That's fixed now! You can start exploiting the game right away now and not worry!
I'm still trying to figure out what the hell they were thinking with the whole perk system. It really needs an overhaul. It is full of loops that generate materials/money from essentially nothing, crit and damage stacks that take you above what any enemy in the game can survive a hit from (with basic starter weapons,) armor boosts that cause invincibility due to stat integer overflow. I want to say it's broken but it's more like it is fundamentally built to work this way. There are too many exploitable bonus freebs, percentages stacking with multipliers, and just all around bad calculations coded into it. It's not like it's just bugged and getting the numbers wrong. Though that does happen, the proper math, in it itself, easily puts your character at a permanent advantage that utterly destroys any balance. Once you crack a ceiling, it only becomes more imbalanced as you level. You can bypass your whole stat system and flood the game economy. And you can get there early, without fancy tricks. Could easily become a monster before finishing act 1.
I'll be curious to see if they try to re-balance this at all, or if we'll just have to wait on a mega-rebalancing mod. I don't even know how it could be fixed without nerfing a good 3rd of the perks. For TW3 an ex-dev even stepped in and made one.