Path of Exile 2 ends its two-year early access run on December 11, and Grinding Gear Games used Exilecon 2026 on November 6 to lay out the full 1.0 release. The free-to-play action RPG’s first major version arrives with two new classes, two new acts and a league built around raising armies.
Shadow and Duelist join the roster
The 1.0 update adds the Shadow and the Duelist, per PC Gamer’s Exilecon coverage. The Shadow brings daggers and new mechanics built on stealth, traps and shadow clones that fight alongside the player, plus older skills like blade vortex and fire trap. The Duelist introduces swords along with fan-favorite skills including cyclone and hemorrhage.
Acts 5 and 6 finish the campaign, closing out the story of chasing the Beast with a return to Oriath and beyond. New campaign areas come with their own bosses, and those same bosses show up again across more than 25 new endgame maps.
Conquerors of Wraeclast: castles, factions and armies
The launch league is Conquerors of Wraeclast, and it centers on base building: players recruit soldiers and construct a castle. More than 70 points of interest across the campaign let players recruit new types of soldiers, and commanders can then run maps on the player’s behalf, converting gold into atlas progress and loot, much as Kingsmarch did in the original Path of Exile.
Players will also pick one of three factions, Karui, Ezomyte or Marraketh, and fight for control of castles spread across the atlas.
A slimmer endgame tree
Existing players face the biggest disruption in the endgame. The atlas tree is trimmed from more than 300 nodes to roughly 70, and jewels move from the tree’s travel nodes into skill clusters themselves. Support gems get an overhaul too, with all the elemental penetration gems folded into a single one.
More than 70 unique items are being reworked and about 40 new ones are being added for 1.0.
The original Path of Exile keeps running alongside its sequel after the December launch. Its 3.30 league, Covens of Umbra, arrives Friday, November 13, roughly four weeks before Path of Exile 2’s 1.0 goes live on December 11.
