The biggest update since Path of Exile 2's early access launch is coming next week, bringing a new class and a bunch of endgame changes

Grinding Gear Games has announced the Dawn of the Hunt update for Path of Exile 2. It launches on April 4, and it's a big one: the first major content drop to hit the early access ARPG.

The headline feature here is a new class—the Huntress—but GGG has also got plenty of new toys for every character to enjoy. New ascendancy options, new skills, new support gems and new uniques—in all, it should result in a pretty major shakeup to buildcrafting.

In addition, we're getting some new features for the endgame, including new map types, new mechanics and a bunch of new crafting systems and ways to hone your loot drops. And towers—one of the more contentious elements of the endgame grind—are getting a nice overhaul that should make it a lot easier to prep maps and actually play the game.

Crucially, while there is what effectively amounts to a new league mechanic being added to endgame, the existing leagues will all remain and have access to all of the new stuff. However, new leagues are also being created, letting you start over in a fresh economy if you'd prefer.

There's a lot to cover, so here's a breakdown of all the big new features planned for Dawn of the Hunt, starting with the new character.

The Huntress

The Huntress is a spear-wielding fighter designed to be a hybrid ranged and melee class. But let's not bury the lede on this one: the Huntress can tame beasts she fights out in the world and use one as a companion. And that beast will keep any mods that it had while you were fighting it. This is cool and rad, but the rest of the Huntress kit sounds pretty satisfying too—a bunch of skills designed around its hybrid nature, with bonuses for engaging and disengaging in combat

For example, her first skill—Whirling Slash—creates a whirlwind around you that blinds enemies in melee range. Leave the whirlwind, and it will explode, damaging everything inside it. Using multiple Whirling Slashes expands the whirlwind, and creates a bigger explosion when you leave.

At range, your spear can summon tornadoes that travel forward—hitting enemies and bouncing off walls. And you can spawn multiple tornadoes if you use the skill inside of a Whirling Slash whirlwind. These effects can also be imbued with any elemental types on the ground. Use a Whirling Slash in a patch of fire, for instance, and you'll add fire to the explosion, and shoot fire tornadoes at your foes.

While that's not quite enough to make me happy when I get an endgame map with the burning ground modifier, the Huntress can also generate those effects herself—spending frenzy charges to throw elemental spears that will explode and spread the effect across the ground.

Those frenzy charges can be earned through the Huntresses favoured off-hand item, the buckler. You can parry incoming attacks, stunning your foe and then following up with a number of counterattack options. If you pair a parry with the Disengage skill, for instance, you'll jump backwards while exploding your enemy, gaining a frenzy charge in the process.

It sounds like there's a lot of nice, synergistic options, basically. It's not all wind effects, either. GGG also shows off a couple of bleed skills, as well as some more elemental options. The studio's claim is that, by endgame, your Huntress will be "slinging hundreds of insanely powerful spears, sending forth spirit animals and summoning the might of Solaris from the sky".

New Ascendancies

Naturally the Huntress will get a couple of ascendancy subclass options to further define and specialise your build, but Dawn of the Hunt is also adding three additional ascendancies, one each for the Warrior, Mercenary and Witch.

Ritualist (Huntress)

This one is themed around plagues and animal sacrifices—for instance, the Corrupted Lifeforce skill causes enemies around you to grow blood boils that burst when they're killed, spreading to enemies around them. There's also the Ritual Sacrifice skill, which you can use on the corpses of rare enemies to temporarily gain one of their modifiers.

Also: you can wear an extra ring. It goes on the finger you wear as a necklace, naturally, and can be further buffed with Mystic Attunement, which gives a 25% increased bonuses to your equipped rings and amulet.

Amazon (Huntress)

This one is a more martial themed ascendancy, designed around making the most out of your spear skills. It has options like Predatory Instinct, which reveals weak spots on an enemy's health bar—causing them to take more damage. There's also Critical Strike, which turns your excess accuracy into critical strike chance. There's a lot of elemental synergy here too, including a skill that leeches health from elemental damage. And there's the Azmeri Brew perk, which lets you recover both life and mana from either flask.

