Shapeshifting skills are very restricting - opinion?

I've tried wolf and bear skills and I have to say they're more refined take on "generator/spender" gameplay they're recently trying to push into the game when compared to Amazon launch but they're very restricting.

I played a lot of Druid in Diablo 4 and there is barely any difference when it comes to build crafting, I would even argue there is more freedom in D4 currently because at least you can "merge" shapeshifting effects which is impossible in PoE 2. A quick example - if you use Calamity and then transform to different beast or a human via weapon swap the effect of Calamity is immediately stopped and then resumed if you go back to bear form.

This leads to very limiting and boring gameplay loop but I'm worried about the identity of PoE as a sandbox game. Why giving us this big passive skill tree if most of it is very constricting and on top of that you're being limited to set of 3-4 gem skills of certain archetype.

All these tags like "Shapeshifting" or "Plants" doesn't really help with theory crafting IMO, they just inflate the affix pool list, all of beast forms are linked to Elemental damage types so you can't really find anything related to Poison or Bleed there and even if you would like to make such builds it's counter-intuitive because they will immediately lose its "ready-to-go" synergy with other skills of this type or you would have to sacrifice insane amount of travel points to get to the desired clusters just to make them barely playable.

So in theory yes you can go play wolfman as a Monk or Amazon or whatever but in the end they're the same builds just with a different set of passives to inflate damage numbers but the tools remain the same - you're locked to the Talismans and very specific interactions between gem skills. We're laughing at D4 skill design but honestly as it is currently if you pick Druid in D4Bad then you're not limited to one weapon type in order to cast skills, you can also switch between beast forms without weird restrictions.

I might have different expectations because I've played a bit of PoE 1 but it seems like they're doubling down on "mobalytics top 5" type of build crafting

I am really enjoying wolf so far. But in general I do agree all the builds feel pretty on rails. Every skill being weapon locked kind of sucks. It feels like it's almost just a D4 skill tree hidden behind layers of illusion of choice.

In D4 switching between wolf and bear is a legitimate way to play. Here I think I can use the wolf leap as a movement skill when I am a bear and that's all?