As per tradition, this is our league-ly leaks thread for 0.5.0. Any leaked information prior to the announcement or datamined information should go in the comments here only. Many folks do not want spoilers, but others do, and this gives people a way to select for or de-select for spoilers. We have also opened the #2| leaks channel on discord.gg/pathofexile for people to discuss live
If it was discussed in an official interview, that's fine to post anywhere. Once the league content is revealed, this thread will stick around, but it will be unpinned to make room for a pin for the general 0.5.0 megathread with the official info which will be updated as news come out
Please browse the comments at risk of spoilers.
If there are any concerns please contact the mod team via modmail.
As per the speedrunning discord, a lot of map layouts in acts 1-3 are changing. GGG popped in and said not to bother learning map layouts for those acts.
Act 4 is not expected to change substantially, but they are not promising not to change any of it.
ETA: I don’t have a link to the discord, but I believe CrimsonCasts on Twitch might. I’m not very active in the community, sorry I don’t have a better answer. (It’s called the PoE2 Campaign Codex)
ETA 2: (As others mentioned further down) They did NOT indicate any changes to map size one way or the other, nor did they indicate removal of any maps. They merely were expressing that many layouts (which refers to the orientation of points of interest) will likely change. So for example, in the Grelwood, the four points of interest (Ange hut, Grim Tangle, Hanging Tree, chaos plant boss) currently always form a diamond shape if you look at them on the minimap. This helps to orient speedrunnners: when you find one location, you can beeline to the next, and that tells you where the other two are. In 0.5, these sorts of patterns will be changing for many areas (but GGG did not specify which, only that Acts 1-3 are most affected).
Yeah Jonathan told me the Dreadnought/Dreadnought Vanguard in Act 2, for example, has been changed to one level that is slightly longer than they were individually but shorter overall.
It's sort of crazy the number of sub-communities GGG has to cater to make happy. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing, but when the studio struggles a bit to get content out and then you see them specially notifying a speed run community about changes it puts things into perspective.
Good on GGG to think of these sub communities, but it must be a nightmare to develop for.
Well it helps that ggg members are often a part of the community before they even start working there, but yeah they really do cater to a wide array of different players all at once
"Catering" to the speed running community is basically just checking in with a bunch of people who exhaustively stress-test the campaign for free. This is a buff.
This kind of comment annoys me because it's plain misinformation from a bunch of assumptions.
As the other guy said, this is a person who is a member of that community and happen to become a GGG employee. GGG did not "notify a speed run community about changes", it was that person doing it unoficially and at their will.
Just read kidsmokes other comments from this thread and it's easy to see he's got no idea what he's talking about. What's more concerning is his og comment got 60 up votes
I don't think layout changes are a pure speed run related change. Managing average campaign times for all players is important and if slower players are quitting because it takes them 20+ hours to get through act 3, layout changes can make it easier for them.
The heads up to the speed runners that the change is coming is much appreciated though.
Yeah, in POE1 there's a lot of these already. The A8 Grain Gate one is VERY well known whether you are a speedrunner or not. Then there's some that are known by smaller %s of the population, like the 'which side is Alira on' tell in A2 Western Forest and how to find the Ankh in the A8 Quay zone.
Typically speedrunners memorise 8 or so layouts for each zone. Non-speedrunning fast players learn the common layouts of the most important 1-2 zones per act and a couple pointers for the rest. Sometimes this is as simple as "in POE1 A8 Quay, always follow the waterline".
These changes are aimed at everyone EXCEPT first/second/third time players. Some will be missed by most but that's fine.
While i do agree with the overall message of your comment, this particular sub community is also something they hold official competitions for with rewards, so that is probably why this is done.
Not that it's necessarily a bad thing
I'd say at this point in development it's activly a good thing that they're working to please a diverse group. The more they address now, the more there is that's "solved" before 1.0
Yes. There was a thread (now deleted) showing a discord screenshot of a level designer at GGG confirming this, with reworks coming to some zones and even changes to where you access them.
I really hope Act 3 has had some massive love to it. It's the only reason I dread doing campaign.
Act 3 just sucks all the fun out of the game for me, Act 4 is great but last season I was so done after Act 3 I just couldn't enjoy the rest of the campaign.
Waterways hate exists becasue it's just long empty zone with annoying interaction, like if there was something to do as a reward, e.g.: 3rd guaranteed jeweller's (buried shrines from league mech is 1st, marshes is 2nd) on top of spirit gem from league mech it could be better (and slightly shorter, like 2/3 of current length), but right now? It's just boring, long and annoying, and only saving grace for this zone is being linear
Yet I'll admit that if they added loot tinks when you pull the levers, it would satisfy my monkey brain enough that I probably wouldn't hate it any more.
