This week Grinding Gear Games announced the newest content pack for Path of Exile 2 titled The Third Edict. There’s a lot of changes and additions coming, and you can see everything that’s coming by checking out the video or by reading the transcript below!

If you want to watch the announcement video, you can find it here:

Below is a transcript:

Hi, I’m Jonathan Rogers from Grinding Gear Games. Welcome to GGG Live! Today, we’re going to show you an exclusive reveal for what is coming next for Path of Exile 2.

Alright, let’s get started with Act 4.

The story continues from the end of Act 3. Doryani has agreed to help you find an ancient weapon that can be used against corruption. The instrument of the Third Edict. The weapon was broken in ages past, but he believes that the pieces may be found in the Karui Archipelago. The home of the Karui tribes. You will need to Journey to Kingsmach. Hire a ship, and set sail. When you open the map you can choose to sail anywhere you like. Act 4 is completely non-linear and you can visit the islands in any order you choose.

Will you visit the pristine beaches of Whakapanu Island? The Karui whisper of a curse that afflicts all who travel there. Perhaps it’s related to the weapon you seek. Or maybe you will visit The Volcanic shores of the Isle of Kin. The Kin have been more restless recently, mining for Sulphite and driven by some dark force. Perhaps you will choose to consult with one of the local Karui tribes. Their ancient wisdom could hold clues to finding The Third Edict.

No matter where you choose to go you will fight dangerous beasts, find fabulous treasures, and battle incredible bosses.

There are 8 islands to discover, each teeming with its own flora and fauna. Act 4 contains over 100 new monster types, 16 new areas. 12 new bosses. And plenty of other…. Interesting encounters.

But what happens after Act 4? Well, until now, you had to repeat the entire campaign again before you could face the endgame, but after adding Act 4, the game is far too long to make you do that. We needed something else to do between the end of Act 4 and the endgame.

So what else could we do? Add 3 new Mini-acts of course. And we are calling them The Interludes. The Interludes are a set of 3 temporary side-stories that will be included in the game until Act 5 is released that will take you to level 65 where the endgame can begin.

The first Interlude sends you on a journey back to Ogham. Renly has been leading the efforts to rebuild Ogham Village after the defeat of Count Geonor. But there is a new danger afoot. The nearby town of Holten is surrounded by an impenetrable darkness, and each night their corrupted townfolk emerge to raid the local farmlands.

You will discover new areas, and new bosses. You will need to find a way through the darkness, uncover the source of the corruption, and defeat it.

The second interlude will have you return to the Vastiri desert where Asala has been given a sacred duty. When the skies align, the Gifting of Water requires a chosen Sekhema to meet with the Sel Khari, guardians of the Sacred Water. But they are nowhere to be found. You will need to track down the Sel Khari, find those responsible for disrupting the Gifting. Fight even more new bosses, discover the secrets of the ancient ritual, discover new locations, and ultimately help Asala carry out her sacred duty

Now for interlude 3!

As Royal Thaumaturge of the Vaal, Doryani had plans within plans to save his people from the cataclysm perpetuated by Atziri’s lust for power. One such plan involved sealing a group of willing Vaal deep in a great mountain Vault near the home of the Azmeri. Deep enough to survive the cataclysm. Even though thousands of years have passed, he believes that their descendants may still live, and may be key to defeating the beast.

The journey up the mountain will be dangerous. New foes stand in your way. And the further up the mountain you venture, the colder it will become.

Explore caves of ice, and enter the vault itself. Who can say what you will find within?

The interludes are 6 to 7 areas each, and generally include 4 boss fights as well. When you put that together with Act 4, that adds up to 35 new areas in the campaign and new 24 boss fights.

It’s worth making clear that the Interludes are temporary. When Act 5 and 6 are added, the Interludes will be going away. These are side stories after all. But don’t worry, the bosses and areas that make up the interlude are all part of the endgame. We are not just going to throw them away!

And with that, we don’t need Cruel Difficulty anymore. We do know that it was a pretty big chore to have to play through the campaign multiple times on each character, and this was a huge reason that the campaign could feel like a bit of a slog when playing through again, but we do also have another new feature to address that particular concern as well.

 

So let’s talk about Sprinting: In 0.3.0 when you hold down the dodge roll button, your character will go into a sprint after they finish the roll. This is available on all character classes, and there is no limitation to how long you can sprint for. The primary purpose of this feature is to make navigating areas faster when out of combat. Because of that, if you do take a hit while sprinting, you will fall to the ground.

The best idea is to use a skill when you see monsters. That will break you out of the sprint so you can engage with no danger. If you do need to run away from monsters, just hold Spacebar. You won’t be vulnerable during the roll, and you are faster while sprinting than basically any monster in the game, allowing you to retreat from combat.

Sprint is a pretty significant change to PoE2’s gameplay, but what I like the most about it is that we can accelerate the pace of the game for those who want that without having to compromise on PoE2’s more visceral combat systems.

Okay, so that’s the new extensions to the campaign. There is a whole giant league to play through as well, but I’ll leave that to Mark to talk about later. And that’s because what I want to talk about is new stuff for your Characters. And probably one of the biggest new systems here is with Support Gems. Now support gems are one of the most important elements to creating a build. They are what enable so many interesting mechanics and different ways to play, but PoE2’s support gem system has just never been quite right.

One of the major issues is the limitation of only having one support gem of each type on your character. We didn’t want builds to become just using the same 5 most powerful supports on every skill. The problem with this design though is that it’s actually working against using multiple skills in your build. If you can only use each support on one skill, it means that you are encouraged to go all-in on that one ability, and we want to encourage you to combo your abilities! Something needed to change here.

So with that in mind, we have removed the restriction of having one of each support gem per character. You can use as many copies as you like. This should drastically increase the amount of possible builds, and increase the amount of skill diversity. There were a lot of potential builds that suffered from the previous restriction. For example, a poison build previously couldn’t add poison to more than one other skill. They couldn’t use Stacking Poison on more than one skill. This severely limited your ability to combo with anything outside of the specifically designed poison archetype. But now you can!

