I’M 100% PLAYING THIS..

Hi, I'm Jonathan Rogers, game director on Path of Exile 2, and welcome to GGG Live. Hi. We have a huge amount of stuff to share today, so it's going to be a good one. Oh, Twitch drops are enabled on today's live stream, so you'll be able to claim the Red Queen's font hideout decoration by following the instructions below. So, with that out of the way, time to roll the trailer for Path of Exile 2: Return of the Ancients. All right, here we go. Those in darkness who once lay dormant. Is this like evolve or something? Now return. Oh yeah. We who came before rise again. Damn. Behold the first edict. Man, new endgame quest. Origins of Divinity. What is it? Oh 30 new endgame. Wait, what? 30 new endgame areas. New Orbiter Pinnacle. Oh Right of the Nameless Ritual Rewit. Oh my god. Waking the dreamer. They're really going in on the lore. What the was that? Free tree work again. We become one. Another endgame quest. You are completely alone. Oh my god, they're busy. Yeah, new delirium pentacle rust. That's cool. I remain royal to the king. A sword. Did you guys see that? I didn't see it. Expedition. How many new bosses are they adding? Hunt like it's your last. Holy See what you can find. Atlas classes. 15 new bosses. Now see how the storm ends. Jesus new, man. Spirit walker is similar. What the hell is this? Wait, is that guy helping you? Martial artist. 40. You know you need To face us is to face return the ancients. Man, that was pretty cool. May 29th. Is that what it said? So, as you can see, there's just so much going on in Return of the Ancients. It's hard for even us to keep track of it all. Now, we promised that this one was going to reented to talk about it. But first, we've got to talk about the league. So, to do that, I'm going to hand things over to Mark. Okay. Hi, I'm Mark Roberts, game director on Path of Exile. Now, for those of you who are new to Path of Exile, each time we release an update, we also release a new league. Mhm. Not only do we have a new economy, but we also introduce new content through the campaign, which gives you a fresh play experience right from the start of the game, as well as new mechanics, storylines, and endgame bosses. Mhm. In the Ruins of Elder League, you will encounter a man being attacked by the undead in Clarefell. Yeah, that was like my first After saving him, he introduces himself as Pharaoh, a young blacksmith trying to bring back the ancient art of runesmithing. Okay. He has been collecting his discoveries in a tome and is keen to show you how rune smithing works. By inscribing symbols on these ancient Ezite remnants, you can create all manner of old magics. Uh-oh. Unfortunately, on doing so, the corpses of the nearby undead are revived and infused with some of the latent power, making for a difficult fight. It's pretty simple. Look at that worm. After defeating these monsters, Pharaoh realizes that runes smithing is a dangerous business. And he is going to need the help of someone a little more inclined to discover these secrets. He lends you his tome and asks that you note down anything you discover when you return to him. In each area in the runes of Alder League, you will find a remnant. And as you approach it, you will notice that some symbols are already present and some are waiting for you to fill them in. Depending on which symbols are already present, you will have different options for which items you can create using this magic. For example, if you combine Tempest and Lightning, you can create an orb of augmentation. Okay, that's pretty simple. Yeah, I get Archemist. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I mean, if you played PoE, like you instantly get it, right? It's pretty obvious like Yeah. Okay. Be careful. The symbols used to also empower the monsters around the remnant who will be revived as undead to fight again with different properties depending on what runes you used. So, if you use a fire rune in your recipe, the monsters will be empowered with fire, of course. Or if you use a moon rune, lunar beams will rain down as you fight the monsters. Oh. Oh, I was thinking about playing that build, but I just couldn't get into it. Break the remnant to receive the item you crafted. As you get higher level, you will start to find remnants with more slots for more runes, allowing you to craft rarer items. As the number of slots increases, though, more waves of monsters will get you. You knew this is what it was going to be. With each wave being empowered by more and more of the runes. Oh. Oh. Oh. And this can get pretty dicey because some of the runes can have powerful effects. I hope there's one where it just like spawns a boss. Like I always think those are really cool. Like the oath rune, which will cause one monster to be nominated as a leader, spawning waves of minions. The leader itself will be invincible, but killing its minions will deal damage to it. Oh, okay. That's cool. Yep. Get thorn. I tried to make a thorns build. It didn't work cuz I'm an idiot. Greater chaos orb. Some recipes can get pretty large requiring six Jesus. Seven. Six. Seven or even eight runes. eight. Ooh. But don't worry, you won't have to remember them. Pharaoh's rune crafting book will record all the options, allowing you to simply pick which one you want to craft given the existing runes that are already on the remnant. I feel like essence crafting was annoying cuz you had to remember to expand your knowledge and to allow you to craft more items. Pharaoh has asked that you keep an eye out for signs of runic magic around Rayclust. He wants to document anything you find in order to rediscover the secrets of Ezomite runesmith's evolution. Yeah, exactly. The first of these can be found in Augen and reveals to you an ancient secret buried deep underground. The runic magic which the Esommites believe to be their own is actually of Calguran origin. So y'all ain't y'all didn't do Thousands of years ago, the Calgurans came to Rayclass to find sources of Verissium, a metal on which engraved runes allow control over reality. Pharaoh is determined to learn these ancient ways and gain mastery over them. If you can bring him more vericium, he'll be able to use it to smith power into any armor, granting you runic ward, the power harnessed by the Calgurans since ancient times. What does that mean? What's runic ward? Runic ward is a new resource that protects you from death. What? Should you run out of life, your runic ward will kick in, sustaining your body until your life can return. It effectively acts as an extra life. accurate example. Of course, should you take enough damage to run out of that, you will still die. So, it's like I said, every single piece of armor in the game can be upgraded. It's almost like the reverse of what rune used to be. Even unique ward, excuse me. Some are just a strict upgrade, giving runic ward with no downside. Others are more extreme, sacrificing defenses to get a much larger amount of runic wardus. There are even some that add new modifiers uniques entirely, making them much more viable for higher level play. But the Calgurans use runic ward for more than just a defense. Is this going to be used to power many other magics? Instead of using gems created from corruption, the Calgurans used runes of power and fueled them with runic ward. Many of the options available from remnant crafting are new types of skills that exclusively spend runic ward to wreak havoc. An example is tralion cascade. Using it will cause your next spell to be triggered multiple times in a triscalion pattern. You can use it with skills like ice that you cast from yourself. Oh, like a triangle or with something you target at a distance like comet. There are also skills to modify existing effects using runic magic, like frost flame nova. Uhhuh. Using this skill on a pack of burning enemies will transform the ignite into frost fire, both burning them and building up freeze at the same time. What the You have basic buffs like hollow shell that guards all nearby allies. Uh-huh. to more complicated mechanics like the mark of repulsion that creates a mark capable of pushing away all nearby enemies. I don't know. Instead of spending mana like skill gems do all these skills cost runic ward and unlike gems they don't have a color. I see this means that they don't care about the tribute requirements or what kind of weapon you use. These skills are designed to be used on any class and so often interact with mechanics that apply across many characters. You see it's like a by combining different runes together. The Calgurans were able to support their runic abilities and you can as well. There is also a set of runic supports that can be combined with regular skill gems in interesting ways. Yeah. Concussive runes allows you to add these concussive shock waves to any skill that stuns. triggering is okay. While rune confusion lets you spend ward to directly empower the damage on any skill. Now, there are other quests during the campaign too unlock even more interesting crafting methods. This is insane. Buried deep in the jungle in act three, you can find the mystic refuge. Containing even more secrets for Pharaoh to learn from. Using this knowledge, he gains the ability to reforge unique weapons into what? With this technique, many low-level unique weapons can be upgraded to do significantly more damage. I'm glad they added we've been able to take a bunch of uniques that had interesting modifiers that were not in-game viable and give them a bit of a boost to get there. And it's not just low-level uniques. All Calguran uniques are able to be rune forged this way, too. and they can do some pretty interesting things like Slit, a new unique which when rune forged can get one of several different outcomes. Now, there is still so much more that you can craft with remnants. There are also 100 new runes as well as many other new crafting currencies. This is the runes of Elder after all, and some of these runes have quite powerful effects. For example, this elemental conversion rune will convert all the existing mods on a non-unique weapon from one element to another. Using it, you could combine a weapon with all three elemental damage mods into a single element, making a weapon with massive amounts of cold damage. There is also a rune that lets you destroy your rune sockets to turn them into a jewel socket on your item. Oh my Oh my god. And there are even crafting meta runes that can unlock new types of mods when used with regular crafting. For example, this rune of Chronommancy will unlock a set of time related mods to be crafted on your boots. Once placed inside, use regular crafting orbs to attempt to get new mods like cool down speed or increase skill effect duration. Oh, there it is. You can also create a new type of currency called alloys. Using regular metals alloyed with vericium, new modifiers not normally available can be directly crafted onto your items. using imbued alloy could improve your ailment damage, for example. 