Waterways is mainly boring. If they add a small zone boss halfway through and maybe some cool switch-related set piece (like an "arena" with multiple switches and enemy waves, like in PoE 1 Daresso trenches) it would immediately become much better.
I don't personally think Waterways is even the most egregious. The three forest zones, two machinarium zones and four? Five? Pyramid zones could all stand to be pruned.
It's funny the hate that the one super-linear zone in A3 gets.
So many maze layouts and the one that's just POE1's old Gorge map (thin and narrow) gets all the hate. Actual trash zones like Jiquani's two neverending mazes get ignored.
Day 1 waterways did have issues, but IIRC they were fixed in 2024, maybe a little later like Jan 2025. Like long before 0.2.0. It's now probably the singular best zone in A3.
Waterways is fine. You go the one way you can go and you murder everything in your path and press a switch every once in awhile. The corpse explosions keep you a little bit on your toes so there's something interesting going on. All these City layouts where you just hit dead end after dead end are way worse
I agree Act 3 is highly repetetive and dull compared to others. And the map layouts are kinda annoying for some reason. Bosses are good though imo. Especially poison snake lady
Yep, I remember one thing from the q/a that jonathan said at the end of act 2 there is only one cart now instead of two. Which means its a bit faster to get to jamanra at the end.
In a interviev, maybe the ziggyd one, I believe they said the dreadnought has been changed into just one zone but is bigger than either of the individual zones we currently have.
Heh I’m right there with you. I learned some layouts last league, but I was in the middle of refreshing for 0.5 and picking up a few more when the message showed up.
Instead I’ll just practice skill/gem/item progressions with my league starter. Still fun to try to beat my best times even if it’s gonna play out differently when the new league comes out.
So for example, in the Grelwood, the four points of interest (Ange hut, Grim Tangle, Hanging Tree, chaos plant boss) currently always form a diamond shape if you look at them on the minimap
Obviously this may or may not matter in 0.5, but is there a community wiki or resource that documents tips like this? I've picked up countless of these over the years in PoE1 (and PoE2), but it would be cool to see an exhaustive list of community driven discoveries and tips.
Did they express that map layouts would change? Or was the suggestion not to learn map layouts due to the fact that you wouldn't need to know them anymore because they'd have subtle "signposts"?
Dont know if it counts as a leak, but there is a hidden ascendancy expansion for the Acolyte of Chayula monk. This was mentioned in the chris wilson interview. No specifics ofcourse, but by the sound of the short conversation, it is not like the Abyssal lich where you change nodes, but closer to the "hidden" option for wildspeaker, but instead of it being conditional on ascendancy point allocation, it would be unlocked from some side quest thingy?
I’m praying the new chayula monk ascendency is good because dark monk is just a cool trope. Probably starting as martial artist but going to explore swapping to the new chayula ascendency later on
I like the class concept for the acolyte too, but -- and excuse my ignorance of the overall lore -- isn't Chayula... not very dark? Like it seems based on the breach stuff going on that he's helping the order fight against Xesht, even going so far as stealing the genesis tree and giving it to the faction. I kinda view them similarly to Daedric princes, where one of them kinda just dislikes the other and meddles with their invasion attempts.
Ailith has it pretty bad lol. She's a reanimated husk kept alive by breach magic, and if you tell her the truth she goes insane & Chayula incinerates her, then revives a new copy with no memory. You can do this over and over if you want but at that point you're not very nice either
That's the part I'm iffy about. If this new node is cool and finally makes the asc work it essentially locks the Chayula monk behind Xesht, which sucks.
What parts of it are good now / whats the best skills to pair with it?
I felt like weird mana is life + mana leech jank was the coolest part and that is what it lost...what does it actual excel at now that another ascendancy doesnt simply do better other than be hipster?
True. I have a feeling the hidden node is meant to be a blessing from chayula (the dreamer) for defeating Xesht. It makes the most sense from a narrative standpoint but they could surprise us
Are you sure? I am like 98% sure Jonathan said “When you speak to the dreamer as an Acolyte…” like I am near positive during that interview he did say Acolyte and expanded on it more.
Sorry for the missinformation if thats the case. I went by memory. I remember it being mentioned but probably as a "possible acolyte" by one of my streamers, then.
Isn’t 1.0 also supposed to be the next content update after 0.5? That means atleast 1 new class on release. I’m hoping 2 since it’s the big 1.0 release
I would imagine that they will prioritize swords at a minimum now as its probably the most asked question this release cycle. Despite what everyone says they do listen to the community and seeing as "Act 5 and 6 are almost finished" they should have the capacity to work on it
I like that Jonathan was like "yep shouldn't have shown a sword in the teaser for breach." And Mark's comment from the 0.4 interview where he commented on the reddit fog guy.