Many utility skills previously couldn’t scale to endgame because the supports that would make them scale were more useful to use on other skills. You would never speed up Killing Palm with Martial Tempo when you would much rather use it on your primary skill instead. There are examples like this all over the place.

In addition to that though, we thought that there wasn’t enough feeling of progression in the supports as you went through the game. There were only 3 tiers of supports, and many of the most important ones were given out at Tier 1. Also, there were no strict upgrades, meaning that upgrading supports once you ran out of sockets required quite a lot of thinking. 

In order to solve these issues, we now also have multiple levels of many supports as you go through the game.

For example: Double Barrel support gives you an extra bolt but at the cost of 30% less reload speed. At Tier 2, the penalty gets lowered to 20%. But then at Tier 3, the support gem gets something new. It now reloads automatically when you heavy stun an enemy. In some cases the highest tiers might work a little differently and you will have to decide if you like the upgrade or not depending on your build.

For example Rapid Casting: The first couple of levels give 15%, then 20% increased cast speed, but then at Tier 3, it changes to a new approach. For each different spell you cast in the last 8 seconds, you get 10% increased cast speed, which could be a pretty big bonus if you use a lot of different spells. 

So that is pretty good for upgrades throughout the campaign, but we wanted to add a little more spice to the Endgame for supports too, and that is where our new system, Lineage Supports comes in. You can think of these things as like Unique Items, but for supports. These supports are only available at endgame, but they are much more powerful. Like Ratha’s Assault. It’s an upgraded version of Double Barrel that reloads your Skill as you dodge roll, as well as increasing the number of bolts it can hold. But it does mean that this is the *only* way you can reload the skill now!

Now, unlike regular supports, you can’t find these through an Uncut Support Gem. Just like Unique Items, many of these can be found from specific bosses, and there are a ton available in the regular drop pool too. Some of them are very rare, others are fairly common. Some of them are build defining, others are just straight power upgrades. All in all there are around 40 lineage supports being added throughout the endgame, so there is a lot of power to find out there!

Now, the new support gems are certainly going to open up a lot of builds, but of course we have a huge range of improvements to individual character classes as well. As well as adding new skills, we had a big focus on buffing existing skills so that they scale well into the endgame.

There is a huge amount to cover here so we’re not going to discuss everything, we are just going to quickfire through some of the coolest changes.

We wanted to make Cold a more useful element on the Ranger so we have expanded the Cold tools available. As well as increasing its range, Escape Shot now creates fragments of Ice when it hits the ground. These fragments explode after a short time, making this skill better for killing groups of enemies, but not only that, we added an Ice Fragments support that creates more of them when killing frozen enemies, and a new buff skill called Ice Tipped Arrows that allows all your arrows to create ice fragments.

This already gives more clear to rangers wanting to use ice, but to take further advantage of the ice fragments, Freezing Salvo has been upgraded to shoot additional cold arrows towards each fragment, giving you a nuke like ability. We have also modified Snipe to consume Frozen from enemies dealing a huge amount more damage, giving you a nice Ice single target option. And something you might notice about that is that the bonus is a lot higher against Bosses. This is actually a change you will see throughout the game. Since it’s a lot harder to Freeze a boss, you should get a bigger reward for it!

Another theme you will see throughout the game is making movement feel better. Toxic growth is a skill that was pretty cool, but a bit annoying to use with the jump that it had. Now Toxic Growth is a rain skill, so you can spam it more easily, and we also added a new poison skill while we were at it called Toxic Domain. It creates a small area around you that makes all your attacks create toxic growth pustules, but attached to monsters.

Another skill that was annoying to use was Electrocuting Arrow. It’s now just a regular arrow making it much easier to use, but it also means you can support it with Projectile supports, and it now also has Area of Effect, making it a tool for more than just single target, and allowing it to scale into the endgame. We also added a new Spirit reservation called Lingerding Mirage. This is a meta-skill that allows you to create shadowy clones of yourself to use a skill of your choice.

Of course one of the other big problems the ranger had was survivability, Evasion was the weakest of the three defences, and we wanted to change that. Currently, Evasion doesn’t evade all types of hits in the game so you are still vulnerable to things like slams or unblockable attacks. To make evasion characters more tanky, we are adding a new mechanic called Deflect. Unlike evasion, Deflect works on everything, and if you successfully deflect a hit, you take 40% less damage from it. Items can now give you a mod that gives you some amount of Deflection based on your evasion, and there is a bunch available on the passive tree too. Deflection is rolled in addition to evasion, so this is an upgrade for regular hits too, and unlike evasion, there is no maximum chance. You can reach 100% deflect against all hits if you spec into it enough.

Of course this is a buff that helps all Dex characters so the Mercenary and the Monk, but especially the Huntress are seeing a big defence boost from this as well.

Speaking of Defensive Mechanics, let’s talk about Block and Parry.

Now, one of the big concerns on the release of the huntress was Parry feeling unreliable.  One of the big reasons for this is that there are a lot of hits that are not blockable, and thus not parryable either. So a huge balance change we are making is that now, everything is blockable except for specifically unblockable “red flash” skills that bosses use. This makes Parry much more reliable. And not only that, but to make Block and Parry nicer to use, you now move much faster than before while using these abilities. This is a massive buff to passive block as well, so to counter that, we did have to lower max passive block a bit, but overall you should feel a lot safer.

Fire skills on the Warrior were not really cutting the mustard, so we decided we needed to upgrade a bunch of them, but also add some more as well.

