Path of Exile 2: The Last of the Druids is launching tomorrow on December 12, 2025, but the creation of the game’s new class has not been easy for developer Grindning Gear Games.

In a discussion with FRVR earlier this month, game director Jonathan Rogers explained that the Druid class is the most complex class the team has ever designed. Alongside revealing his regret that rares were ever included on the game’s map, Rogers discussed why the new class was so difficult to bring to life.

Path of Exile 2’s Driud class was originally shown at Gamescom 2023, but Rogers explained that the new class had to be “taken back to the drawing board” to continue expanding the class and find a way to actually make it feel balanced within the game.

“At that time, we only had the bear [form],” Rogers said. “And one of the other big changes that we had since then was that we added WASD [movement] so that actually required us to go back to the drawing board with a lot of stuff that we had done. It didn’t affect the bear to much, but it actually did affect the other two [wolf and wyvern] a lot.”

While it may not sound like a huge deal, the addition of skills like the Wyvern being able to fly around the map while breathing fire required a lot of under-the-hood changes for Path of Exile 2. Additionally, due to the fact that the Druid has four major forms—his base human form and his three animal forms—bringing the class to fruition required a lot of work.

“With the Driud, it’s sort of like designing four classes at the same time,” Rogers said. “Basically, you have to be able to have a path when someone only wants to play one animal or when they only want to play as a human, so there’s already four things there, or when they want to combine all of these and then any of the combinations of those. There was just a lot more thinking carefully about how all those things combine together well.”

Rogers explained that the Druid class is “one of the hardest” classes GGG has ever made simply due to how much interconnectivity there is for the class. Every form has its own way to buff, and the team has worked to make sure that every form’s buff plays with every other form while also being unique for players to main a single option.

“We tried to make sure that each of the three forms had something that the other forms could use,” Rogers said. “For example, with the bear, the bear can specialise in generating rage, so we want to have a way to spend that rage on the other forms even if they don’t have a way to generate it. In the case of the wolf, you have marks, the wolf is good at applying marks, but then there’s ways to use those marks with the other classes.”

The Druid is a very complex class, but it’s also the game’s most experimental class with multiple ways to combine animal forms and the class’ human form for unique effects. Druid has been in development for Path of Exile 2 since before the game’s Huntress class, which launched in the game’s first expansion, Dawn of the Hunt, in April 2025.

As Grinding Gear Games continues its path towards 1.0, which Rogers claims should launch sometime in 2026, there are still a lot of classes that are planned to come to the game. However, as far as Rogers is concerned, none will be harder to create than the Druid.