Path of Exile 2 is getting its free-to-play 1.0 update release on December 11. With an hour-long panel at ExileCon 2026, we now have a much cleaner picture of what this update will contain. We already knew that not all of the classes will be making the cut, and instead the focus will be on finishing Acts 5 and 6. Now we also know what the new League mechanic is going to be, the two Classes coming to 1.0, and loads more.
So for those who missed the Path of Exile 2 keynote at ExileCon, or want a written summary, here’s the gist of everything important.
All Path of Exile 2 1.0 features, as revealed in ExileCon keynote
First off, some information on Acts 5 and 6. They contain 24 new areas in total. Plus, they will have:
- 18 new bosses
- 20 named unique minibosses (and some more added in earlier Acts)
- 70 new points of interest
New Class: Shadow
- Shadow’s gimmick is Stealth (plus the Darkness and Shade mechanics).
- Triggering Stealth, of course, hides you (indicated clearly by a visual effect around the screen). Stealth creates a vision range around monsters, and as long as you stay out of it, you are undetectable. Scoring kills refreshes Stealth’s cooldown. It’s not known whether other Path of Exile 2 classes can use Stealth if they have daggers equipped.
- Throwing traps from Stealth won’t detonate them until you reveal yourself, allowing you to stack them as many times as you want for a big boom.
- Traps also trigger in the order that you placed them, which aids you in setting up various combos, like the classic gas-fire explosion.
- There are 8 total types of traps, and each combos with at least 3 others.
- There’s a heavy emphasis on combos around the Impale mechanic, too.
- Then, of course, you have another classic – Blade Vortex. It sucks up all the Impales on monsters around you, and the vortex also inherits additional effects that enemies are affected by, such as ailments.
- Instead of being a duration-based uptime, Blade Vortex lasts indefinitely until it does a certain number of hits.
- Entering Stealth leaves behind a Shade, which is a decoy with its own health. As long as it’s alive, it duplicates your melee attacks.
- You can use Skills like Blade of the Night to cause monsters to drop Darkness, a new resource with its own meter. Picking it up adds bonuses to your next Skills as empowered casts, like higher AoE or damage.
- You can also use a Skill to extract Darkness from monsters, and then immediately use it to empower your shades, get multiple shades, and thus make it a flashy and effective melee build.
- Eclipse is a Glory Skill, and once you activate it, every attack counts as if it were from Stealth (up till the duration runs out).
- There will be two new Ascendancies for Shadow in Path of Exile 2 patch 1.0: Infiltrator and Assassin.
Duelist: Knight Ascendancy
- The Knight Ascendancy uniquely gets to hire a Squire, a permanent minion that levels up with you. This one is unlike any other permanent minion in Path of Exile 2 so far.
- You equip your squire with gear as you see fit, so this might become an amazing late-League scaling Ascendancy, from what I can see.
- The Squire gets a Metagem where you can add Skill Gems so your Squire uses those skills. It’s basically like Mirage Archer in that way.
- With the Bannerlord node, you can specialize Banner skills in various manners. The Vaal option, for example, will create Corrupted Blood puddles in your banner’s AoE, so that you can suck it up in your Cyclone to inflict Bleed.
- The Honourbound node makes it so that generating Valour after placing down a Glory skill, like a War Banner, makes you Honourbound, where every strike will set out additional projectiles as “waves of Justice”.
- Another Ascendancy skill lets you charge into battle on a spectral chariot, pushing aside and stunning enemies, including even bosses.
New League: Conquerors of Wraeclast (and an insane crafting mechanic!)
The new League in Path of Exile 2 1.0 seems to be a miniature Heroes of Might and Magic mode, where you build your army and wage small-to-medium-scale warfare.
- You can recruit unit stacks of various types from different factions.
- In an instanced Assault map, you directly skirmish with an enemy army, where you place your troops in a specific formation, which matters because each unit type has its strengths and weaknesses.
- There’s also a named Unique or a whole boss encounter at the end of the map.
- There are 23 different battles throughout the campaign.
- You can build a Stronghold after you hit endgame, where you can get various buildings and upgrades to specialize your army as you see fit.
- With siege weapons and big armies, there are also castle sieges where you take down a rival faction’s castles.
- This League also introduces the Crimson Iron currency. This lets you “Forgemark” any mods on your items you don’t like, and then you can Reforge that item. The Forgemarked mods are rerolled randomly, but become Fractured at whatever roll they get.
- In the endgame, there are Blood Vials as another crafting currency, which can be used to reforge mods into specific new types of mods.
- In the Endgame castle sieges, you also get Commanders. Commanders can do Mapping for you. You can give them an army, some Waystones, and even Tablets to apply their effects to maps they clear. They do this in real time, although it’s, of course, a simulation. You get a randomized loot pool from each map, simulating how profitable they would be with their mods and relative difficulty.
- There’s also a pseudo-PvP mode tucked into the 1.0 league in Path of Exile 2. There are a hundred castles on your map, and many of them will be replicas of castles built by players who chose a different faction than you. Taking these down provides significant bonuses, such as increased magic find, for as long as they’re held.
All major general changes in Path of Exile 2 1.0
- Path of Exile 2 will get a Death Summary feature with 1.0!
- 70 Uniques underwent major reworks to make them more lucrative to use in your build. Many of them also received changes that make them more viable for a build scaling into Endgame.
- 200 new base item types, many of them with unique innate effects.
- Passive Tree was massively upgraded, a “total makeover” with “hundreds of new stats”.
- Warrior side of the Tree was buffed significantly, with nodes focused on Fissures, Totems, and Ancestral Boosting. This includes new Keystones, like Tawhoa’s Overgrowth, which allows you to Overgrow your totems like Plant Skills could before.
- Ascendancies also received new nifty tools, such as a new permanent demon summon that you can get from the Infernalist’s Ascendancy Tree.
- Many Support Gems now dynamically adapt to your build to switch damage type. For example, Living Lightning will now be attack damage rather than minion damage if put into a bow skill.
- Many Support Gems were buffed, with fewer trade-offs to worry about.
- There are now a total of 60 Jewel Sockets in the Tree.
Biggest Endgame changes in Path of Exile 2 1.0
- Atlas Tree is only 70 nodes now, with each node being much more powerful.
- Fully clearing the Fortress should get you all nodes by the time you do your campaign Arbiter.
- You can also travel directly to an Endgame quest’s hub area as soon as you receive the quest. You no longer need to path to them for that.
- 25+ new map varieties were added to the Endgame.
Performance Improvements
- Compared to 0.1.0, Path of Exile 2 will now be “three times the speed” in CPU-bound situations. There have already been significant improvements by the time it hit the 0.5.5 subpatch, but it is now 25% faster than that Early Access build.
- RAM usage should also be lower with Path of Exile 2 1.0.
- The game will only be 10 GB bigger than the current build, so roughly 150 GB at launch.
That’s all we know about Path of Exile 2 1.0 at the moment. Patch notes will be released about a week before release, so in the first week of December. Until then, stay tuned for more Path of Exile news and guides on Sportskeeda!
Edited by Sambit Pal