Let’s start with a buff. Volcanic Fissure now branches into multiple fissures giving it much more clearing potential. We also added a new skill called Forge Hammer. This skill throws a molten hammer that does a slam at a distance. You can recall the hammer back by using the skill again if you like, but the cooler thing to do is use a Warcry near it. Using a Warcry makes the hammer explode, making a bunch of Volcanic fissures around it. Volcanic fissures retrigger when you slam them, so it’s a great skill to use to make a flaming arena to fight a boss. We also buffed Perfect Strike to have a much larger area of effect and changed Molten Blast to not always force you to move forwards. Trust me, it feels a lot better to use now. This skill now has a massively boosted chance to ignite monsters, and you are going to want to ignite monsters, due to a new Glory skill called Ancestral Cry. Ancestral Cry charges up with Glory by igniting monsters invoking King Kaom’s favour. After you do, use it to channel Kaom’s ancestral power. Every attack will be ancestrally boosted with Fire. Your very steps will explode triggering Volcanic Fissures, and molten balls will erupt from your attacks.

Warrior Shield skills were another area that we wanted to improve. Now that we have sprint, we actually don’t need to have the cooldown on Shield Charge anymore. It now does more damage the farther away you are when you use it.

Shield Wall got…. Significantly upgraded aoe. Also you can Shield Charge right through it to trigger all the walls. We also added a new Shield warcry. Fortifying cry gives you a defensive buff, but also builds up charge on your shield that empower your other shield skills. Magma Barrier now doesn’t require timing in order to use, just wait for your shield to charge up. Seismic Cry now stuns enemies that are primed for stun. We changed the Sunder interaction with Armour Break. It now also gives a Sundered Armour debuff that makes enemies take 40% extra physical damage. Great for bosses.

Ancestral Warrior totem has undergone some pretty significant changes too. We wanted this skill to feel more like using an ultimate. That summoning an Ancestor to fight for you was a big deal, so we have changed this Totem to require 3 endurance charges to summon, and massively buffed its damage. It also now scales with your weapon damage too.

Since there is no limit anymore, if you build around generating endurance charges, you can summon an entire forest of totems. In order to make that easier, we added some new sources of Endurance Charges. There is now a support to make Perfect Strike generate charges. And a support for generating Endurance Charges from Heavy Stuns as well.

Speaking of totems, we wanted to upgrade the Warbringer.

Answered Call now gives an extra totem, and the spirits have just been generally buffed in many ways. Use it with your limitless Ancestral Warrior Forest to make an army of Karui that would make Tukohama proud. We merged the Greatwolf Howl and Warcaller’s Bellow support so that you can get all the benefits with one point, and Encase in Jade no longer removes the Jade when getting hit, making it a much better defence.

Next up, let’s talk about Accuracy. Accuracy was always intended to be something that Warriors don’t need to care about very much so long as they are in close combat. But unfortunately that is not currently the case. This was particularly annoying with skills like Bone Shatter which you certainly don’t want to miss with, so we significantly buffed your chance to hit at close ranges when you don’t have much accuracy. Warriors shouldn’t require any accuracy investment in order to hit with close range attacks now.

We also wanted to improve armour. Now, one of the major weaknesses of armour is the inability to defend against elemental damage. In order to mitigate this, we are adding a lot more of the stat that allows your armour to defend against elemental damage. It’s now available on items, and in a lot more places on the passive tree.

Now Crossbow skills. One of the most important improvements we’ve made in 0.3.0 is to de-clunk the action and flow of shooting crossbows. You can now reload crossbows without any movement penalty. But not only that, ALL skills that can be used while moving now slow you for a shorter amount of time. This change benefits everyone, not just Crossbow skills. With both of these changes put together, the run-and-gun playstyle feels much better. It’s hard to explain how important this change is for the feel of the class.

The Mercenary is a good chance to talk about how we are rebalancing to make comboing skills much better. Take Shock for example, it buffs damage and lasts 4 seconds right now but that isn’t really giving you enough time to take advantage of it. If you are going to add a Lightning Skill into a build that otherwise wouldn’t use one, we need to make mechanics like this better. So we have increased Shock duration on monsters to last 8 seconds, and skills like Plasma Blast which are intended to be good at shocking enemies now increase the damage bonus by a lot. You will find changes like this all around the game. Chill now lasts 8 seconds giving you more of a reason to weave in cold damage. Freezing skills need to be better at freezing. Burning skills need to cause burns that last longer. By making skills like Permafrost Bolts and Incendiary Shot double down on how they are supposed to be used, it makes using them in your build alongside other skills much more likely.

We are also making sure to buff specific combos too. Freeze explosions from from Frag Rounds now chain to nearby enemies, and using High Velocity Rounds with Armour Break will now Fragment the opponents armour. This causes the monster to take a portion of high velocity rounds damage with every subsequent hit, even tiny pellets. So that means following up with a shotgun blast is way more effective. After fragmenting armour, switch to frag rounds to melt bosses.

Now there are a lot more buffs to Crossbow skills, but for now I’ll just talk about a new one we added. The Mortar Cannon, which lets you socket any Grenade Skill. Using it will summon a cannon which loads and then fires the grenade you chose. Talking about Ballistas, if you want to go all in on that playstyle then there is now notable on the Tactician Ascendancy that can help. Each different type of totem or Ballista gets a different aura. This means that to fully exploit this node you will want to use a wide variety of them.

On the Witch Hunter we added a new node that gives you a new Mark skill. When critting an enemy with this mark, we spawn different remnant energies on the ground depending on what type of monster you killed. Picking up a remnant from a Beast will refill all your flasks while picking up a remnant from an undead monster will give you immortality for 2 seconds. Grab these at the right time in combat to use them most effectively.

Another issue on the Mercenary were Banners. They were just not very good, so we are doing a big upgrade to them. They now last longer, don’t disappear when moving out of them, and we removed the Valour mechanic. They just give a more consistent and stronger buff and you can use them when you get enough glory.

On Witch one of the main focuses was making various minions types more useful to use together. Melee minions in particular were just not that great compared to ranged ones. As a starting point, we just straight up removed the requirement for minions to have accuracy. Attack minions now always hit, which makes them significantly better. Brutes got some good numeric buffs, but we also added a new command skill where they do a Warcry that intimidates enemies, and detonates any frozen monsters and allies around you in a big cold explosion.

