Path of Exile’s Covens of Umbra Kills Scarabs and Hands You a Wickerman Full of Boss Guts

Path of Exile 2 hogged the headlines at ExileCon, but the original game is the one that drops first. Grinding Gear Games’ 3.30 expansion, Covens of Umbra, lands on 13 November Pacific time, which is Saturday 14 November here. It’s free, and it bins Scarabs, the bit of the endgame a lot of players have been sick of for years.

The West Auckland studio revealed it on the ExileCon stage at home in Auckland over the weekend, alongside Path of Exile 2’s 1.0 launch. Here’s what’s actually changing in PoE 1.

When it lands in NZ and Australia

• The date: 13 November 2026 (PST), which is Saturday 14 November in New Zealand and Australia.
• The hour: GGG hasn’t put the start time in a news post yet. Timesaver.gg and How To Video Game both report GGG’s countdown points to 11am PST, which would be 8am NZDT and 6am AEDT on Saturday.
• The price: free, as always.
• Platforms: PC (standalone, Steam and Epic Games Store), PlayStation and Xbox, according to GGG’s press release.
• The old league: Curse of the Allflame wrapped up at 1pm on 9 November (PST), according to GGG’s expansion timeline, which was 10am Tuesday NZDT.

The league: witches, Fates and a Wickerman made of boss bits

The story is that the Coven Queen has plunged her homeland, Umbra, into eternal darkness and now fancies Wraeclast too. Her witches are running grim cauldron rituals across the map, and you help a prisoner of hers called Mora break them up.

• Fates: beating a coven gives you Fates, which you invoke on a boss to make the fight nastier in exchange for better loot. You can stack up to three on one boss, from explosive blackfire to vines and bone harpoons.
• The Wickerman: a wooden effigy that stores the remains of bosses you’ve killed. You equip their Viscera, grisly trophies with bonuses like more life, regeneration or stronger poison.
• Viscera: GGG says there are over 120 to collect, with four slots on the Wickerman: head, arm, body and leg.
• New bosses: more than two dozen new campaign bosses fill areas that never had one, so every campaign area and every map has a Viscera to take.
• Grim Fates: harvested from empowered bosses in higher-level Atlas areas. They carry between instances and can be used on pinnacle bosses, turning Sirus’ storms into crow swarms and making the Shaper conjure illusions of himself.

Scarabs are gone, and the Atlas is rebuilt

The bigger deal for anyone who plays past the campaign is the endgame overhaul. Scarabs, the consumables you jammed into the map device to juice your maps, are being replaced outright.

• Threads of Creation: the Scarab replacement. You invest them in the ten main league mechanics, Abyss, Blight, Legion, Breach, Incursion, Betrayal, Bestiary, Expedition, Ultimatum and Ritual, up to eight per mechanic.
• Less inventory faff: your Thread setup carries over between maps and pulls what it needs from your stash automatically. You unlock up to three map device slots through the Atlas questline.
• Atlas regions: the Atlas is split into regions tied to different mechanics, and running maps in a region beefs up its mechanic.
• A new Atlas tree: the Atlas Passive Tree has been rebuilt from scratch, and many bonuses that used to need pricey Scarabs now sit on the tree.
• Old leagues shuffled: Mirage becomes part of the core game, while the Viridian Wildwood, Sentinels and Beyond can appear across the whole Atlas instead of just top-tier maps. Atziri takes over Incursion’s Temple of Atzoatl.

Better loot on the ground

• Tiered drops: Magic and Rare items can now drop with visible tiers. Higher tiers mean better modifiers, better bases and a shot at more sockets and links.
• Chase bases: Simplex Amulets and Cord Belts join the core drop pool at the highest tiers, and Tier 5 Magic items can drop Fractured.
• Item Rarity: it now also raises your odds of currency, Divination Cards, gems and Uniques, not just more coloured items.

Our take

Killing Scarabs is the right call, and it’s about bloody time. Juicing maps had turned into a spreadsheet job with a side of inventory Tetris, and making Threads persist and pull from your stash is GGG admitting it.

The Wickerman sounds like the fun kind of PoE greed, but 120-odd Viscera on top of a rebuilt Atlas tree and new drop tiers is a lot of change for day one. Expect the usual launch-weekend hotfixes, and maybe hold off on spending your Divines until the dust settles. Still, this is the West Auckland studio carrying a big chunk of NZ’s billion-dollar games industry, shipping a massive free expansion a month before its sequel goes 1.0, and that’s a flex.

Starting a new league build on Saturday morning, or sticking with PoE 2? Come argue about it in the GetRekt Discord. Everything else lives on our Path of Exile page.

Sources

• Grinding Gear Games (Steam): Play Path of Exile: Covens of Umbra on November 13 PST
• Grinding Gear Games (YouTube): Path of Exile 1: Covens of Umbra Trailer
• Worthplaying: Covens of Umbra press release
• Inven Global: Path of Exile: Covens of Umbra launches November 13 after ExileCon
• RPGamer: Path of Exile: Covens of Umbra, Path of Exile 2 extra details revealed
• Timesaver.gg: PoE 3.30 release date and launch time by region
• How To Video Game: Path of Exile 3.30 release time in every region