So what do you do? Well, you can respec, and in this article, we’ll tell you how to do a full and complete respec in Path of Exile.
How Do Respecs Work in Path of Exile?
As you play Path of Exile, you’ll complete quests and level up, and as you do that, you’ll unlock passive skill points, up to 121 of them at level 100 and with completing all the necessary quests. Once you complete the campaign and start running maps, you’ll get access to another skill tree tied to your Atlas, and as you complete Map Bonus Objectives in maps, you’ll unlock Atlas passive points you can use to fill out the tree. You can respec either your passive skill points or your Atlas points, but it’s not like it is in other games where you might spend a currency and unallocate all your points. In Path of Exile, it’s considerably more involved than just that, but it’s far from impossible to do. What you’ve got to do is use ‘respec points’ to individually unallocate each point you’ve spent. The thing is with respec points, though, is that you can’t just unallocate anything you want immediately, you can only unallocate skill points that don’t connect other skill points. What this means is that if you have a skill point chain from A to B to C, then you can use a respec point on C, then B, then A, but you’ll have to go in that order. You won’t be able to change A without changing B and C. So, as you’d expect, you’ll need a ton of respec points to fully respec your build. Plus, as you play the Path of Exile campaign, you eventually choose to help a certain bandit group, which gives your character permanent buffs, and you can use respec points (20 of them, to be exact) to change this choice, as well. So, how do you get respec points?
How to Get Respec Points in Path of Exile
For passive skill respec points, you’ll unlock about 20 of these as you play through the game’s major story, though, there are 121 passive skill points you can allocate on a single character, so obviously, you’ll have a lot more skill points than respec points. This is where orbs of regret factor in. These orbs are a currency you can use to each give you a passive respec point. There are ways to get these as random drops in-game, but in general, you’re never going to casually get enough orbs of regret to fully respec your character just from the game. There’s a similar system for the Atlas respec points: you use orbs of unmaking, which you use to get respec points. These orbs drop in maps, and once again, they aren’t exactly common enough that you’ll generally find you can get enough of them to fully respec an Atlas tree. However, you can get enough respec points to fully respec either tree, and it’s not even that complicated or expensive to do so, if you know how to do it. How is that possible? The short answer is trading. So, if you’re playing on a trade-free League, you’re out of luck, here. Now, prices will fluctuate, but right now, for example, you can buy 2 orbs of regret for 1 chaos orb. So, if you want to fully respec a character with all 121 passive skill points, which likely most players won’t even have, that’ll cost you 121 orbs of regret, assuming you don’t have any respec points banked from the campaign and you haven’t found orbs of regret on your own. So, at the current pricing, that’ll cost you 242 chaos, which is less than 2 exalted orbs. Yes, this is pricey if you’re a new player who doesn’t know Path of Exile very well, but for most players, this is a pretty reasonable level of wealth to have, if you even try for it a little bit. Orbs of unmaking work similarly, but respecing your Atlas tree is more expensive than your passive tree. In-game, you can vendor 2 orbs of regret for an orb of unmaking, so generally, orbs of unmaking (i.e. Atlas tree respec points) are about twice as expensive as orbs of regret, so you’ll generally find that trading for an orb of unmaking will cost around 1 chaos per unmaking orb.
Should You Respec in Path of Exile?
Ultimately, this is a personal question, but there are some rules of thumb. If you’re playing a character that’s still fairly low level, respecing something is easy, even if it’s an earlier point. However, if you just don’t like the build, there’s little sense in playing until you have enough currency to respec, just make a new character. However, it can get more complicated than that. Say you’re building a character that you won’t get to fully experience until late in the game, but when you finally hit that point, the build doesn’t work as well as you thought. Then, though, you’ve already spent a bunch of time and resources on the character, so starting over feels like a loss. This might be a good time to invest in respec’ing, if you want to keep using the character. Plus, you could always get lucky, because once in a while Path of Exile drops a major update, and skill tree passive points are completely unallocated, so players have a chance to make different choices after the choices on offer change substantially.