20%. There are honestly so many options here that unlock all sorts of crazy crafting. guys. So, I think people will be experimenting with these for a long time. What about the new Once you get to King's March in act four, Pharaoh finally meets Danig, a real Calguran runesmith, and riddled with excitement, he wants to learn how to merge modern Calguran techniques with the ancient knowledge that he has found. Where's King's War? From here on, Pharaoh joins in the Calgaran expeditions that Danny has been using. With the ancient knowledge that Pharaoh brings to the table, the Calguran expeditions that Danny has been going on will change significantly. I did. For those of you who haven't played it, the expedition league mechanic involves carefully placing explosives, uncovering the buried dead, and recovering Verissium from them. By choosing where to place the explosives, you can choose which kind of challenges you'd like to face or rewards you would like to claim. But unlike before, expeditions now contain the remnants from Runes of Elder, allowing you to do some specific crafts along the way using the new League crafting mechanic. I've done it before. I know how it works. One very important difference from the simple remnant encounters, though, is that the empowerments that the remnants grant apply to every monster down the explosive line for the rest of the encounter, stacking together. This can lead to some pretty extreme situations. If you stack too many remnants, you might be in for a fight beyond your abilities, but the rewards can be very worth Each mod on the monster is improving the items that they can drop. Once you get to the endame, you will find that the atlas has changed substantially. To the south, you will now find the coastline of Rayclast with the ocean beyond. King's March has not fared well after the cataclysm and lays in ruins in World of Warcraft. Rog's shop has been destroyed, but he is much more concerned about his wife, Gwennan. He would like to launch an expedition deep into the ocean to find her. Are these the characters? This begins a new major mechanic for expedition, exploring the ocean. Previously, a log book was a single encounter. Now, using a log book, you can send ships to explore an area of the ocean to the southeast. Oh. Uncovering a range of islands to begin your search for Gwennan. You can hop from island to island, doing many new encounters. Damn, there are islands with expeditions, grand expeditions. Are we going to be able to sail around? I I won't be able to do that. That'd be cool. What's that big rock? new bosses and all sorts of other unique things to find. Eventually, you will find the island that Gwynan has been holed up on. What's the boss? It turns out that she has found the tomb of an ancient Calguran, Medvid. While she appreciates you coming to her rescue, she is still keen to blow open the doors of the vault and take whatever you can find inside. That is really cool. So, this is where you have to fight the new boss. It's just a shame that Midv isn't as dead as you previously assumed. just did zero damage. Now, after you have defeated Medv, you will find another log book, and this time you can use it to choose which direction you want to explore. The ocean is vast and contains a huge number of new islands to find. With each log book, you can explore one sector and you can go as deep as you like. So, is it like delves? There are all sorts of interesting Wait, what happened? Objects to uncover and dungeons to explore. About that. Many of the islands have expeditions with totally new mechanics. Like what? So, for example, here is a volcanic island with voltaxic sulfite. Blowing up the sulfite will unleash extra waves of enemies. but there is also this wall with a suspicious light coming from behind it. On blowing it open, a giant ogre comes out and he is determined to eat as much sulfite as possible. The more sulfite mounds that you have blown up, the more empowered and the more rewarding he will become. Honestly, I might play necromancer this league just because I want to beat all the content. I I might like these islands contain all sorts of little secrets that you can find. I might have to go in. Free trapped wisps. There's a lot. Handicap Herald. The easy route. Yeah. Blow open brute doors. To be fair, I know how to play it, right? Even raise ancient precursor technology. And of course, more bosses. There are more and further vaults to blow up. And one of them in particular is pretty important. The tomb of Utrid the star drinker. Utrid the starrinker. Well, this guy was responsible for calling down the meteors of Verissium, which the Calgarans used to power the ancient magic. What the? And upon defeating him, he calls down a truly gigantic one into the ocean nearby. On visiting it, you find that it is shrouded by a strange energy emanating from the vericium core of the meteor within. There is something growing in there, and it can't be anything good. In order to gain entry, Dan suggests that the Triscalian flame, an ancient Calguran artifact that can absorb and cancel the effects of Rissian magic, could be used to enter. But to find it, you will need to locate the tomb of or leader of the Knights of the Sun. I really like how much war they're putting into the game and gain access to whatever Aldrich nightmare is growing inside. Now, we're not going to spoil the boss, but one thing you should know is that the vericium that makes up the core of the meteor is of a quality that has not been available for millennia. Bringing this to Pharaoh and Danig should allow them to forge some objects of power, the creation of which has been lost to time. So, that's the league and there is a lot going on. To sum all that up, there is a new encounter with over 30 new monster types and over 30 new rune modifiers to enhance them. Godamn. You can create more than 100 new runes to craft your gear, as well as dozens of other new currency items, and there are new quests added to the campaign to unlock even more new crafting options. Rune forging armors. Holy man. Upgrading uniques. Dozens of new Calguran skills and supports. Tons of new islands to discover by exploring the ocean. Yeah, what the Five new bosses, including a new pinnacle boss. Oh, yeah. I didn't even talk about that. And a bunch of new uniques to top it off, but there is still a ton more to come. It's time to talk about the massive changes to the end game. But for that, I'll hand it back to Jonathan. Yeah, the games. Now, as Mark hinted that before, Atlas is very different now. And the ocean to the south is the least of the changes. The entire area around your starting location is now teeming with new quest lines and things to discover. Yeah, I didn't like the investigate the strange forest to the west, the cracks in the earth to the east, or perhaps visit the ruins of a vile city in the north. The atlas now has fixed points of interest at specific locations, giving you specific objectives that are easy to find. This is just for the league. Like before though, no matter which objective you choose, going to towers to see what's out there is always a good idea. The first time you do that though, something new happens. The earth shakes. Y'all see the reason why I quit? And a gigantic fortress rises from the earth. Y'all see now a remnant of the ancient precursor civilization. You get it? So this is the big wall. The cataclysm of the beast has caused an ancient protocol to be invoked. Who's the beast? Should corruption ever take hold to this degree, the world must be scoured and purged of corruption guy, right? You will need to make your way into the fortress and activate the gates. Activate. Gain the keys to reach these ancient precursor weapons. I want Yeah, the squiggly boy and disarm them. All right, the 29th, bro. Like, this will be no easy task. I'm I'm going to be live. The fortress has many areas to explore and many new things to find. Oh, that's badass. You will power up ancient machines. Is this like a new labyrinth? Fight new and deadly foes. discover many new areas and uncover some dark secrets. Damn, this looks Now, the fortress is the first of the new full endame story that we're adding in 050, and there's a lot going on with it. But not only that, it has some pretty cool new mechanics as well. The areas inside the fortress are special. Many of them have new mechanics or rewards that they grant, like this map where all the rares are contained in essence crystals. Or this one, which replaces all monster packs in the area with strong boxes. Or this one, which spawns in his merry spirit that always moves on from a rare after you kill it, allowing you to chase it through the entire map. I hated these so much, bro. Like, I really did. This was so annoying cuz it made them so strong. Now, just like the normal areas of the Atlas, you'll need to fight the map boss of each area to complete the map. But unlike a normal map, the ones in the fortress each contain precursor nodes after the boss. And activating these nodes will give you points for the new and improved Atlas passive tree. That's awesome. That's so cool. Especially for like casual players. We had an Atlas passive tree before, but it was one of the areas of the endame that just wasn't up to scratch. The Atlas tree now works quite a lot differently. Damn, look