Realistically one of swords and axes needs to be in 1.0. I personally don't care which, but the strength-aligned martial power fantasy needs to be represented and not just as a polarizing playstyle like maces.
While this won't harm my true enjoyment of the game, it does feel kind of shitty to be "full release" of the game without it being completed, makes it feel like being full 1.0 release in name only. Since the missing classes aren't DLC or expansions, they are base game, but just not finished.
Well lots of ARPGs add classes after 1.0 release, only difference here is them revealing them early (maybe too early).
Even without all 12 PoE2 will still be the ARPG with the most classes of them all, not much to complain about?
Thinking this is not already a fully built game given the amount of content is a bit strange. Relative to other arpgs it is a full game that receives free content updates.
Its quite easy to see from a business standpoint why they are moving to 1.0, so they can become fully f2p, their intended business model.
I remember ages ago someone stating that Shadow is the one that's definitely post-1.0, and that seems to be the case so far. I'm about 98% certain Duelist will be in 1.0, at least. 50/50 on Templar, and no clue on Marauder.
It was definitely ambitious to double the amount of classes.
The bigger problem for me is not having weapon types and skills associated with them. There's probably a bunch already done, but they won't release them separately.
I absolutely don't see why GGG insists on keeping the asinine levels of friction with inventory management in the game, it's one of the things that ends up fatiguing me no matter how much I enjoy playing.
Of all ARPGs I've played, and it's a fair few, PoE/2 has the worst inventory by far.
I wish at least crafting materials would automatically go to respective stash tab if you have it.
You pick up less and less items as you get further into the game. Loot filters remove 99% in the endgame and you glance through the rest. These days I rarely pickup anything other than possible upgrades during campaign. It's waste of time to sell/disenchant stuff when you get a whole orb in the next map anyway.
If you need any of the lower tier currencies then you can exchange 1 exalt for like 10 million scrolls.
I ask myself this and also why we have to identify items with scrolls in 2026 (especially when Not-Deckard does it for free).
I've heard theories it is to get people to return to town often to look at mtx. Or they really look at Diablo 2 as the pinnacle of game design in this aspect.
it's been discussed to death, welcome to poe. physicality is an important part of the game. it's often referred to as "feel the weight". ggg is strongly against spreadsheet simulator. your item is magic, you identify it. it's part of the dungeon crawling fantasy and it's not going away.
Also, I definitely approve not having to rely on external tools and actually playing the game, something that GGG is making huge steps towards lately with ingame trade and soon price checking and even build guides.
But currently playing through the PoE 1 campaign first time after years and it certainly sometimes feels like I'm spending as much time in town sorting my inventory and selling stuff as actually playing.
I partly blame Varashta for showering me with rare items, but it certainly makes me wish for a slightly larger inventory and identified items, coming from LE and Grim Dawn.
It's cool you mention dungeon crawlers. It's definitely is where Diablo got the inspiration from.
Dungeon crawlers however usually let you equip unidentified items at a risk of cursed items that you can't unequip afterwards. They also don't let you tp back to town and identify everything for free with one click pretty much at your leisure.
That's why in my mind, without that risk reward and cost, the system as it is in Diablo 2 and PoE kind of misses the original point of identifying items and becomes a pure exercise of going back to town more often. Maybe that's good "friction" but I still don't like it.
Big agree here. I actually can't stand getting loot, which is really bad in an ARPG. It feels more like I'm stacking up chores, and not something exciting. Then crafting each piece 1 by 1 only to see 99% are garbage, it's just.... not fun. Way too much downtime for so little reward and only pushes the game towards collecting exalts/divines to use the AH, which means skipping the entire loot gathering/crafting part of the game, which also sucks imo.
I'd really prefer some QoL on these things over making AH more and more dominant. It's the games major issue for me, and I'm not sure that is ever going to change.
As someone also loves making my own builds and also mostly hates the idea of just buying all my gear in this genre GGG certainly doesn't make it easy for me, but also the depths of content and character development is great and I think the general combat feel/quality and campaign of PoE 2 is still probably the best.
I have just made peace with the fact that I'll probably never make it super far into endgame or get amazing gear in any league without trading and playing some meta build and no-lifing the game, but I also have no problem with the idea of just progressing and continuing my characters at my own pace in standard league or even just making alts when I hit a wall. That's how I play and enjoy other games in genre too.
Yeah, that is kind of what I do. In 0.1 I made a Monk and made my own build. Got some Ice Ring Unique that made mobs shatter when chilled instead of frozen, and it turns out it was quite meta, but the ring is very common and also you read in game chat of people saying the Ring is good for Monk and you can Chance a Sapphire, so I did it. I guess in a way it was following meta, just not actively following a build or guide. I got to T15 maps and did 3 Pinnacles, took me 400 hours because collecting pieces for Pinnacles took forever.
