It feels like we have been waiting ages for the Druid class in Path of Exile 2, and now it is finally almost here with the "The Last of the Druids" update, landing right in time for players who have already started planning their PoE 2 Currency routes and builds. On paper it is a Strength and Intelligence hybrid, but once you actually look at how it plays, it feels more like the missing link after the Templar vanished from the sequel. You get big, heavy hits, you get spells, and you get that weird PoE mix where you are never just doing one thing at a time, you are juggling forms, resources, and skill cooldowns all at once.

Shapeshifting That Actually Feels Fluid

The coolest bit is how smooth the shapeshifting feels in practice. You do not open a clunky menu or press some awkward stance key, you just slot an Animal Talisman and the skills tied to it flip you into that form on use. You pick a main form early on, Bear, Werewolf, or Wyvern, but the game clearly wants you to bounce between them. Bear form is slow and chunky, sure, but it chews through packs with ground slams that spit out fire and builds Rage so you can keep swinging. Werewolf is the opposite, all speed and cold damage, darting between targets while little wolf adds help you clean up. Then there is the Wyvern, which feels like GGG flexing a bit. You are swooping around, breathing fire over packs, then eating corpses on the move to charge up lightning bursts. It looks ridiculous in a good way, and you can already tell people are going to spend hours fine tuning how they chain those transformations together.

Human Form, Totems, And Ascendancy Depth

Human form does not go away once you unlock the cool animal stuff, and honestly you would not want it to. You are still casting spells, throwing out totems, and using that as the glue between your forms. Totems now cost charges rather than just mana, so you cannot mindlessly drop them on cooldown, you have to think about when a buff or extra hit really matters. When you hit the Ascendancy layer it gets even stranger, in a good way. Shaman leans into messy elemental setups, mixing fire, cold, and lightning so that your different forms all feel useful. Oracle is for the people who love theorycrafting; it adds well over a hundred new nodes that mess with the passive tree and includes this odd "future self" mechanic where you line up what you are doing now with a ghost version of what you could do later for big damage windows. It sounds like the sort of thing that will be bad if you ignore it and completely broken if you build around it.

Fate Of The Vaal League And Risky Rewards

Outside the class hype, the "Fate of the Vaal" league is doing something pretty bold with endgame. Queen Atziri is back, but this time the loop is about building your own Vaal Temple layout bit by bit, then eventually stepping back in time to try and stop her ritual before it goes off. Along the way you get access to double corruption again, which is always scary. You can turn a decent item into something absurd or just delete it on the spot, and PoE players kind of love that coin flip. The Flesh Surgeon system might push that even further. You can replace arms or legs with mechanical parts, pick up some strong buffs, then lose them if you die. It is the sort of thing where you know you are going to gamble on a boss you are not ready for, die in two seconds, and then immediately queue up another map anyway.

What Update 0.4.0 Means For The Next Few Months

Update 0.4.0 drops on December 12 with a free weekend, which is perfect if you have friends who keep saying they will try PoE 2 "later" and never do. There are no new story chapters in this patch, and that is a bit of a shame, but there is enough going on that most people will not notice for a while. Between learning the Druid, figuring out how far you can push double corruption, testing which limbs you are willing to lose for a damage spike, and hunting down things like a well rolled preserved jawbone poe2, the game is setting up a pretty busy holiday grind.