at this. We have significantly upgraded the kind of mechanics that you can find on the Atlas tree. Like this one that gives a chance to make rogue exiles you fight retreat from combat and then do what? And flee to an adjacent and move to an adjacent map. Before you fight them again, they'll upgrade their gear and come back with a grudge this time. There are also a lot of nodes that combine mechanics together in new ways, like this one, which lets as many spirits possess strong boxes. All the regular monsters that come out of touched by the spirit, and the rares are all possessed, giving you some incredible loot potential. This is so ridiculous. How do they do it to him? You get points from every single area you complete in the fortress. And unlike before, that means you can allocate the entire Atlas tree. Yes, this whole tree can be yours. This change is pretty important since it allows us to be able to create many types of bonuses that we wouldn't have been able to create before, like this one, which gives a chance for cities to be invaded by another faction and can even allow it to contain two faction leaders, allowing you to get two crisis fragments. If we done this kind of thing in the old tree, we'd have wanted to spec into it before running a city map, then unspec out of it before running anything else. With full allocation, we can have cool bonuses like these. Now, obviously, we still want to make sure that you have choices that define your in-game Atlas build. So, many nodes in the Atlas tree are now multi-choice. Everyone will get the node, but which bonus you choose to use is up to you. Do you want your powerful boss maps to contain more essences, summoning circles, or rogue exiles? But there's also nodes that contain more unusual things. So, for example, on this node, you can choose. Do you want to give a chance for shrines to instead be given to the map boss in the area, making them more challenging, but dropping special loot? What's this? Would you rather give a chance to be given a shrine buff before entering boss arenas, making for an easier fight? Oh, yeah. Oh, isn't there a one where you're invulnerable? Now, I could probably nerd out about cool stuff in the tree. We should probably get back to the fortress. Now, one of the really important things we wanted to do was make it so that all the boss fights in the end are now accessible with a quest line. That means that to fight the Arbiter of Ash for the first time, you don't need to get lucky by finding keys. They will be in fixed locations and there's a quest to get them. Oh, that's so nice. But the Arbiter of Ash is no longer the pinnacle of Path of Exile 2. For that, you'll need to travel into the very center of the fortress. An incredible challenge awaits you should you choose to go there. They're not going to show up, right? This this is the Templar guy. After the story line, you still unlock keys for pinnacle bosses in the usual way. Exploring the world and finding the keys required to get to them, but we have added a lot more interesting things to find out there as well. Bro, this is not There are now sort of mechanics that can spawn on maps in the wilderness. For example, some maps might spawn as a rogue exile hunting ground containing multiple rogue exiles who are there to hunt rare beasts. Yeah, you might come upon them in the middle of a fight and be able to take out both of them. I always got that buff where I used champions that makes all the natural inhabitants of the area into magic Or this one that causes all shrines in the area to release as merry spirits when used. That's like that uh found you can return to fight the pinnacle in the fortress again. But this version of him will be harder. And not only that, you'll have new unique rewards as well. Each time you fight him, you get the ability to activate one section of the fortress, and any maps that you didn't finish there will be automatically completed, giving you all the Atlas points. So, if you're the type of player who doesn't want to explore the fortress, and instead just race out into the infinite atlas, you still have a way to get all those points, So, that's the Origins of Divinity story line. It's a huge amount of new content with a ton of new areas, five new bosses, including a pinnacle with a bunch of new unique items, but not only that, it also completely revamps the Atlas tree and includes a ton of new map mechanics that you can find both inside and outside the fortress. But this is just one of the new story lines. So, let's talk about the next one now, Masters of the Atlas. There's another talked about how the multi choice nodes on the tree allow you to still have an in-game Atlas build, but we didn't think that was quite enough. You have an aseny class for your passive tree. Why not the sensy class for your atlas tree? Well, that's where the masters of the Atlas come in. Throughout Rayclust are many opportunities for those with the skills to find them. Atlas masters are willing to train you in these skills if you're able to help them in return. One such master is JO, a member of the Order of the Jin, an organization that secures powerful artifacts to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands. Jedo will send you on missions to investigate strange occurrences on the Atlas and recover the artifacts causing them. And for each one you recover, you will gain more trustes and teach you more ways of the order of the gin. That's smart. At level one, you could choose to massively increase the chance for rare and unique chests. Or make it so that all map bosses drop an additional unique item. That's probably what I'm going to do. This one seems simple. Or make corrupted way stones have an additional modifier. Oh, that's nuts. But at the cost of making them send you to a totally unknown location, like a ball mount. Each mission you complete for Jada will unlock another row of abilities and give you another point to allocate, letting you choose how you want to specialize. The just the way this looks better, for example, visually, Hilda is a member of a guild of monster hunters. She will send you on missions to assassinate specific deadly creatures around Rayclass and harvest their In exchange, she will teach you her monster hunting skills. A 25% chance to upgrade any map boss to a powerful version. I'm not how to do that. or this one which makes his mar and spirits no longer possess rare monsters making them go for the unique bosses in the area instead. You might notice that many of the effects on these are both upsides and downsides. So Hilda, for example, can make it so you only get one attempt when fighting pinnacle bosses, but in exchange for that, they always drop two uniques. Because of that, we wanted it to be easy to swap between them depending on what you're doing. As you unlock each master, they will appear on the side of the screen. Simply click whichever one you want to use to run the map, and all the bonuses you have selected for that master will be activated. This allows you to have a few different strategies that you can quickly pick between depending on what you're running at the moment. Now, one thing that's been pretty obvious is that the endgame leagues we created when launching early access in 010 were not really up to the standard of the leagues we did since then. Fate of the Val and Rise of the Abyssal just have a lot more going on than Delarium or Expedition, for example. We wanted to do a serious upgrade to all these mechanics before we do our 1.0 release. And so that's what we've done. All four of the leagues we launched in early access have been upgraded with not only new quest lines, but new mechanics, new crafting systems, new uniques, and new pinnacle bosses. One of the really important changes we made to all the leagues is that you can now find them on the Atlas in specific locations. And each one has a quest line that will lead you there to being able to complete the league along with its atlas tree and its pinnacle boss. Honestly, this is true even for the leagues that we didn't do major redesigns to. So, let's use Abyss as an example. When you first encounter one in the end game, you'll get a quest that leads you to the east where you will find these mega abyss cracks in the earth leading away from the well of souls. Yeah. All the maps along the cracks will contain abysses with special properties. And mapping along these cracks will close the Atlas scale abysses, giving you points for the abyss atlas tree. At the end of each Atlas abyss, you'll find an abyssal depths with the boss fight for one of the abyssal factions, giving you a guaranteed way to fight them. I hated these. After completing the three, you get a key for the well of salt, allowing you to fight the vessel of cooler map. I hate it. This kind of thing makes an endame league so much more friendly than giving people obvious goals and a guided experience to complete them. So, let's talk about the first of the upgraded land, Delarium, and it new story line and the Raven. As you may remember, during act four, you are tricked into releasing an ancient entity from a Kardi prison known as Tangazu, the Raven Trickster. Super bad. Tangazu delights in breaking the minds of those who step through his mirrors. And when touching one, he will attempt to destroy your mind with twisted abominations generated from your worst fears. In Return of the Ancients, the first time you approach one of his Delarium encounters in the endame, you will find Elder Maddox locked in a trance. His mind is trapped in one of's delusions, and you will need to free him. Once free, Alder Maddox demands that as you caused this problem, you should put it right. He asks you to travel west to the withered willow, the location he believes that Tangazu first gained his powers. But be careful. As you travel there, the Raven trickster will attempt to break your mind. Each map around the withered willow features Delarium encounters. Now, this is more than a simple quest upgrade. The mechanic of Delarium has been overhauled and expanded. What? At the bottom of the screen, there is now a bar that indicates how deep into Delarium you are. You