Path of Exile 2 The Third Edict has no new class, yet I'm more excited than ever

Path of Exile 2 The Third Edict marks season three for Grinding Gear Games' opinion-splitting sequel. While its campaign and meaty combat have proved popular, the slower pace and comparatively light endgame to its decade-old predecessor have seen many return to the free-to-play original. The new update doesn't give us another class, which is certainly somewhat disappointing, yet I'm actually more excited for The Third Edict as a result. GGG has focused its attention on some core pieces of the ARPG, and might have finally solved one of the series' longest-standing frustrations in the process.

The new Path of Exile 2 update introduces Act Four of the story, much as we expected, but GGG has actually gone a lot further as it aims to deliver a sequel that can live up to the name of one of the best games like Diablo. Recognizing that the game would now be "far too long" to make you replay it in Cruel difficulty, that second playthrough is now completely gone. Instead, three new 'interlude acts' will carry you from the end of Act Four to the endgame.

Combined, these total to approximately the same size as the fourth chapter, giving us a total of 35 new zones and 24 major boss battles across the second half of the campaign. The interlude acts will be removed once the remainder of the story is complete, but the regions and bosses will be carried over into the endgame. Act Four takes us to Kingsmarch, and features a nonlinear progression where you're free to sail between islands in whatever order you choose. The interludes, meanwhile, will take you back to earlier zones to follow up on the events of the first three acts.

Before we get into the meat of The Third Edict and its accompanying league, Secrets of the Abyssal, I want to address the biggest talking points. The first is a new sprint feature, used by holding the dodge key after a roll. There's no limitation on this and game director Jonathan Rogers says it makes you "faster than basically any monster in the game." The caveat is that if you are hit while running, you'll fall to the ground and be extremely vulnerable, so you can't use it as a way to just dodge past enemy packs - instead you'll want to cancel out of it with a skill to ensure your safety.

The other crucial change is the addition of full, asynchronous trade. A feature that has been requested ever since the first Path of Exile launched more than a decade ago, it's finally here for The Third Edict. "This has been a long time coming," game director Mark Roberts admits. It's being tested in an initial form here, and he says that "there will certainly be some kinks to work out," but notes that the plan is to bring the feature over to PoE 1 once it's fully in shape.

During Act Four, you'll meet trade expert Ange in Kingsmarch, and can invite her to join your hideout. There, you can list items in a new 'Merchant's tab' in your stash with a set price in crafting currency. If a player sees it on PoE 2's trade website, they can click a button to teleport to your hideout and buy it directly, without you ever needing to go back to base. Your shop will even function while you're offline. The buyer also pays a small gold fee on top of the list price, which covers Ange's fees.

As someone who's been playing Path of Exile since the early beta days, I can count the number of items I've sold on one hand. Having to go through the rigmarole of messaging a player, wondering if they'll respond, and waiting for them to finish what they're doing to come back to base is simply too much hassle. This update is therefore entirely transformative, and should make me a lot richer. If you've already bought Premium stash tabs prior to The Third Edict's launch, you can convert some to Merchant's tabs via the PoE website. These will also work in the first game once the system is implemented there in the future.

With those landmark changes addressed, what's actually in The Third Edict? As mentioned, we'll be setting sail from Kingsmarch to explore the surrounding islands in Act Four, with more than 100 new monster types, 16 areas, and a dozen boss fights. From there come the three interlude acts, designed to fill the gap to roughly level 65 and the endgame. First, we'll go back to help rebuild Ogham village, where you'll also have to deal with the corrupted residents from the cursed town of Holten.

Next comes 'The Stolen Barya,' where we're taking part in the Gifting of Water ritual. Unfortunately, the Sel Khari, the guardians of the Sacred Water, have gone missing, so we'll have to track them down and help complete the ritual. Lastly is 'Doryani's Contingency.' The Vaal's iconic Royal Thaumaturge has a plan to reawaken a sealed vault deep in a mountain where willing Vaal were locked away thousands of years ago in an attempt to protect them from the cataclysm. It's time to crack the seal, Fallout-style, and discover what awaits inside.

While we don't get a new addition to the roster of Path of Exile 2 classes, there are some major updates across the board, with new skills and rebalancing for all. To make Evasion feel like a more worthwhile defensive option, a new stat called Deflect has been introduced. This can be gained through nodes and items that grant it as a percentage of your Evasion, with the ability to reach a full 100% activation chance. It works on everything that comes your way, causing you to take 40% less damage when hit.

Speaking of defenses, every enemy attack in the game has now been made blockable except for the specific red-flash unblockable moves. There's some rebalancing to passive block to account for this, but it also has the effect of making parry moves vastly more reliable as you won't run into situations where it suddenly doesn't work. Warrior accuracy has been reworked, and "shouldn't require any accuracy investment in order to hit with close-range attacks now."

Likewise, minions no longer need accuracy - your melee summons will always hit, and the freeform Raise Spectre skill has been made more potent across the board (Rogers says the team was initially "a little afraid" of their potential power). Monks can now play a fully unarmed build with Hollow Palm Technique, which allows you to use quarterstaff skills and scaling while you have no weapons equipped in either hand.

To help encourage more elemental variety, the Sorceress gets Elemental Weakness, which combines all three curses into a single skill. The time on weapon switching has been removed entirely to allow you to rapidly flip between two elements on the fly. There's also a new feature called 'elemental infusions' where certain skills leave a lingering effect you can grab that applies effects to other skills, such as infusing them with cold from a Frost Bomb. If you've played Expedition 33, this reminds me a lot of the way Lune's Stains work.

