Waiting for the Druid in Path of Exile 2 has felt like it took forever, but now it finally looks like Grinding Gear is ready to let us loose, and stocking up on PoE 2 Currency suddenly feels worth it again. The new update, The Last of the Druids, brings the first real Strength/Intelligence hybrid, and it is not some awkward stance-dance setup. You slot an Animal Talisman, jump into a map, and your skills just swap you between human, Bear, Werewolf or Wyvern on the fly. No extra menu, no clunky wheel, you just hit the button and you are in fur or scales before you even think about it. How The Forms Actually Play The forms are not just different skins, they push you into very different habits. Bear form is for people who like to walk straight into a pack and dare it to move you, stacking Rage while you roar and slam things into the floor. Then you have the Werewolf, which feels more like a crit‑happy skirmisher, darting around with cold skills and letting a bunch of wolf minions do half the cleanup for you. The Wyvern is the wild card: once you start flying, spitting fire or lightning over an entire screen, it is hard to go back. You can do weird stuff too, like dropping a volcano in human form, diving in as a Bear, and detonating it with a slam, so your rotation starts to feel like a little puzzle instead of just spamming one button. Ascendancies And Build Weirdness The new Ascendancies push the Druid away from the usual “pick one shape and spam it” style. The Shaman feels like it is built for people who love stacking overlapping effects: storms, quakes, eruptions, all feeding off each other while you swap forms to trigger different parts of the combo. The Oracle is stranger and will probably be the one theorycrafters argue about. It messes with your passive tree, letting you bend time around how your build scales, so you are not just chasing more raw damage, you are planning how your stats line up three nodes ahead. If you like builds that take a bit to click but feel amazing once you get them online, this looks like that kind of thing. Fate Of The Vaal League Hook The league itself, Fate of the Vaal, taps straight into old‑school lore hype. You are not just hearing about Queen Atziri this time, you jump back to when the Vaal empire was still alive and dangerous. Instead of a pre‑built temple, you drop rooms onto a grid yourself, linking Smithies, Power stations and other spots to set up your own little disaster machine. Then you run it in the past and try to stop Atziri’s massive experiment from blowing everything up. It feels familiar if you played older temple content, but with a lot more control over how greedy or safe you want the layout to be. Risky Rewards And Holiday Grind The rewards lean hard into that risk. Double corruption is back, so you really can flip a coin on your best piece and watch it vanish, or come out with a monster item that carries the whole build. On top of that you can hunt down Flesh Surgeons, who literally swap your limbs for mechanical ones so you get big stat boosts tied to your body parts. The catch is simple: die, and those upgrades are gone, so people who like living on the edge are gonna love it. With a free weekend starting on 12 December and some pretty big performance tweaks aimed at smoothing out frame drops, it feels like a good excuse to sink time into a fresh character, chase Druid forms, and maybe grab a bit more poe2 gold buy before you throw it all into the next doomed double‑corrupt attempt.