Lack of vaal orb sustain in SSF is killing my will to play

So I'm finally reminded why I hated ruthless in PoE1. Which was the fact you were completely gated out of doing any harder content because you could not sustain high tier maps at all and you just eventually got powerful enough but all you had to do was piss baby low tier maps 24/7.

Now in PoE2 SSF, sustaining T15 is easy enough, you get enough alch to alch and go. But im already at the point now where my character is plenty strong enough to start tackling double corrupt maps, and really that's the only place in the game you are going to find any challenge at. There's is like almost no difference between a t1 and t15 map, the difference between an alched T15 map, and a double corrupt T15 map is tremendous by comparison.

Like at this point I'm just saving up ~10 vaal orbs which make take an entire fucking day, respeccing my tree to double corrupt, and then running them till I run out of vaal orbs.

im gated out of doing hard content and I just hate that. I didn't spend all this time and suffering in SSF just to run piss easy T15's 24/7.


Why is the majority of the difficulty in maps gated behind a currency and a single node on that atlas tree?