can see which direction leads deeper by looking at the fog. And the deeper you go, the more challenges you will face. By looking at the bar, you can see how long you have until the delarium ends. Omnophobia. And you can also see special encounters that you will face if you're able to go deep enough into the fog. At the end of the bar is always the boss of the map, but we now have a variety of other encounters that you might find as you explore the horrors of your own mind. For example, you might encounter a purple mirror shard that when shattered will cause all the enemies to become more nightmarish. After hitting this, you'll notice the delarium demons are enhanced, significantly more powerful, larger, and scarier in general, along with more rewards. Or should you encounter a red mirror shard, you'll be sent into the depths of your mind. Wait, what? What does that mean? the depths of your and must escape it while fighting off hordes of your worst fears. If you are able to do so, you will gain a powerful amulet with two instilled notables on it. Once you reach the withered willow, Elder Maddox discovers that a shard of the mirror is missing. You will need to track down Tangazu and restore it if you have a hope of discovering how to defeat again. And that means entering the Raven trickster's mirrors in an attempt to locate him. Each area around the withered willow contains delarium encounters. So that's a good place to start. As you do delariums, some of the special encounters will drop liquid emotions. Normally, these emotions can be used to install amulets to add notable passive buffs to them. But in Return of the Ancients, emotions have a new function as well. Uh-huh. Each one now has the ability to add crafted mods to jewels, allowing you to add specific mods to an item slot that can be quite difficult to roll. For example, liquid despair will allow you to add critical hit chance, while liquid suffering will allow you to add movement speed or air of effect to your jewels, but there are many more. once you've done enough del mirror, an entrance into Tangmazu's realm is revealed. But it won't be that simple to enter. Using his powers, he reflects the map boss for a ridiculous empowered fight, then destroys the entrance into his realm of madness. The is that? The arbor attack. This is crazy. In order to find him now, you'll need to let the insanity fully into your mind. There's a lot of boss mechanics. Strange fruit is left behind, which you can consume to fully embrace the madness in an attempt to reach the Raven Trickster's realm. I I don't know if I'm ready. Consuming the fruit will cover an entire area of the Atlas and fog. And every map you do in the fog will get progressively harder and harder as you explore the deeper reaches of your mind. At some point, you enter a new layer. This is serious. A simulacrim of your memories twisted and perverted by the raven trickster. Should you be able to complete the simulacrim, Tangazu will believe that you are worthy of a true challenge. underneath you and will let you take the remaining shard of his mirror, allowing you to enter his realm of madness back at the withered willow. If you dare to face him, it will be a fearsome challenge. So, that's the new story line of Delarium. That's really cool. As you can see, it's not only a quest line. There are new mechanics, new crafting options, and new boss fights. But one question you might have is what happens after? What do you mean after? Well, once you've completed the story, grand mirrors will start appearing on the atlas sometimes after completing like 100 hours. After doing the Grand Mirror, you can select where on the atlas you want to do your fruit induced drug trip and get another key to fight Tangazu. But this time, the fight will be quite a bit harder. And only that, the fight will be able to drop a bunch of new uniques that were not available in the quest line version. We'll show some of those later. Oh my god. After doing a Grand Mirror, the decision of where to spread the fog can be important because there are some potent emotions that only come from certain map bosses affected by delarium this way. Like all emotions, they can craft special mods onto jewels. But these potent emotions can create mods that you can't get any other way. So, for example, potent liquid melancholy is an emotion that can only come from human bosses and allows you to add a variety of effects. I don't know. Also, you might want to try instilling amulets with these emotions. They could have some interesting effects with some powerful notables that do not normally exist on the tree, like storm's rebuke, which makes armor break boost your cold and lightning damage, but also notables from a clearly deranged mind's blessing. This skill allows you to ancestrally boost fire spells. That's actually really good. How about using an ancestral flame blast? Now, just like before, you can also upgrade the league by getting points for a dedicated delarium atlas tree, but this now works in a much better way and has much cooler effects. The maps in the Delarium area of the Atlas give you Delarium passive points for completing them, so it's easy to see how to progress. Some nodes will add new types of mirror shard encounters to your delariums, like this one, which will pause the delarium for some amount of time, allowing you to more easily get to higher depths. Oh, damn. or this one which adds extra delarium modifiers to monsters when you pick it up. I forgot which talent tree. There are also nodes that can add new types of drops like this one which modifies similacrim encounters to add special liquid emotions which can craft time lost jewels. And nodes that apply to the atlas mechanics of the league like this one which causes the grand mirror to spread Delarium fog over a larger area of the atlas potentially containing multiple simulacrims. All right, so that's the changes to Delarium. The core mechanic now includes a bunch of new things to find, new monsters to kill, and new mechanics on the Atlas. It also has new crafting system for jewels, and over 20 new unlockable notables for amulets. Not only that, we have a new pinnacle boss with a bunch of new unique items and a massively upgraded atlas tree just for But there's still a lot more to come. So, let's talk about breach next. When you first do a breach in the end, you'll find Alith, one of the keepers of the flame, an ancient order of monks dedicated to preventing the hiveborn from entering the world. As you seem to be a keen slayer of demons, Alith would like to recruit you to the order and asks that you travel to their monastery to the south. On the way there, you'll start to encounter more breaches and will notice one of the first changes to the minor mechanic. Now you still have to kill monsters as fast as you can to keep the breach open. But now you can visibly see how much time you have left intimidated guys. It's not as it appears. You just watch the reach and he'll play the game for you. You will learn more about the in the 25 years since the events of Keepers of the Flame in Path of Exile 1. The war with the Hiveborn has not gone well and they have managed to establish a foothold in the world nearby. Looks like a gigantic area has fallen to the scourge and the keepers are unable to get inside. Inside the monastery is the Genesis tree, a powerful asset to the war effort, stolen from the enemy and gifted to the keepers by the dreamer himself. Using the tree, Alith could create a breach stone and penetrate the hiveborn foothold. But without hive blood, the tree has withered. To get hive blood, you will need to take advantage of another new mechanic of breach. What's that? If you can keep the otherworldly portal open for long enough, the breach will stabilize and will enter a new phase. like the whole map. The hiveborn will send their toughest miscreations to defeat you. And the breach will not close until you can annihilate them, dropping hive blood that you can use to restore the genesis In some cases, you may even attract one of the deadliest foes the hiveborn can offer, a marshall of Zest. These monsters also drop womb gifts. And if you take these to the Genesis tree, they can be used to craft items to help you in the war against the hive. Wait, so this is another type of amulet? Given that 25 years have passed since the beginning of the war, the tree has grown and withered many times. But with each cycle, it learns and expands its abilities. When you first open the Genesis tree, you will notice these holes into which you can place your womb gifts. Each worm gift can be used to create a different type of jewelry that must be fertilized with hive blood. So, for example, you can place this amulet w into the tree and it will give birth to a random rare amulet. But the genesis tree is capable of much more. As you continue to feed the tree, its branches will regenerate and allow you more and more control over what kind of items it will birth. So, for example, this branch of the tree will allow you to control which base types of amulets can be birthed. And as you go deeper, it will even allow you to create new base types that you can't get anywhere else. A tree with a gives you an entire spirit skill for free. Uh-huh. or this one which has a rune socket in it. To the left and right are branches that will let you control which mods the amulet can get, including making sure that they're higher level or controlling which specific mods that they will always have. With 15 points to allocate, you will have to choose wisely how you want to specialize your crafts. But it's worth noting that this tree doesn't have any cost to respeing it. You can enable or disable the nodes at any time by clicking on them. Thank god I hate having to I hate costing res new crafting options as well. You have a bunch of new base types like these. But you also have entire new classes of mods that can be added. The right hand branch of the ring tree adds an entire new set of caster mods to rings. All right, here you go. From basics like extra elemental damage for spells, shut the up. or more niche options like this mod that increases the rate you