We also changed the Frost Mages command skill to an ability that adds Ice Armour to your other minions, adding a layer of defence, and makes them deal cold damage back to the attacker as well. The ice armour also makes the minion count as frozen, so the Brute’s warcry can detonate them too! Unearth was changed to work on the corpses of your dead skeletons,allowing you to summon the minions more easily in boss fights, and they also got a new jump ability allowing them to get into combat faster. Raise Spectre was also feeling pretty weak for the spirit costs that they have. To be honest, we were a little afraid when we first balanced these. We have both decreased spirit costs for a large range of monsters, and we have significantly increased Spectre damage. They should feel much more impactful now.

There are also a lot of new spellcaster weapons with new Occult skills but I’ll just talk about one of them that I thought was particularly cool.

The Reaping staff is actually a wicked scythe that gives you a new ability called Reap. When an enemy is on low life, you can dash forward and rake enemies with the scythe and cull them instantly, healing you. It can also inflict Critical Weakness on enemies.

Now there are a lot of balance changes in the Witch’s Ascendancy classes, but I’ll just talk about two of them for now.

On the Blood Mage you were previously required to spend your first points on Sanguimancy which really was supposed to be the downside for being able to access the powerful abilities on the rest of the class. In order to make picking the Blood Mage a better early option, we have made Sanguimancy free, unlocking the power of the rest of the class immediately. On the Infernalist the Demon Form wasn’t something people were really using because you lost your weapon stats while transformed. Well, you no longer do, so it’s a much better option now.

On the Monk, the wind skills needed a big upgrade for sure. Staggering Palm can now stack up it’s duration if you use the skill multiple times in a row, so you can keep the effect of all your skills throwing out wind much more easily. Wind Blast had the purpose of building up to Dazing an enemy, but Dazing just wasn’t worth all that effort. Now it just Dazes on hit, meaning a single wind blast will make all your skills stun enemies more easily. Following up with Vaulting Impact on a Dazed enemy previously did a bunch of stun. Now it does a bunch of damage, making it way more useful. A cool build that certain people always enjoyed in PoE1 was hand to hand combat, but until now we didn’t have any real way to make it viable. Well that changes now. The monk as a true martial artist now has the ability to learn the Hollow Palm Technique. A keystone that lets you use all quarterstaff skills while unarmed. All quarterstaff attacks now have special unarmed versions, and you get further bonuses to all your attacks for stacking Energy Shield and Evasion on your character.

A new Keystone that we added in the Monk section tree is Walker of the Wilds. This changes mana leech to work with elemental damage instead of physical damage which is pretty useful for all those elemental attacks the Monk has, but works well for the Ranger too. Now, one of the least used Ascendancy classes in the game is the Accolyte of Chayula, so we knew we needed to make some changes here. One of the key things we had to do was make the Chaos damage that the Accolyte can do much more useful. So we added a new skill allowing Chaos damage to Ignite, Shock, Chill and Freeze, embracing the Elemental Prowess of the monk and a truly Chaotic fashion. In addition, he can make all his Chaos damage leech, and we have buffed Into the Breach and Embrace the darkness by moving the effects of the 4 point nodes into the base skills. He also gains a new notable, Grasp of the Void which leaves Void Illusions behind you as you dodge roll. If they are killed, they do massive explosions of darkness, dealing damage to everything in sight.

 

Now let’s talk about Sorceress skills.

One of the things we wanted to improve on the Sorc is the ability to use multiple elements together more effectively.

Now, this might seem small, but one thing pushing you towards using a single element was debuffs like the Elemental Curses which was lowering resistances of a single element. In order to fix that, we are making quite a lot of game wide changes to those kinds of mechanics to broaden what they apply to. So for example, there are no longer 3 curses for Fire, Ice and Lightning, there is just a single curse that buffs all 3, and things like Frost Bomb which gave Cold exposure now give Elemental Exposure. You can use it to buff any of your other skills. We also wanted to make switching between different weapon sets smoother, so you can use different Elemental Staves more effectively. To do that, we have removed the weapon switch time, it now happens instantly. This applies game wide too.

We didn’t want to just stop there though. We wanted to add some specific mechanics that work between the different elements, and that is where Elemental Infusions come in. Certain skills now drop Elemental Infusions. For example, when a Frost Bomb explodes, it leaves behind a cold infusion on the ground. After picking it up, you can spend it on one of any number of different skills to transform how they work. Spark will create a nova of cold infused projectiles. Ice Nova will leave a chilled area on the ground. We also added a new low level skill (Frost Dart) that fires Ice Shards. Use it with cold infusion though, and the ice shards will explode. Orb of Storms now generates lightning infusions when you cast enough spells near it. And that’s all spells by the way, not just lightning. Once you have one, you could cast a lightning flame wall which adds both fire and lightning damage to all the projectiles that pass through it. Or power up Ember Fusilade with Lightning which will generate arcs to nearby enemies as each fireball hits. Or maybe go lightning on lightning with Arc. This skill is now a projectile, and by infusing it you can go full Palpatine.

Get fire infusions by blowing up monsters with Living Bomb. Then use them with Comet to summon a giant fire meteor from the sky. Or use it with Firestorm which transforms it from a small area, into a much bigger one. Firestorm is unique in that it can be infused by multiple different elements at the same time, add Ice infusion to rain down ice at the same time as fire, and lightning to add deadly strikes from the heavens into the mix.

There are a few other ways to generate infusion charges as well. Cold Snap has been simply turned into… Snap. Previously you could use it to shatter ice, but it now works to detonate all of the different elemental ailments, and makes them leave behind infusions.

And just like how you could previously use it on Frost bolt, you can also use it on Orb of Storms and Solar Orb to detonate those as well, which means you can create many infusions at once.

We also have a spirit reservation skill, and a support gem to help generate them too.

On the passive tree, we have added quite a few new keystones to the Sorceress section. Here are a couple of examples.

