Playing as one of six character classes, players find themselves banished for their past misdeeds to the dark fantasy world of Wraeclast. There, they will encounter hundreds of species of opponents laden with loot and mysterious artifacts as they explore the abandoned continent.

Players will be able to purchase in-game perks, such as extra victory animations, clothing and special effects. To protect the integrity of the game for all players, Grinding Gear Games has decided not to sell abilities or experience points – ensuring a level-playing field for everyone in game.

With an open-ended and flexible skill and item system, randomised items and random dungeons, the game promises three acts of visceral combat gameplay, with additional expansions already planned.

During its latest Path of Exile livestream Grinding Gear Games Co-founder Chris Wilson revealed that Path of Exile: The Forbidden Sanctumwill feature a brand new Challenge League and improvements to Path of Exile's endgame, alongside two new Skill Gems, seven new Vaal Skill Gems, over 15 new Unique Items, significant balance changes to jewels, hexes, monster modifiers, unique weapons and more. This expansion also introduces Ruthless, an optional new way to play Path of Exile with extreme item scarcity.

More information on The Forbidden Sanctum content can be found below:

• New Three-month Challenge League: The Forbidden Sanctum is a roguelike that takes place within Path of Exile. Players will explore an ancient sanctum which is rumored to be hidden beneath the Fellshrine Ruins. Long abandoned, a malevolent presence has taken hold. In each area of Wraeclast they play through, players will have the opportunity to explore one room of the Sanctum as they search for its treasures.
• New Skills and Vaal Gems - Two new skill gems that benefit melee characters have been introduced. These are Volcanic Fissure, a fiery slam skill, and Frozen Legion, a spell that summons a ring of icy melee statues. Many new Vaal Gems have been introduced. Vaal Gems are alternate versions of existing skill gems that come with a periodic and massive power boost.
• Ruthless Mode - An optional new game mode which can be selected during character creation. Ruthless is all about extreme item scarcity, which creates a challenging and brutal way to play Path of Exile.
• New Unique Items - This expansion introduces over fifteen new unique items that can be found within the Sanctum or throughout Wraeclast. These items create new opportunities for specialized character creation.
• Monster Modifiers - The Archnemesis monster modifier system has been replaced with a refined set of modifiers that each only do one thing and say exactly what they do. Their rewards have been updated as a result and are no longer associated with specific modifiers. In general, magic and rare monster combat is now less complex but can still result in a combination of modifiers that get your heart racing.
• Endgame Improvements - Improvements have been made to the Atlas Passive Tree that allow players to invest even further into content they enjoy. Two new Atlas Memories can now also be found, telling the story of Domination and Bestiary.
• Buffed Endgame Unique Weapons - Ten endgame unique weapons have received massive buffs to bring them in line with some of Path of Exile's most iconic items. Naturally, they're now extremely rare.
• Balance Changes - Many balance changes have been made to game areas such as Jewels, Hexes, and Eldritch Altars

Path of Exile expansion, The Forbidden Sanctum will launch December 9 on PC and December 14 for consoles.

The Forbidden Sanctum

The Forbidden Sanctum is an old Templar enclave, long rumored to be hidden beneath the Fellshrine Ruins. Abandoned for a long time, it is now controlled by a malevolent entity. In this league, you'll explore it, find out its secrets, and deal with the evil that lurks there.

The Sanctum Challenge League is a roguelike game, played out one room at a time as you explore Wraeclast and the Atlas in Path of Exile. In every area or map you enter, you can make a choice of which room in the Sanctum you will explore next. On the Sanctum Map, you can see the contents of a few rooms ahead, enabling you to plot a path through its dangerous halls.

And the Sanctum is dangerous. Like most roguelikes, you should not expect to be able to complete it on your first try. Getting to the deeper floors requires experience, knowledge and luck. You should expect that your early attempts will fail, but over time, you'll be able to push yourself farther and farther. As you progress deeper into the Sanctum, you'll find a variety of treasures that will help you eventually fight your way through to the dangers that await you at the end of its four floors.

