Path of Exile 2 Full Release on December 11: Shadow Class, Acts 5 and 6

Path of Exile 2 goes free-to-play on December 11, 2026, and Grinding Gear Games used its ExileCon 2026 keynote on November 6 to show what ships with the full release: a new playable class called the Shadow, the last two campaign acts and a new endgame league.

The date itself is not new. GGG published “Path of Exile 2 Fully Releases on December 11!” around gamescom, when it revealed the Duelist at the Opening Night Live show in Cologne. What is new is the content list, and GGG’s full 1.0 breakdown is unusually specific about it. The full release adds Acts 5 and 6 to the campaign, with 24 new areas, 18 new bosses and more than 20 new Champion Rare encounters. The passive skill tree gains hundreds of new stats, jewel sockets move into the clusters, and 40-plus new unique items arrive with more than 70 existing ones revamped.

The Shadow is the new class, and it is built around staying out of sight: daggers, traps and shades, plus a Stealth mechanic where monsters cannot see you until you are close. GGG says that works differently from any stealth system in the game so far. On launch the Shadow carries two Ascendancy classes, the Assassin and the Infiltrator. The Duelist, the class GGG showed in August, gets his own Ascendancies at 1.0, the Knight and the Master-at-Arms.

Endgame changes more than the campaign does. The new Conquerors of Wraeclast Challenge League puts you in charge of Varek’s mercenaries, with an endgame storyline about the ancient Blood Lord. There are more than 70 new points of interest, objectives such as recruiting troops, capturing castles and reforging gear, three factions with their own fortresses, and a real-time system for taking castles off other players’ factions. GGG also rebalanced support gems and reworked several Ascendancy classes.

On platforms, Path of Exile 2 is on PC and console. GGG’s own registration FAQ names Steam, Epic, PlayStation and Xbox as the eligible platforms, and console early access is a paid purchase: the PlayStation Store still sells a $29.99 Founder’s Pack for Early Access.

One hour is still missing. GGG has published December 11 in Pacific time, but no start time, and the Steam store page still shows the December 6, 2024 early access date. December 11 is on our release calendar, without a start time.

One thing is worth doing before the date. GGG is handing out cosmetic rewards for registration milestones at pathofexile2.com/register. Every account that registers gets at least one microtransaction code by email once the game launches, and five if the community unlocks all four registration milestones. The codes are exclusive to the promotion and will not be sold in the store.

The same keynote also detailed Path of Exile: Covens of Umbra, a free Path of Exile 1 expansion with a new challenge league, fundamental changes to the endgame and new unique items, out on November 13 (PST).

Two years of early access end with a free launch, and that will change who shows up on day one, because nobody has to buy an early access copy to see any of it. The December build is the first with the whole six-act campaign and the first with a class built around staying unseen. The league decides whether early access players stay, since commanding an army and taking castles off other players’ factions is a different endgame from clearing maps.

Correction (November 8, 2026): We originally said registration gives two cosmetic effects; GGG says at least one, and five if the community unlocks all four milestones.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report