I’m sure this is already a familiar issue but it feels frustrating enough to be restated. Removing an item that grants +skills removes passives from your tree seemingly at random (or there does seem to be a logic to it but I can’t figure it out). This is usually just an annoying inconvenience as you can simply re-equip the item and look for where the points have been taken and then refill the spots. But in the case where you aren’t re-equipping the item and you’re ending up with less total skill points, your character can be gimped as build defining nodes are removed. This can be hugely frustrating as your character has lost a significant part of its identity and power and you then have to respec points from OTHER places in the tree, and level up without them, to reassign them to the important nodes that have been emptied.
Suggestion: the game should only remove the most recently added points, in the reverse order they were added.