The Blackflame Covenant Keystone converts your fire spells to chaos and causes your Ignites to deal chaos damage. Your fire spells and ignites will also turn purple. The Ritual Cadence Keystone causes your Invocation skills to trigger spells more times, but makes them trigger periodically over a longer duration instead of all at once.

Now, in addition to skill changes, we have added a lot more options to the passive tree for each class. Overall there are more than 150 new notables on the tree. Usually around 20 per class along with smaller clusters as well.

The new version is a lot more dense with interesting nodes than before. Now we probably can’t go through too many of these in the livestream, so I’ll just show you one from each class’ area on the tree. We tried to be a lot more thematic with the new nodes, so for example “The Molten Ones Gift”. It lets the benefit of armour break apply to your fire damage. Or how about “Last Stand” which gives you lots of stats as your situation becomes more and more desperate.

A lot of these have themes aligning with Ascendancy classes. Like for the Gemling Legionare you have Crystalized Immunities which makes you immune to different status ailments depending on which support gem colour you have socketed the most. It’s actually possible to get all three of these if you have the same number of each colour.

Another ascendancy class aligned one is Sanguimatic rituals. It allows Arcane Surges to generate life instead of Mana, unlocking that support gem to be used with the Blood mage ascendancy.

In the Sorc area you will find these Archon nodes that allow you to convert all of your elemental damage to a specific element. You become a Lightning Archon when you spend enough mana, after which all of your skills will be converted to lightning, and you will do extra lightning damage. We have ones for Cold and Fire too with different triggers.

Here is another cool one, Elemental Practitioner gives crit bonuses if you have triggered a skill recently, while also making crits generate more energy for triggers. Or maybe The Great Boar, it gives you a reason to stack Dexterity to make you tougher, giving a bonus to life and stun threshold. Or The Cunning Fox. It straight up gives you 5% quality to all your gems.

Now, another major change is attributes. We felt like players probably had a few too many nodes in attributes, and not enough in interesting passives, so we lowered Attribute Requirements by 25% across the board. That means you will have more points to spend on interesting notables, rather than just needing to allocate Strength Dex and Int. Now there are way more changes than just these. These are just some of the cooler ones that we wanted to show off, but I would say that that is just about enough for now. We are not even half done yet. So I think it’s time we talk about the League. The Rise of the Abyssal.

As you just saw, even though there are major changes to the campaign for this update, we want to make sure that every time you come back for an expansion, each area feels different with something extra going on. It is really important to make sure that your experience when returning between expansions is fresh and filled with new content, and the way we did this was through “Leagues”.

Every expansion we make has a League, which not only has a fresh economy, but also has new content exclusively available in that League, so, let’s delve into the details of what Path of Exile 2’s first official league is bringing to the table!

The Abyssal are a race that have mastery of forbidden magics and necromancy. They were thought to be extinct, but have merely been biding their time underground. You first encounter signs of the Abyssal in Clearfell, where you discover that during the night, weaker members of the undead legion have been attacking the encampment. The townsfolk require your help to investigate where the monsters are coming from and put a stop to their attacks. As you proceed through Wraeclast, you’ll find fissures in the earth connected to larger pits the monsters normally inhabiting the area, are being affected by it, harmed by it even, having their souls eaten to strengthen the Abyssal underground.

As you defeat the monsters, the fissure closes and Abyssal emerge, angered by you killing their food. Once all those fissures have been sealed, the pit activates, and more Abyssal pour out. This is where the larger, and more dangerous monsters reveal themselves, as hordes of Abyssal spew out from the pit to take your Soul. If you kill a magic pack, then magic Abyssal arise, if you kill a Rare, then a Rare monster will emerge from the pit having absorbed some, or all of its modifiers for itself. This means the monsters emerging will generally be more difficult, and more rewarding as each modifier gives better rewards. If you are able to kill them all, the pit will seal shut. As each Pit is closed it reveals a potential reward. Abyssal Troves will rise up out of the pits allowing you to get some epic loot. Areas often contain many pits, with many fissures, and the amount goes up as you progress through the game, getting more intense!

It doesn’t stop there, when monster mods are absorbed they have a chance to become infused with the dark necromancy, transforming them into Abyssal Modifiers. For example, you defeat this monster with the Mana Siphoner Modifier, their soul is eaten by the pit, and a Rare monster emerges… the Mana Siphoner modifier has transformed into Soul Siphoner, and is now amplified in danger, and reward. As all the modifiers can be taken, and all the modifiers can be upgraded to Abyssal Modifiers, you can get some pretty crazy encounters, especially at Endgame.

Abyssal Pits also interact with other monsters and mechanics. If you defeat a Rogue Exile that’s near one, it’ll be revived as a Lichborn that has multiple Abyssal Modifiers. Lichborn Exiles even have their own unique Jewel they can drop if you are lucky enough to encounter and kill them. If an Abyss spawns near a boss, killing it will summon a gigantic giga-larvae creature

Monsters imprisoned in Essences near Abyssal Pits are affected by the Abyss too, they will come with an additional new Essence item that can be used to craft your items. So, that’s your bread and butter of the Abyssal league. Kill surface-dwelling monsters, kill the emerging Abyssal, close the fissures, overcome Pit encounters, and reap the rewards.

There’s a lot more to this league however.

As you complete Abysses, you can find ancient pieces of bone, preserved from the remains of fallen Lichborn. These are one of the many rewards for your mission to seal the pits. You can use this on a Rare item to imbue it with abyssal magic, adding a special hidden modifier to your item, but how do you reveal it?

In Act Two of the campaign you’ll encounter a new area. This area is overrun by the Abyssal and the Lost-Men, one of the groups of monsters you’ll find in the Desert. After clearing through this area you find The Well of Souls, a giant cavity with a massive vortex of souls swirling beneath you.

So, how do you reveal the mods on your Abyssal infused items. Obviously just throw them in, right? Yes, that’s exactly what you do!

