If you've been tinkering with Skill Effect Duration in Path of Exile 2, you'll notice it's not just a "nice to have" stat anymore—it's the whole tempo of a build. Cut duration a bit and buffs feel snappier. Push it hard and some skills stop behaving the way you expect. People chasing smoother setups often end up looking at gear and planning routes the same way they would when stocking up on buy game currency or items in u4gm, then deciding what they can afford to test, and that's where u4gm PoE 2 Currency conversations keep popping up in build chats.

Why 100% reduced duration is the line in the sand

The wild part is the "100% reduced" breakpoint. It's not just "shorter," it's "gone." Delays that normally pad out a skill's timing can drop to basically zero, and you feel it instantly. That's why folks describe it like the game suddenly got less clunky. But it's also why this setup is picky. You can't casually stumble into it on any start; you need a path that can actually stack enough reduced duration without gutting your defenses.

The only practical route people are using right now

At the moment, the cleanest way players are reaching the cap is starting Warrior and going Titan. The key is the Titan node Hulking Form, because it juices your small passives by 50%, and that's what makes the math finally work. You're aiming to be around level 70 so you have enough passive points to grab the right clusters and still patch your life/armour layers. The usual picks include reduced duration pockets like Near at Hand and that Forthcoming area over by the Witch side. Then there's Searing Heart—most people don't want to hike across the whole tree for it, so they anoint it and keep their route tight.

What it feels like in actual gameplay

Once you hit zero-ish duration, you stop "waiting" for your own skills. Ember Fusillade is the easy example: normally you cast, embers hover, then they fire. With duration erased, they spawn and they shoot. No awkward beat in the middle. It starts to feel like a rapid-fire trigger skill instead of something floaty. Earthquake also flips from "slam now, payoff later" to "slam and the ground answers right away," which makes mapping feel way more direct—hit, move, hit, move, no babysitting aftershocks.

The defensive angle that surprises people

Offense is fun, sure, but the real eyebrow-raiser is how it interacts with recovery tools like Time of Need. That skill is built around periodic healing and cleansing. When you crush the timing window down to nothing, the game can behave like it's constantly reapplying the effect. In practice, that means curses and nasty dots don't stick the way they normally would, and your life keeps snapping back unless you get deleted in one hit. If you're the type who likes experimenting, it's one of those setups where you'll keep tweaking points, testing gear, and sometimes grabbing a little extra budget to try variants—people often fold that into plans like path of exile 2 currency so they can swap pieces without stalling their progress.