PoE 2 1.0 Conquerors of Wraeclast League, Shadow, Duelist, and All Major Updates Explained
On December 11, 2026, Path of Exile 2 will end its nearly two-year early access phase and launch its 1.0 full release completely free-to-play. For all exiles, this is not only a major update but also marks the complete maturation of the game's core content.
From a complete six-chapter main campaign and the addition of two new classes to the new Conquerors of Wraeclast League, which combines strategic management with ARPG loot-hunting, PoE 2 1.0 will bring a completely new experience in terms of story, class building, and endgame gameplay.
New Conquerors of Wraeclast League
Path of Exile 2 1.0 Full Release Overview: New League, Classes, and Endgame Overhaul
The first league in the full release is named Conquerors of Wraeclast, which integrates army recruitment, stronghold building, and faction warfare into the traditional ARPG loot-hunting experience.
Campaign Phase: Recruiting an Army
During the campaign phase, players will meet Varek and his mercenary army, recruiting different types of warriors by exploring over 70 new Points of Interest.
Different unit types possess their own combat characteristics; some excel at frontal assaults, while others are better suited for ranged attacks or support. Over 20 special battles will occur during the campaign, including defending villages, attacking fortresses, and breaching city gates. Players will need to adjust their troops and choose appropriate tactics based on the enemy's composition.
Endgame Phase: Building a Stronghold
POE 2 Stronghold
Upon entering the endgame, players will begin building their Stronghold and choose from three factions: Karui, Ezomyte, and Maraketh. Each faction has unique fortress appearances and exclusive units.
Stronghold building includes over 20 types of buildings, such as Barracks, Tavern, and Archery Range. By continuously building and upgrading, players can gradually expand their military stronghold and unlock more features.
Commander System: Automatic Atlas Exploration
One of the important goals of stronghold development is unlocking Commander system.
Players can assign soldiers and Waystones to their commanders, sending them to automatically complete various endgame missions, including:
Atlas Maps: Automatically explore and clear the map.
Towers: Complete towers on the map.
Tablets: Use tablets to find specific rewards.
As the stronghold level increases, players can simultaneously send up to three commanders on missions, gaining additional rewards while clearing maps themselves.
Faction Wars: Conquer Wraeclast's Castles
The Conquerors of Wraeclast's endgame story revolves around the ancient Sanguar bloodline. Players must breach the castles they control to prevent the Blood Lord from awakening.
Meanwhile, the league also features global faction objectives. Players can cooperate with their faction members to compete for over 100 castles scattered throughout Wraeclast.
Successfully capturing a castle not only grants the faction an Item Rarity bonus but also unlocks entrances to special reward maps and provides a starting point for further exploration of the Atlas.
New Equipment Crafting Mechanism: Bloodvial
After conquering a castle, players can obtain special Bloodvial crafting materials, providing new options for crafting high-end equipment.
Bloodvial can replace an unwanted modifier on equipment with a random fractured modifier. This mod remains locked during subsequent crafting processes and cannot be removed by other crafting operations.
Complete Campaign: Acts 5 and 6
POE 2 Act 5 & 6
Patch 1.0 completes the campaign with the final two pieces: Acts 5 and 6. The story takes players back to Oriath, ravaged by repeated disasters, to track down and end the threats of the Twilight Order and the Beast.
The two chapters contain a total of 24 new areas, 18 new unique bosses with multi-stage mechanics, and over 20 Champion Rare encounters with their own independent mechanics.
With the release of Acts 5 and 6, the Interlude, previously serving as transitional content, will be removed, and the six chapters of the campaign will form a complete and coherent main character progression storyline.
New Classes & Ascendancies
PoE 2 1.0 will introduce two new classes: Shadow and Duelist. Each class brings entirely new combat mechanics, weapon types, and ascendancy options.
Shadow: Stealth and Traps
Shadow is a hybrid DEX and INT class centered around daggers and traps, with its most distinctive feature being the Stealth mechanic.
When in stealth, nearby monsters cannot easily detect the player, and some dagger skills gain additional effects, such as triggering poison explosions or summoning shadow clones to draw enemy fire.
Furthermore, Shadow can pre-place traps while in stealth and detonate them in the order they are thrown, creating an ambush-then-attack combat style.
Shadow's two ascendancies are:
Assassin
Infiltrator
POE 2 Assassin & Infiltrator
Duelist: Swords and Stance System
Duelist is a melee class centered around swords, with its main feature being the new Stance system.
The basic stance is Ready Stance, where players can hold down the button to charge sword skills, granting attacks extra damage or special effects. Two advanced stances can be switched on top of this:
Sand Stance: Triggers a spinning Sand Disk attack by stunning enemies, emphasizing area damage and efficient enemy clearing.