Before throwing it in, you are given the option of how you want to transform it, in the form of a choice of three different modifiers. Once you’ve chosen your desired mod, throw it in, where it will absorb the power of the souls and the ominous creature will then retrieve it for you. During the campaign you can use it as a way to more easily add useful existing mods, but during the endgame, there is a whole set of new and powerful mods you can add to your items.

And speaking of Endgame, you can also use this system to craft waystones: With a Preserved Vertebrae fused into your Waystones, you can get some new modifiers pushing difficulty and rewards to new heights. Here are some examples of these mods. You always get a choice of three, so you can avoid anything you don’t think your character is capable of. With this modifier, the natural inhabitants of the area are all spawned near abysses, and there are up to 9 additional Abyssal Pits in the area, making it just a full on abyss ruckus. Or this one. Which causes the final Abyssal Pit in the area to always result in a Boss Encounter, be it either one underground, or one that emerges out! There are dozens of these Waystone modifiers in total you can get from this crafting.

That covers the new crafting mechanic, so what’s left?

 

Well, we talked about how when closing Pits you can get Abyssal Troves, but sometimes when closing an Abyss, you’ll reveal an underground cavern that leads to the Abyssal Depths. After jumping into the depths… you’ll find an abyssal city, swarming with legions of the undead. When underground, every single Rare Abyssal enemy will have an Abyssal Modifier, and at the end of the dungeon you’ll even find a Rare a more powerful Lichborn modifier. Once you’re able to defeat this powerful Rare, you can also find some nice rewards. Aside from the entire area being valuable due to the Abyssal Modifiers on the monsters, it has its own specific drops too.

One example is a set of Lineage Supports that can rarely be found in these Depths, like Kurgal’s Leash. This Support empowers both you and your minions when you command them, granting Unholy Might to you both. Another Depths-specific outcome is a set of Omen-like items that amplify your Abyssal Crafting.

Additionally we’re adding some new socketables that can drop from Abyssal Depths. Take Ulaman’s Gaze which can be socketed into your armour. These are a bit special in that you can only have one equipped at a time, but give some pretty powerful effects, think of them as almost a “unique socketable” for your equipment.

In the Endgame, where you can still find Depths, you also start to find a different type of underground chamber. In these areas, you’ll find an Ancient Spire, a device being used by commanders of the Abyssal factions to plunge Wraeclast into a lightless void, creating the ideal place for the Abyssal to thrive. Your goal is simple, kill this commander and destroy the spire.

Now there are 4 bosses in the Abyss league, and there are some pretty cool uniques available from them.

An example is this belt, Darkness Enthroned. It has 2 sockets- but hold on, socketables don’t work on belts? Well, this belt has a special mod that allows it to count as a different slot for the purpose of Socketables. This one for example counts as a Helmet. I kind of want one that counts as a Body Armour. I wonder how rare that one is… You can also find this unique jewel: Undying Hate. This jewel transforms part of your passive skill tree into an Abyssal version, and has multiple depths. The deeper it goes, the more your passive tree is affected, allowing you to fulfill your fantasy of becoming part-Abyssal Lich.

Now the last thing that Abyssal commanders can drop is a Finger of the Lich. But what use do you have with a random undead finger? Well.. the next time you return to the Well of Souls with the finger in your inventory your character will feel… almost compelled. To do what though you might ask? To jump in! The items you threw in came back more powerful right? So .. what’s the worst that could happen?

Well, you will have to find that out for yourself.

And There you have it, Path of Exile 2’s first league! When the Third Edict update is released, you can create new characters in the Abyssal league and immediately start to experience everything we’ve shown you today, and more! Now, we’ve gone over the changes to the campaign, to our character classes, and now the new league, but we’re not even close to done, there’s a LOT more coming in this expansion. Let’s move on to talking about Endgame.

Along with the introduction of Act Four, and the Interlude, we will be adding twenty-five new Endgame Maps. These maps will contain all the new monsters and bosses we’re adding, improving variety and giving you opportunities to experience the new boss fights many times!

Rockpools is a Map where you explore a shallow rocky coastline surrounded by coral and filled with Sirens, at the end is a giant Goblin King boss, ready to eat sulphite and squish you like a bug! Holten is an Ezomyte township which has seen better days. Explore and clear the township to find a gothic reaper-like boss with the ability to manipulate storms and fry you with both lightning, and wither you with chaos. Given some of the new bosses added are a bit more epic, such as the Act boss, and final bosses of each Interlude Part, it would be a bit of a waste to just use them as regular map bosses. Instead, we’ll be adding some new mechanics to the Atlas that use them. These start appearing pretty fast into the Endgame and will help bridge the gap until you do your Pinnacle bosses.

In the Desert biome, you can encounter a wild Sandstorm. Three maps around the sandstorm contain a device you must activate. Upon doing this, the sandstorm’s magic is disrupted, revealing the map inside and allowing you to access it and find the cause. This presents itself in the form of a boss, similar to the existing citadel bosses. This boss is a Faridun Swordmaster who has been blessed with the power of a Time Djinn, allowing him to take his swordsmanship to the next level by replicating himself, maneuvering rapidly, and severing the fabric of time itself with his powerful slashes.

In the Water Biome, you’ll encounter a giant Maelstrom, where one of the maps surrounding the water biome connects to it but the connection is obscured. You must run the maps nearby, hoping to find a beacon, which will remove the Maelstrom and reveal the connection to that map.

Another example is this Vaal Vault in the Mountain Biome, but how do we get inside? Running the adjacent maps to it will yield a key, which you can then use to gain access to this vault. Or you could just trade for one I guess. Use the key to dispel the powerful forcefield surrounding it, leading to the Vaal Elite and their rewards inside.

These all contain uber versions of the Act Four boss, and the bosses at the end of each part of the interlude, and each have their own exclusive drop pool of new Lineage Supports, which as Jonathan spoke about earlier, are powerful Support Gems that modify your skills in pretty crazy ways.