gain sales for unleash. What is this? So you can like specialized crafting I think has always been something on the left hand side you can unlock an entire new set of mods for minion huge. This stuff is actually pretty important because casters and minion builds didn't have as many slots with interesting item crafting compared to attacks. The genesis tree narrows that gap. There are also trees for belts. Oh my god. and currency. I won't go over them too much here, but there are all sorts of goodies in these two. like being able to create new catalysts for jewels or a belt that gives lightning damage. Once you've done enough breach encounters, you may finally get a womb gift capable of birthing a breach stone. What is it? What is a breach stone now? And you can then use it on the Hiveborn and Cur. Is this going to spawn a a big boy? Once used, the true extent of the breach demon's foothold becomes clear. They have not only transformed the land, but constructed huge skyhives as well. It's like a citadel. When you enter the outskirts of their realm, you will discover breach hives. Using the power of the Keepers of the Flame, these other worldly structures can be burned away when walking through them. But for each one destroyed, more of the Hiveborn will attack when you attempt to purge the Oh, you got to summon the boss. Wave one out of zero out of seven. The These encounters are particularly rewarding for womb gifts, so you'll want to do as many of these as you can. But your real goal are the skyhives deeper into the domain. Is this the these twisted creations are securing the demon's entry into our world? Inside the very center are the breach lords Tulle and Ash, and you will need to defeat them if you want to get rid of the foothold once and for all. Now, once you've completed the quest line, there is still more to do. You will find other breach domains on the Atlas randomly in your travels. For each one, you will need to find a breach stone, destroy the skyhives, and defeat the breach lords. God damn. I wonder if doing these encounters as well access to fight zest, the existing breach pinnacle boss which you can access by communing with the dreamer himself inside the monastery boss too. While completing the quest line for breach, you will also be gaining points for the breach atlas tree. And there are a lot of cool new options here. This node will cause breach hives to spawn outside of the hiveborn domains on the atlas. And this one will give Aith additional abilities that you can use while attacking a hive. Another tree. Yeah, you've been spending which causes all hiveorn in the next wave to be magic, drastically increasing their difficulty in exchange for reach like that. That's There are also moves that allow you to control your rewards. This one, which adds a set of new lineage supports to the Marshall of Zested. Look at that damage. Or this one, which lets you control which womb gifts you will get. There's also some nodes that affect the Genesis tree, like this one, which will cause Zesh to drop his head, which when returned to the Genesis tree will grow a grasswing orchid on the side of it. You'll have to experiment to find out what this thing is good for. Putting rings on its fingers seems to make it happy. You have to put 60. That's a rundown of what you can expect from the new breach quest line. There's a new stabilization mechanic for breaches. So, you have to collect 60 breach rings. Hive encounters. What? and hiveborn incursions on the Atlas, but you also have a huge new crafting system and new bosses as well. All right, so let's talk about the Right of the Nameless story line next. When you first complete a ritual in the end game, EA, a lost spirit, will appear. She appears to need your help. It isn't able to communicate more than a few words, beckoning. This is another one now, right? But wait, the other leagues, ritual now has a place on the Atlas to call home. The Wildwood can be found to the west. Oh man. When you first arrive there, Epha's spirit will guide you in where you will discover that inside the Wildwood, spirits can take physical form. Epha has been bound to this place by the king in the mists and requests that you free her boss. But in order to do so, you will need her body currently in possession of the king. To reclaim it, you will need to gain an audience with heritual. Inside the Wildwood, there are many ritual encounters to complete. Like before, in each area, triggering rituals will resurrect the nearby bound monsters to attack you, and killing the monsters will give you tribute. That's pretty. Each ritual you do in the area will add the monsters from the previous ritual, making the encounters much more challenging the more rituals you complete. Once you've completed them, spend your tribute to get items. Now, an important change to the rewards of ritual is that all the items in the reward window are now uniques or omens, making this league's rewards much more valuable than before. Yeah, I feel like an audience with an king, you need to sacrifice tribute to him. Any remaining tribute you don't spend can be sacrificed this way to fill up this bar. I always like that's once you have enough tribute for an audience, return to the Wildwood to divine his location. I feel bad leaving there. His location will be revealed deeper in the Wildwood and you will need to make your way to him, kill him. Yeah, we probably and get EA's body. We We I feel like we have to play necromancer. Using her body, you can attempt to release her spirit, but this is when you learn about the true threat of the League. The Wildwood is built on top of an ancient prison. The king and the mists didn't gain his power out of nowhere. He was granted it by an ancient being of darkness known as the Bodok. and the Nameless King's use of this power has been causing the prison to weaken. In order to prevent the Bodark from entering the world, a champion will need to enter its prison and beat him back. But those with a name are unable to survive there. In order to do so, you will need to transfer your name to another with a new mechanic in the ritual league, the right of the Nameless. The right will begin in a nearby forest. At first, it appears to be a regular ritual encounter, but that will soon change. The final ritual of the area will include the map boss. Okay. All right. I I mean, they've had defeating him will give you a piece of the effigy onto which you will transfer your name. It's really just that boss, but the ritual is still not complete. Once the map boss is defeated, the atlas will open and you will need to pick another adjacent map to continue the ritual. During the right, each adjacent map will have different rewards to tempt you. So, for example, if you go in this direction, you gain significantly more tribute. But if you go in this direction, the uniques in the reward window will turn into currency instead. You can also sometimes get offered specific items that will be added as rewards. So, in this case, you'll have to choose if you want to get five chaos orbs or a mage blood. A difficult decision, I'm sure. Now, as this is one continuous ritual, the encounters on the next map won't start from scratch. They contain all the monsters that were gathered from the rituals of the previous map as well, making them harder and harder. Wait, so that includes the map boss, too. You will need to defeat both map bosses in the final encounter for your next effigy piece. Jesus Christ. And it still doesn't end there. Pick another map, another reward. But wait, and add another map boss to continue until the ritual of the Nameless is complete. It will take five maps in all and will be an incredible challenge. We're playing necromancer for sure, guys. Sorry. But once complete, you can return to the Wildwood to perform the final route. I'm not playing melee in this. Transfer your name to the effigy, adorn the crown of the Nameless King, and enter the prison. Yeah, five bosses at the same time. Now, of course, once the pinnacle boss is complete, the league doesn't end there. What? As you do rituals on the app, you can continue to give tribute to the king in the mists for another audience. Let me guess, he's even at least like way harder. Pick another forest to begin the ride of the Nameless once more. And this time with a harder pinnacle boss and new unique items to find. Of course, we've also significantly upgraded the ritual atlas tree. Get points by completing maps in the Wildwood, and you'll be able to unlock some pretty cool nodes. Some of them affect the right of the Nameless, like this one, which extends its duration. You thought fighting five map bosses at once was hard. How about six? Or this one, which makes maps during the right have more reward mods, often having two. You also have nodes that allow things to combine with other content, like this one, which gives a chance for rituals to be created inside summoning circles, adding a random boss to the ritual Oh my. There is even a node which adds a new type of possible ritual, the audience with the queen, which causes the bride of the king to sometimes appear. Okay, so that's ritual. But let's have a look at what this means for endgame content as a whole for Path of Exile 2. When you include the expedition changes made by the league, a total of five new endame story lines. I totally forgot about crafting systems, areas to explore, NPCs, and a pinnacle boss as a capstone. Not to mention the Masters of the Atlas story line as well. But more importantly, you now have immediate quests as soon as you arrive at the endame and goals with obvious progressions that you can see how to finish. That is the thing that each endame quest line has a progress bar that you can pop out from the side of the Atlas screen at any time that shows you how far through you are and buttons that will take you to the hubs for them. Overall, it's just a way better endame experience with a significant number of fun objectives to complete. But just in case you didn't have enough goals, we did have one other thing you might want to complete this league. Oh my god. These are called challenge leagues after all. Where are all