Rufous

Path of Exile 2 (also known as PoE2) is a sequel to Path of Exile, currently in development by Grinding Gear Games.[1]. It was first announced on November 15, 2019, during ExileCon 2019 as a major "Version 4.0" update to the first game with a new act campaign and major overhauls to core game mechanics and graphics.[2] In ExileCon 2023, it was announced Path of Exile 2 will now be its own separate game that will be supported alongside PoE1. A date for Early Access was announced for June 7, 2024, but was delayed to November 15, 2024, and announced that it will be available for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. It was subsequently delayed to December 6th, 2024 due to issues with database infrastructure.[3]
An official launch date for the game's release has not yet been announced.
Path of Exile 2 will introduce a completely new game, although microtransactions will be shared with both games whenever applicable. The game features a six-Act campaign with twelve classes and major changes to many of the game's core systems. The skill gem system is drastically changed, removing gem sockets from equipment and moving them to active skill gems instead. Combat has received a revamp, which includes a new dodge roll mechanic. Other additions and changes include a major visual rework with physics-based rendering, an overhaul to itemization and crafting, 36 Ascendancy classes, a new passive skill tree, and a brand new endgame system.



System changes
Gameplay mechanics
Dodge roll: Players will have access to a dodge roll at all times, using the spacebar button by default. It has no cooldown or other limitations and can be further modified via the passive tree. The start of the roll animation avoids projectiles and attacks, and can be used to cancel almost any animation except another roll. Rolling covers more initial distance but overall travels the same distance as walking. Roll speed is affected by movement speed. Rolling while transformed will morph you out of the transformation, though there will be ways to prevent that.
Spirit: A new resource called Spirit is added in addition to Life and Mana. Spirit is used to reserve skills with persistent effects like buffs and auras, upkeep permanent minions, and enable trigger meta gems. Spirit can be increased through story boss rewards, modifiers, and sceptres.
Crowd control: Crowd control effects such as freeze and stun now "build up" if not immediately applied, allowing them to affect bosses at a certain threshold. Bosses become resistant to crowd control for a period after it wears off.
Death:

Reservations do not deactivate on death.
Dying in the campaign does not lose experience.
Dying and reviving in the Acts will return you to the start of the zone and respawn monsters.
Bosses are typically preceded by checkpoints. Dying to a boss resets it, preventing corpse rushing.
Logging out or disconnecting gives you the option to return as it was left in or return to town when reconnecting.
Party members that die to a boss will be locked out of the instance, unless they are revived by another party member still in the instance. Dead party members can be revived by channelling over them for a few seconds.
Combat:

Skills now can inherently turn mid-animation, with a wider angle of turning for skills with longer animation times. Additionally, many skills now dynamically move the player forward if targeting far away or have other in-built mobility. Most skills also allow limited movement or turning during the skill animation.
Bow skills can be used while moving, with an inherent movement speed penalty.
The majority of skills now have unique animations. Moreover, each skill has a set of faster animations played when a character reaches certain thresholds of attack or cast speed. These animations cut out portions of the animation's start and end.
Mana cost is spent throughout the skill instead of on use; cancelling the skill or getting stunned will not consume mana. Most skills can be cancelled, with dodge roll forcibly cancelling most skills.
Using a skill with insufficient mana causes a blue visual effect near the character and plays a sound effect.
You can move while using ranged attacks or casting certain spells at reduced speed.
Minions can be commanded manually to move to location, target enemies, or open chests. Some minions have a command skill that can be activated by the player. Permanent minions will revive themselves automatically if no other allied minions have died recently.
Enemy skills no longer have a distinction between attacks and spells. To ensure visual clarity, players won't have to guess what is a spell and what is an attack. As a result, all monster skills are affected by evasion and accuracy, and spell suppression no longer exists.
Stun can now build up towards a Heavy Stun, which causes them to unable to act for a longer period of time. Enemies inflicted with a Heavy Stun will go into a significantly longer stagger animation. The amount of Heavy Stun built up on an enemy is displayed as a bar under the life bar.
Lightning damage can Electrocute enemies. Once the threshold to electrocute an enemy is reached, they will be unable to act for a short time.
Bleeding and Poison bypass energy shield.
Bleed damage now only scales with damage dealt to life by the hit that applied it.
Chaos damage no longer bypasses energy shield, but instead removes twice as much energy shield.
Marks are no longer considered to be curses. As a result, there is no longer a distinction between Hex and Mark curses, and Hex curses are now simply referred to as curses. Marks now also have a limited duration.
Curses have an activation delay before the effect takes place.
Some shields come with the "Raise Shield" skill, which causes your character to hold up the shield to block all incoming attacks from the front. This is limited by a "guard meter" that leaves you stunned when depleted, and this cannot be used to block certain attacks, such as AoE slams or certain boss attacks.
Projectiles are affected by gravity. Projectiles lose vertical height as they travel further, reducing off-screening from projectiles.
Some skills can break armour, reducing it by a flat amount. Some skills also have effects that trigger against targets that have their armour fully broken.
Traps have been completely overhauled and are no longer considered attacks or spells, dealing a separate damage type - "trap damage". Additionally, traps now require a "trap" weapon type, which determines Trap Trigger Delay and Detonation Type (e.g. Proximity (trap playstyle) or Manual (mine playstyle)).
Poison no longer stacks. Units afflicted with poison have a green life bar.
The screen shows a green or red effect when the character becomes poisoned or reaches low life.
Opening a portal to town does not require any Portal ScrollStack Size: 40Creates a portal to townRight click on this item to use it.s. Portals cannot be opened during boss fights.
Larger bosses are more mobile because they can have multiple hitboxes, unlike the limit of 1 in PoE1.
Stats:

Ailment chance is now based on the damage dealt by the hit which applied it. Critical strikes no longer guarantee applying elemental ailments.
Accuracy/chance to hit now is dependent on enemy distance, with melee builds requiring less accuracy than ranged ones.[4]
Charges do not grant inherent bonuses and instead are used to empower skills which spend them. Skills that spend charges cannot grant charges.
Critical strike damage is calculated differently: instead of a Critical Strike Multiplier, critical strike damage is determined by Critical Damage Bonus, which can have increased/decreased and more/less modifiers, as well as flat modifiers. The default Critical Damage Bonus is 100% (200% base damage).
Culling strike kills normal, magic, rare, and unique enemies at 30%, 20%, 10%, and 5% life respectively.
Conversion now only scales by the final damage type, and does not remember converted damage types. (e.g. 100% Physical to Cold no longer scales with Physical).
Energy Shield recharge rate has been decreased to 12.5%/second.
Evasion cannot dodge area of effect/unlockable skills, unless the Acrobatics keystone is allocated.
Leech is simplified without having various caps, simply leeching a percentage of damage dealt, and instead enemies have leech reduction based on monster level.[5]
Light radius modifiers extend the range of the minimap's fog of war.
Attributes provide more stats per point compared to PoE1 and affect how many support gems of their respective colour you can have socketed.
Miscellaneous:

Support for optional WASD movement.
The Hooded One can identify all items in your inventory in town.
Dialogue and quest states will differ if you skip lore from NPCs and interactibles.
The game can be paused while playing solo. You can hover the mouse over enemies and status icons to check their infos while paused.[6] Other players in the party can unpause the game. Opening the passive tree automatically pauses the game.
The amount of flask charges gained by killing a monster depends on "monster effectiveness". Normal monsters only have a small chance to give a flask charge, while larger and higher rarity monsters have a higher chance to give more.
Monsters have a bigger disparity between resistances, encouraging builds to utilize multiple damage types to deal with them.
Areas contain several checkpoints that restore flask charges when activated and act as revive zones. Bosses are almost always preceded by a checkpoint.
There are Wells in towns that restore you to full life and mana and recharge your flasks. It's no longer done automatically upon entering a town.
Vendors now allow items to be bought and sold within the same window.
An in-game glossary can be pulled up to look up information on any underlined keyword.
You can view the changes to stats or tooltip DPS that a node or equipment provides to your character or all your equipped skills by holding ⇧ Shift over it.
The life bar will display the total amount of damage an enemy took within a certain time frame and if your attacks missed.
Crossplay between PC and console versions with progression saved cross-platform.
Support for 2-player local co-op; players can play two characters from one account or one character from separate accounts.
Characters
Character selection screen
The character models have been reworked for higher resolution and dynamic movement. Character models also have a new rigging system that improves the physics of equipment and MTX. Characters now have new dynamic walking/running/sprinting animation based on movement speed.

