At present, Path of Exile’s 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas expansion has entered the mid-term stage, and Path of Exile 2’s Dawn of the Hunt league has been launched for more than 3 months.

In this case, these two games with similar core mechanisms and game content will be compared to many players. So in this guide, we will compile some of the current player comments and feedback about POE 1 and POE 2 across several gaming communities and social media.

Here we will compare you specifically to the aspects of campaign content, endgame content, and players’ demands for each game. Not only that, we will also predict which of the two games will go further and have more advantages in subsequent development.

Campaign Content

The first thing to introduce is the comparison between the main campaigns of Path of Exile 3.26 and Path of Exile 2, which is also one of the most important parts of every MMORPG to attract players. First of all, the results are said that the original has received more positive reviews.

At this stage, Path of Exile 1 includes six acts of base game content, while the Early Access version of Path of Exile 2 only includes three acts of base content. Not only that, the original game has a lot of high-quality and interesting league mechanisms in these exploration contents, while the sequel can only experience some mechanisms transplanted from the original game in the endgame content.

Although this cannot be entirely blamed on the developers, after all, POE 2 was released for a short time and not enough league mechanisms have been retained, but the new mechanisms introduced in Dawn of the Hunt league in the sequel, such as Rogue Exiles and Asarian Wisps, are not satisfactory.

The original intention of the developer to add Rogue Exiles to the game is to allow players to add more PVP elements to this game, which has more PVE combat modes, and adjust their strategies according to the corresponding combat methods.

However, what all players did not expect was that although these new enemies were easy to defeat, the loot they contained, such as the number of Uniques and POE 2 Currency they were equipped with, was very small, and the quality was not very good, which made many players complain.

Back to Path of Exile, Mercenaries of Trarthus league mechanic added to the currently active Secrets of the Atlas expansion also provides players with a mercenary enemy that is very similar to the character they control, but with a completely different reputation.

Not only does it provide players with the option of 0.5 allies to fight alongside them, but also because the combat moves and item options equipped in these mercenaries are closer to regular characters, even the more challenging Infamous Mercenaries, which have more commons with high-tier players.

In this case, POE 3.26 has received unanimous praise as soon as it was launched, even though the developers have made some nerfs to many mercenaries in several supplementary patches after the release of the 3.26 patch, because this mechanism allows players who are accustomed to exploring alone to have more build possibilities.

Endgame Content

In this comparison dimension, Path of Exile 1 can be said to be a complete winner. Since the release of this sequel that has been promoted for nearly 3 years on December 6 last year, players have complained seriously about the lack of depth of its endgame content.

In this process, players can only blindly follow the established process of entering the map, running the map, and collecting loot. To give a very simple example, Path of Exile 2’s endgame is like a puddle of water with a huge surface area but only a metre deep.

You may think it is worth exploring when you look at it from the sky, and the various systems contained in it are attracting you. But when you really step into it, you will find that there is not much you can do, and it cannot even make a player with a medium game level feel highly challenging.

In the endgame content of the previous game, you are like entering the Mariana Trench, with many explorable parts and more POE Currency. And there is no established process here, you can explore whatever you want. According to player feedback, POE 1 has an endgame depth that is approximately three times that of the sequel.

However, it is worth celebrating that the developers have clearly recognized this flaw and have announced that they will spend the entire second half of the year adjusting and modifying the problem of insufficient depth in POE 2, which is expected to appear in the 0.3.0 patch to be released at the end of the year.

Players’ Needs

In fact, some loyal players of POE 1 will not ask for large-scale changes to this game that have been released for more than ten years, such as adding new classes or completely removing some of the original game mechanisms and adding new ones.

So compared to POE 2, which is still at the center of controversy, players only need to improve the game graphics and adapt to the iteration of more updated game consoles. This is not only an important factor in improving the player experience, but also a major feature of the game itself to attract more new players.

For this imperfect sequel, players have a lot of requirements: release the official version as soon as possible, add more classes and game mechanisms, and deepen the depth of the endgame as mentioned above. According to the current attitude of the developers, they are likely to gradually complete these requirements and do their best.

But the cruel thing is that the purpose of developers doing this is not just to change players’ reviews of the game from negative to positive, but also to make more revenue: because the player group of the previous game is relatively stable, but the players in the sequel will return or join because of wider publicity and more positive reviews, thereby earning more.

Which One Can Go Further?

Judging from the many reviews of these two games, they can both go a long way, but the sequel has more potential. On the one hand, it is the attitude of the developers towards it, and on the other hand, it has a more build possibility than POE 1.

Although Path of Exile 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas expansion brings some new crafting options to players, this crafting system is a bit difficult for many players, and many players cannot farm or make Path of Exile currency they need within the limited time.

However, in the crafting system in POE 2, players can clearly get corresponding crafting materials from some game content, such as basic content will provide you with basic currency, encounters related to essences can provide you with essences, and Ritual encounters can provide you with Omen Crafting materials.

In summary, players who already loved the diverse challenges of Path of Exile 1 can continue to explore it, because the developers will no longer move all staff to the development process of the sequel, so its subsequent league updates will have the previous frequency and may receive higher-quality updates.

But for those players who have been lingering in various RPGs for many years, Path of Exile 2 is worth a try because it has more development potential. Of course, this potential is also limited, and it depends on whether the developers are willing to launch POE 3 and more sequels. I wish you a happy game!

Generally speaking, each Path of Exile league can be experienced independently except for the possible connection with the main storyline, but sometimes it can be continued to the next league if the mechanism performs well enough.

For example, in the current 3.26 Mercenaries of Trarthus league, you can not only play Settlers of Kalguur content belonging to 3.25, but also Necropolis challenges related to 3.24.