Every roguelike needs a resource that helps you track how well the run is going. In The Forbidden Sanctum, it is your Resolve, indicated by this bar here. As you explore the Sanctum, your Resolve is threatened by the dangers within. When you lose all of your resolve, your Sanctum run ends. Your level of resolve is maintained between consecutive rooms on your run, but is only shown when you are in the Sanctum itself.

The Resolve mechanic applies equally to all build archetypes. Your resolve is reduced when you are hit by monsters or environmental hazards in the Sanctum, and these telegraphed attacks are not affected by regular Path of Exile defensive mechanics, such as evasion, armor or block. While these attacks do some nominal damage to your regular life, the bulk of their impact is against your Resolve.

This mechanic provides a mechanism for tracking your progress between rooms, where your regular life pool would long ago have been recovered. Another aspect of the Resolve system is that characters who are struggling can be ejected from the Sanctum without having to actually die, avoiding experience loss or hardcore death.

So maintaining a healthy level of Resolve is key as you navigate the Sanctum. And that means making careful choices of what rooms you enter. Let's have a look at some of the things that Sanctum rooms can contain:

Afflicted rooms cause you to gain an affliction when you enter them. Afflictions make your Sanctum run more difficult. For example, reducing your Resolve recovery, causing rewards to become hidden on the Sanctum Map or causing Sanctum rooms to spawn volatile anomalies that follow you. These minor afflictions accumulate as you get deeper and deeper into a run, making it more challenging. Major afflictions exist, and are a big deal. They have significant consequences, such as entirely preventing the recovery of Resolve.

So, a Sanctum run gets harder and harder as you pick up more afflictions. Sounds great. But every Roguelike needs a way for you to gain power throughout your run. In The Forbidden Sanctum, that system is boons.

Boons are beneficial buffs that help you as you progress through the Sanctum. Minor boons make things a little easier, such as slowing down monsters or adding a special shield to your Resolve called Inspiration. Major boons don't come along often, but have large effects such as preventing you from receiving more minor afflictions or recovering your Resolve to 50% the next time you run out.

Due to the vast variety of afflictions and boons, no two runs are the same. Generally speaking, your best Sanctum runs are the ones where the afflictions you choose have little effect on you, and the boons either counteract them or have a large benefit for the strategy you're running.

Some rooms in the Sanctum contain a fountain, which will restore some of your lost Resolve. Others contain Afflicted Fountains, that restore even more resolve… at a cost.

Rooms with a treasure reward contain chests full of the templar Aureus currency, a type of gold coin they used for commerce within their sanctum. You'll also find some Aureus coins from monsters that you kill as you explore. These are picked up automatically like Azurite, are not tradeable, and like your afflictions and boons, are lost when your Sanctum run ends.

Some rooms contain a merchant who accepts your Aureus coins in exchange for boons. Plan your purchases carefully, as you may encounter the merchant again later on with even more expensive boons to purchase.

Occasionally, the sinister powers controlling the Sanctum will present you with the choice of making an Accursed Pact. You are given several Pacts to choose from, and can even opt to take all that are offered! All pacts have a big upside and a big downside, such as exchanging a portion of your maximum Resolve for a random major boon. It's very dangerous to make a Pact, but if you pick the right circumstances, your gamble could pay off.

In addition to rewards that help your progress through the Sanctum, many rooms let you immediately receive Path of Exile currency items, but with a twist. Whenever you're offered some currency items that you can receive right away, you're also offered a more valuable option that will be waiting for you after the boss fight at the end of the current floor of the Sanctum. It's a gamble, because if you fail your run before you reach and defeat the boss, you will not receive the reward you picked. Later on, you're offered the extreme temptation of getting a massive currency reward that is conditional on completing your entire current Sanctum run without failing.

At a specific point in The Forbidden Sanctum's storyline, you'll discover a special altar that Templar Relics can be placed on. These relics directly affect your Sanctum runs and are not lost when a run ends, they persist throughout the league as a permanent source of meta-progression. Acquiring new and better relics is one of the ways you can push farther and farther with each run you try.

Relics cannot be crafted and cannot be traded, as they represent your personal progression through the league. You'll accumulate more than you can use simultaneously, so you'll have options to fine-tune your strategy from run to run. You can store your extra relics in the Relic Locker, a free storage space like the Expedition Locker.

