Path of Exile 2 Early Access

Nov. 26, 2024

Hi guys, I'm Asmo and in this article I'm going to tell you everything you need to know about Path of Exile 2 Early Access and how will it be different from Path of Exile 1. I'm going to explain all of the important new mechanics, new classes, and how you can join the Early Access.

If you prefer to watch this information in a video form, you can check out the video I've made about it here:

Early access information

The Early Access for Path of Exile 2 launches on the 6th of December and you can find a countdown on the poe2db website.

You can get early access to POE 2 through the $30 supporter pack, any of the higher tier POE2 supporter packs, and if you've already spent at least $480 on Path of Exile 1, you'll get the the key automatically.

The Early access as well as the full game will be available on PC, PS5 and Xbox.

It will start with 6 available classes, a 3 act campaign with 50 bosses and multiple end-game systems ready to explore. More will be added throughout the Early Access period and the full game will have 12 classes, 6 act campaign with a 100 unique bosses and an extensive endgame with many different mechanics to engage with.

Classes

The 6 classes available in early access are going to be: Mercenary, Monk, Ranger, Sorceress, Warrior and Witch. Each of them will have 2 available ascendancy sub classes at the start of early access.

The Mercenary can become a Witchhunter, who specializes in slaying demons, undead and powerful boss enemies or a Gemling Legionnaire that gains powers from embedding skill gems into their body, gaining skill gem related bonuses.

The Monk can ascend as an Invoker, focusing on harnessing elemental powers, energy shield and being able to transform into an Elemental Avatar form, or the Acolyte of Chayula that harnesses dark powers of chaos, sacrificing spirit for damage and resistances.

The Ranger can choose between Deadeye and focus on projectile skills and being fast and accurate, or a Pathfinder who can utilize flasks for damage or debuffs, and offers bonuses to mobility and poison damage.

The Sorceress can become a Stormweaver - focusing on elemental ailments and elemental damage (similar to Elementalist from POE1), or a Chronomancer who can manipulate time and cooldowns to bend the rules of combat.

The Warrior can ascend as Warbringer gaining bonuses to totems, warcries and other ancestral powers or a Titan that utilizes heavy slams and powerful stunning attacks.

The Witch can choose between a Bloodmage who sacrifices life for more damage and gains life related bonuses, or an Infernalist that focuses on fire damage, can summon a pet Hellhound and can assume the Demon Form which gives ramping damage bonusses at the cost of increasing life loss.

Skill Gem System

The socket and skill gem system has been reworked - you no longer socket your skill gems in gear, instead your character has a set number of slots, which can be expanded and support gems go into sockets that are tied to each skill gem, so if you want a 6-link, you'll need a 6-link active skill. This means, that it's going to be easier to upgrade your gear and switch your skills to try new things, but the game will still offer a multitude of options.

There are hundreds of active and support skill gems, with an insane number of combinations possible between them all. It's like an all you can eat buffet of mechanics for autistic people like me.

You can find uncut gems of various levels and turn them into whatever skill you want. There are hundreds of active skills and support gems that modify those skills, but you're limited to only one copy of each support gem, so you'll have to get creative and find the best combinations of them, rather than just using whatever has the highest damage number.

Some skills, especially attacks are tied to specific weapon types, but any class can use any skill and any weapon, allowing you to mix and match them however you want.

Gameplay and Game Mechanics

Even though we don't socket our skills in items anymore, the items can still have sockets. Most items can have up to 1 socket, while 2 handed weapons and body armors can have 2. You can add sockets to items with the new currency - artificer's orb or with a lucky vaal orb. The vaal orb sockets can exceed the regular socket limit per item.

• Sockets are used to slot in Runes, which provide additional modifiers, such as flat damage or resistances, allowing you to further customize your gear.

• Persistent skills now reserve a new resource called Spirit instead of mana. Spirit is used to reserve buffs, auras and permanent minions.

• Minion skills come with with command skills by default, which allow you to reposition them or command them to attack a specific enemy, so no more dealing with stupid Zombie AI.

• Attribute travel nodes on the passive skill tree, allow you to select which attribute you want - Strength, Dexterity or Intelligence, allowing for more flexible pathing around the passive tree
• Your passive skill tree can also be respecced with the power of capitalism - it will simply cost you some gold.

• You get gold from selling the items you find to the vendor and from monsters dropping it. You can also choose to disenchant your items instead to get transmutation orbs from magic items or regal orbs from rare items.

• The scouring orb, which removes all mods from an item, is not available in POE2, but things like Exalted orbs, which allow you to add modifiers to items are much more common.