Smith of Kitava (Warrior)

Blacksmithing on the battlefield? It's now more likely than you'd think. Smiths gain a skill that lets them plop an anvil on the ground and enhance their weapon to cause fiery explosions. Also through the power of blacksmithing, you'll be able to summon an animated copy of your weapon that will float alongside you, aiding you in the fight.

The most interesting aspect of this ascendancy though is on the armour side. If you take the free Smith's Masterwork node, you'll be unable to equip any body armour that contains mods—ie, you'll be restricted to normal armour only. But, you'll gain access to new notable passive nodes that enhance that armour, effectively letting you craft your own armour mods. The Padded Plates node, for instance, gives +75% to cold resistance.

Tactician (Mercenary)

There's a couple of neat co-op options for Tactician players—including the Whoever Pays Best notable, which lets you place multiple banners at once, and the Watch How I Do It skill, which grants 25% of your main-hand weapon's damage to allies as bonus attack damage.

But this ascendancy also has some crowd control and damage options. You can buff it so that all attacks pin enemies, and further so that all pinned enemies are unable to perform actions as well as move. And you can command an army of off-screen archers to carpet bomb the screen with arrows. Seems useful.

Lich (Witch)

The Lich can create a phylactery—a special socket in their ascendancy tree that gives a 100% bonus to any jewel placed in it. The downside is that, when you run out of energy shield, your mana costs will increase by 50%. That aside, the Lich is all about chaos magic—able to imbue herself and allies with extra chaos damage, and cause cursed enemies to trigger chaos-flavoured explosions when they die. And through the Dominion over Flesh notable, you'll be able to apply an additional curse.

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Skills, support gems and uniques

In addition to the 20 skills releasing for the Huntress, two more skills are also being added in Dawn of the Hunt:

• Raise Spectre: This one lets you trap the soul of "almost any monster in the game", letting you summon them from the skill panel at the cost of spirit. More powerful monsters will require more spirit to summon, meaning you'll be able to raise a small horde of weaker monsters or a smaller group of more powerful ones.
• Summon Rhoa: It's a bird pal who can help you in combat, but can also be mounted—letting you move at full speed while shooting bows or throwing spears. The Rhoa has a stagger bar that increases as you're attacked—if it fills, you'll be knocked off and vulnerable.

To further shake up buildcrafting, GGG is also introducing over 100 new support gems used to modify your skills. Here's what the developers showed off in a preview of the update earlier this week:

• Haemocrystals: Instead of causing damage-over-time from bleed attacks, you'll instead generate haemocrystals that will detonate after 1.5 seconds.
• Alignment: Shows a directional arrow when using bow skills that will deal 30% more projectile damage if you fire in the direction indicated.
• Caltrops: Ranged spear attacks drop caltrops along the spear's path, which damages and maims any enemies nearby.
• Enormity: Larger persistent minions, who have more life and deal more damage at the cost of more spirit.
• Unsteady Tempo: Hobble yourself on the first melee attack of a sequence in exchange for boosted critical hit chance for the second attack and increased damage for the third.
• Profanity: Supported skills will consume a corpse on use, dealing 30% more chaos damage.
• Retaliate: Melee attack skills deal up to 40% more attack damage, scaling as your stun bar increases.
• Syzygy: Slam skills become crushing blows against enemies that are either ignited or have their armour fully broken. If these enemies are heavily stunned, they become intimidated.

Dawn of the Hunt will also introduce over 100 unique items—this time with a focus more on mid-to-endgame builds. Again, GGG showed off just a handful of examples in a preview stream, including:

• Chernobog's Pillar (Shield): Gain fire damage based on your block chance.
• The Coming Calamity (Body Armour): Gain all three Herald skills with no spirit cost. Also removes elemental resistances from all enemies near you.
• Waistgate (Belt): Lets you equip life or mana flasks in either slot—essentially letting you run with two life or two mana if you choose.

