Path of Exile 2 leaves early access and goes free-to-play on December 11, 2026 (PST). Version 1.0 finishes the campaign with Acts 5 and 6, adds two classes, the Shadow and the Duelist, and launches a new challenge league, Conquerors of Wraeclast, where you recruit an army and siege castles. It also reworks uniques, the passive tree, support gems and the endgame Atlas tree.
Key Takeaways
- Release: December 11, 2026 (PST), free to play. You no longer need to buy early access.
- Campaign: Acts 5 and 6 add 24 areas, 18 new unique bosses and over 20 new Champion Rare encounters.
- New classes: the Shadow (daggers, traps and a new Stealth mechanic) and the Duelist (swords and Stances). Each has two Ascendancies at launch.
- League: Conquerors of Wraeclast lets you recruit troops, fight battles, build a stronghold, send commanders to run maps and fight over 100+ shared castles.
- GGG promised 12 classes but 1.0 ships with 10. The other two will come later.
When Does Path of Exile 2 Fully Release?
Path of Exile 2 1.0 launches on Friday, December 11, 2026 (PST) as a free-to-play game (GGG). You don't need to buy early access anymore. GGG's earlier 1.0 press release lists PC (Steam, the standalone client and the Epic Games Store), PlayStation and Xbox (GGG press release). GGG hasn't announced the exact launch hour yet.
Two more dates matter:
- Patch notes: the full 1.0 patch notes come out about a week before launch.
- Path of Exile 1: its 3.30 league, Covens of Umbra, launches a month earlier, on November 13 (GGG).
What's in Acts 5 and 6?
The story is finally complete. In Act 5 you return to Oriath, the island where Path of Exile began, to stop the Twilight Order and the Beast (GGG). A huge harbour chain blocks a sea attack, so you land on the far side of the island, fight through the city and lower the chain from inside so the armies of Wraeclast can attack.
| What | Count |
| New areas in Acts 5 and 6 | 24 |
| New unique bosses | 18, including a giant rat king in the sewers and an encounter with the Blight |
| New Champion Rare encounters | 20+ (more were also added to the earlier acts) |
Areas range from slums and estates to the Temple District and the Grand Arena. Champion Rares are named rare monsters with their own art, skills and sometimes mods; GGG says some are as cool as "a lot of games' full bosses".
How Does the Shadow's Stealth Work?
The Shadow is a dagger and trap class built around a brand-new mechanic, Stealth. Story-wise, he's a Perandus who now owes a debt to the dark god Prospero (GGG). This is the class our PoE 2 teaser breakdown predicted from the "Become the Darkness" coin and dagger.
How Stealth works, from the live demo:
- Monsters can't see you until you get within a short range of them.
- Any attack from Stealth dashes through the target and backstabs it.
- Stealth has a cooldown, but it resets when something dies. Strike hard, get the kill, then dash straight back into Stealth.
- Dagger skills get extra bonuses from Stealth. Viper Strike from Stealth coats your blade in poison, so each follow-up hit causes small poison explosions.
It isn't slow crouch-walking. GGG's pitch is "the same fantasy without the slow gameplay." Ethereal Knives can even be used without breaking Stealth: the knives don't hit right away but leave impales (spikes stuck in monsters that break for extra damage) that explode for chaos damage when you attack. Blade Vortex now pulls those impales out of monsters to circle you, and its blades expire after a number of hits instead of over time.
How Do the Shadow's Traps Work?
Traps are what GGG calls the Shadow's other new weapon type (GGG), and they finally work like real traps (keynote, 2:10:45):
- A trap thrown in Stealth won't explode until you leave Stealth. You can load up a pack with traps, then strike.
- Traps explode in the order you threw them, so you can plan combos.
- There are eight trap types, and each one interacts with at least three others (GGG).
