Thorns?

Why include thorns anywhere on the passive tree if everything in the game (including and more important the trials) is telling me getting hit = bad.
Honour becomes a insurmountable hurdle that simply bricks any build that relies on it. Also to note that using the passive tree can only accumulative you 140% extra thorns % damage(not include jewel slots). This compared to literally any other stat is pretty low on the totem pole.

So I suppose my question is.... Why would anyone bother? And if no one is bothering, why include it in the game? If the threshold that is holding this back is you don't want people to passively AFK play the game. Why does it exist at all?

I personally love thorn builds in other ARPGs. Call it what you want. Like it or don't I would agree it's not for everyone. I'd even consider it more of a slow-safer type of playtime. I hope you at least... fix the honor system in the trials. Labs sucked. But at least you could have fun with it instead of worrying about getting hit by every single mob or trap.

I think we're forgetting what "Early access" means. This isn't the finished product. Some things to note are the fact that we're missing a large number of support gems, and we're missing several classes. It's entirely possible another class like druids will have an ascendency benefitting thorns, who knows. We shouldn't make comparisons to the pacing of POE1 to an early access, pre-league, unfinished version of POE2.

Clearly there is some effort made to make thorns work somewhere, we just don't have all the pieces yet to make it a viable build.