As an example of a Lineage support which can come from the Faridun Swordmaster mentioned earlier, we have Garukhan’s Resolve, which causes your Critical Strikes to Fork, but requires some mobility on your part to properly enable! From the boss sealed in the Vaal Vault, we have Paquate’s Pact, which supports Warcries, causing them to inflict massive amounts of corrupted blood at the cost of your own life. Additionally, some maps can now also spawn Summoning Circles, a room resembling an Ezomyte Henge. Activating this henge will spawn bosses, it’s as simple as that.

We’ll also be making changes to how affixes on Waystones work, as the current “Prefixes = Good, Suffixes = Bad” iteration isn’t quite hitting the mark. We tried something new here in Path of Exile 2 but after seeing the feedback we decided that we actually liked what we had in Path of Exile 1 more.

Like Path of Exile 1, each affix will now be both difficult and rewarding.

Waystone Mods now grant an increase to the number of Waystones dropped and an additional specific upside attached to it. This means as you roll your map they will continue to get more difficult, and more rewarding and allow you to customise the difficulty and rewards of your Maps better. For example: the “Frostbitten” mod which causes enemies to deal Cold Damage also increases the Rarity of Items Dropped as its upside; whereas the “of Venom” Suffix modifier which causes enemies to Poison on Hit has the upside of granting increased Pack Size.

Some Maps will end up having a lot of Rarity, some a lot of Pack Size and others will just have a mixture of everything. Due to now having more modifiers granting difficulty, we will of course be reducing the difficulty per modifier to account for this.

So that’s your Atlas, Maps and Waystones, but what about Breach, Ritual, Pinnacle content and others of the sort?

We’re making some changes around this too. The first change is that you will now be able to invest two points into your specific League Atlas Trees before having to run the Pinnacle content. There will be a specific objective for each type of content which grants you those points. For example in the case of Delirium, it’s simple, you just need to find, and kill one of the Bosses in a Map, Omniphobia or Kosis.

The rest of the points for each content come from the pinnacle content, but we’re making some changes to accessibility here too. Currently, access to most Pinnacle Content requires the same key at the easiest, and most difficult version of the content. This creates a negative feeling where at lower difficulties, instead of wanting to run the content, you’re often better off just selling it to someone who can run it at maximum difficulty.

To address this, each content will now drop Splinters, which will not form into singular Items. Instead of using the singular, combined item in the Realmgate, you can now just bring your Splinters. Upon inserting the splinters into the Realmgate, an interface will appear allowing you to pick your difficulty, and you’ll notice each difficulty has a different entry cost.

This means if you want to run easier difficulties, it costs less, which also allows you to run this content much sooner into the Endgame. Because these encounters now just require Splinters, their corresponding Atlas Tree no longer affects the difficulty of them, and has been changed to purely affect the content in Maps on the Atlas.The Arbiter of Ash works a bit differently, instead of requiring splinters he still needs Crisis Fragments.

We now have only two difficulties of the Arbiter, the first, requiring the existing Fragments obtained from Citadels. The second, Uber Arbiter, requires Calamity Fragments. These come from Citadel bosses also, but only once you’ve allocated the maximum number of points in your Boss Atlas Tree, ensuring those Citadels are at their highest difficulty level. Since we’re talking about pinnacle content, we also felt that the leveling curve in the late game was a bit too steep. We’ve smoothed this out a bit so that it’s easier to get to the mid-90s.

 

We’ve also added some new Endgame unique items. Let’s take a look at a couple!

Thunderfist is a pair of gloves that grants Crackling Palm, a skill which empowers your unarmed attacks, granting the ability to call down the storms themselves on enemies you hit. Put simply, literally every single monster you hit with your unarmed skills will be struck by powerful lightning. With Thunderfist equipped you can also become lightning itself as you rapidly move between those foolish enough to stand before the storm. Pair this with the aforementioned Hollow Palm technique to embrace your true unarmed prowess in combat.

Another Unique we’re adding is Hinekora’s Sight. Equip this amulet to be granted the power of the Mother of Death herself. This is reflected by granting you a skill called: Foresight. While you have Foresight your Dodge roll no longer avoids hits, but instead being hit while Dodge Rolling restores you to full life and makes you unable to die for a brief period of time. You’ll notice when this does occur a copy of your character appears and takes the full damage, this is you seeing that future as if you hadn’t been wearing the amulet.

Ultimately, your Endgame experience should be more streamlined, with new content to find, you’ll be able to invest in your atlas trees sooner, engage with pinnacle content faster, have less fomo running said pinnacle content, reach higher levels easier and do all that while finding many new chase endgame items. Talking about finding items is one thing, but what about crafting them? We’ve taken a step back and looked at some of our crafting systems to make some notable improvements.

Let’s start with Essences, which suffered from an issue where the regular essences were effectively useless and didn’t give players the tools or excitement that a crafting system should provide. To alleviate these concerns, essences are being changed in a few ways: Firstly, they’re being changed to function like Regals and add specific modifiers, with specific values. Meaning you know exactly what you’re going to get. We found that players were often bottlenecked by Regal Orbs when crafting in the Campaign so this helps to fill that gap allowing you to better upgrade your items. For example, this Lesser Essence of Flames, which will be able to add a flat amount of Fire Damage to your magic Martial Weapons.

Secondly, we’re adding many more tiers. That Lesser Essence of Flames for example has a regular variant, and a Greater variant too, adding even more Fire Damage with each upgrade. The intention of this is so that when you find one early on, you don’t worry about holding onto it until later to use on a higher level item, you should feel free to use them as they come to get powerful upgrades during the Campaign. Lastly, our highest tier of Essences, now called Perfect Essences, will function like a Chaos Orb instead of Regal, so it will replace one of the modifiers on your Rare Items with the specified mod.

Such as this perfect essence of Flames, You’ll notice this one doesn’t just add Flat fire damage like the ones before it, the Perfect Essences often give something a bit different, with some opportunities to be pretty damn powerful! There are many different essences, each with many tiers, covering many of the more core modifiers you’d want on items early on; through to chase specialised ones for Endgame.