We don't want to spoil important story details, but the end boss of the Forbidden Sanctum can drop unique items from a pool exclusive to this league. Today we'd like to show you a unique amulet called Eternal Damnation. This amulet offers a powerful way to gain additional elemental mitigation, by introducing the concept of elemental damage reduction. Despite the drawback of reducing your maximum resistances, if you have sufficient chaos resistance, this is more than compensated for.

Because of the roguelike nature of The Forbidden Sanctum, defeating the boss of a floor is a difficult achievement and hence rewards a lot of experience. You may fail on the way, so if you do manage it, expect a good experience boost for your achievement.

Another reward you can find is a special type of relic called a Sanctified Relic that has mods that directly affect your character's build. You can only unlock one slot for this type of relic, and while these Relics can't be crafted through conventional means, you may find special reward rooms in the Sanctum that can modify them. These relics exist for this league only, and provide a boost to character power for players who are able to master the Sanctum.

The Sanctum league offers a roguelike experience that tempts you into taking risks, and rewards you if those pay off. There's a lot to explore in the Sanctum, and we can't wait to hear about your experiences next week.

Endgame Improvements

In each expansion leading up to Path of Exile 2's release, we're improving Path of Exile's endgame with new content to explore and improvements to how you customize your endgame experience.

In The Forbidden Sanctum expansion, we're revamping the Atlas Tree, reworking how Eldritch Altars function and are introducing two new Atlas Memories.

Atlas Tree Revamp

The Atlas Tree is generally working really well, but has a few problems we'd like to address. The tree offers you the ability to specialize in killing pinnacle bosses, providing extra rewards when you do so. While this sounds good on paper, it creates a situation where you're incentivized to specialize your tree for regular mapping, save up all your boss fights, then respec fully into boss mode, and then do your saved-up boss fights before speccing back again. Ideally the design of the Atlas tree would let you spec into one build and then just play the game.

We have removed all boss bonuses from the Atlas tree, and have baked some of them into the base properties of the boss fights. For example, you don't need to allocate the Gaze into the Abyss notable that makes the Elder more likely to drop a Watcher's Eye, as he just has that drop chance built in now. The Atlas tree is now focused on allowing you to specialize into content that you encounter in every map.

We also want you to be able to specialize into your favorite leagues more deeply on the Atlas Tree. For each of the ten leagues that the tree lets you disable, we've added a bunch more passive to the tree. These new passives allow you to increase the league's spawn chance to much higher levels than currently possible and juice the league even further than before.

Eldritch Altar Rework

We are making a number of changes to Eldritch Altars that mostly affect their rewards but will also affect gameplay decisions you make involving them.

Some of the key changes include splitting up the Basic Currency, Scarab and Divination Card rewards to be explicit in their description of what reward you'll get. For example, instead of Map Bosses dropping three unknown basic currency items, the Altar specifically says which currency item they'll drop. As part of this change, we've removed some of the lower-value yet quite common currency rewards from the pool, such as Orbs of Augmentation and Orbs of Transmutation.

Speaking of Scarabs, these will be less available from Altars but we've improved their availability elsewhere to offset this. Rusted Scarabs can now drop from the core pool and we've added a vendor recipe that allows you to upgrade your Scarabs (up to Gilded) using the normal 3:1 ratio. You can also perform this action from your Fragment Tab using the new upgrade button.

We have made reward types exclusive to different influences so that you know which influence type to invest in if you want to target-farm a certain reward. To give you a specific example, if you run maps influenced by the Eater of Worlds, you'll see Divine Orbs from the 'Basic Currency Reward' more than twice as often as before.

We've also rebalanced rewards so that choices that affect Boss Drops or Influenced Monster drops are comparably more valuable.

The Wrath of the Cosmos Keystone has been reworked. Previously, it was so rewarding that players felt obligated to use it despite its extreme level of difficulty. It has retained the risk vs. reward element but with the overall intensity toned down.

You can now also get Awakened Gems from defeating Maven-witnessed map bosses. This additional reward helps further balance the expected returns from the various types of influence.

For more detail on these changes, check out the balance manifesto we posted last week, or the upcoming patch notes.