Bloody Stance: Activated by parrying enemy attacks, inflicting a Bleeding effect on subsequent hits, better suited for sustained damage and single-target combat.
Duelist's two Ascendancies:
Master-at-Arms
Knight
New Skills, Items & Passive Tree Changes
Path of Exile 2 1.0 made several adjustments to the character building system, involving critical hit mechanics, passive trees, support gems, and the equipment system. These changes not only increased build options but also altered some traditional build investment methods.
Critical Strike
1.0 removed all nodes in Passive Skill Tree that increased critical hit rate. Going forward, critical hit rate will rely more on equipment, especially the inherent critical hit attribute of the base weapon type. For example, a dagger's base critical strike chance is 15%, while a sword's is only 5%, a gap that can no longer be easily bridged with talent points.
The talent tree now provides critical damage bonuses, creating a division where equipment provides critical strike chance, and talents amplify the benefits of critical strikes.
Passive Skill Tree
The passive tree undergoes two significant changes:
Jewel Sockets: Moved from the main path to individual clusters, allowing players to choose clusters based on build needs without having to detour for jewel sockets.
New Stat Nodes: Hundreds of stat nodes have been added to the passive tree, along with more cross-mechanism interactions.
Support Gems & Unique Items
Patch 1.0 features a major balance overhaul of Support Gems, with previously weaker gems receiving numerical or mechanic enhancements. The gem recommendation system has also been improved, making it easier for players to find support gems suitable for their current skills.
Regarding equipment, the full version will add over 40 new unique items and rework over 70 existing unique items, affecting affixes, skill effects, and visual appearance.
Charm Slots
The maximum number of Charm Slots has been increased from 3 to 6. In the current system, players can typically only equip protective charms against Stun, Freeze, and Ignite. With the slots doubled, more utility and unique charms can be incorporated into builds, significantly increasing customizability in terms of survivability.
With attribute adjustments and increased skill and equipment choices, new league players are expected to spend more time completing their builds. To speed up progression, players can buy PoE 2 currency to shorten resource accumulation.
Existing Ascendancy Improvements
PoE 2 1.0 not only adds new classes but also adjusts some existing classes and ascendancy.
Acolyte of Chayula: New Companion and Clone Mechanism
Acolyte of Chayula gains a new companion summoning ability. Companions can use any Quarterstaff skill, extending the ascendancy from a gameplay centered on individual abilities to one focused on summoned synergy.
In addition, players can sacrifice their own life to transfer their soul to a clone and detonate their original body. This adds a more skill-intensive and risk-rewarding combat style to this Ascension.
Mercenary: Weapon Switching and Reload Optimization
The reload mechanism in Mercenary has also been improved. Patch 1.0 allows Weapon Set switching and reloading to occur concurrently: after using the first weapon set for damage output, switching to the second weapon set to continue attacking will automatically reload the first weapon set in the background.
This means that players can now maintain damage output through a weapon switching loop of main skill - sub-skill - main skill, without having to rely excessively on reload speed to compensate for attack gaps.
Blood Mage: Corrupted Blood and New Blood Skills
Blood Mage has reworked Corrupted Blood mechanic. Enemies affected by this effect will take double damage from all damage sources, and the corruption effect will be consumed.
Furthermore, Blood Mage has gained new abilities and curses, allowing players to unleash stored blood for wide-area attacks, turn enemies into minions, or summon blood tentacles to corrupt enemies.
Infernalist: Demonic Minion and Covenant Skills
Infernalists gain a new demonic minion, which can cast any spell the player assigns to it. The summoning limit for Infernal Hounds has been increased to 3, providing more options for summoner builds.
The new covenant skills allow players to trade with Demon Lords, sacrificing certain costs for different buffs.
In conclusion, with the full campaign, new classes, a new Challenge League, and numerous deck-building mechanics reworks, we have reason to expect PoE 2 1.0 to bring Exiles a more complete and diverse Wraeclast.
What Aion 2 Korea Anniversary Changes Could Come to Global?
Although Aion 2 Global has only just launched, Korean version has already been live for a year. On November 8, Korean server celebrated its first anniversary and announced a series of major changes.
Many players assume that Global will take a full year to catch up with Korean version. However, some QoL features could arrive on Global much sooner. So let's take a closer look at how these changes could affect Global version, particularly around Season 2.
Aion 2 Korea Anniversary Update | New Features and Changes Expected in Global
Class Changes
Aion 2 Korean version is receiving major combat system changes for its first anniversary. All eight classes, including Assassin and Chanter, will lose a significant number of sources of Cooldown Reduction.
Cooldown Reduction, Guaranteed Critical Hit effects, and other bonuses from Specializations will also be removed. Skills will no longer reset directly, and Guaranteed Critical Hits will no longer be available.
