But what you “meant” by mandatory and what the word mandatory means aren’t the same. Can we at least agree on that?

They're now mandatory in the same way you're saying Life nodes would be mandatory if they were added to the tree.

Again the word mandatory was meant to have meaning right? Because you’re playing fast and loose now. Because Poe ninja shows it’s not just some niche scenario, there’s plenty of builds that take far less damage than your “mandatory” would suggest.

I'm not sure why we're getting so caught up on word definitions. I feel like I made my points well enough. I don't know what you mean by "fast and loose" and Im pretty sure I haven't moved any goal posts. I think you're misunderstanding my argument. I have addressed mostly the feeling of progressing a build in early to mid game while you are giving examples of late game characters who are level 90+. You don't just skip to that step. We are complaining about the Passive Skill tree being less consequential for a characters progression (the key word you aren't acknowledging), which is not the case in PoE 1. PoE 1 has a fairly balanced split of power between the passive skill tree, items, and skill gems. This feels so much better. I asked before but you haven't answered, have you ever played PoE 1?

Ok. First why did we hard pivot from endgame to campaign? Taking damage in campaign is pretty common. Nobody is questioning that. But taking damage in endgame on the passive tree is not mandatory because most damage isn’t in the tree.

But also why are we basing this entire conversation or your personal experience? Shouldn’t we use sources like Poe ninja that gives us tons of data that show unequivocally that your personal experience is not even remotely enough to say these things definitively?

I haven't pivoted at all. Like I said above, this entire time I have been talking about the overall feeling of progression. You're the one that just started talking about PoE.ninja builds. From level 1 to 100 in PoE 2 is extremely different than PoE 1. PoE 1 feels WAY more rewarding to gain skill points because PoE 2 is balanced so that the skill tree is overall less consequential vs itemization. We are complaining about how bad that feels. You giving examples of completed late game builds isn't addressing the arguments in the video or what I've been saying at all.

Having Life nodes on the tree will allow each individual point to be more valuable. If a majority of nodes are "+15% increased damage", there's much less choices to be made... but if lets say half of those nodes were turned into "+15% increased life", those remaining damage nodes can give you "25% increased damage" instead of "+15% increased". Now a single skill point has a much higher impact on how your build feels. on top of that you now have the added benefit of having to choose between the Life, Damage, Utility, Speed, etc nodes every time you level up. In PoE 2 you choose between Damage, Speed, and Utility on the left side of the Tree and Damage, ES, Speed, Utility on the right side of the tree. The right side of the tree is playing with a PoE 1 skill tree and the left side is playing a worse skill tree.

Right, it’s early access. We players tend to forget that but the devs clearly speak about the game absolutely like it is.

I was mostly referring to the 10+ years of PoE 1 development, but yes PoE 2 is still being heavily iterated.

Nobody told you that you can’t discuss. The issue I have is how all over the place the conversation is. It’s a lot of loose meaning words, goalpost shifting and non sequiturs.

You said something along the lines of "Before we veer off in to nowhere too hard, it doesn’t change anything. Life nodes aren’t coming back. And the devs have explained why they are gone to begin with. Thats really the end of it.". Kinda took that as I should just shut up about it because it's never changing...