Classes
Path of Exile 2 has twelve base classes, with each single or hybrid attribute combinations being represented by two classes. Like the first game, each class lean towards a certain playstyle or build archetype, but they can freely mix skills between other classes. Alternate classes share the same starting location in the skill tree, but have different notable passive skills near their starting location and different choice of Ascendancy classes. The Scion will not be playable in Path of Exile 2. 
The available classes are as follows:

Strength: Marauder - axes
Strength: Warrior - maces, hammers
Dexterity: Ranger - bows
Dexterity: Huntress - spears
Intelligence: Witch - minions and occult spells
Intelligence: Sorceress - elemental spells, staves
Str/Dex: Duelist - swords
Str/Dex: Mercenary - crossbows, grenades
Int/Dex: Shadow - daggers and traps
Int/Dex: Monk - unarmed, quarterstaves
Str/Int: Templar - flails, shields
Str/Int: Druid - shapeshift spells, staves
Ascendancies
Each base class has three Ascendancy classes to choose from, resulting in 36 Ascendancy classes. The new ascendancy classes will not be available through the labyrinths, but through various trials found in the campaign. Completing these trials allows the player to choose an Ascendancy class or gain Ascendancy class skill points. The player does not need to complete each type of trial to gain points; they can choose to complete the same type of trial on harder difficulties to earn points instead. These trials are also available in the endgame.
There will be three different trials in the full release:

Trial of the Sekhemas (Act 2): Based on Sanctum. Endgame Sekhema trials can provide radius jewels as rewards.
Trial of the Chaos God (Act 3): Based on Ultimatum. Endgame Chaos trials can provide Soul Cores as rewards, which can be socketed to equipment like Rune.
Unannounced third trial (Act 4)
Passive skill tree
Path of Exile 2 has a Dual Specialization system which enables two different passive skill tree setups that update dynamically when you weapon swap. Shapeshift forms also have a separate specialization. Only a limited amount of passive points can be allocated this way, earned by using quest Skill Books.
Masteries are not found on the new skill tree, but passive skills are numerous than the base game. Passives tend to be less weapon-specific and are more likely to grant generic modifiers. Increased life is far more rarer on the tree, only found on select notables.
The player can choose which attribute points you receive from minor attribute nodes, and can be changed for half the gold for a skill refund.
The nodes near the starting locations for classes can change depending on your character's class. For example, as a Sorceress, the starting area will have more nodes tailored towards Sorceress skills, the Witch will have more Witch-oriented nodes in the same area, and other classes will find a mix of both Sorceress and Witch nodes in that area.

Skills
Most attack skills are now weapon specific, sometimes with added distinction between one and two-handed versions or dual wielding. Dual wielding is more restrictive and most skills will not allow you to use it while wielding two different weapon types. Certain weapon types cannot be dual wielded at all. Unarmed skills are present in this game.
Skills can also be assigned to use a specific or any weapon set, dynamically weapon swapping based on your Dual Specialization settings. Weapon swapping has a slight delay based on the weapon's size.
Skills now have independently selectable advanced settings, such as Attack in Place and targeting options like minion/totem aggression.
Skills do not have to come from a skill gem in order to have support gems socketed. Default Attack and skills granted by items or Ascendancy passives can be socketed with support gems.
Skills granted by ascendancy classes or items will now scale with skill levels based on the character's progression rather than be granted at an arbitrary specific level.[7]
Raise SpectreSpell, MinionLevel: (1-20)Cost: (15-28) ManaCast Time: 0.85 secRequires Level 28Raises a spectral version of a defeated foe as a minion to fight for you in battle.Maximum (1-2) Raised SpectresMinions have +30% to all Elemental Resistances55% more Minion Movement SpeedMinion Movement Speed is CappedMinions have (105-776) additional Accuracy RatingRaised Spectres are Level (28-70)  Additional Effects From 1-20% Quality:  Minions have +(1-20)% to all Elemental ResistancesPlace into an item socket of the right colour to gain this skill. Right click to remove from a socket. is now called "Bind Spectre" and allow you store a monster in the skill. This combined with minion auto-revival removes the need for "spectre banking".
Certain minions can be mounted, allowing you to ride them and attack while moving at faster speeds, but taking heavy damage while mounting will leave your character stunned.
Wand skills like Kinetic BlastAttack, Projectile, AoELevel: (1-20)Cost: (6-9) ManaAttack Speed: 115% of baseAttack Damage: (140-155)% of baseEffectiveness of Added Damage: (140-155)%AoE Radius: 14Requires Level 28Fires a projectile from a Wand that causes a series of area explosions in a secondary radius around its point of impact, each damaging enemies.Kinetic Blast creates 4 additional explosionsIncreases and Reductions to Spell Damage also apply to Attack Damage from this Skill at 200% of their value35% less Area DamageBase explosion radius is 1.4 metresBase secondary radius is 2 metres  Additional Effects From 1-20% Quality:  Kinetic Blast creates (0.05-1) additional explosionsPlace into an item socket of the right colour to gain this skill. Right click to remove from a socket. are spells. Brands have been merged in totem skills.
Transfigured gems will not return in POE 2. Vaal skill gems may return in POE 2 at some point. [8]

