Path of Exile 2 Sets The Stage For Massive Update Alongside December Launch

Published Nov 7, 2026, 11:13 AM EST Tomas Franzese is the Weekend News Editor at Polygon, following and reporting on the latest goings-on in the gaming and entertainment spaces. During the week, you can find him working on Remastered, his newsletter about video game history and retro gaming, or contributing to GameSpot and other publications. Previously, Tomas was the Gaming Segment Lead at XDA and a Staff Writer at Digital Trends. The campaign will wrap up and the Shadow class will be introduced next month Sign in to your Polygon.com account At ExileCon 2026, Grinding Gear Games gave us a deep dive into everything we can expect to be added to Path of Exile 2 by the time its 1.0 launch happens next month. That includes a new stealth-driven class, two more narrative acts for its campaign, and a new league called Conquerors of Wraeclast. What to expect from Path of Exile 2 at launch The most obvious thing that Path of Exile 2's 1.0 launch will do is wrap up the main campaign with Acts 5 and 6. This will exponentially increase the amount of content in the game, with a press release teasing that 24 new areas and 18 new bosses will come to the game as part of these final two acts. Players will also now have access to a new stealth-driven Shadow class, which lets players lay traps on the battlefield, chain kills to keep reset their stealth cooldown time, and summon Shades to fight alongside them. If you just want to boot up Path of Exile 2 and play through its campaign, 1.0 seems like the time to do so. For those who plan on sticking around after finishing the campaign, there are a lot of other things for you to look forward to in the endgame. For example, Shadow has two new Ascendancy classes, the Assassin and the Infiltrator. Meanwhile, the Duelist class gains the Knight Ascendancy, which gives them access to a squire companion and other new abilities. Grinding Gear Games is also reworking more than 70 unique items while also introducing 40 more, and adding 70 more nodes to the endgame Atlas Passive Tree. All of that should keep people playing Path of Exile 2 after launch, when the Conquerors of Wraeclast league rolls out and adds the reforging crafting system, independent commanders for Atlas missions, and faction-based castle sieges to the game. Path of Exile 2 exits early access and has its 1.0 launch across PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X on Dec. 11. A Mac port will be released on that day too.