Speaking of Endgame, we really wanted to expand our crafting options for  late Endgame crafting projects. You might have noticed that at Endgame you get way too many Transmutes. Wouldn’t it be nice if some of those didn’t drop, but instead you got something a little more powerful? At higher levels you can now find Greater Orb of Transmutation and Perfect Orb of Transmutation. These can be used on normal items to upgrade them to magic, ensuring that the modifier generated is of a minimum level. This is similar to how you find higher Tier Items on the ground, but for crafting! These higher tiers will also exist for Orb of Augmentation, Regal Orb, Exalted Orb and Chaos Orb, meaning you can get all the orbs required to take your item from Normal Rarity to a fully completed Rare with guaranteed high tier mods.

On top of these new core crafting currencies, we wanted to make sure there are powerful crafting bases to use them on. Now in Endgame you can start to find Exceptional Items. These are items that drop at Normal Rarity, and are perfect for your from scratch crafting projects. They can come with extra quality, up to 30% OR an additional Socket to use your Crafting Socketables in, and yes, they can be corrupted for yet another Socket. You can also get Exceptional Unique Items. To add even further to your crafting arsenal, we’ve added a whole suite of new Omens to Ritual content, and removed some of the more unimpactful ones that weren’t being used.

Some of the new omens include the Omen of the Ancients, which will cause your next Orb of Chance to not destroy the item, but generate a random Unique of the same class. Or the Omen of Sanctification, which is my new favourite, which will cause your next Divine Orb used on a Rare Item to reroll the values of its modifiers, allowing it to exceed the normal minimum and maximum values, raising the ceiling on the new most powerful rare items in the game. This Omen will also cause your item to become Sanctified. Sanctified Items cannot be Crafted, just like Corrupted items so consider carefully when you use this. Another is the Omen of Chaotic Monsters will cause your next Chaos Orb to reroll all Modifiers on a Waystone, allowing you to fix your Maps if you get some modifiers that are not feasible for your build.

Besides these examples there is a huge variety of new omens for you to discover in your Ritual Encounters. With the release of Act Four, notably taking place in the Karui Archipalego. You’ll be able to now find a new Currency Item, Hinekora’s Lock! Hinekora, the Karui Goddess of Death has the power of Foresight and is able to see many futures, including the outcome of your next craft, so imbuing her Lock onto an item gives you that same power too! For example: you’ll know whether or not to use an Exalted orb on your item as you will know exactly what the outcome is. 

In Dawn of the Hunt we introduced the Recombinator to Path of Exile 2. In 0.3.0 there is a new way to use this device. If you’re a bit more daring you’ll be able to let fate decide the outcome of your item. By giving up your ability to select which modifiers transfer you can guarantee that you will at least get an item back from this process. So with all these new crafting improvements, it’s safe to say you’re going to be making some epic items, and not necessarily just ones for yourself, so given that it’s Time to talk about a massive one, Trade.

It’s finally here, the moment we’ve all been waiting for! Fully asynchronous Trade…

Over the years the way players trade with each other in Path of Exile 1 has morphed from using the forums, through to using the in-game chat all the way through to using the website. These systems, in all their iterations, work for a while but with each iteration new problems eventually reveal themselves. Be it, requiring you to be in your Hideout too much instead of out there killing monsters, or never getting responses from people who are either AFK or just can’t be bothered. In order to finally solve this, and this has been a long time coming, we’re adding a new system that allows you to buy items from other players without requiring the seller to be present. They can continue farming, killing monsters, afk as they please, and can even just be offline.

With the introduction of Kingsmarch in Act 4 you will encounter Ange, assistant to Rog in the Meridian Free Traders company. Over the last two decades or so since Path of Exile 1’s storyline, Faustus has handed down his knowledge and expertise to Ange and she is now ready to take over his business.

Upon reaching Act Four, you can find Ange in the Tavern. If you have a Hideout unlocked already, you can immediately invite her there. If you don’t have a hideout yet, you will need to acquire one, you can do this by completing a quest to defeat one of the bosses inhabiting an island in Act Four, allowing you to then take a slice of it for yourself, making it your new home and base of operations. Once invited to your Hideout, she will now serve as operating your Currency Exchange. But also serve as the figure-head in your new trading empire.

So, how does this new system work? In the existing Trade System you would list items for sale in Premium Stash Tabs and then when someone wanted one you’d have to take it out yourself and trade it to them. Now, instead of using those, you can get a Merchant’s Tab, then give your items to Ange so she can sell them for you. 

Each item must have a price set…

The prices are set using in-game currency items, such as Exalted Orbs, or Chaos Orbs. Once a price is set, other players will be able to find the item by searching for it on the trade website. Once a desired item has been found, you can hit a button, which will instantly teleport your character in-game to their Hideout. Then you can immediately purchase the item, and while there, if you want, browse their other goods, in case there’s a good deal someone else hasn’t yet discovered!

You’ll notice that as a buyer, on top of the currency the seller set for the price, it also costs Gold to purchase an item, as Ange has bills to pay after-all. As a seller, you’ll immediately receive a notification when an item of yours has sold, and can also see an effect above Ange in your Hideout when she has unclaimed currency. Just go talk to her, claim your currency, and continue playing at your leisure!

As many people already acquired Premium Stash Tabs for the purpose of the Trade System, we wanted to add a way for you to convert your existing tabs to Merchant’s Tabs, if you want. You can do that here, on the website. But only if you purchased those tabs before the release of The Third Edict.

To clarify, the existing trade system will remain fully intact, so your Premium Stash tabs will not lose any of their functionality, we just figured people might want to switch over to this new system.

 

We expect a lot of feedback around this new system and are looking forward to trying it out with you, as we are not able to test internally with an entire, thriving economy, there will certainly be some kinks to work out! Based on how this system goes, we will be adding it to Path of Exile 1 when ready, so any of the tabs you purchase will also be use-able there later!