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Discover everything you need to know about the 10 major changes in Path of Exile 2: Dawn of the Hunt and how they can affect your gameplay.
Dawn of the Hunt is the first ever update of Path of Exiles that has shaken the world for most players. 7 New Endgame Maps, Tower & Tablet Improvements, Unique tablets, 6 Portal systems reintroduced, Atlas Passive Tree Revamp, and Cleanse the Corruption are the endgame improvements introduced. This update brings some major changes in the game, like Skill Gems and Support Gems get nerfed or buffed. Apart from these new additions and changes, there are some other changes that players need to know before jumping in.
The game now has Reliquary Keys from the Early Access Supporter Packs. The game now has Reliquary Keys from the Early Access Supporter Packs. Cleansed enemies can drop Fracturing Orbs. It’s worth mentioning that the Fractured Modifier cannot be changed by any means. The developers have revamped the Atlas Passive Tree. Now, you can explore new nodes along with unique options. You gain equipment by defeating the exiles. You also gain the opportunity to earn unique items. In this guide, we’ll discuss 10 major changes in Dawn of the Hunt that change the gameplay mechanics and builds. s
10 Major Changes in Path of Exile 2: Dawn of the Hunt
Here are the top 10 major changes in POE 2: Dawn of the Hunt.
- Map Portals and Deaths- The amount of portals decreases, but the map gets modifiers.
- Map Completion and Progression- Added more unique maps and unique loot, and changed the tower system.
- Corrupted Areas- Clear that map and end up fighting one of the corrupted bosses.
- New Endgame and New League Mechanics- Spirit wisps are available on the maps, and each one will have a different impact.
- Atlas Passive Unlocks Changing- You will not get Atlas passives just by completing 10 maps of the current tier.
- Endgame Corruption and Cleansing Maps- Get to the nexus and slay the final rare monster
- Pinnacle Bosses Doable Now- The difficulty of zero bosses for the initial encounters has their life lowered by about half.
- The Huntress (New Class)- A new class was added to the game, along with two ascendancies.
- New Ascendancies- Five new ascendancies are added to the game, and each one offers a unique playstyle.
- Rune Changes- Gets multiple changes, including a tiered system, new types, and enhanced utility.
1) Map Portals and Deaths
You can now enter and exit maps as many times as you want to trade and stash loot. When you return to a map after dying, you cannot go back to the last checkpoint. So, there’s no need to return through an empty map. Death limits are relaxed somewhat; they’re still a thing, but they’re tied to map difficulty. You can begin with your lower-tier maps, and unmoded will have six death-limit. This number goes down as you add more modifiers to the map.\
A high-tier six mod map will have one death. This means that if you’re struggling and dying occasionally, and still want to be able to make progress through your maps. You can stick to running blue or regaled three mods maps. However, you will not get as much loot or progress as much. There are 6 Portals in the maps now. This means that if your character dies, you will not lose progression easily. The number of portals decreases, but the map gets modifiers.
2) Map Completion and Progression
You still need to kill all of the rare enemies to complete basic maps, but thankfully, boss maps now only need the boss to kill; the rares are options. Tower maps undergo a lot of changes. They’ve also reworked the tower system completely, making this one of the best changes they could have made. Not only have they added more unique maps and unique loot, but they’ve also changed the tower system. These pieces can have additional suffixes or additional prefixes depending on how they roll. Eight new maps come with unique mechanics and challenges. The number of Towers is reduced, but each one is extremely powerful.
Use the tablets to affect the area twice, as each tower consumes three tablets at once. These changes simply make your progression very smooth and more satisfying. Use the new uniques to craft new builds. The 100 new Support Gems and 20 Runes can customize your skills and gear to modify your play style. The Ascendancy class in Path of Exile 2 becomes available in the 2nd Act, helping you to create some powerful and unique builds. Tower maps are still just based on activating the tower, so you don’t have to hunt down every rare in the map. The final rare monster of a map now also has a loot slot for a guaranteed map at endgame progression. The last rare monster of every map is going to drop a map. This is coupled with no maps dropping below your current tier.
3) Corrupted Areas
You can jump into a lot of these different maps just like you normally would. However, there are corrupted areas that you’re going to need to cleanse. These corrupted areas have more and different enemies than we’ve seen in the past. You’re going to go in and fight them. Once you’ve cleared this and you’ve made your way to the corrupted nexus, you need to clear that map and end up fighting one of the corrupted bosses. These are the bosses that you may have encountered while you were mapping.
They were essentially a random spawn during these corrupted levels. Now, there’s going to be kind of this endgame thing where we go, clear the nexus, and fight the boss. This is how we can unlock our Atlas points instead of just randomly clearing tier five and tier 7 maps. Not only will this clear the corruption, but it will then convert it into a cleansed area with even more enemies, new bosses, and unique crafting items. The developers have completely overhauled it, and it looks so good.
