Path of Exile 2’s full release is out on December 11, and coming with it are two new classes, two new acts, a new league, tons of new monsters, bosses, battles, endgame changes, gem updates, atlas and skill tree updates, a new pinnacle boss, base types, uniques, and, I don’t know, probably a kitchen sink or something. Let’s go over it.
First of all, we’ll have two new classes: the Shadow and the Duelist. With them, we’ll get all new skill gems for daggers and swords, with tons of new builds available. Daggers introduce new mechanics around stealth, traps, shadow skills with clones that attack with you, and classic skills like blade vortex and fire trap.
The Duelist will introduce swords, and with it fan favorite skills like cyclone and hemorrhage. With swords we’ll be able to use stances like blood and sand or ready stance. Add to this being able to two-hand, dual wield, or sword and board and swords look to add a huge amount of mechanical complexity.
After two years of early access, the campaign will finally be fully finished. Acts five and six will complete our story of chasing the Beast through the world, with a return to Oriath and beyond. The campaign will also feature new bespoke rare monsters with their own abilities, appearances, and even mods. In addition, the campaign will feature an introduction to the league mechanic for 1.0, Conquerors of Wraeclast.
The league will feature a base building mechanic, where you recruit armies and build up a castle. As you progress through the campaign, you’ll recruit armies to battle against enemy armies. There are over 70 points of interest throughout the campaign that let you recruit new types of soldiers for your army, and battle through to kill the boss and get loot.
As you progress your base, you can recruit commanders that will be able to take your recruits and fight battles for you. Like Kingsmarch in Path of Exile 1, these commanders can run maps for you, letting you convert your gold into progress through the atlas and lots of loot. Your castle gets upgraded just like Heroes of Might and Magic, with a beautiful base that you can spend gold to upgrade.
After all the pinnacle bosses and campaign, you can use your armies to battle against other players. Depending on which of the three factions you choose to join (Karui, Ezomyte, or Marraketh), you can battle to take control of various castles around the atlas. As long as your faction controls a castle, you can travel to it on the Atlas to skip around and get to sweet new maps, and you’ll receive additional item rarity. It also unlocks hunting grounds nearby that feature rare monsters with increased loot. You’ll be able to use currency you find in battle to craft gear, a system which lets you pick mods to remove and reroll into new fractured mods.
All of the new campaign areas feature new bosses, which you’ll also face in the endgame in over 25 new maps.
The endgame has been updated as well—in addition to being able to use castles to jump around the atlas, the atlas skill tree has been substantially changed. Instead of 300+ nodes, it’s been trimmed way down to about 70. If you beeline the skills, you should end up with about 50 of 70 by the time you battle against the Arbiter of Divinity.
Tons of gems have been updated. Not only are we getting new gems for daggers and swords, but they’ve added new skills for existing weapons as well. Support gems have been overhauled so that they’re more useful as well, like all of the different elemental penetration gems being rolled into one called elemental penetration. Support gems like brutality are also better, with less of a penalty for chaos damage. Chain support becomes just an upgrade, without the penalty to damage on the initial hit.
The passive tree has had huge changes. In addition to a bunch of new nodes, they’ve changed how jewels work. Instead of always being located on the travel nodes on the outside of the tree, they’ll be located in actual skill clusters. Hopefully this will prevent all of our endgame skill trees looking the same, with a big circle maximizing jewel slots and nothing else.
With tons of new items including base types and uniques, there will be lots of new loot to find. Some of the base types look insanely powerful, like an armor that makes you immune to curses. They’ve overhauled over 70 uniques and added about 40 more, which should make finding uniques way more exciting, especially in the campaign.
Taken all together, 1.0 looks like it will be an incredible moment for Path of Exile 2, both for players who’ve been waiting to play it, and for those of us who already have hundreds or thousands of hours in the ARPG. The full release of Path of Exile 2 will be available on December 11.