New Atlas Memories

In the Lake of Kalandra expansion, we introduced Atlas Memories. When applied to your Atlas, they unlock a sequence of maps that tell the story of an NPC's past. These stories manifest as specialized encounters that involve new challenges and enticing rewards. In this expansion, we're introducing two new Atlas Memories, describing events related to Bestiary and Domination.

The Bestiary Memory line allows you to capture Harvest monsters as beasts for your menagerie. These Harvest Beasts can be used in nine new beastcrafting recipes.

These recipes cover an array of options. For example, you can remove one of the special modifiers from a Watcher's Eye Jewel and then add another. This can have potent results, but won't affect the life, mana or energy shield modifiers.

You can reroll an Awakened Gem from one type to another.

Another example is that you can also reroll a Synthesis Implicit Modifier. If your item has more than one Synthesis Implicit, it will randomly reroll one of them.

The Domination Atlas Memory thrusts you into a tale of Pantheon Gods that stand watch over their shrines. Like regular Shrines, these are guarded by monsters and emit a buff that empowers the monsters until you claim that buff for yourself. This Atlas Memory introduces a new set of shrines with specialized buffs, guarded by rare monsters that drop tantalizing rewards.

Fracturing Shards and the Fracturing Orb

This expansion introduces a new type of Shard that can drop from Harbingers: Fracturing Shards. When combined together into a full currency item, you get the Fracturing Orb which behaves the same as the Fracturing craft from Harvest. It can be used on any rare item with at least four modifiers. When the orb is applied, it locks one of the modifiers in place so that further crafting efforts do not affect that modifier. Items fractured in this way can only have one fractured modifier.

Previously, this crafting option was gated behind the Oshabi fight in Harvest. Now that it has been re-homed to Harbinger, the Harvest crafting option is no longer available. This means you'll be able to use your Harvest Lifeforce and Oshabi kills on other crafts. Because Fracturing Shards drop from Harbingers, you'll be able to target farm them by speccing into Harbinger content on your Atlas Tree.

New Skills

The Forbidden Sanctum expansion introduces a number of new skill gems. In addition to some new melee vaal skills that we'll discuss later in the livestream, there are two totally new skills that we'd like to unveil today:

Volcanic Fissure is a new fiery Slam skill that can be used with Staves, Maces, Axes and Unarmed attacks. Strike the ground to create a chasm that winds towards your target. This chasm can path around corners before erupting as the fissure gets as close as it can reach. It releases a burst of fiery projectiles that explode on striking the ground. Enemies hit by multiple impacts will take a lot of stacked damage. Use it up close for reliable bursts of damage, or aim far away to damage a larger area.

Frozen Legion is an unusual spell, summoning a ring of icy statues that attack with your own weapon damage. This skill has multiple cooldown stacks, and consumes all cooldown uses at once to summon a statue for each available cooldown. The statues perform a sweeping ice slash, and these sweeps can overlap, resulting in multiple hits against targets close to you. This spell can be used with Staves, Maces and Axes. The skill is particularly powerful with slow, heavy weapons, as while the statues will use your attack speed, you should instead prioritize the spell's own cast time and cooldown.

New Vaal Melee Skills

This expansion also introduces many new Vaal Melee Skills. As you know, equipping a Vaal skill gem grants you both the Vaal and regular version of the skill. As you kill enemies, the gem charges up with their souls, and after a certain number are collected, the Vaal skill can be used once. Most of the new Vaal skills introduced in this expansion are melee skills, and this results in an indirect buff to any melee builds that use one of these skills. Where previously you'd just be using your melee skill to kill enemies, you now get to periodically use a super powered version of the skill.

If you like Flicker Strike, you'll love Vaal Flicker Strike, as it really dials up the concept of letting fate take the wheel. Vaal Flicker strike causes you to flicker dozens of extra times, slashing enemies. During this time, you don't deal any damage to the enemies you slash. You're quite vulnerable due to not leeching or generating fortify stacks. When you finish flickering, if you survived, you'll be rewarded with a single huge hit of damage against each enemy you slashed.