Crossbows have been "de-clunked." Reloading no longer penalizes movement, and all skills that work while moving have had their slow effect shortened (a change that actually extends beyond crossbows to all classes). Debuffs such as shock and chill now last longer, and skills that benefit from hitting targets affected with them gain bigger bonuses, especially when fighting enemies that are harder to apply statuses to such as bosses. This should make combo skills a lot more viable.

Taking this even further is a major redesign for support gems, which are no longer limited to a single copy of each type. This was supposed to encourage variety, Rogers explains, but ended up actually resulting in players putting all their power into a single ability. It also shut down many potential Path of Exile 2 builds (a poison build could only have Stacking Poison on one skill, for example) and meant many utility moves didn't scale into the endgame well because you needed the likes of Martial Tempo's speed-increasing effect for your main attacks.

To further the late-game scaling potential, support gems now have several tiers that you'll unlock as you progress. The second tier is typically a small increase in power, or reduction of a penalty, but many rank-three options introduce a new aspect, such as an automatic reload when you heavy stun for Double Barrel. On top of this comes 'lineage support gems,' which appear in the endgame and are essentially unique supports with much more distinctive, powerful ways to alter your skills.

There are "around 40" of these lineage supports to discover. Going back to Double Barrel, its lineage equivalent is Ratha's Assault, which changes the skill so that it reloads whenever you dodge roll, but makes doing so the only way to reload. It also ups the number of bolts held. "Some of them are build defining, others are just straight power upgrades," Rogers remarks.

The Path of Exile 2 passive skill tree has been made much more dense (yes, that's possible) with over 150 new notables, approximately 20 per class, along with smaller clusters. This should increase the potential for buildcrafting significantly, with a focus on "thematic" groupings. A lot of the additions appear either on parallel branches to existing paths, or as 'centerpieces' for groups of nodes, so you won't need to travel around more than before. Attribute requirements on gear have also been lowered by 25% across the board, meaning fewer points spent on raw stat nodes.

Crafting has been given an upgrade; Essences now function more like Regal Orbs that apply specific mods to make them more useful. These, along with other materials such as Transmutations, Augmentations, Regals, Exalteds, and Chaos Orbs can now drop higher-rank variants in the late game that guarantee you a higher base tier of modifier when used. This encourages you to spend the lesser ones early, while also making them more useful as you get deeper into the endgame. The Recombinator has a new 'unpredictable' mode that relinquishes modifier control to guarantee that it'll always give you something.

That's it for core-game updates, yet we're still not done. The first proper Path of Exile 2 league is also coming with The Third Edict; "We want to make sure that every time you come back for an expansion, each area feels different with something extra going on," Roberts says. Our new league is The Rise of the Abyssal, which opens up sprawling fissures across many regions across the world. From these pour the eponymous Abyssal, masters of forbidden magic and necromancy that were thought extinct, but have been buried underground.

As you fight monsters near these fissures, they'll gradually seal, leading to the opening of a pit. This unleashes the most dangerous Abyssal enemies, which will have taken on the strength and modifiers of the creatures you just felled. Kill a Rogue Exile in proximity of one, and they'll return as a Lichborn. Manage to take down a boss in the area and you'll be 'rewarded' with a colossal giga-larvae from the depths.

Typically, defeating everything that pours from an Abyssal pit will seal it and present you with a chest full of rewards, but sometimes it will instead become a hole you can jump into. Below, you'll enter the 'Dark Domain,' battling through an undead city filled with even tougher mods and a deadly Lichborn overlord. Clearing this, of course, will grant you some of the best payouts, including lineage supports and other rewards unique to the zone. Fancy slotting gems into your passive tree that alter your skills and transform you into an Abyssal lich yourself?

You'll also earn a new crafting item that applies 'desecrated' modifiers to items. These are initially hidden until you take them to the Well of Souls, a new area found in Act Two that you can chuck your desecrated gear into. This will unveil a choice of three potential modifiers for you to select between. You can also do this for Waystones to enhance your endgame maps further.

Want to take a bigger risk? You'll first need to head to the endgame, where you'll find a new type of underground region called the Ancient Spire. This device is being used by Abyssal commanders "to plunge Wraeclast into a lightless void," and will feature one of four different boss battles. Among their unique rewards, you can find a Finger of the Lich; take this to the Well of Souls, and you'll be given the option to jump in yourself. "The items you threw in came back more powerful, right?" Roberts teases, "So what's the worst that could happen?"

There's also even more new stuff to be found across the Atlas, including a new Rockpools region where you'll fight a mighty Goblin King. The Act Four boss and the final battles of the three interlude acts all qualify to get their own uber variants that can appear in new zones, and act as a bridge to help you prepare for the actual pinnacle encounters. Waystone modifiers have also been reverted to the PoE1 model, with each one adding a positive and negative. "After seeing the feedback, we decided that we actually liked what we had in Path of Exile 1 more," Roberts says.

Path of Exile 2 The Third Edict and its accompanying league, The Rise of the Abyssal, go live on Friday August 29 at 1am PDT / 4pm EDT / 9pm BST / 10pm CEST. I'm certainly sold; the removal of Cruel in favor of a more complete campaign is a bigger draw for me than any single new class could have been, and the introduction of asynchronous trading might be the most welcome change PoE has ever seen.

If you're thinking about starting for the first time, check the Path of Exile 2 system requirements to make sure your rig hits the recommendations. We've also got a guide to all Path of Exile 2 bosses to make sure you don't miss some of its most spectacular fights.

What do you make of PoE 2 The Third Edict? Will you be coming back for the new season, or are you waiting for the full 1.0 release, when it will become a free Steam game? Let us know in the PCGamesN community Discord server, and share your favorite builds with us while you're there.