the challenges? Well, players of Path of Exile 1 will be used to the fact that each league comes with a series of challenges that you can complete in order to prove that you are indeed the best. We haven't done these yet in Path of Exile 2, but it's time to change that. Oh no. If you're able to complete them, you'll earn pieces of the Knight of Alder armor set. Opening the challenge screen will show you a series of eight challenges. After completing each one, anyone in chat or in the forums will be able to see your prowess. In addition, you'll get a statue to put in your hideout, showing anyone you train with how many challenges you've completed. You'll earn the first piece of the armor set after doing two challenges and the full armor set after completing all eight. So, that covers all the content you'll encounter in Return of the Ancients. But what about some new tools to fight against these new welcome? Yeah. Well, we also have some new ascendy classes as well, but to introduce them, I'll hand you guys back to Mark. As Jonathan said, we have two new classes to show you today. the spirit walker and the martial artist. Let's start with the huntress's new class, the spirit walker. The spirit walker has developed an affinity with the Asian animal spirits. All right. She is able to infuse the power of multiple spirits of her choosing. On the bottom part of the class, you will find paths for each wisp you would like to commune with. Be they primal, vivid, yeah, or wild. What does this mean? Each one can give you different abilities that align with the stag, owl, or bear. Each ability gives you a method to become possessed by wisps of that type and a new ability when you spend them. The stag allows you to summon stampede when you attack. The owl grants boounds in the form of their feathers, which adds extra projectiles and enhances the projectile speed of your next skill. Okay. And the bear simply summons a giant bear companion to your side. The bear will maul, slam, leap, and do intimidating roars to debuff your enemies. Do I go bear? You can specialize more into each of these wisps, but if you want to combine all three of them, then a new hidden power will be unlocked. The power of the sacred wisps. This node is free and enhances the quality of all three of your spirit animals. Your bear will take some of the damage you take and grant you life regeneration. Your stags will become more aggressive, leaping towards enemies, and your owl empowered skills will leave a trail of soaring ground behind them. But that's not all. The spirit walker has other powers beyond wisps, such as idolatry, which can give you large bonuses for using idol socketables in your equipment. And this one, which is my absolute favorite on steroids. Spirit Walker having attuned herself with nature can gain the ability to tame beast bosses, opening up a whole suite of very cool options for your build. Maybe you tame the mighty silverfist in the jungle depths. Or maybe a threeheaded chimera beast in the Chimera wetlands. No way. Then there's a giant frozen owlbeast, Rakar, the frozen talent. There's so many choices. You're going to have to experiment a bunch with this one. And I'm very excited to see what bosses you all choose to have as your trusted boss companion. Next up, we have the monk's new ascendy class, the martial artist. After decades of training, he has mastered three of the seven holo techniques. Channeling hollow form technique allows the martial artist to create illusions of himself, which then use a skill of your choosing. Perfect for turning skills with less area of effect into ones that can obliterate packs with ease. Should you find yourself overly vulnerable while channeling, you might want to take way of the mountain, which causes you to be covered in stone when you immobilize enemies, mitigating large amounts of damage. This can even enhance your attacks, too. By hardening your weapon in stone, you can deal even more damage. He's aura farms on him. Yeah. After taking hollow focus technique, you can manifest your spiritual energy into objects. In this case, bells, which will appear around the martial artist and can be shattered by any of his attacks, even ones from the holo form technique earlier. Uh-huh. Hollow resonance technique furthers that by adding a manifested bell to your back which rings each time you deal a critical strike damaging all enemies around you. Insane. Through all the martial artists thorough training, he has mastered the flow of internal spiritual energy too and has engraved runic tattoos around his meridians. By doing this, he can gain the benefit of extra runes. Just open your inventory and add the runes. There is one that counts as a helmet, two as a body armor, one as gloves, and one as boots. Finally, your hands. The ultimate expression of a master of the martial arts. Taking way of the stone fist will cause your gloves to become a new base type when equipped. Each modifier on the original pair of gloves has an equivalent, more powerful, and more impactful modifier. For example, these gloves add some physical damage, cold damage, lightning damage, some resistances, and life gain on hit. This is what they do. Now, when I equip these, they become literal fists of stone, and not only grant me a bunch more evasion and energy shield. They now also grant a lot more damage, some maximum resistances, and a significantly higher amount of life gained on hitting enemies. With all the different rune combination you could do and the different modifiers and gloves, there's a ton of different build options and we're looking forward to seeing what you can come up with. Now, with so many new bosses in Return of the Ancients, of course, we want to have a huge number of unique rewards. The necromancer, there are some pretty cool things. We need something. So, we wanted to show you a few of them. Okay, let's see it. Twisted Imperion is a two-handed mace made from the purest of Verissium combined with the beast's corruption. It converts all of your base skills fire damage to cold and visually does so too turning your volcanic fissures into glacial ones. Okay, that's this base also comes with its own built-in skill, Starborn onslaught. Please let this Using glory, you can leap backwards, throwing your mace at the ground, creating vericium fissures before calling behind it a storm of cold metallic bolts from the stratosphere. That's pretty cool. Next, we have Even Tide Petals, an amulet that not only grants runic ward, but also comes with its own reservation skill. Midnight Zenith. This skill causes your critical hits to grant Arctic petals that hover around you. Once you have acquired enough of these petals, they will be consumed, creating a floral ice crystal near an enemy. Then destroy that crystal to do devastating cold damage to everything around it. The Raven's Flock is a staff perfect for minion characters. Not only does it grant spirit reservation efficiency and minion damage, it also allows your minions to inflict grueling madness on hit, slowing enemies and making all other slows on them more powerful for maximum crowd control. That's not where this item shines, though. It grants a skill called spiraling conspiracy. This skill causes a flock of ravens to circle you, dealing damage over time to anything near them. Killing enemies or just by standing near unique enemies causes the flock to grow, getting larger and larger. Guys, I think I just build. You can think of this just like a raven righteous fire. That's not all, however. Oh, dude. These ravens are also minions, so they fully scale with minion damage and come with their own command skill. We're playing This command skill causes your flock to create a tunnel of deathly damage between a set of illusory mirrors, obliterating anything in between. bros walking. Dude, these birds is a pair of gloves and stealed with the purest of fear. Yeah, I'm playing these causes your enemies to become terrified. Fire necromancer. These gloves cause you to gain stacks of fear incarnate when you kill enemies. Oh man. To aid in your culling, these gloves also come with the skill crushing fear. This is similar to the monk skill killing palm. That's a lot of level except it deals chaos damage and the amount of damage and area of effect scales drastically based on the power of the enemy. As you use this, gain your stacks of fear incarnate, which increases your culling threshold, meaning enemies become easier and easier to cull. Wait, even to the point of being able to instantly kill some monsters from full life. Sivven's effigy is a scepter for those wanting to run companions. It allows you to have any number of companions of different types. The a companion? Instead of the normal restriction of just one per type, but what makes this cool is the Asarian wolf companion it comes with. This is a persistent minion that bites foes to maim them, leaps to cause bleeding, and even howls to buff nearby allies. Wait. Additionally, it comes with the command skill eternal hunt, which when used, it will howl, calling on the spirits to manifest spectral wolves to ambush all foes around you. Liinal coil is a crazy wand. It allows you to apply as many curses as you please, but those curses will have no effect. What's the point then? Two reasons. Firstly, your spells gain a bunch of extra physical and chaos damage for each curse on enemies. Secondly is the skill it grants called coiling bolts. This skill is a projectile spell that fires coiling physical and chaos projectiles with every cast. What makes this skill truly special though is that it will split and chain through every cursed enemy causing an absolute ruckus. Like visually that looks badass. Periphery is a unique bow which utilizes all the powers of the Asmerian spirits by dealing damage of all elements. And all elements can cause all ailments. The coolest thing about this bow, however, is the Asrian swarm skill. These are minions that are summoned when you kill enemies. They will pursue all nearby enemies, damaging them and inflicting a debuff on them that boosts your elemental damage even further. Watch as you mow enemies down and the swarms of Asmir and Wisps