Vaal Cleave is a new Vaal skill that buffs the behavior of its non-Vaal version, in a similar way to how Vaal Reave works. Vaal Cleave triggers two buffs, one when you kill a rare enemy, and one when you kill either a rare or unique enemy. The latter is a strong buff to regular Cleave which you can keep up almost permanently if you're able to kill rare or unique enemies often enough. The bonus for killing a rare enemy is that you get to steal its mods for a time. You can enjoy part of the power of having a Headhunter without actually needing to find one. Overall, Vaal Cleave is a very powerful upgrade to any melee build that could run Cleave. That +2 radius buff looks pretty good after all, right? (Don't hurt me)

We'll showcase the other new Vaal Skills we're introducing over the coming week.

New Unique Items

The Forbidden Sanctum expansion introduces over 15 new unique items, from Sanctum-exclusive uniques to ones that can be found from Path of Exile's pinnacle bosses. I'd like to show you three examples of these, designed by winners of our prior leagues' boss-kill races.

Progenesis is a Unique Amethyst Flask that was designed by Ben and drops from the Uber Maven. It's a defensive flask that grants a mini version of the petrified blood effect, but without requiring you to be on low life. This is a useful tool to prevent you getting one-shot by large amounts of incoming damage in scary situations.

Rational Doctrine is a Unique Jewel that was designed by Rawlings and drops from Uber Venarius. By manipulating your attributes, you can change how this jewel behaves. While the ideal dream outcome is that you manage to get your Strength and Intelligence tied for highest, enabling both of the benefits simultaneously, the jewel is still very powerful if it only grants your choice of permanent consecrated ground or profane ground.

Entropic Devastation is a pair of Unique Gloves that were designed by GucciPradas and drop from the Uber Shaper. Currently, the ways to get spell impale are very limited. These gloves provide the powerful property of causing all of your spells to impale on crit.

Massively Buffed Unique Weapons

Let's talk about unique weapons. Specifically, endgame unique weapons.

In many ways, the weapon is the most iconic and important item on a character, so it's very important that we make them exciting and worthy of their unique status. While some unique weapons have special properties that enable entirely new builds, others are best compared to powerful rare items - as a primary source of your character's damage. We have to be very careful when pitching the power level of these unique weapons. If they're not powerful enough, then they're useless and are ignored. But if they're too powerful, then they discourage entire archetypes of characters from trying to find or craft rare weapons.

Interestingly, the above problem doesn't apply to belts. Despite Mageblood and Headhunter both existing as extremely powerful unique items, people still craft plenty of rare belts. That's because Mageblood and Headhunter are extremely rare and people don't actually expect that they'll reliably get one in a league. Players tend to treat them as luxury upgrades to their build, rather than something they're certain to get.

[Show Soul Taker]
In this expansion, we're promoting ten iconic but underused unique items to the same tier of rarity as Mageblood and Headhunter. We are buffing them a gigantic amount, and are making them incredibly hard to find.

[Show Starforge]
Remember when Starforge used to be an exciting item to find? Well after this change, it certainly is again! It still drops exclusively from The Shaper and the Uber Shaper, but it'll take a lot of runs or a lot of luck to earn it.

[Show Lioneye's Glare]
Over the next week, we'll reveal the other unique weapons that have been massively buffed. We have targeted around ten iconic underused unique weapons, and have generally buffed only their damage stat, but by a lot.

Jewels

We've made a number of changes to Jewels that we covered in a recent balance manifesto, but in case you missed it we want to quickly summarize what the changes are.

In the Forbidden Sanctum expansion, we have made Jewels a better source of ailment mitigation by buffing the values of ailment-focused Jewel modifiers and adding new modifiers that enable mitigation to a wider variety of ailments than before.

We have also removed some ailment mitigation modifiers that were only available on Jewels through corruption because there are now better options through the regular Jewel mod pool.  This also means that other desirable corruption modifiers, like immunity to Corrupting Blood, are more likely to roll.

We want the moment of finding a unique Jewel to be way more exciting than it currently is.
We've added a handful of new very powerful unique Jewels and have removed some old less-interesting ones. An example of one of these new unique Jewels is Firesong, which propagates any modifiers to your ignite mitigation to other elemental ailments. If you're able to substantially reduce the duration of ignites on you, then you can use Firesong to basically shrug off any elemental ailment.

For full information about the other changes to unique jewels, check out the balance manifesto post we made recently.

