You have the freedom to take every talent that is good and ignore every talent that is bad. That just means you take every good talent and ignore every bad talent. Every build is now the same build but you swap the primary/secondary weapons.
Every vet build will have the same exact pathing for like 25 points and the last 5 are just choosing keystones and maybe swapping a toughness regen option at top.
To me Helbore always was the big fat sniper
It still does that to this very day
It ultimatively removes the meaning of build if every build is just an “any weapon enabler”.
Tax nodes is a neccesity, they just shouldn’t be useless or too specific, but regular stats hp/toughness. Maybe even like in PoE2 - you pick a tax node and choose wich stat do you want hp or toughness, damage reduction or attack speed (or some other deffensive vs offensive)
With how devs decided it you are stuck with +1 stamina or +5% crit even if you don’t need it, that was just bad.
Without tax nodes you are able to create an all rounder that is great against anything and has no flaws, leading towards everything is homogenized, feels samy and non-unique.
Specific and niche talents should be in clusters, the deepr you go in that cluster the more specialized your build become. But those clusters themselves should be separated by tax nodes.
And the fact people use the term “tax” is hilighting those nodes are trash. And should provide some universaly good stats people are happy with no matter what.
They kinda remade trees to have clusters but decreased the ammount of “tax” nodes wich led up to powercreep (again) and homogenization.