Almost two years into early access, Path of Exile 2 finally has its finish line in sight. On 11 December the action RPG leaves early access, flips to free-to-play and ships version 1.0 — and at ExileCon 2026 in Auckland, Grinding Gear Games revealed just how enormous that update is: two new classes, the final two campaign acts, a faction-warfare league, a rebuilt endgame and a numbers sheet that reads like a full expansion.
By launch, GGG says the finished game will feature ten playable classes, 26 Ascendancy specialisations, more than 320 skills, over 400 unique items and upwards of 150 endgame maps. Here is what actually changes in December.
The Shadow Brings Stealth and Traps to Wraeclast
The first new class is a returning archetype from the original game: the Shadow, a dagger specialist built around deception. Its headline mechanic is a genuine stealth state — monsters cannot detect you until they get uncomfortably close — and it is designed for speed rather than patience. A rapid dash turns the Shadow into a puff of smoke, and every kill resets the cooldown, so the loop becomes ambush, kill, vanish, repeat.
Traps are the other half of the kit. Laid while hidden, they stay dormant until stealth breaks, then detonate in the order they were placed — eight trap types stack poison, fire, freezing and impale damage into pre-planned kill chains. Shades, shadowy copies that distract enemies and replicate attacks, add another layer, while a new resource called Darkness empowers skills and the Eclipse ability temporarily turns every attack into a stealth strike. At launch the Shadow gets two Ascendancies: Assassin and Infiltrator.
The Duelist Finally Draws a Sword
Swords have been conspicuously absent from early access, and the Duelist arrives to fix that. The class emphasises speed, precision and stance-switching: a Ready Stance upgrades into Blood or Sand stances that alter how sword skills behave, and fan favourites like Cyclone and Hemorrhage come with the weapon type. Two-handing, dual wielding and sword-and-board are all supported.
The Duelist’s Knight Ascendancy is the showpiece. It lets you hire a Squire — a permanent minion that levels alongside you, wears gear you equip and even runs skill gems through a metagem socket. Another notable has the Duelist charging into battle on an ethereal chariot, colliding with the first monster hit and dropping a War Banner at the impact. A second Ascendancy, Master of Arms, follows later.
Acts 5 and 6 Close the Campaign
After two years of early access, the story finishes. Acts 5 and 6 conclude the hunt for the Beast with a return to Oriath and beyond, adding 24 new areas, 18 new bosses and 20 named unique minibosses with their own mechanics, plus more than 70 points of interest to uncover. Bespoke rare monsters with unique abilities, appearances and modifiers punctuate the acts, and the campaign also introduces the 1.0 league mechanic so new players meet it on the way to endgame.
Conquerors of Wraeclast: Castles, Armies and Faction Warfare
The launch league, Conquerors of Wraeclast, hands you a war. A base-building system lets you recruit armies from those points of interest, build up a castle and send commanders — Kingsmarch-style — to run maps for you, converting gold into Atlas progress and loot. Your castle itself upgrades in what has been compared to Heroes of Might and Magic fashion, funded with gold.
Once you have finished the campaign and pinnacle bosses, the armies turn outward. Players join one of three factions — Karui, Ezomyte or Marraketh — and battle other players for control of castles scattered around the Atlas. Holding a castle grants fast travel to that region, bonus item rarity and access to nearby hunting grounds packed with high-loot rare monsters. Currency earned in battle feeds a new crafting system that lets you strip modifiers and reroll them into fractured mods.
A Slimmer Atlas, Reworked Gems and Free Entry
The endgame is being rebuilt around the same philosophy: less sprawl, more choice. The Atlas passive tree has been cut from more than 300 nodes to roughly 70, jewels move from outer travel nodes into actual skill clusters — killing the ubiquitous “big circle of jewel sockets” build — and over 25 new maps carry campaign bosses into the endgame. Support gems have been overhauled too: the elemental penetration variants merge into a single gem, Brutality softens its chaos-damage penalty, and Chain becomes a pure upgrade without the damage penalty on the initial hit.
Loot gets a shake-up as well, with more than 70 uniques reworked, around 40 new ones added and fresh base types that include an armour granting curse immunity. On the technical side, GGG promises performance work — up to 25 per cent extra CPU performance — Steam Deck Verified status, and Mac support for M2 and newer machines plus M1 Pro. The game arrives on PC, Steam, Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, and full patch notes are due in the first week of December.
After nearly two years of early access, then, 1.0 is less a patch than a second launch — and this time, nobody has to pay to see it. Mark 11 December; the war for Wraeclast starts properly then.
