Path of Exile 2 moves the build engine away from the linked-socket armour model of the first game and onto a character-level Skills Panel where every skill carries its own support slots. The resource that makes that work is Spirit, and the question every build answers is the same: how many persistent skills, minions, auras, and support gems can you keep running at once before you run out of Spirit to spend.

What changed

In the first Path of Exile, support gems gained effect by being linked to a skill gem inside a piece of gear with the right number and colour of sockets. Path of Exile 2 splits that into two systems. Skill gems are socketed into the Skills Panel rather than into gear, and each skill gem has its own support-gem slots — two by default, expandable to five with Jeweller’s Orbs. Persistent skills (auras, heralds, minions, sustained buffs) are cut from Uncut Spirit Gems and reserve Spirit to stay active, while active skills are cut from Uncut Skill Gems.

This separation changes what a build optimises. In PoE1 you chased gear with six linked sockets; in PoE2 you chase enough Spirit and enough attributes to keep the right set of persistent skills and supports running, and you cut gems from a supply of Uncut Gems whose level is determined by the area level where they dropped.

How it works

Spirit and reservation

Spirit is a reserve of power used to activate and maintain persistent skills, managed in the Skills Panel. Reserving Spirit does not lower your maximum Spirit — it sets aside a portion so it cannot be used by anything else. Auras, heralds, persistent minions (Skeletal Warrior, Wolf Pack, Infernal Hound), and sustained buffs (Arctic Armour, Wind Dancer, Grim Feast) all reserve Spirit while active. Weapon sets can hold different amounts of Spirit because Sceptres and weapon-set passive points belong to a specific set, so a swap between sets can quietly change what you can keep running.

Support gem sockets and the attribute gate

Each skill gem starts with two support slots and can gain up to three more through Jeweller’s Orbs, for a maximum of five supports per skill. The hard cap on how many supports you can actually use is gated by your attributes, at a ratio of five points of a stat per support of that colour: Strength for red, Dexterity for green, Intelligence for blue. A character with 20 Strength, 40 Dexterity, and 30 Intelligence can run four red, eight green, and six blue supports in total across all skills. Two rules constrain stacking further: you cannot socket two supports of the same category into one skill, and only one copy per rank of a spirit-reservation support is allowed across all your skills — so you cannot double up Herbalism I everywhere, though Herbalism I and Herbalism II can live on different skills.

Persistent skills add a second gate. A support socketed into a persistent skill often increases its Spirit reservation by a cost multiplier, and some supports add a flat Spirit reservation instead. If you have just enough Spirit for the base skill but not for the support, you must remove the support before the skill will activate.

Lineage supports

Lineage supports are a separate tier that only drop from the core pool or specific bosses — they cannot be cut from Uncut Support Gems. Only one copy of each lineage support can be socketed across all your skills, with one exception: the unique helmet Solus Ipse lets you socket up to two additional copies of the same lineage support on different skills. Lineage supports are markedly stronger than craftable ones and are the endgame upgrade target for most builds.

Uncut gems

Uncut Skill, Uncut Spirit, and Uncut Support Gems drop with a level tied to the area level, on a breakpoint table that rises roughly with campaign and map progression. Uncut Support Gems cap at level 5 even from the highest-level areas. An uncut skill or spirit gem can either create a new gem or level an existing one to its level. Since patch 0.3.0, uncut skill, spirit, and support gems can all be traded through the Currency Exchange, which turns the uncut-gem supply into a real economy rather than a self-found-only one.

Reservation efficiency

Reservation efficiency is the lever that expands your Spirit budget, and it behaves as a divisor, not a subtraction. Fifty percent increased Reservation Efficiency drops a reservation to roughly 67% of its base cost; one hundred percent increased drops it to 50%. Reduced Reservation Efficiency does the opposite and grows the reservation, which is why debuffs to it are dangerous on a tight budget. The Tactician ascendancy notable “Persistent Buffs have 50% less Reservation” and similar passives are how serious support-stacking builds fit everything in.

Build path

Optimising a build is the process of fitting a desired set of persistent skills and supports inside a Spirit budget that is set by your Sceptre, your passive tree, and your ascendancy. The steps are mechanical.

  1. List the persistent skills you must run. For a minion build that might be a primary minion (Skeletal Reaver or Wolf Pack), a Grim Feast for revive sustain, and one or two auras. For a spell build it might be Archmage, an elemental-infusion buff, and a herald. Each has a base Spirit reservation.
  2. Add the supports you want on each. Persistent supports usually add either a cost multiplier or a flat Spirit cost. The category and one-copy-per-rank rules mean you pick the best support in each category, not every support. Hulking Minions, for example, makes minions larger, tougher, and harder-hitting but costs significantly more Spirit — a classic trade against how many other persistent skills you can keep.
  3. Compute the attribute gate. Sum the supports you intend to run by colour and confirm your Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence cover five points per support of that colour. Attribute requirements on endgame skill gems were lowered in 0.3.0 (roughly 20-25% less on average), which frees points for the support gate, but the gate is still the binding constraint on highly stacked builds.
  4. Apply reservation efficiency. Stack increased Reservation Efficiency from passives, the Tactician notable, and weapon-set points until the total reservation fits inside available Spirit. Remember the divisor math: each 50% increment saves a third of the remaining cost, not half.
  5. Resolve weapon-set splits. Because each weapon set can reserve a different amount, you can park a costly persistent skill in the set where it matters and drop it from the other. A Sceptre that grants Spirit only applies to its set, so a swap can enable or disable a whole aura block.
  6. Spend the uncut-gem supply deliberately. Uncut gems are level-locked, so the supports you can cut early are limited by where you are in the campaign. Trade duplicate uncuts through the Currency Exchange to convert a surplus of one kind into the level or type you are short on, rather than cutting a low-tier support you will replace immediately. Save Uncut Spirit Gems for the persistent skill you are building toward, since re-cutting wastes the supply.

The lineage-support endgame changes the last step. Once a build can run its base persistent block comfortably, the upgrade path is replacing craftable supports with their lineage equivalents on the skills that matter most, respecting the one-copy-across-all-skills rule (plus the two extra copies Solus Ipse grants). That is where the real support-stacking ceiling sits.

What it means

Path of Exile 2’s gem system makes Spirit and attributes the two currencies of build optimisation, and the uncut-gem drop table the supply you spend. A build does not “have five links” the way a PoE1 build did; it has as many supports as its Spirit reservation, its attribute totals, and its category limits will hold at once. That is a stricter and more legible constraint than linked sockets, and it is why reservation efficiency and weapon-set Spirit management are the skills that separate a working endgame build from a stalled one.

The trade-off the system forces is explicit: every support you add to a persistent skill either multiplies or flat-costs Spirit, and every persistent skill you add competes with every other for the same pool. Picking which persistent skills are worth their reservation — and which supports are worth their added cost — is the core decision, and the uncut-gem economy is simply the budget you make those decisions against.