4) New Endgame and New League Mechanics
There will be spirit wisps on the maps. Each one will have a different impact. You will follow this spirit, and it’s going to empower enemies along its path till it finds its target. Once it gets to the end of the path, it will empower a rare enemy, and it’ll make them even stronger and give them a special ability. The loot that you get from this is going to be unique ruins that you can slot into your gear that have special effects. Each spirit has a different set that is available. There’s also a unique map that has multiple wisps on it, which will be pretty darn cool. However, they also revealed that when you do unique maps, it will help give you more map points.
This is good because they have expanded the Atlas quite a bit. As for the Atlas, there are multiple new maps with new bosses, and it looks fantastic. We’re talking unique mechanics with multiple waves of bosses and new items. This is a complete overhaul of the endgame as we know it. It will be a similar system where you can go to the different towers and explore. However, they have changed things in a way that I think everyone is going to like. GGG wants maps to feel more interesting and have more league mechanics in them. So, naturally, they should have more at base.
5) Atlas Passive Unlocks Changing
Now, you will not get Atlas passives just by completing 10 maps of the current tier. It will be tied to completing a corrupted nexus in areas of corruption on the Atlas map. You want to specifically hunt down those corrupted areas and then cleanse those nexuses inside of them. You are now able to unlock extra passives, and the Atlas passive is now expanded. You can check what the new nodes are by completing the unique maps, so each of the unique maps will get you one passive. The are obvious icons to distinguish them and visual effects on the Atlas.
6) Endgame Corruption and Cleansing Maps
Corruption is a lot more important overall, in addition to getting those passives. Your goal for each corrupted area is to get to the nexus and slay the final rare monster. This allows you to summon a corrupted boss to defeat to cleanse that map and all of the corrupted maps in that specific area. So, you get your passive points, and then all of those other maps then become cleansed maps. Cleansed monsters in cleansed maps apparently drop no gear. You only gain currency and more waystones and tablets.
The cleansed bosses don’t have unique drops either, but they do drop fracturing orbs for crafting. This is huge for crafting, allowing you to do things like Chaos Orb, while keeping that modifier that’s locked in safe. Conversely, the corrupted map bosses that will be spawning as you kill the corrupted rare have uniques. The corrupted maps are what you’re going to be getting more gear drops.
7) Pinnacle Bosses Doable Now
Pinnacle Bosses are changing as the difficulty of zero bosses for the initial encounters has their life lowered by about half. You should be less scared to give these initial encounters, especially because they’re now also twice as easy to access. All of the unique items that those bosses can drop can now drop from any difficulty, including difficulty zero. It’s just an increased chance for the better ones to drop at higher difficulties. Another side effect of the Pinnacle boss changes is that they found that the final bosses of Trial of Sekhemas and Chaos had way too much life.
8) The Huntress (New Class)
Huntress is the new top-tier class that is added to the game. This class is a dexterity-based class that offers us a new weapon called a Spear. The Ritualist and The Amazon are the two ascendancies of The Huntress. The players of this class use a spear and a buckler, allowing them to deal damage in both melee combat and ranged combat. They can harness energy from the wild, tame beasts, and weave in and out of combat with the help of 20 new Huntress skills. The Huntress can combine many of her skills to create different variations of attacks.
They can even tame defeated beasts and summon them to fight at their side. However, the players can only have 1 active beast at a time. You can stab with the spear and throw it. Not only do they have a parry when using a buckler, but they’ve also got these spinning whirlwind slashes and tornadoes. You specialize in using spears that offer both ranged attacks and melee combat versatility. Ritualist abilities allow for sacrificing enemies to gain power, and Amazon abilities focus on elemental skills and brute force. These features of the Huntress class allow you to increase critical hit capabilities, along with exposing enemy weaknesses.
9) New Ascendancies
Huntress class comes with two new ascendancies that can make your character more powerful if you choose the right one according to your build. Witch, Mercenary, and Warrior also get new Ascendancies that make these classes more powerful. Here are all the ascendancies that come with Dawn of the Hunt in Path of Exile 2.
Amazon (Huntress)
The Amazon is an Ascendancy option for the Huntress class, offering both offensive and defensive capabilities. This Ascendancy allows the players to infuse their attacks with elemental properties based on charge types. Amazon has access to various defensive passives. This is an ideal Ascendancy for players who prefer a hit-and-run playstyle, along with the high mobility and versatility to manage critical strikes and elemental damage.