Skill gems & sockets
Items no longer contain sockets. Instead, the gem menu contains 9 slots for skill gems or meta gems. 


Meta gems: Meta gems are special types of skill gems that can be supported by both support gems and other skill gems. Meta gems can trigger skills or provide more complex effects.[9] Most trigger meta gems activate the supported gems when you fulfill the condition enough times.
Support gems: Support gems can be socketed into skill and meta gems. Support gems are now designed towards providing added effects and utility rather than raw damage (i.e. Elemental Damage with Attacks SupportAttack, SupportIcon: WLevel: (1-20)Cost & Reservation Multiplier: 130%Requires Level 18Supports attack skills.Supported Attack Skills deal (20-34)% more Elemental Damage  Additional Effects From 1-20% Quality:  (0.5-10)% increased Elemental Damage with Attack SkillsThis is a Support Gem. It does not grant a bonus to your character, but to skills in sockets connected to it. Place into an item socket connected to a socket containing the Skill Gem you wish to augment. Right click to remove from a socket.). Support gems have a colour associated with their attribute, and the number of support gems of each attribute you can have equipped scales with your attribute points (5 attributes per +1 support gem). Support gems add to the skill's attribute requirement rather than having an attribute requirement itself. Furthermore, each character can now socket only one copy of each support gem across all sockets.
Gemcutting: Players can find "Uncut Skill Gems" and "Uncut Support Gems" which can be engraved into a usable gem in the Gemcutting menu. Skills in the Gemcutting menu are categorized by weapon or spell type[10]; any skill that meets the gem level requirement can be crafted on any character.
Gem levels: Gems no longer gain experience from killing monsters, and are instead leveled by using Uncut Gems. Existing skill gems can be upgraded to the Uncut Gem's level. Support gems do not have levels.

Items
Equipment
Weapons and armour have stronger stat and visual identity within their archetypes. Base items are now consistently visually themed around their drop locations in the Acts, and can only be purchased from related themed vendors. Additionally, the name of base-type items are consistent between each attribute combination. Most weapon categories that have generic implicits on all base types no longer do, making room for more interesting implicit modifiers.

Magical weapons, such as Staves, Wands, and Sceptres, do not have attack stats. They grant a skill as an implicit in place of the weapon's default attack.
Sceptres grant base Spirit and roll minion and aura-based modifiers. They can be equipped off-hand with a wand, but can't be dual-wielded.
Quarterstaves replace Warstaves and are completely separate from Staves. Many unarmed skills can be used while wielding a quarterstaff, though they don't scale with the weapon's damage.
Daggers are purely attack themed, and can roll around 15% base critical chance.
Introduced five new equipment types: 

