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Path of Exile 2 Showcases Ranger, Path of Exile: Necropolis Announced

by Alex Fuller · Published March 21, 2024 · Updated March 21, 2024

Grinding Gear Games held a new presentation, where the developer provided new details and reveals for both Path of Exile and the upcoming Path of Exile 2. The first part of the presentation covers the reveal of the ranger class for Path of Exile 2, while the second covers Path of Exile’s latest expansion and Challenge League, Necropolis.

The Ranger is a returning class for Path of Exile 2, but has undergone a variety of enhancements and upgrades for the game and comes with multiple skill sets. The Ranger is designed as a class with high agility and to allow movement while firing a bow. It allows any kind of basic arrow skill to be used while moving, though there is a movement penalty, giving players a lot of freedom in battlefield.

Adding to the class’s mobility are plenty of skills to move around the battlefield. For example, Frost Escape jumps backwards while shooting a freezing arrow at the ground, potentially freezing monsters that were surrounding the player. This can be used in conjunction with Snipe, a skill shot that requires charging and releasing at the right time to deal a critical strike, for a powerful combo. Rangers can also move while using arrow rain skills such as Lightning Rod, with sticks in the ground and does a small AoE. However, they also attract other nearby lightning arcs, causing them to explode, allowing players to unleash multiple Lightning Rods that bounce lightning between them.

In addition to those skills that can handle groups of enemies, players have other skills to assist with more powerful, larger foes. Stormcaller Arrow is a good opening skill that sticks an arrow in an enemy, which calls down a lightning bolt after a short time that has a high chance of causing shock, making them take 30% more damage from any other sources for a time.

Players have numerous ways to customise their character build with Support Gems that can be attached to skills. For example, the Multiple Projectiles gem can be used on Lightning Rod to call down multiple rods at once. Meanwhile, a Chain gem attached to a Lightning Arrow skill lets it hit multiple targets, potentially activating a full set of Lightning Rods in one go. Other options include a Less Duration gem that reduces the delay on Stormcaller Arrow, or Shock Proliferation, which causes the shock statues to jump to nearby foes. There are many other skills and gems that can work together in different ways.

In addition to being mobile, the Ranger also have many ways of slowing enemies down. The class’s poison and plant-based skill set includes Vine Arrow, a skill that creates a small plant where it lands that uses tendrils to slow down and poison any nearby enemies, as well as applying any additional poison it takes to them. Poisonburst Arrow creates pustules on the ground that gain in power and explode as they take in poison, and can be combined with the Gas Cloud Arrow to make them more powerful before they explode. A skill called Plague Bearer has a counter that increases with every foe poisoned, allowing for a big explosion of damage when unleashed.

Path of Exile 2 is in development for PC, Mac, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. A closed beta was planned to begin in June 2024, but Grinding Gear Games announced that it is delaying the beta until later in the year, though an alpha will still be held in June. The game will be completely separate from Path of Exile, though all cosmetic purchases made on either game will be shared between them. Path of Exile 2 will feature a brand new six-act main storyline, said to include 100 distinct environments, 600 monsters, and 100 bosses as well as twelve starting character classes — two classes for each possible combination of Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence — though players will be able to freely adjust their character build and utilise skills from other classes.

Meanwhile, Necropolis is the latest free expansion and Challenge League for Path of Exile. It will release for PC, Mac, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on March 29, 2024. It sees players encountering Undertaker Arimor, who is collecting the spirits of the Eternal Empire for an unknown purpose. These spirits are haunting the monsters of Wraeclast, and by using the Lantern of Arimor, players can illuminate the spirits.

The lantern can be used when entering any new area in the game. It lets players examine the spirits in that area and potentially manipulate them to affect specific monsters, giving players some control over the difficulty of the encounters they will face, as well as providing details on their effects and the abilities of the various monsters in that area. These spirits are always moving, so players can wait a few minutes before looking into the lantern to see different ones available.

Not all spirits are malicious, and instead of haunting monsters the spirits can make them Devoted. These grant rewards such as increased experience, or even spawning an NPC called the Nameless Seer that grants a unique item for defeating all monster packs affected by the spirit. The more haunted monsters defeated in the previous area, the more likely it is that Devoted monsters will appear in the next one.

Other rewards come from collecting corpses of monsters with Unresolved Anguish. These can be taken back to Undertaker Arimor for special treatment, who will store them in the morgue. When ready, players can visit the morgue and bury the monsters in Arimor’s cemetery. His experiments will then coalesce powerful items from the corpses. These work with Necropolis’s crafting system; each corpse has its own crafting effect and any adjacent corpses buried in the cemetery can be exorcised at once to create a single item, applying all their effects to that item. Corpses can also be itemised using empty coffins purchased from Arimor and traded between players.

The release of Necropolis will also bring changes to Path of Exile’s endgame maps. The current most challenging and biggest rewarding content in the game are the Uber Pinnacle bosses. However, Grinding Gear Games has noticed that the economy of the game makes it so running non-uber variants offers less value than selling them as well as a large difficulty gap between Pinnacle and Uber Pinnacle content. To counter this, Keystones giving access to Uber Pinnacles bosses are being removed from the Atlas Tree and replaced by new fragments. These fragments can be found from the new Tier 17 Maps, which add in a new set of bosses, uber monsters, and modifiers.

In addition, players will now be able to have multiple copies of the Atlas Tree and freely swap between them. Up to two extra trees can be unlocked and labelled, giving players the ability to play through the endgame in multiple styles and change between those styles at leisure. The update will also include a variety of improvements and surprises to the game’s campaign, plus new Transfigured Skill Gems, a new Support Gem, and various quality of life improvements.

Path of Exile 2 Ranger Screenshots and Videos