Combos GGG showed on stage:
| Order | What happens |
| Shrapnel trap, then Freezing trap | The spikes from the first trap burst into ice fragments |
| Freezing trap, then Concussive trap | The concussive blast shatters frozen monsters for big damage |
| Poison gas trap, then Concussive trap, then Fire trap | The wind spreads the gas before the fire ignites it, for a much bigger explosion |
| Fire trap, then Concussive trap | The wind fans the flames, causing extra explosions that leave burning ground |
What Are Shades, Darkness and Eclipse?
The Shadow has three more tools:
- Shades: entering Stealth blinds nearby monsters and leaves a shade behind as a decoy. You stay hidden until they kill it. When you melee from Stealth, your shades copy the attack. Shadow Extraction creates more shades from monsters covered in darkness.
- Darkness: a new resource GGG called "kind of anti-rage." Blade of the Night covers enemies in darkness, and killing them drops darkness you pick up. Coming out of Stealth spends all your darkness for a bigger damage bonus.
- Eclipse: a Glory skill (Glory is a resource you build up in combat to power big skills). With enough darkness you enter the Shadow Realm, where every attack counts as from Stealth and your shades repeat all of them, until your darkness runs out.
What Are the Shadow's Ascendancies?
The Shadow launches with two Ascendancies: the Assassin and the Infiltrator (GGG). GGG describes the Assassin as a contract killer who "delivers deaths to his targets before they ever lay eyes on him," repaying his debt to Prospero "in blood." The Infiltrator, says GGG, "is a master thief who has stolen many of Wraeclast's best-kept secrets." GGG didn't show either Ascendancy's nodes at the keynote and said it will reveal them later.
What's New for the Duelist?
The Duelist, announced in August, is PoE 2's first sword class. He uses Stances: Ready Stance empowers sword skills and upgrades into Sand Stance (when you stun enemies) or Blood Stance (when you parry) (GGG). His two Ascendancies are the Master-at-Arms, "an expert in a thousand forms of combat," and the Knight, who "leads his followers to glory from the front lines" (GGG).
The keynote showed the Knight live in the Plaza of Patrons:
- A Squire companion. Allocating the right node recruits a Squire that you equip with armour and any melee weapon, and you teach it skills by socketing gems. In the demo, the Squire's spear skill Blood Hunt exploded the blood loss the Duelist built up.
- Banners. Placing a banner makes you "honour bound," sending out waves of justice with every strike.
- Mounted Charge. A late Ascendancy skill: you ride into battle, it places your banner at the end of the charge, and it pushes aside and stuns anything you hit, even large monsters.
How Does Conquerors of Wraeclast Work?
Conquerors of Wraeclast is the 1.0 challenge league. You join Varek and his mercenaries, rescue and recruit troops, and fight battles across the campaign (GGG).
Battles in the campaign
Troops cost gold, and every mission needs supplies you collect in each area. Before a battle you place your units, and each unit type counters others: for example, knights are strong against undead and shield mercenaries block fire mages' projectiles. During the fight you push into the enemy's back line and kill their strongest fighters. GGG's page lists over 70 points of interest and over 20 missions in the campaign, and on stage GGG said there are 23 battles.
Reforging: the new crafting
Every battle ends with a boss that drops the key to the treasury. Treasuries hold gold and a new crafting material, such as Crimson Iron:
- Use the material to mark one or more mods you don't want on an item.
- Take the item to the reforging bench.
- The marked mods become random fractured mods (mods that are locked and can never be changed), and that item can't be reforged again.
Later, blood vials let you reforge into specific mods instead of random ones. GGG showed two for the Shadow: one makes chaos skills apply Engulfed in Darkness, the other makes strikes from Stealth apply Corrupted Blood.
Stronghold, commanders and castles
- Stronghold: in the endgame you pick one of three factions and build its fortress. GGG named an Ezomyte castle, a Maraketh redoubt and a Karui fortification, each with over 20 buildings and upgrades that attract different troops.
- Endgame story: you siege rival strongholds with catapults, war elephants and chimeras, and uncover a plot to awaken an ancient Blood Lord (GGG).