Curse Balance

We've rebalanced Curses to make them stronger where they matter most, against unique monsters and pinnacle bosses.

We've simplified things by removing the Doom mechanic. As a result, we've made several balance changes and mechanical adjustments to fill the void left by Doom's removal.

We have buffed several Hex-related unique items and reworked unique items that previously interacted with Doom.

To replace the Doomsday keystone passive, we have brought back a version of an iconic curse-related keystone from the past.

We've introduced some powerful new unique items that interact with Hexes, which we'll reveal in the leadup to launch.

For more details on changes to curses, check out the balance manifesto we posted recently or the patch notes that will come out after the livestream concludes.

Monster Mods

When we first created the Archnemesis monster mod system, our goal was to improve Path of Exile's outdated set of monster mods with new and interesting mechanics that have modern game balance. We feel that Archnemesis did introduce a lot of interesting mechanics but it unfortunately also had several of its own problems.

We have replaced Archnemesis with a system that is more similar to the way monster mods worked in the past.

The new monster mods are a lot simpler. They now each do one thing, and very clearly state what they do. Each encounter with a rare monster is now less complex and is easier to understand in the heat of combat, compared to Archnemesis.

You'll still encounter challenging combinations of mods, from time to time, but this emergent synergy will be rarer than it was under Archnemesis. The goal is that combat is interesting and varied with moments that get your heart racing, but without the frustrations of the Archnemesis system.

Let's talk about rewards. Under Archnemesis, it often felt mandatory to bring in a magic find culling character to kill some monsters for you in order to maximize your rewards. In the new system, we have added a significant pool of new rewards to rares, but the reward that is on the monster is hidden (and not associated with a specific mod), so you don't know what kind of rewards you will get until you kill the monster. Rare monsters with more mods are more likely to have these special hidden bonus rewards.

To find out more about other balance changes that are taking place in The Forbidden Sanctum, check out the patch notes which will be available when the livestream ends.

Ruthless

Over the last year or so, some of our senior developers have been tinkering with a more challenging way to play Path of Exile. We've been publicly Alpha testing this mode, known as Ruthless, for the last month, and are planning to make it available to anyone who's interested alongside the launch of The Forbidden Sanctum next week.

Ruthless is an optional additional character flag like hardcore or solo self-found that completely changes how Path of Exile feels to play.

Ruthless is a lot more difficult than regular Path of Exile. But it doesn't achieve this by making the monsters harder to kill, it instead focuses on reducing character power through extreme item scarcity, limited crafting, and many other changes such as support gems being drop-only.

We've posted an article about the philosophy and rules of Ruthless on pathofexile.com/ruthless. We plan to release this mode alongside the Forbidden Sanctum expansion in a week. In addition to being a character flag like hardcore or solo self-found, it's also available as a modifier for private leagues. To be clear, The Forbidden Sanctum league content can be played in Ruthless, with appropriately balanced rewards.

Ruthless is still very experimental during 3.20 and we won't be afraid to make mid-league balance changes to it during this experimental phase.

Ruthless is not for everyone, but so far it has found a supportive and growing group of players who enjoy the additional challenge that it brings. If it sounds like something you're interested in, then try it out next time you're looking for a new way to enjoy Path of Exile.

Quality of Life Improvements This expansion also contains a number of small quality of life improvements. Some examples are that: Divine Vessels can now be used by right clicking them, rather than taking them to Sin. On the player overhead life bar, the Energy Shield bar is split into a separate bar. You can now right click an itemized Temple of Atzoatl to see its layout. And most importantly, Beastcrafting recipes that add mods to flasks now actually say what the mods do. We'll post more information about these and other quality of life improvements in the leadup to release

Key Features:

• Download and play for free, but never pay-to-win
• A dark and deep action RPG
• Unlimited character combinations with the game's gigantic skill tree
• Combine skill gems to create unique combat strategies
• Explore a dark and gritty world rendered from a fixed 3D perspective
• Explore randomly generated levels for nearly infinite replayability
• Craft weapons, magic items, and even end-game maps to become more powerful
• Cooperate or compete with thousands of other Exiles in a persistent online world
• Ascend online ladders in every game mode

Path Of Exile is available for PS4, Xbox One and PC.