While developer Grinding Gear Games had some big announcements about the far future of its ARPG today, standard updates and expansions for the game are continuing ahead of the Path of Exile 2 release date. The 3.9 expansion is officially called Conquerors of the Atlas, and it’s scheduled to hit December 13 – with a new challenge league.
Conquerors of the Atlas will make some notable changes to the Atlas itself. At the start, you’ll only have access to 50 maps, and you’ll have to beat the titular Conquerors to earn Watchstones that’ll socket in and level up the tiers of the local region and open new maps. You’ll find five new endgame bosses to contend with, too.
The Conquerors also have a chance of dropping a Support Gem Plus – each of which is more powerful at level one than its standard level 20 counterpart. A new set of of rare items can drop with one of four new influence types that have unique mod pools. And beyond all that, you can expect a broad bow rework that rebalances all the relevant skills and generally makes the ranged weapons more useful.
You can get more details on the official site, or get a taste of the update in action with the trailer below.
Alongside the 3.9 expansion, a new challenge league called Metamorph is set to land. Here, you’ll use all sorts of horrible alchemy to set new challenges for yourself, and you can use the samples you collected from monsters you’ve defeated to build a custom boss that offers custom rewards.
You can take a closer look at Metamorph League above.
More details on both parts of the update are available on the official site. Path of Exile is expanding in big and small ways over the next few months and years, and it looks like one of the best free PC games is only going to get better from here.