So at the moment you have two distinct things called levels, your actual character level and your investment in the passive tree.
This creates the bizarre situation where a passive will say ‘requires Sentinel level 10’, a Character will be a level 10 sentinel, but still not be able to take the passive. Or what about the fact that I can be a level 44 void knight and a level 33 void knight at the same time?
I feel simply changing the passives to say ‘requires Sentinel rank 10’ would help ward of some the inevitable flood of confusion from new players, not all of it, but some of it.
I think the confusion you’re having is the distinction betweeen Character level, and Class level.
Character level is your overall level, class level is how many points you have invested into a class’s passive tree. This is a concep that’s not that dissimilar from, say, D&D where a player’s level is not the same as the level of their class (if they’ve multiclassed).
The distinction here is that becuase of bonus passive points, your Character level does not necessarily = your combined class levels.
I understand this can be confusing on the surface level, and probably the terminology can get a bit confusing when discussing builds.
In your example with the Void Knight though, you don’t have a character who is both a level 33 and level 44 knight (I presume this to mean your character level is 44); you instead have a character who is level 44 with 33 ‘levels’ in the Void Knight passive tree (and presumably 20+ in the Sentinel tree).
Perhaps a clearer term would be Ranks? A level 44 Void Knight Sentinel with 33 ranks in the Void Knight tree and (presumably) 20 ranks in the Sentinel tree.