aid you, melting enemies one screen at a time. Oh my god, dude. The ordained is a new spear. Mastering in physical and lightning damage with high critical strike from the boss. This spear allows you to leech life not only from physical damage but lightning too. It also creates a fragment of divinity nearby periodically. What are those? Well, this spear has the skill righteous descent which is an epic divine aided by angelic wings. If you use the skill when a fragment of Divinity is nearby, it will become empowered, dealing significantly more damage, gaining massive area of effect and bypassing its cool down. When fighting a boss, let a bunch of the fragments and then just unleash your divine havoc, obliterating them. Last but not least, we have a new unique jewel, Voices. Voices is simple. It consumes one jewel slot to add more. There are versions that add two jewel slots, three jewel slots, and for those who are absurdly lucky or rich, one with four jewel slots. Equip it and notice the slots appear next to your character's portrait in the center. One of the things we are concerned about is how long it takes for experienced players to replay through the game in each new league. As we learned from Path of Exile 1, one of the things that can really help is having elements in the campaign that tell you where to go if you know what to look for. We'll cover just one example per act for acts one to three, but there are many more than just these. For example, hunting grounds in Act One is a large, sparse area containing multiple entrances and landmark encounters. here's an example of some of the changes we've made here. Finding the ritual encounter in this area isn't too difficult. Now, after completing it, a trail of locusts will lead to the entrance to Freythornne. Just follow it and find the source of the evil. I think that's just better. Yeah. You might also find corpses of dead animals killed and pecked at by the crowbar. And that's where the You'll notice a trail of blood leading away from them. Follow the trail and it will lead directly to the boss. We even put a signpost on the road to tell you which way to go to find Auggum Village. Oh, that's smart. In act two in the Mastad on Badlands, you need to find the light cabins and track down the abyssal. That That's the hard one. Now, to make this quicker, in the level, you'll find these cracks. Just follow them, and it will take you right to their lair, allowing you to find and unlock the Well of Souls. Okay, this is Diablo 5. In act three, the jungle areas have camps of explorers to sell you items. However, they are now even more useful. By talking to the explorers, they will point towards the next area. Not only that, but it will also reveal it on the mini map so you can know exactly where to go. Holy, thank God. These are just some examples. We plan to do more and more of these over time in order to streamline the experience. Yeah, I I got lost. As this is an endame expansion, it makes sense that we would work on Atlas Q. We've added a search box that updates live as you type. Smart. have a specific map you want to run. Now they will be much easier to find. If there are multiple maps, hitting enter will move you from map to map. Now, making a character build in Path of Exile 2 can be pretty complex. Yes. And instead of designing a build yourself, many players enjoy following online build guides. We have a pretty awesome community that has built many tools over the years for designing this, but we wanted to improve the experience of following them. So, we are introducing a new build guide system directly into the game client. Here's how it works. Community creators who write build guides can now create a new file format, a build file. Once downloaded, the builds appear in the in-game client, and selecting one will show you everything you need to know to make that build. So, you can see all the passives you need to allocate. No more altity points you need to take. skill gems you need to equip and recommendations for all the support gems you need to use as well. For items, the build designer can specify which uniques to use in each slot, or if needed, just add some notes to the item slot to say what kind of item you need. So, it's like a built-in guide. In fact, build creators can add notes to just about any of these areas, allowing them to explain different trade-offs in context or just give more info about how these things should be used. This is just like I didn't even know. They can also give level ranges to each element, allowing recommendations to change over time. Great for builds that need to respspe after they reach a certain level. Now, this is written in a standardized build format that creators can use. And we imagine that a lot of community build tools will be updated to add support for this format. Now that we have trademark searching built into the in-game client, we have added the ability to price check items you can find more easily. Control alt clicking an item will now search for it on the trade market, showing you the current prices. So you don't need to have the macro. It's handy to exclude some mods. So, we added the ability to enable and disable each mod so you can see what effect each one has on Listen to Trade. Next up, we're going to be talking about the new supporter packs for Return of the Ancients. This is so good, man. Today, we're launching two new series of supporter packs. I am so happy. Blood Reaver and Divinity. Each tier contains the pack's full face value and points alongside several exclusive micro. I might have to buy that. So, I have another As always, the microtransactions in these packs are purely cosmetic and do not affect your character's power or progression in any way. The Blood Reaver series of supporter packs contain six exclusive microtransactions. I get two extra minions. Blood fuel your bloodshed. The Exanguinator weapon effect draws the blood of enemies you've slain and funnels it into your weapons. Turn the appearance of your endurance, frenzy, and power charges into orbiting globules of blood with the blood reaver charges. While your charges are active, these blood orbs will grow in size when you absorb more blood from nearby enemies. There are options to have pure blood charges or charges that still display which kind of charge they are at their core. That's a taste for blood doesn't negate a taste for style. The elite Blood Reaver armor features crimson levers and golden accents to set yourself apart from univilized leeches. It also features a back attachment fashioned out of the wing of a colossal bat. I don't see it. Oh, now I see. Alongside every Blood Reaver is their trusted gargoyle pet. In true Gargoyle fashion, they take the form of a stone statue when you are idle. Oh, man. Leaping into action when you're on the move again. War accurate. What good is immortality if you don't have a vast mansion to come home to at the end of the day? Dracula. The eternal Blood Reaver supporter pack contains the Blood Reaver Mana Hideout. This exquisite twostory estate features an organ, a grand dining table, people's bodies, cages for your visitors. You can alter the walls to create as many or few rooms as you like. Last but not least, the servant of the manora. Eternally bound to the order of the blood reavers. This henchman will manage your store so you can spend more time spilling blood. Stop that. We won't disappoint you. But if we do, you have our permission to beat us most. That's nuts. The Divinity Pack series also contains six exclusive microtransactions. Call on Divinity to aid you in eluding enemy hits with the Divinity dodge roll effect. As you sprint, actual divine lightning wings will form out of your back, leaving a trail of radiance as you engage or escape from combat. For situations that are too dicey, call on the gods above to send down the Storm of Divinity portal to create a safe passage for you to retreat through. Adorn yourself with the Knight of Divinity armor set. A highly revered attire only bestowed to those deemed worthy for the divine cause. Equipping the divine surge character effect empowers you with a storm of divine energy. Using skills causes the storm to burst from your character, spilling raw divinity into the area around you. The Arbiter of Divinity wings are the final piece remaining to emphasize the force Divinity has over this realm. This ancient precursor machine was found locked away in a highly guarded vault. Its original purpose is unclear, but it has been altered to fuel your maps using the pure everlasting divinity within the statue. The pillars surrounding represent how many portals you have left for your map. This map device also tracks your progress as you complete the new Origins of Divinity story line added this expansion. Additionally, all microtransactions from the supporter packs will be made available for use in Path of Exile 1. On release weekend, we will also be releasing the Return of the Ancients mystery box, which will contain two armor sets, a set of map devices for your endgame adventures, a new tracking scroll that records the amount of currency you've gained from the currency exchange or your shop, and much more, like a set of finisher effects and affinity stashes. Of course, the fragment stash tab is finally coming to Path of Exile 2. Oh, wow. And with it comes a tab seion. Inside this one tab, there's a tab for your various boss key fragments. There's also a tab for all your precursor tablets with each type of tablet getting six tabs of storage. Finally, there's a tab for your gin barriers and inscribed ultimatums, both of which get their own six tabs. That's a lot of tabs. Amazing. Great. So, that's everything in 050. This is by far the biggest update we've ever made to pee one or two. New endame story lines. Pinnacle bosses. Crafting systems, items, classes, and so much more. And because this update contains so much endgame content, we're doing significantly more testing than usual. For that to happen, we're taking a little longer than usual between the announcement and the release. 