• Every character has access to dodge roll. The rolling speed and distance matches your movement speed, and the first few frames of it, let you avoid single target attacks and projectiles. Dodge roll can also be used to cancel the animation of any other skill.

• Characters in POE 2 have 1 dedicated life flask slot and 1 dedicated mana flask slot, plus up to three charms that serve as an automated way of dealing with debuffs, that also function based on charges gained from slain enemies, similar to flasks. This means, no more flask piano, you can instead focus on pulling off sick combos with your abilities.

• Block and Evasion work against all incoming monster hits, without discriminating between spells or attacks. That's very progressive of them. There is also an active block ability, allowing you to raise your shield and block all hits coming from the front, until you run out of the stun meter

• Some attacks will indicate with a red flash, that they're unblockable.

• Ailments like Freeze, Stun and Electrocute can now work on bosses. Every monster has an ailment threshold that requires a certain amount of damage for the ailment to be applied, and in POE2 this damage doesn't have to come from a single hit and instead can be built up over time. Targets affected by hard crowd control effects, gain a little bit of resistance against them for a set duration, preventing you from endlessly chaining CC on bosses.

• When you die in a boss fight, the boss will be back to full HP, so you have to actually beat the fight, and can't endlessly whittle it down by dying over and over. Monsters also respawn, allowing you to clear the zones ahead of the boss to get more xp and make the boss fight easier, through naturally progressing your character.

• Skills have way better animations and not just in the way they look, but melee skills move you closer to your target, some ranged skills can be used while moving, skills can also turn mid animation, allowing you to hit moving targets easier.

• You can assign one of your two weapon sets for each of your abilities, allowing you to automatically swap weapons when you use the appropriate skill. There are also bonus passive points for your passive skill tree for each of your weapon sets, giving you a better way to specialize in more than one playstyle at a time.

Campaign

The final release of the game will have a 6 act campaign, but the early access will let you play through the first 3 acts with about 50 unique bosses, which you can repeat in higher difficulty to gain access to the end game.

There will be three different ways of earning your ascendancy sub class. The first one - Trial of the Sekhemas - which is similar to the Sanctum mechanic form PoE 1, the second one - Trial of the Chaos God, which is similar to the Ultimatum mechanic from PoE 1 and a third trial that will be added later. You can complete any of the trials you choose, to get your ascendancy points.

Endgame

The endgame atlas is an ever-expanding map with various locations, biomes and points of interest, a little bit similar to Delve mechanic form PoE 1. You traverse it by completing maps, which you gain access to through craftable tokens, called Waystones which drop from monsters. The location on the atlas determines the map type, layout and environment, while the waystone determines the level of the content.

The atlas also contains unique maps, towers which reveal more atlas areas, cities and special encounters.

You traverse the atlas, from one map to another, creating your own path, as each player will have an atlas that is unique to their account, however if you die and fail a map, you won't be able to repeat the same exact map, instead you'll have to find your way around it. There will most likely be a failsafe mechanic so you never lock yourself out of the atlas completely.

The league mechanics available in PoE 2 early access are going to be:

• Strongboxes
• Breach
• Shrines
• Expedition
• Ritual
• Delirium
• Essence
• and the endgame versions of the Ascendancy trials

Each major endgame mechanic present on the Atlas comes with a passive skill tree that allows you to specialize in it and customize the difficulty as well as rewards of the corresponding encounters. Yes. Path of Exile 2 has a lot of skill trees.

Most mechanics have been reworked and adapted to POE2, giving different rewards. For example:

• Breach is now the source of catalysts that allow you to improve the quality on your jewelry, and breach rings allow for that quality to reach up to 50%

• Ritual rewards omens that allow you to target prefixes or suffixes with other crafting orbs.

• Delirium gives distilled emotions that allow you to anoint your amulets with an extra passive, and enchant your maps with additional modifiers and layers of delirium.

• Essences now upgrade the item to magic, giving one deterministic mod, and Greater Essences upgrade a magic item to rare, adding their deterministic mod to it, making it easier to craft the item you want.

Only 1 in 4 maps contain a boss, but they're much more powerful and much more rewarding. You can choose to do maps with or without bosses and specialize in whichever playstyle you prefer.

You can find Tablets, which are craftable items that can be used in the atlas Towers, to add more encounters and modify these encounters in maps within the Tower's range. Similarly to old sextants or watchstones from POE1

Of course there are Uber Bosses, Pinnacle Bosses and lots of smaller encounters, so right from the beginning of the Early access there should be plenty of content for everyone to enjoy.

I hope you've learned something from this article and are as excited as me for the Early Access. Stay tuned for more Path of Exile 2 content!