Azmerian Wisps

This is as close as the Dawn of the Hunt update is getting to a new Path of Exile 2 league mechanic—a new event type that will be found throughout both the campaign and the endgame.

When you approach a wisp that you find on the map, it will flee. While you chase it, any monsters that it passes by will be infused—gaining new bonuses based on the type of wisp. A Wisp of the Great Bear, for instance, will give enemies more health and stun attacks. A Wisp of the Winter Owl will give enemies extra cold damage and energy shield, and cause them to release wind bursts on death. A Wisp of the Wild Cat increases enemy evasion and gives their attacks greater critical chance.

The chase will end when the wisp finds and possesses a rare monster, buffing it and granting it a new ability depending on its type. When defeated, you'll gain rewards based on the number of enemies killed throughout the chase. Those rewards will tie into GGG's stated aim of expanding the number of specialised mods using socketable items such as runes, which will now be available in multiple tiers letting you increase the bonus they offer.

Endgame

GGG says it has two main goals with its endgame changes: Smoothing out progression, and adding more interesting stuff.

On the progression side, one of the big changes is giving players the ability to respawn and reenter a map after a death—at least to a point. With a default waystone, you'll have six total attempts at each map, giving you another chance if you accidentally fall foul of an on-death effect (or patch of burning ground). But the number of attempts you get will decrease with the number of modifiers you add to a waystone. For rare waystones, then, you'll only get the single attempt—just like in the current game.

Although here's a change I'm not too wild about: for those one portal maps, you now only spawn a single portal to enter. That means you can no longer manually exit and reenter—either to sort your inventory or to meet another player to fulfil a trade request.

That's a definite downgrade. Even though in the late-endgame you're really only picking up the most valuable loot—rarely filling your pockets on a map run—it's not great that we now have yet another layer of friction added to the game's already antiquated and onerous trading system.

At least the tower changes are more positive. Currently players are encouraged to prep their maps by visiting all nearby towers, socketing tablets into each to increase the potential rewards by stacking modifiers and mechanics. With the Dawn of the Hunt update, the number of towers is being drastically reduced—there are apparently a third as many towers, but each will be much more potent in its effect.

Tablets will now inherently apply their mechanic to twice as many maps, and you can further increase that number by using a higher tier waystone when you run the tower. At tier 15, GGG says, a single tablet will apply its mechanic to four times as many map nodes as before. And because there are now fewer overlapping towards, there's a new way to stack multiple types of mechanic onto a map. By stacking mods on the waystone used to open a tower map, you'll unlock extra tablet slots—so up to three tablets can be applied to the tower.

Towers should also now be more interesting to run, as they can now also spawn with any mechanic—including new unique bosses.

Beyond these big changes—addressing two of the most major complaints about the current endgame—there are plenty of other tweaks coming with the patch. Here's a quick summary of some of the highlights:

• A pass on map modifiers designed to make them more interesting and rewarding.
• A new introduction quest to replace the "run X number of tier Y maps" grind.
• A rework of the corruption map mechanic that lets you create a new type of map, called cleansed.
• Rogue Exiles: enemies that use player skills, items and uniques, and can drop those items when killed.
• Unique strongboxes with more challenging mechanics and better rewards.
• Eight new unique map biomes, with extra Atlas passive points available for beating them.
• A new recombination crafting mechanic tied to expeditions that lets you merge two of the same item in an attempt to get their best mods on a single new item.
• Unique tablets, including one that lets you run any map within its radius, regardless of node connections.
• An expanded Atlas tree.

Naturally there'll also be a pretty hefty balance patch to existing skills. In all, Dawn of the Hunt is going to feel like a major refresh of the game, and hopefully a big step in the right direction for its admittedly undercooked endgame. After burning out on the grind myself, I'm excited to have a new reason to jump in and roll a new character—and to finish up gearing my now neglected endgame Deadeye. The update arrives next week, on April 4.