Following the update, manually activating skills will grant approximately 20% additional damage, clearly rewarding players who perform their rotations themselves.
Macros will still be viable for easier content, where players may not care about missing out on that 20% damage bonus. However, manual control will become essential when tackling new challenges, especially in PvP.
Arcana System
Arcana system is one of the biggest focuses of this update. The official team is removing the ability to farm Transcendence Dungeons indefinitely. Players will be limited to five Transcendence Dungeon entries per week for card rewards, putting an end to unlimited farming.
In return, players will be able to reroll their cards. This system has a Gacha element to it. First, you need to fully Enchant a Relic to its maximum level. You can then reroll the skill levels assigned to the card.
Rather than rerolling the entire card, the system allows players to change the distribution of skill levels across its four skill slots. Each card contains four skills, such as Dark Rush, Spinning Strike, and Recuperation.
The total number of skill levels and their distribution remain fixed, but their positions can change. For example, Spinning Strike might move from Slot 1 to Slot 4, while Recuperation moves forward, changing which skills receive the higher levels.
Players will still need to farm high-quality Enchanted cards. However, since the skill combinations can now be rerolled, they will no longer need to collect thousands of cards just to find a perfect combination.
Transcendence Dungeon drops are also changing. In addition to cards, players will now receive equipment. However, with only five entries available per week, players cannot rely on unlimited Transcendence Dungeon farming as a replacement for Conquest Dungeon equipment farming.
Instead, these five weekly entries serve as an additional progression boost, allowing players to collect cards while picking up some extra equipment.
Dungeons
Korean version is also streamlining its older dungeon content. Some dungeons will remain, others will be converted into group content, and certain older dungeons will be removed. Meanwhile, Solo Dungeons will be introduced as another farming option. Their drop rates and quantities will be identical to those of the group versions.
Global version does not necessarily need to follow Korean server's dungeon reductions exactly, since Korean changes are partly intended to simplify progression for new players. However, Solo Dungeon feature is quite likely to make its way to Global.
The weekly limit for Kinah rewards will also be reduced from 84 to 63 completions. Additionally, players will still be able to obtain a small amount of Abyss Points after reaching the weekly cap.
Sanctuary
Sanctuary system is receiving a major overhaul as well. The new Sanctuary features three Bosses. Players will receive their drops immediately after defeating the first two Bosses, while the final Boss requires them to choose a difficulty level.
Players can enter on Hard Mode, defeat the first two Bosses at that difficulty, and then decide whether to challenge the final Boss on Hard or Normal.
However, the current system only allows players to switch from Hard to Normal, not the other way around. If they cannot defeat the final Boss on Hard, they can lower the difficulty to Normal to avoid failing the run. However, players who enter on Normal cannot upgrade the final encounter to Hard.
Sanctuary will also adopt a point-based Pity System. Each Normal Mode run grants 1 point, while each Hard Mode run grants 2 points. These points can then be exchanged for guaranteed rewards.
This means that players who exclusively run Normal Mode can eventually obtain the same guaranteed rewards as those playing Hard Mode. They will simply need approximately twice as many runs and twice as much time.
This is a more player-friendly progression system. Players can start by farming Normal Mode and accumulating points, then move on to Hard Mode as their equipment improves. Either way, they can eventually obtain Sanctuary rewards.
Consumables and QoL Changes
Consumable durations will be increased from 5 minutes to 10 minutes. Furthermore, dying and reviving will no longer reset or cancel active Consumable effects.
As for Arena, players will be able to obtain dedicated free Consumables for Arena matches. These free items will be available starting from Iron I, meaning players will no longer have to use their own Consumables during Arena matches. This could save a considerable amount of Kinah, making it a highly likely QoL addition for Global version.
On the client side, character statistics will also be added. Players will be able to check various records, including the number of players, Bosses, and monsters they have defeated.
Housing System
Aion 2 Housing System
Housing System will launch on Korean server on November 11. It provides players with their own personal space without granting any combat stat bonuses. As a result, it could also arrive on Global in the near future.
Players can permanently own an island estate for 1,000,000 Kinah without having to compete in land auctions. The interior space measures approximately 90 pyeong.
This is no small amount for players who have just reached the level cap, but it should be manageable for those in the endgame. If you are not quite there yet, you can also find cheap Aion 2 Kinah for sale.
Players will be able to customize floors, walls, pillars, partitions, lighting, and other interior details. Furniture can be crafted, with some materials obtained from Boss drops. None of the furniture provides combat bonuses, and dye customization is also planned for the future.
The changes coming to Aion 2 Korea are well worth keeping an eye on, as many of these features will eventually make their way to Global version. Understanding them in advance will help you prepare for what's coming next.