You can forge your weapon and increase its viability in the middle of battle. This adds explosions to your weapon with a tempered weapon. You can also craft your chest piece using the ascendancy. Your body armor will essentially be a blank slate where you can add different stats on top of it using your ascendancy. This is a unique thing, and it allows for some interesting customization.
Ritualist (Huntress)
The ritualist has some unique abilities from blood boil, which would cause explosions that would give corrupted blood to nearby enemies. However, the big one that I see here is that you can get an extra ring slot. If somehow this pairs with Ingenuity, then this is busted. You’re also able to perform rituals on rare monsters, steal some of their mods, or even sacrifice your own HP to get a random mod that a monster could get.
The players who choose the Ritualist Ascendancy have the ability to corrupt enemies and cause them to erupt and damage closer enemies. However, the effects of Corrupted Blood are not confirmed right now. They can also consume monsters or invoke a ritual to achieve rare enemy monsters’ modifiers. As a result, the Ritualist gains unique effects in combat and uses an enemy’s power against them. You can also gain multiple modifiers, as there’s no limitation on getting only one modifier.
Lich (Witch)
Lich is a brand new Ascendancy for the Witch class, added with the Dawn of the Hunt (Patch 0.2.0) update. It mainly focuses on an offensive playstyle with the ability to curse more enemies. Moreover, while playing Lich, you can also curse the Hexproof enemies, those who are immune to curses. In addition to the increased limit of curse, Lich drastically excels in dealing Chaos damage to enemies. The Rupture of the Soul node allows the enemies to explode (33% chance) when they are near you or your allies. The explosion on enemies deals 25% of their maximum Life as Chaos damage.
Not only is Lich good for mapping and the campaign, but the ability to have an extra Jewel Socket will allow it to scale well into the endgame content. However, the Crystalline Phylactery node only grants the additional Jewel socket for non-Unique. It means you can only have an additional Jewel Socket for the basic Jewel.
Smith of Kitava (Warrior)
Smith of Kitava is a strong ascendancy, especially for players who are looking to become strong early in the game. Due to the Smith’s Masterwork node, players can enhance their normal (white) armor to something extraordinary with all the modifiers. There are 12 exclusive modifiers available for the armor that you can apply if you get the Smith’s Masterwork. Moreover, it does not require any points as it is free to allocate. However, the 12 different modifiers the node offers require points.
As Smith of Kitava mainly focuses on defense to be the strongest tank, the Forged in Flame node gives the best resistance. It alters the maximum resistances, applying your maximum Fire Resistance to both Cold and Lightning Resistances. Activating this node will help you greatly in the fights against the Elite mobs and bosses.
Tactician (Mercenary)
Tactician is a brand-new Ascendancy for the Mercenary Class. It mainly focuses on providing support for the allies and other players for a cooperative play style. Moreover, the nodes of this Ascendancy also provide various bonuses to increase the overall defense for high survivability. Due to its versatility, players can use Tactician as both a defensive and a supporting Ascendancy. Tactician is one of the strong contenders for making a Minion Build, especially with a lot of supporting buffs. The Unleash Hell node is a must one to have if you are going for the Minion build. It grants the Supporting Fire skill, which summons an artillery squad that can fire volleys of arrows at your command. Moreover, this squad scales up with your Strength and Dexterity attributes.
10) Rune Changes
Runes in Path of Exile 2 have faces multiple changes, including a tiered system, new types, and enhanced utility. They evolve with your progress and drop higher tiers as you advance. Attribute Runes are added to address early-game requirement issues. Artificer’s Orbs are more accessible through fixed campaign locations. Runes are not affected by the effects of unique items. Runes are being updated to apply to Wands and Staves. It requires new modifiers for these items. The drop rate of each tier changes as the player progresses, as the lesser, medium, and greater runes exist. The non-removable rune system encourages players to plan their builds.
FAQs About Path of Exile 2: 10 Major Changes in Dawn of the Hunt
Which are the five new Ascendancies in Path of Exile 2?
Ritualist, Amazon, Lich, Smith of Kitava, and Tactician are the five new ascendancies in Path of Exile 2 that come with the Dawn of the Hunt update.
What are the unique changes in Path of Exile 2?
The game now has Reliquary Keys from the Early Access Supporter Packs. The game now has Reliquary Keys from the Early Access Supporter Packs. Cleansed enemies can drop Fracturing Orbs. It’s worth mentioning that the Fractured Modifier cannot be changed by any means. The developers have revamped the Atlas Passive Tree. Now, you can explore new nodes along with unique options. You gain equipment by defeating the exiles.
What are the changes for Towers in Dawn of the Hunt?
The number of towers is reduced, and now we have unique tablets. Tablets are powerful and influence more maps.
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