- Commanders: give a commander troops and Waystones (the items that open endgame maps) and they clear maps for you in real time, keeping the gold and giving you the items. You can have up to three, send them to complete Towers, or give them Tablets (items that add a league mechanic to maps), like a Breach tablet for Breach rewards.
- Castles: after the endgame story, all players share one map with 100+ castles, and the factions battle for control of them. Holding one gives you a "fairly significant" item rarity bonus and your whole faction a small one.
What Changes for Every Build?
These changes affect every build, not just the new classes:
- Uniques: over 40 new uniques and more than 70 reworked ones with better mods, skills and visuals (GGG).
- Base types: over 200 new base types. Examples on stage: Twilight Order swords with jewel sockets, vestments that make you immune to curses, and gladiator armour that generates Glory when you're hit.
- Passive tree: hundreds of new stats. Jewel sockets move off the main paths into clusters: there used to be 18 sockets, now there are around 60.
- Support gems: a big rebalance so recommended supports are actually good. Examples from the keynote: Chain no longer reduces the first hit, the three elemental penetration supports become one, and Brutality no longer penalizes chaos damage.
- New skills: for classes that lacked them, like Molten Forge, a mace skill that charges your mace with fire (GGG).
- Mercenary: reloading happens in the background while you use other ammo, so switching ammo is much faster (GGG).
- Death Summary: a new summary screen after you die.
What Changes in the Endgame?
- A smaller Atlas tree. It drops to 70 nodes, each one much stronger. You earn points from special maps, towers and fortress bosses, and can finish the tree by the time you beat the Arbiter of Divinity, one of the endgame's pinnacle bosses.
- Faster league quests. Once you're given the quest to travel to a league's hub, you can go there right away and map from it.
- 25+ new endgame maps with endgame versions of the new campaign bosses.
- Performance: about 25% better on the CPU than the last update, roughly three times faster than at early access launch, and hundreds of megabytes less memory. GGG also says the crashes and random engine stalls from early access are fixed. We covered one of the earlier fixes in our NVIDIA shader crash post.
- Install size: GGG cut over 30 GB from the install but added 40 GB of new content, so in GGG's words "the game isn't any smaller" on PC, though it's much smaller on consoles.
How Much Has PoE 2 Grown Since Early Access?
At the end of the PoE 2 keynote, GGG compared 1.0 with the first early access release, 0.1.0, two years ago
| Early access launch (0.1.0) | 1.0 | |
| Campaign areas | 50 | 100 |
| Bosses | 40 | 100+ |
| Monster types | 400 | 800+ |
| Base types | 400 | 600+ |
| Uniques | 200 | 400+ |
| Classes | 6 | 10 |
| Skills | 175 | 320 |
GGG also admitted what isn't done. It promised 12 classes, but 1.0 has 10, and the other two "will come, just not immediately." Porting all of PoE 1's cosmetics to PoE 2 isn't finished either.
Frequently Asked Questions
When does Path of Exile 2 1.0 come out?
December 11, 2026 (PST). GGG hasn't announced the launch hour yet.
Is Path of Exile 2 free at 1.0?
Yes. GGG says 1.0 launches as a free-to-play game, the same model as Path of Exile 1.
How many classes does PoE 2 have at 1.0?
Ten. The Shadow and the Duelist join the eight early access classes. GGG originally promised 12, and says the last two will come later.
What are the new Ascendancies?
The Shadow gets the Assassin and the Infiltrator. The Duelist gets the Master-at-Arms and the Knight.
When are the 1.0 patch notes coming?
About a week before the December 11 launch, according to the keynote.
Sources:
- GGG: Path of Exile 2 Full Release (official page)
- GGG: ExileCon 2026 Announcements
- GGG: Path of Exile 2 1.0 press release (platforms)
- GGG: The Shadow trailer (YouTube)
- Images: official Path of Exile 2 Full Release press kit from Grinding Gear Games. All game art © Grinding Gear Games.