050 will be released in 3 weeks on May the 29th. This is going to go patch notes being released on the Friday before that on May 21st. But there's just one more thing to talk about. Now that the endgame is up to scratch, we have to start talking about our plan for 1.0 release. the feedback we've had during early access has been critical for making all the improvements that we'll be making to the game. At the same time, we had to create enough in-game content to make an ARPG that can call itself a successor to Path of Exile 1. Right. Well, with 050, we now believe we have reached that point. And so this is going to be the last full-size league during early access. That's right, the next big update is going to be 1.0. Now, normally we would do our next big content release in August. But in the run-up to full release, our plans take a little longer on this one. As big as 050 is, 1.0 is even bigger. So we'll be launching 1.0 this year sometime after Exile Con. But that doesn't mean we won't be doing updates in the meantime. In this final phase, we have a lot of things to polish throughout the game and balance to improve. I'm sure there'll also be feedback about the new endgame that we need to incorporate, too. The difference is that the focus is not going to be on adding more content like the previous updates. It's going to be on improving what we already have. But we still want to encourage people to try out all the balance changes and improvements that we're making. So, we're going to be running a few event leagues during this phase alongside each update. Think remixes of existing mechanics or features. and speaking of Exelon, don't forget to pencil it in on the weekend of November the 7th in New Zealand. Exilecon is a gathering place where they're going to announce a chance for us to showcase everything we've been working on for both Path of Exile 1 and 2. And this one will be particularly important for us since we finally get to unveil some of the coolest content that we've been working on for a while now. That five and six. Tickets for the Inerson event are currently sold out. But don't worry, all the announcements and talks are going to be streamed online for all of you to watch. Now, I'm personally so excited for this. This is the year that PO2 comes out. The campaign is finally finished. It's been 8 years to get here. We're finally near the finish line. And with that, it's time to move on to our live Q&A. I usually don't watch the Q&As's. I think that that's we we've we've gone through it. Like I I really got to say that I actually think this is probably one of the biggest patches they've ever done. This is unreal. Sort of save for 1.0. Well, I don't know what their plan is really with everything. I have no idea. But just in general, I can't get more. Yeah, this is insane, man. Like the What is PoE? Oh my god. And they just announced the full release. So So the game is coming out this year. It's really funny that's happening because somebody asked me earlier, it was like yesterday, they said, "When do you think PoE2 is going to come out?" I said, "Probably a year, a little bit longer." And apparently not. It's coming out this year. Holy Original Po. Okay, so this is the original. Just keep in mind this is the original PoE1 trailer. Okay, let's watch it just for comparison, guys. So you get an idea of where this is POE1 announcement trailer 15 years ago 2010. 15 years later. That's insane. Pervail was the only boss fight. Whenever I played the ball over soul was the last boss. You played through acts one and two four times and then you had like a map system, Free to play online. Join the community. Isn't that insane? how many years ago? 15 16 almost years ago, right? And I got the beta. Yeah, I got in. So, I remember very clearly what it was with me is that I started playing when Creparion was interviewing Chris Wilson on his stream because I would watch Creparion every single day and he was like my favorite streamer because I was like, most streamers were garbage, right? They were bad at the game. So, I didn't want to watch a loser. So, I was watching Creparion. And so, I was uh going through everything and I come home from my dad's house. I remember I remember everything about this, right? I come home from my dad's house and they had a free weekend to play the game. And so, I'm watching him play it and at the beginning I actually thought he was playing Diablo II. And then I found out it was a new game that was being made. And so, I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to jump in the game. I'm going to play the game for this free weekend. And I think I played like of the three days that the game was like available to play for free, I played it for like a 100 hours. It was like insane. I played it like a ridiculous amount of time. And so I did all of this and I I love the game so much that at the time I was a student. And I was in I was in college at the time and I had like $34 or like $32 in my bank account and you had to donate $20 to keep playing it beyond that weekend. And I did. I spent the majority of my net worth at the time on PoE1 to be able to play the game. And so uh the easy choice. Exactly. And so that that was really it like all the way back then. The math ain't math thing. Oh, it did for me. And so best financial decision ever made it one of them, right? And so then after that I uh I I played the game constantly, right? I played it a lot. night. And what what's really funny about it is that when POE 1 came out, everybody was like at that point coming down from Diablo I like uh or Diablo II, I mean, people were frustrated about the game and like this is the point whenever I was playing and like I went from like Diablo II to POE 2 or POE 1 and like the entire general chat was just people talking about how bad uh how bad PO how bad Diablo II was because like at the time like a lot of people didn't really like a lot of the changes that they made with with Diablo I or Diablo. Yeah, I keep saying this. It was Diablo II at the time. And so what I always thought was super funny is that in the POE 1 chat, everybody was spamming about how it was better than Diablo II. And whenever the PoE 2 uh beta comes out, everybody was spamming about how it was better than Diablo I. it was really funny. D3 was a disappointment. Well, I mean I think that really I mean Okay, so I mean D3 was really fun on release. Like I liked it, but it just had like the problem and this is the issue that Blizzard had was like there were so many unnecessary L's with D3. And also like with D4, I feel like the game is a lot different. I haven't really played it enough to like really have that strong of an opinion on it, at least recently. But like the reason why I don't really like this is why I don't really play a lot of Diablo 4 right now is that I feel like they're just it's it's not interesting to me. Like I just I don't find the game to be interesting. It's just you you just continually play for like you know like kind of scripted numerical upgrades for you to continually play. And I just got kind of bored with it. And I'm going to be real, like whenever I fought that tutorial boss in uh D4, like I I I did it on like the hardest difficulty, which is like they said it was like you're supposed to have like legendaries and I didn't have anything. So I I just fought the boss like raw. And in doing so, I had to actually like deal with like a lot of the mechanic intricacies. And because of that, I No, you didn't. Oh, I I think I did, right? Yeah. No, I did. I did. It was on the penitent difficulty, which was the hardest one. And so, uh, I did that and I was like interacting like the way that, for example, you move in the game and the way that characters interact with you and the roll or dodge function, it just felt shitty. That's really all I can say. Like it it did not feel good to play. And I think that there is a certain degree of like responsiveness and a tactile nature that PoE2 had that is just better. It it it it's just better. It is like it it's more precise. It's more measured. It's more accurate. And I just think that it plays better. And that was the one thing that I held Diablo III over PoE1 with is that I think that this might be an unpopular opinion. I think Diablo III played better than PoE1. And I think that there are a few exceptions. Like if you have Tailwind and everything else, like towards the end of an endgame build, yeah, maybe POE 1 plays better. But in a general sense, I felt that Diablo III played better. And obviously I think that for sure Diablo I played better, but then PoE 2 came around and like, you know, I'm a big person around like combat and gameplay. That's the main thing that I care about. I care about that more than anything else in a video game. So the moment that like I'm thinking about that, that's my main focus. Like I don't really care about anything else really besides that. So true. I got 2,000 hours in Diablo 3 and 300 hours in POE 1. Yeah, sure. And they locked the in for POE 2. And that's the main thing that I wanted because you know like that's one of the things that you know you play a game like Elden Ring for example and like it's the difference between Souls games and Souls likes is that there's a certain level of like just precision and quality that like From Software has that almost no other developer is really able to lock in. They're just simply not able to do it for whatever reason. And because of that, I I I kind of expected I mean cuz Blizzard used to be like the pinnacle of this, right? Like Overwatch, I think, is so responsive and it plays so well. You might not like the way that, you know, the game objectives or, you know, like the game itself, but like if you look at the way that it plays and the way that it responds, it's just perfect, right? And so it's kind of odd that Diablo I has regressed and they've moved uh away from that now, right? So, uh, yeah, that's it. We're going to start calling the genre exile. Like, I think people have been doing that for a while, actually. So, it's not anything new at all. Agreed. And a net code is so clean feeling. It is. So, yeah. I mean, overall, I think this has just been an amazing event.…

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