Crucible weapon trees, good idea, bad execution

The weapon trees stink.

They
1. Rarely give useful nodes to a build
2. Contain crippling downsides
3. Have unwanted effects
4. Take to long to uncover

Poe requires to much minmaxing for the starter nodes to be as bad as they are. Instead of extra cold damage to attacks for example, it should be extra damage, global, useful. Then add the tree develops it could be more specialized.

Then their are nodes that will literally stop build from working. Either from having negative attributes or effects that just destroy the item.

It takes too long to level up the passive tree. Especially if you ain't full charging it. And it is near impossible to get a good weapon, with the right sockets/ links, with a good tree.

And we can't really tell that easily, or use uniques until the endgame. That's just dumb.

Good idea. Terrible execution.

Weapons should have empty trees and the actual nodes drop in form of Runes you can put into your tree.
Skill altering runes aside (which would be limited to 1 per tree) those runes start at low tier and need to be leveled up by either running a lot of forges or offering runes of the same kind which would give big forge EXP boosts to your node.
Unique weapons would require a special item for each level once you gained the needed EXP.

There there, the mechanic is now worth farming as Runes would be on high demand.
By the way the forge EXP needed shall be chosen so even players with life get much benefits and only the highest tiers for absolute minmaxing would require unholy EXP.