GGG's ExileCon keynote in Auckland revealed the full 1.0: two final acts in Oriath, the stealthy Shadow class, and Conquerors of Wraeclast, a league where you build an army and it runs your maps for you.
Path of Exile 2 goes free-to-play in full release on 11 December (PST) on PC, PS5 and Xbox.
Acts 5 and 6 finish the campaign in Oriath, with 24 new areas and 18 new unique bosses.
Two new classes: the stealthy, trap-throwing Shadow and the sword-and-stances Duelist.
The Conquerors of Wraeclast league lets you build an army, siege 100+ castles and send commanders to run maps for you.
40+ new uniques, 70+ reworked, a passive tree overhaul and a big Support Gem rebalance.
The story’s done. Grinding Gear Games used its ExileCon keynote in Auckland this morning to show off everything coming in Path of Exile 2’s full release on 11 December, and it’s a lot: the final two campaign acts, two new classes, a league about raising your own army, and an endgame where you can literally send your troops to run maps for you.
The official Path of Exile account put it simply: “The Path of Exile 2 campaign is complete!” GGG has also refreshed PoE2’s Steam page for the 1.0 launch. Here’s the Acts 5 and 6 trailer:
PoE2 has been running with four acts and a stopgap “Interlude” since early access started. 1.0 finishes the job. You head back to Oriath, which GGG says has been “ravaged by countless disasters”, to finish off the Twilight Order and the Beast.
The Shadow is the surprise second class, joining the Duelist that was revealed at gamescom in August. He’s a Perandus kid who now owes a debt to the dark god Prospero, and he brings two new things to PoE2.
The Duelist is PoE2’s sword specialist, an Oriath slum kid who fought his way out through the arenas. His big thing is Stances. Ready Stance powers up your sword skills, and you can upgrade into Sand Stance by stunning enemies, which flings sand discs around, or Blood Stance by parrying, which makes every hit bleed. He also gets two Ascendancies at launch, including the Master-at-Arms.
The launch league is Conquerors of Wraeclast, and it’s one of GGG’s bigger swings. You join a mercenary called Varek, recruit troops and lead them into proper battles to stop the awakening of an ancient Blood Lord.
This is the 1.0 PoE2 needed. A finished story, two classes that actually play differently to anything already in the game, and a league idea big enough that people will be talking about it for months. Stealth in an ARPG where everything usually just runs at you on sight is a genuinely fresh idea, and traps that chain off each other sound like exactly the kind of thing the PoE community will break in a week.
The commander system is the one to watch. Letting an AI army clear your Atlas sounds amazing on a Tuesday night when you’ve got an hour, and it might also be GGG quietly admitting the endgame grind was a bit much. Whether it ends up as a handy helper or the most efficient way to farm currency is going to decide how this league goes.
And credit where it’s due: a West Auckland studio just put on a global games convention at the Aotea Centre and announced one of the biggest launches of the year from it. GGG is already carrying a big chunk of NZ’s billion-dollar games industry, and a free-to-play 1.0 is only going to grow that.
Shadow, Duelist or sticking with your Monk? Come and theorycraft with the crew in the GetRekt Discord.
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