Spears - hybrid melee/ranged attack weapons
Crossbows - Ammo skills (Burst Shot, Rapid Shot, Power Shot) change what types of shot it fires. Can equip attachments in offhand which also grant skill (Oil Grenade Launcher, Flash Grenade Launcher)
Traps - determines throw speed and detonation type for trap skills
Flails - new melee strength/intelligence weapon with medium base crit chance (~10%)
Foci - off-hand equipment that can roll caster modifiers
Sockets: Attack-based weapons and armour can have sockets (2 for 2h weapons and body armour, 1 for everything else). These sockets can be slotted with Runes or other socketable items to add additional modifiers to the item. Socketing an item into an equipment is permanent.
Each base type will have a Unique version at release that closely ties with the base item's visual identity. Iconic POE1 uniques such as Shavronne's WrappingsEnergy Shield: (274-377)Movement Speed: -3%Requires Level 62, 180 Int(3-10)% increased Spell Damage(100-150)% increased Energy Shield10% faster start of Energy Shield Recharge+(30-40)% to Lightning ResistanceReflects 1 to 250 Lightning Damage to Melee AttackersChaos Damage taken does not bypass Energy ShieldShavronne's apparel became ever more extravagantas her body and soul became ever more corrupted. or HeadhunterRequires Level 40+(25-40) to maximum Life+(40-55) to Strength+(40-55) to Dexterity+(50-60) to maximum Life(20-30)% increased Damage with Hits against Rare monstersWhen you Kill a Rare monster, you gain its Modifiers for 60 seconds"A man's soul rules from a cavern of bone, learns andjudges through flesh-born windows. The heart is meat.The head is where the Man is."- Lavianga, Advisor to Kaom will be adapted for POE2 with new modifiers or base types. 
The amount of items that drop in Path of Exile 2 is significantly lower than in the first game, but have better rolls on average to compensate.

Flasks
The flask system has been significantly reworked. Each player can have only one life and mana flask equipped at a time. Utility flasks are not in the game. Instead, players can equip Charms that provide conditionally triggered effects that grant protection against ailments and debuffs. Belts can have modifiers that grant additional charm slots.

Gold
GoldStack Size: 50000Used as Currency in Kingsmarch is a core resource in Path of Exile 2. They are dropped by monsters and various encounters and are picked up automatically within range, like Azurite. Gold cannot be traded with other players and is only used to purchase items and services from NPC vendors (which is intended to be much more important in the campaign than in the first game).
Gold is also used to respec passive points (replacing Orbs of Regret), gamble for a piece of equipment with random rarity (similar to Gwennen), and as a fee for listing items in the currency market. These systems were implemented in Settlers league as an experimental system.

Itemization
Vendors now sell significantly more magic and rare items, and the modifier pools on items have been updated to make relevant stats more common. Items can be either sold for Gold or disenchanted for Transmutation or Alchemy Shards. Rare currency items like Exalted Orbs are much more common in PoE2.
Currency: 


Item rarity: Item Rarity now affects currency drops, making bosses and unique monsters a good source of rare currency.
Many areas contain deterministic item drops to help smooth out gear progression, such as chests dropping a specific tier item of each weapon category.

Campaign
Path of Exile 2's campaign features six Acts and over 100 unique bosses. Defeating optional story Bosses can grant items that grant permanent stat bonuses to your character. You can also receive these upgrades from their post-game counterparts, should you skip them during the campaign.
Some Act areas contain special gimmicks, such as the Ziggurat, which contains an environmental hazard in the form of an artificial sun that deals damage while you're standing in its light.
The campaign is said to be changed throughout leagues. The exact details of the changes are unknown.
Story:
20 years have gone since the death of Kitava. Since his death, society has been slowly rebuilding, but Corruption has once again started to spread throughout Wraeclast. The people whisper of a ghastly living Seed that drives those around it to madness...
Acts:

 SPOILER WARNING ▾
[Expand] ▾

Act 1: The dark forests, bogs, and crypts of Ezomyr.
Act 2: The deserts of the Plains of Vastiri, travelling via Maraketh caravan.
Act 3: Ruins of the Vaal civilization near the flooded city of Utzaal, overgrown by tropical jungle.
Act 4: The port city of Kingsmarch located on the coast of Forsaken Phrecia, and the surrounding Karui Archipelago
Act 5: Unknown
Act 6: Unknown

Endgame
Path of Exile 2 features a new endgame with a new storyline.

