The passive tree has WAY TOO MANY travel nodes and other tree feedback

Just my opinion. It feels like there's literally twice as many travel nodes as there should be for the leveling process to feel good to me. I would much prefer some early impactful passive choices POE1 didn't have this either, would love to see the starting areas reworked to give 4 interesting pathways instead of 2 travel and 2 lame ass weak wheels.

Warrior/Marauder is particually weak in the starting area. with a heavy tax of 8% melee nodes or garbage armour nodes. I realize POE1 also shares this lameness but at least there's life nodes there.

I guess here is where I point out that ES has tons of scaling and life has none, Life has really shitty leech, and armour is 12 times less effective in POE2 as POE1 against the same sizes of damage.

All this logicaly means that ES becomes the better eHP pool, especially now that its automatic bleed immunity and in a game where "time til death" is slower 4 seconds until you get an automatic flask isn't the same downside. which we can clearly see demonstrated by the ES+EV meta. As many expert players have already noted there's Titans running around with Ghostwrithe equipped for fucks sake.

There's a huge amount of notables that are incredibly uninspired and very mismatched with other notables power.

There's way too many samey and uninteresting wheels

There's way too many wheels that are far flung and WEAKER then similar wheels that are easier to reach.

This has made me feel forced into the same pathing on multiple builds to avoid big traveling pathways where I don't want any of the wheels along the way because they are too inefficient and/or I need something mechanical from a further flung node that has a good wheel. In general a lot of crit wheels and bleed/ailment wheels fit into this. Poison especially fits this I've tried to make 4 different poison trees and haven't liked a single one they all just feel bad and are bloated with travel nodes.

SOme of this is stuff that would have been a mastery I really feel the lack of this feature from POE1, some things I feel forced to go get would have been a mastery. The above point about not wanting to path certain ways on multiple builds simply because "I have to get a wheel of that but it needs to have the good notable, so I ALWAYS GO THIS WAY". This makes trees feel stifling and this is made worse by the bland/uninteresting wheels all over the place. There are so many places on the tree that I am either constantly forced to go through or constantly avoid ever going through.

There should be 6 jewel sockets spread along the "inner ring" centered on each starting location about 7 passives apart. The same way their are every 5 passives in the second "ring" and every 4 passives on the outer ring.

Why? I see a reoccuring pattern where an otherwise decent tree can only get 1 jewel because their trees hug the center to get important things not available otherwise. Meanwhile I have other builds that have 6, 7 or even 8 just because they move along the outter "ring" and dip inwards. Purely dictated by where your wheels that you need are (dictated by notables that have a mechanism you need), not actual power or build choices. Basically certain builds just get a ton of jewels for no good reason. The power on the inner ring is similar to outter and doesn't justify the lack of jewels its just arbitrary in that regard. There are multiple builds that want to be outter ring that also get crazy imbalanced and arbitrarily large numbers of jewel sockets because of this.

There's a couple insanely powerful keystones that really need to be heavily nerfed.

As a melee fan Giants blood will never not be taken under any circumstance. I will literally never not use it, I will simply just never play a melee that can't get it thats a sword/mace/axe.

But worse than that: I can't see ever playing flails, and I love the class fantasy of flails... but dropping hundreds of damage? nah.

There's a couple keystones that feel more like notables or are just heavily lacking in value:

Unwavering stance and the one next to it are woeful and probably need buffing.
Blood magic... Okay I guess... or I just get a mana leech rune or use a flask there's no real life stacking design space at all so BM seems pointless except as a way to give Bloodmage some casting cost reduction lol.

There's a few notables that are borderline keystones; Fast metabolism for example
And there's a few that look like notables combined with a mastery from POE1 Lasting trauma for example.

Rage wheels that are absolute garbage and ones that are twice as useful or powerful. One of these is an example of "hey free jewel sockets because I always take the best rage wheel and ignore the bad rage wheel that also gets no jewel sockets".

Basically the tree is filled with grooves or patterns that would ideally be broken up by jucing up some weak wheels and toning down some busted keystones.