Give people the ability to transform into a bear and they will do anything in their power to avoid reverting back to their flimsy human form. This is the core fantasy of playing a druid in any RPG, and it's something the Path of Exile 2 developers learned at the least opportune time when polishing up its version of the archetype for its next major update.
"So funny story about that," Path of Exile 2's co-creative director Jonathan Rogers said when I asked if the druid's animal forms—bear, wolf, and wyvern—could dodge roll and sprint like everyone else. Originally, they couldn't, he said. When you press the button, you'd always swap back to a human.
"So, then we really had to set a challenge for our animators, kind of quite late in the game, of like can we make a dodge roll for the bear—well, for all three animal forms?" Rogers said.
I think I can see why it wasn't an easy task. The new druid class coming in PoE 2's 0.4 update The Last of the Druids looks phenomenal as far as animations go. The bear can stand up on its hind legs and slam down to make the earth crumble beneath its paws; the wolf lunges toward enemies and is bathed in moonlight when you use lunar skills; and the wyvern can lift off from the ground and singe anything unlucky enough to be below it.
PoE 2 is easily one of the best looking action RPGs out there and the druid raises the bar even higher. And the best part? Anyone can shapeshift as long as they pick up one of the new animal talisman weapons. You can be a witch who summons minions by day and goes wolf mode by night or a warrior who has sacrificed his humanity to become one with the dragon.
Animal form skills are made to combo with normal spells. Before you start stomping around as a bear, you can lay down mini volcanoes as a human that will erupt every time you land in animal form. And if you are specifically playing a druid, you can pick one of two ascendancy classes to expand your options even further. One of them, the oracle, adds a whopping 130 additional passives to the skill tree just for picking it.
After seeing everything the druid is capable of, it was hard not to see how lackluster the older classes look in comparison. Rogers laughed when I pointed this out and said "that's why we'll probably circle back around and improve those again later as well."
Path of Exile 2's The Last of the Druids patch goes live on December 12.
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