A build planner for both games

Path of Building is the best tool either game has, and it is a desktop application. That is fine while you are the one planning. It stops being fine the moment you want to show somebody what you planned: what changes hands is a wall of base64 pasted into a thread, and the person on the other end either has PoB installed or does not get to see the build at all.

Most of the web tools that fill that gap draw the tree as a schematic — circles and lines that carry the same information and look nothing like the thing you spend a league staring at.

So there is now a build planner here, for Path of Exile 1 and Path of Exile 2, in one editor. It is free, it needs no account to use, and what comes out of it is a link.

The tree, drawn the way the game draws it

The canvas is built from Grinding Gear Games’ own tree export: the same sprites, the frames that mark what kind of node you are looking at, the orbit arcs between them, the faint backgrounds behind the groups. You pan and zoom it like a map. Clicking a node allocates it and charges the points the path to it costs; hovering shows what it grants; the search finds a node by name and puts it under the light. Undo and redo cover the whole tree, class and ascendancy swaps included, which matters more than it sounds three respec decisions deep.

Ascendancy sits in its own inset with its own pool of eight points, because that is how the game spends them — not out of the same budget, and not hanging off the tree by a line.

Path of Exile 1 runs on tree export 3.29.1: 2,732 nodes, and 315 masteries where you also choose which effect the mastery grants, exactly as the game asks you to. Path of Exile 2 runs on export 0.5.2.

Gear and gems

Gear is a paper doll. Every slot takes an item with a base and its affixes, and the affix picker knows which affixes that base can actually roll and what tier a given roll is for it: pick prefix or suffix, walk down the ladder of the family, put the number in. Both games get their second weapon set. Uniques are in there too — 1,381 across 11 slots in PoE 1, 441 across 9 slots in PoE 2. Every item carries a “look for first” priority, so a build can say what to buy first and what can wait.

Gems are grouped by the slot of the item they sit in, with that item’s icon at the head of the group, each gem’s own icon and socket colour, and supports linked by a rail to the skill they support. Hovering a gem opens a card that includes where the gem comes from — the question every levelling guide answers worst. There are 642 gems for PoE 1 and 1,082 for PoE 2, after duplicates and unreleased ones were taken out.

Spirit gems in PoE 2 are deliberately not in that list. The .build format the game imports does not carry them, and a planner that lets you place something the game will silently drop is worse than one that admits the gap.

Bring a build in, take it out

Import reads a whole Path of Building build, from PoB 1 and PoB 2 both: the tree, the items with their mods, the gems with their levels and links, the loadouts as tabs, the notes, the class, the level, the bandits. Official PoE 1 passive tree links work as an import too.

Export goes the other way. PoE 2 gives you a .build file the game imports itself — the format GGG documented with 0.5.0. PoE 1 gives you the official pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree link.

Typing a build in by hand is the second way in, not the first. Most planning starts by importing something that already exists and arguing with it.

Variants are tabs

A build is a set of loadouts, and each tab holds its own tree, gear and gems — the league starter and the version with the mirror-tier weapon are two tabs of one build, not two builds. Levelling stages live inside a tab, next to the notes.

Sharing, and what the review is for

A saved build has three states, and you pick which one it is in:

• Private. Yours, and nobody else’s.
• By link. Anybody with the address opens it, it appears in no list, and it carries noindex so search engines leave it alone. Nobody reviews it — this is the state for handing a work in progress to a friend.
• Published. It goes into the builds section after somebody here has read it.

That last step exists for one reason: a public list that anyone can post to becomes an advertising board within a week. Published builds get a category — verified for the checked ones, community for the rest — and readers can like them, which is the only ranking the list has.

A build page shows the tree read-only, the gear, the gems and the notes. The reader needs no account, no download, and no Path of Building.

What it does not do

It does not calculate DPS, and it does no arithmetic at all: no effective HP, no resistances totalled, no “this build does 4.2 million”. Path of Building does that better than we would, and there is no version of this where we quietly reimplement it and get the numbers subtly wrong in patch week.

What this is instead: a planner you can read in a browser and hand to somebody. That is the whole claim.

The account, and how much it keeps

Using the planner needs no account. Saving a build does, and an account is free.

A free account holds five builds, and the regex setups are shelved by category: five per category. A Patreon subscription raises both ceilings — Exalt at $3 to ten, Chaos at $5 to twenty, Divine at $10 to forty, Mirror at $25 to a hundred. That is the entire difference a subscription makes: every tool on this site is free and needs no account, and what money buys is how much the site keeps for you. Nothing already saved is ever removed when a number moves.

What comes next

Loot filters, still. That remains the big one.

The planner has gaps of its own in the meantime, and they are written down rather than hidden — the spirit gems above are one. If you find another, the contact address is in the footer, and it is read by a person.

This site is not affiliated with or endorsed by Grinding Gear Games in any way. Start from an empty tree, paste a PoB code into it, or read what other people published in the builds section. Everything you save lives on your builds page.