowbeak for the extra skill points, then swing over to Clearfell for Beira and the permanent Cold Resistance. It looks like a detour when you are racing, but the first time you walk into Act 3 without that Cold Res and get chain frozen, you will wish you had done it. In Act 2, the route changed a bit with this patch, so you want to tick off Modron Mine and Traitor’s Passage, but the real prize is the Valley of Titans now that it unlocks a charm slot. Getting that charm slot early lets you slot in a strong offensive charm and suddenly your whole build feels smoother.
Mob Choice, XP And Pack Focus
Once you get used to the new pacing, you start to notice how bad white mobs are for XP. Blue magic packs, on the other hand, are crazy efficient. When you see a blue pack on the edge of the screen, you peel toward it. When it is just a line of whites in a long corridor, you leap slam or movement skill past them unless they are physically blocking you. This is where a lot of players lose time: they full‑clear rooms that are basically filler. You do not have to be a math nerd to feel the difference; a couple of short runs focusing on blue packs and you will see your level always hovering in that ideal zone range without feeling like you are grinding.
Late Campaign, Druid Tree And Big Power Spikes
By the time you hit Acts 3 and 4, your passive tree should lean heavily into damage clusters, especially if you are on the new Druid. People love to overcomplicate it, but for the campaign you just stack flat damage, attack speed and whatever helps your main skill clear faster on the warrior side of the tree. You can respec into crit, leech and more layered defence later, somewhere around level 65, when mapping starts to demand it. If you slam into a wall on a boss, chasing a 5‑link or 6‑link through gambling, trading, or even throwing an Exalt on a good base can just delete that problem. That is where having some spare poe2 gold from a trustworthy shop or your own farm comes in handy, because one big gear spike plus Wolf form movement speed often means you are cruising into maps while other players are still stuck back in the jungle trying to brute force underleveled content.