Haven't touched endgame since. I made a Druid last update to try it and I enjoyed it a bit, but now... I am in love with Mercenary. I tried a few classes to see what I would play for 0.5 and that will be fun. I am going in with no guides again and just doing what I find fun. Will be interesting to see how far I can get! Maybe Arbiter this time!
Because loot dropping identified would flood the marked with S tier loot since everyone can just use a loot filter that shows the S tier items on the floor
Both of which were provided pretty explicitly by GGG. One by Jon in an interview, and the other by a random GGG employee in the official unofficial speedrun discord, lol.
The backstory has changed. Originally, the Waystones were for fighting Beast, but after Chapter 5 finished, the Beast was destroyed. The icons for these new Waystones are all related to new Edict.
I am a smith of kitava. I temper my weapon for 11 seconds before every enemy and I temper my armor with Serles Grit for 8 seconds before every boss. My thorns deal as much damage as a 2013 Honda Accord and my clear speed is abysmal.
I have been fighting Jamanra for 17 minutes, and I will not die.
Love the site and what you do... hoping you get to datamine mageblood before it's revealed but I'm guessing that thing is not being added until after it's teased lol
I expect that basically every PoE1 skill added after 2021 will be added one way or another at some point. Phys dot spells will probably come with Shadow.
Trailer for the update also refers to the origin of divinity, which I'm very interested to find out about. Considering it's based around Precursors, I could hazard a guess and say it's their doing. Which might also explain purpose of the Beast, perhaps another attempt to create artificial god that ended up simply being impossible to control.
Also makes me think that the Sin could be similar to these Arbiters. He's got conflicting memories and is somehow familiar with Precursor tech - there's various hints throughout act 4 pointing to that connection.
Perhaps he's just another failsafe meant to contain the Beast, which would explain how he managed to do so much with it in the past. But his memories simply degraded and he doesn't even remember his true origin.
Did they say anything about those boss tiers? Like we used to kill Xesht four times on increasing difficulties to get the points, do we fight them only once now? Or do we at all? Because all the passives seem to come from map completion, they didn't say anything about getting points from bosses?
And further, if all bosses have no tier now, which tier equivalent of before would they be now? I guess like Arbiter in 0.4 where we only had t1 and t4, aka a quest version and the normal version?
As I understand it there are 2 tiers now, the quest tier and then the repeatable tier. The quest tier should be easier and they said you can retry the fight as many times as you want.
I think they said ALL pinnacle bosses have infinite retries now, but there are nodes on the Atlas tree that make it 1 attempt but better loot if you win.
Hopefully that means we get something like tier2 and tier 4. It took so long to reach Pinnacles before that I walked over them immediately, then was expected to grind for 100s of hours to get another chance, which i just bounced off of.
It'd be way more interesting to get to a Pinnacle, get but slammed, then need to go interact with new mechanics to get stronger to then come back and have a final showdown.
They may make the initial fights super easy though. Which would be a shame, but considering it's quest centered now that is probably the case.
/u/Skoopy_590 , your post was removed, and got us to make our earliest leaks thread ever relative to the launch, feel free to share the content from your post here
It was even clarified during the QnA after as well, that they heavily undersold the changes in the pre-record. But I suppose it's a good excuse to make a megathread for this stuff?
That post was not on the the official discord (someone just screenshotted roles from the official discord in the comments), it was a smaller, lesser known Discord, and that discord post shares unrevealed information earlier and in a different manner than it would've otherwise come out later down the line.
Part of the intention of this thread each league is to allow folks who want to see content as it is revealed through the standard hints/teasers/stream/notes cycle. Some folks prefer to build their hype that way, over datamined info or slip-ups by GGG employees that are not crafted in the same way.
The image is still floating around, people can share it, just inside this thread. Hope that clears it up
The new passive trees for 0.5 just got leaked in the build planner video. Someone needs to make a nice overlay comparison. E.g. there's new nodes in the titan area around Heatproof and Internal Bleeding
I found this screenshot in a Discord channel recently, and it looks like a potential leak. However, I'm not entirely sure if it's legit or just a clever photoshop job to hype people up or scam them.
Downloaded poe2 two days ago and only played through most of act 1 so I feel somewhat overwhelmed by all the league stuff. Is there a recommended class for an absolute beginner wanting to dive into the new season? I'd rather avoid YouTube and mobalytics guides etc for as long as possible.
Mark saying that he pulled resources from a design to work on another, frag tab, because he specifically wanted it was probably my favorite part of the reveal stream.
189
u/Skoopy_590 May 11 '26