Mess with Skill Effect Duration in Path of Exile 2 long enough and you'll notice it's not just about "buffs last shorter." It's about timing. Wind-ups, aftershocks, little waiting windows that make a skill feel heavy. If you can push reduced duration all the way to 100%, those waits basically evaporate. A lot of players end up planning their whole character around that moment, and yes, some folks even stock up early through u4gm PoE 2 Currency so they can test gear swaps and passives without stopping every five minutes.
How people are reaching the 100% breakpoint
This isn't a "pick any start and you'll get there" kind of trick. The clean route right now is starting Warrior and taking the Titan ascendancy, because you need Hulking Form. That node is doing the real work: it boosts the effect of small passives by 50%, which turns normally modest reduced-duration nodes into something you can actually build around. Most setups aiming for the full reduction are doing it around level 70, when you've got enough points to grab the key clusters and still patch up life and defenses so you're not made of paper.
The passive tree pieces that make it click
Once Hulking Form is online, the tree suddenly feels different. Clusters like Near at Hand and the Forthcoming cluster over near the Witch side stop being "nice extras" and become core math. You'll also see people anointing Searing Heart instead of walking halfway across the atlas of passives just to touch it. That's the part new players miss: the breakpoint is strict, and travel nodes are a tax. If you waste points pathing, you usually give up either survivability or damage, and the whole "instant" fantasy starts to wobble.
What zero duration does to actual gameplay
The funniest part is how it changes skills you already thought you understood. Ember Fusillade is the easy example: normally you feel that little pause where embers hang before they shoot. At zero duration, it's immediate. Spawn and fire, no awkward float time. Earthquake gets that same glow-up. The aftershock isn't "later," it's now, so mapping turns into a steady rhythm instead of slam-then-wait. And if you like trigger setups, you'll feel it even more, because the build stops fighting its own animation pacing.
Why it also feels like a defensive exploit
Time of Need is where things get spicy. It's meant to heal and cleanse on an interval, which normally leaves you with gaps where you can still get stuck in curses or dots. With duration crushed to zero, the interval behavior gets weird in your favor, and it can feel like the game is constantly washing you clean. You're not immortal—big hits still delete you—but the day-to-day damage just… doesn't stick the same way. If you're planning to lean into this style, you'll want to keep your respec and crafting budget ready, and a lot of players doing that end up browsing path of exile 2 currency options mid-testing so they can iterate fast instead of rebuilding from scratch each time.