Please make Respecing your passive tree incredibly cheap, or bring back Regret Orbs.

You might be seeing that title and think "What is he even talking about?", and that's precisely the issue.

Let me use this image to explain.

https://imgur.com/a/poe-2-skill-tree-issue-screenshot-Pen44x7

If I want to respec Area 1 of my skill tree, I have to have enough gold to unspec all of the points from Area 2 all the way back to Area 1, even if I just want to get rid of a mistake I made at level 5-10, making the whole system incredibly punishing. I almost feel like I bricked my character, since I don't use Chaos damage anymore and switched over to Fire exclusively once I got my ascendancy.

Making respecing so expensive means their claim of not being able to make mistakes on the passive tree is ringing pretty hollow to me. I either have to go farm tons and tons of gold in order to manually respec the entire tree from Area 2 all the way back to Area 1, or I have to hope that they reduce the price of respeccing or add some other way for me to be able to get those skill points I spent back.

Unless I'm just stupid and am missing something incredibly obvious, I wanted to leave this negative feedback since it's really hurting my experience right now.

100% agree.

You are still farming for hours to get any kind of a real respec going. It's not really an improvement.

Of course, in this game you would get one orb of regret for about 4 hours of farming so idk.

Exactly! And the worst part is, I just found out the respec cost goes up the higher your level is, even if you save your points. I just farmed out like 10,000 gold (which is what I needed at the time I calculated it), and now I need like another 3,000+ because the cost went up ;-; Not sure what to do, this character might be permanently bricked and that absolutely sucks.

I did find just now that even though you need that insanely high total amount of gold to reach every node you want to reset, it doesn't cost nearly that much if you're respeccing the points where you want them at the same time. It took me around 14,000 to pull all the nodes back to the start so I could ditch Chaos damage, but once I placed them all back where I wanted them to be I had 9,100 gold left. Still needs to be addressed since the upfront cost is what'll stop you from being able to do it at all, but at least there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Knowing that you get most of the money back feels good, having to get all of it in the first place instead of spending your passive points like you want to doesn't.

Adding Regret Orbs back is a bad idea. You wouln't have one dropped till you are in red tier maps.