The Atlas
PoE2's endgame involves traversing across Wraeclast through an endlessly expanding Atlas. Unlike PoE1, the maps are on the Atlas itself. The player makes progress on the Atlas by completing maps connected to your starting point and completed maps. Maps are opened using Waystones on the Map Device, which can be crafted with affixes the same way as PoE1's maps. Completing a map requires defeating every Rare and Unique monster in the zone. Dying will cause the map to be failed, preventing it from being reopened.
Maps may randomly have additional encounters, indicated by the icons on top of it. The icons will indicate if the map contains a boss or a league mechanic. Not every map will contain a boss. Some areas contain Corruption, making it more difficult. Unique maps, such as Untainted Paradise, and hideouts can be discovered on the Atlas.
There are also Towers scattered throughout the Atlas, which reveal nearby areas when completed. Various endgame mechanics can drop Tablets. They can be placed on a Tower to add more encounters of their respective mechanic and bonuses to surrounding areas.
The Atlas also contains a mysterious Fortress, which houses an endgame pinnacle encounter. They require beating the pinnacle versions of Act bosses on the Atlas in order to gain access.

League mechanics
The King in the Mists and a Ritual in POE 2
Various league mechanics from PoE1 make a return in PoE2. Completing the pinnacle encounters for these mechanics will grant you skill points towards that league's sub-tree.


Delve is also planned to return eventually.
Atlas passive skill tree
The Atlas passive skill tree consists of a main tree for general use, and sub-trees. The sub-trees grant specific bonuses towards boss encounters, league mechanics, and pinnacle content. Points towards the sub-trees are gained by completing the pinnacle content of their respective mechanic. Putting points into a sub-tree will increase the difficulty of the pinnacle content, which are required to unlock more points on the sub-tree. Certain items require a sufficiently high difficulty level for it to drop.

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Trivia
The skill gem screen as seen in ExileCon 2019.
An item with a red/green hybrid socket.
When Path of Exile 2 was first revealed in ExileCon 2019, it was planned to be an update to the first game with a new campaign and overhauled gameplay mechanics. At ExileCon 2023, it was announced that PoE2 will be its own separate game, and that many of the plans from the original preview were altered.

The campaign would have consisted of seven Acts, rather than six.
No new base classes were planned. The game still used the seven classes from the first game. Each class would have received three new Ascendancy classes (one the Scion) for a total of 19 new Ascendancy classes. The PoE2 Ascendancy classes would had first have to be unlocked in PoE2 in order to be used in PoE1.
The following Ascendancies were teased in Exilecon 2019, though they may not be relevant in the current iteration:
Survivalist (Ranger) - Projectile effects, Spell Avoidance
Tactician (Ranger) - Spears, Flare Arrow (meta "arrow rain" skill), ballistas, melee bow attacks
Beastmaster (Ranger) - Shapeshift (Werecat (crit), Bear); Wild Cat Companion (Cheetah, Lion, Panther), Aspect buffs
Arcanist (Witch) - Lightning damage and Energy system
Defiler (Witch)
Reaver (Marauder) - Melee and ally buffer
Unnamed Marauder - Ancestral proxies and Ancestor Totems
While support gems could be socketed to skill gems, skill gems still had to be socketed to equipment.

Both PoE1 and PoE2 would've shared the same endgame system.
References

↑  "https://www.pathofexile2.com/". Official Path of Exile Website. Retrieved July 28, 2023.

↑  "https://www.pathofexile.com/exilecon/one". Official Path of Exile Website. Retrieved November 16, 2019.

↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2zus8ux73s

↑ https://www.reddit.com/r/PathOfExile2/comments/18jpk86/comment/kdnkydn/

↑ https://youtu.be/RskRFwgoQ5g?si=cagQp3G1IhC_COBS&t=5930

↑ https://www.reddit.com/r/PathOfExile2/comments/18kfsu2/staring_at_the_ui_in_an_action_game_gets_you/kdv47rp/

↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVdpOCxRwj4&t=21084

↑ https://youtu.be/nAz85ZwUMko?si=qLLJqimE1ljBS2GI&t=4680

↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVdpOCxRwj4&t=19925

↑ https://youtu.be/PP-P5oNCaB4?si=nsCFPZrxLDSPbs95


External links
Path of Exile 2 official website