Completing these challenges can not only help you win the required POE currency, but also reward you with special appearance decorations. So how can you get them with the highest efficiency? We will introduce it to you.

What Is Necropolis Challenge?

The gameplay first appeared in POE 3.24, which was launched on March 29, 2024, and then remained in Path of Exile 1 as a playable system.

Now you can experience 40 levels of Necropolis challenges i 3.26 expansion, and when you reach the 12th, 24th, 36th or 40th milestone, you can also unlock special level rewards:

• 12 Tier: Base cosmetic (including helmet, weapon effect and more)
• 24 Tier: Mid-tier reward (including character effect and back attachment)
• 36 Tier: Premium tier effect
• 40 Tier: The totem pole of Hideout

In fact, in addition to currency and item rewards, in the process of completing these challenges, you can also get a deeper understanding of the current league’s mechanics, endgame content and the best builds to choose and utilize. To explore the deeper Secrets Of The Atlas.

What Do Necropolis Challenges Include?

According to the specific difficulty of all 40 levels of challenges, they can be roughly divided into the following 4 difficulty levels:

• Level 1 (1-12): Novices can also complete it, close to the tutorial difficulty.

Complete the campaign, utilize skill gems and craft items.

• Level 2 (13-24): The difficulty is close to the endgame content.

Complete as many maps and sets of corpse affixes as possible.

• Level 3 (25-36): You need to prepare enough currency and items to ensure that your character is strong enough.

Pinnacle bosses farming, and clear endgame events such as Rituals.

• Level 4 (37-40): In addition to reliable strength, you also need to have good luck.

Kill Uber bosses, win PVP battles or racers events.

In these challenges, you will have the opportunity to experience the following gameplay:

• Necropolis Mechanics
• Atlas & Mapping
• Crafting
• Farming bosses
• Various miscellaneous. For example, special leagues mechanics.

How To Complete Necropolis Challenges?

Before stepping into the official Necropolis challenges, you need to complete the following prerequisite tips:

• Check your remaining items as soon as possible.
• Make sure your Atlas layout is good enough.
• Don’t consume too much time looking for rare drops, as you can trade them in time.
• Try to complete multiple challenges in the same map to be more efficient.

At this point, you are fully qualified to be a warrior in Necropolis challenge! But if you want to improve your reward farming efficiency and avoid taking damage as much as possible during the challenge, you can refer to the following suggestions.

Complete All Map Tiers

Even if you level up inefficiently, you can quickly complete all levels of the map. If you find that there are missing tiers, you can find them through Kirac missions. In addition, if you can upgrade the map early, don’t create extra chaos.

Try To Kill The Map Bosses

Killing certain map bosses or even some unique map bosses, such as The Shaper, Elder, Sirus, or Eater of Worlds, can bring you higher-level loot. Of course, the premise is that you can deal with them.

Completing Delve Encounters

This gameplay requires you to explore the nearly infinite Azurite Mine dungeon and obtain rewards by clearing nodes in it. If you want to be more efficient, follow the horizontal route, utilize flares and dynamite to find more cities and broken walls.

Consuming Scarabs In Mapping

To complete multiple game tasks at the same time through mapping, you must invest at least 4 scarabs for each. It should be noted that utilizing Rusted Scarabs as early as possible can reduce currency consumption, and you can continue to upgrade them later.

How To Speed Up The Process Of All Challenges?

Although following the above guidelines is enough for you to complete all challenges independently, 40 challenges is a long process after all, and you will definitely want to find more ways to continue to speed up the farming speed.

To do this, you can seek help from other players through relevant forums or groups, and view your real-time challenge progress through special filtering tools to adjust your current playing strategy.

Most importantly, you should choose the right builds. Generally speaking, you may want to craft more powerful POE 3.26 builds, but they are not necessarily suitable for dealing with Necropolis challenges. In contrast, the following builds are more targeted:

• Tornado Shot Deadeye
• Poison Concoction Pathfinder
• Explosive Arrow Ballista Champion

The above is the information on the skills and related rewards for completing Necropolis challenge in POE 3.26. Thank you for reading.

With Path of Exile 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas expansion now in full swing, its sequel seems to have been forgotten by players. But recently, Jonathan Rogers, the game director of both games, said they would be dedicating more time and energy to POE 2 for the remainder of the year, delaying Early Access period until the end of the year.

In fact, as soon as this interview came out, all players who are keen on Path of Exile series of games are very interested in it. If you missed the live or want to know the details directly instead of watching a video that lasts more than half an hour, we’ll take a look at exactly what changes the developer revealed in this interview will be making to the controversial Path of Exile 2, and how they’ll affect players in this guide.

New Trading System

This is a very important change that Rogers took the initiative to introduce at the beginning. Although he did not reveal important details about the trading system, he promised that the emergence of this system will make in-game transactions more convenient, especially for players who are new to POE 2 or who focus on casual.

In the process, he symbolically listed some possible contents, such as vendor NPCs in the player’s hideout that can trade items or POE 2 currency and a more concise way to list in-game goods; as well as cracking down on cheating behaviors such as false prices and ghost sellers that have appeared before.

In fact, the improvement of the trading system in the player community and major social media is not completely exciting, because before the official release of POE 2’s early access in December last year, the developers used the reason of improving in-game micro-transactions when delaying the release time.

Although it is not perfect at the beginning, the situation that players feel uncomfortable with the hideout trading interface and interactive screens that are exactly the same as the original should not occur.

On top of that, the developer team plans to launch the system at the end of 2025, that is, before the end of early access, which may disappoint players again, because this change should have been put on the agenda earlier, instead of being delayed.

Many Game Content Reworks

In addition to the most important trading system update, the game director said that each Ascendancy class in POE 2 will be reworked in the future, so that players can create more distinctive and powerful builds around them, which may be a very large project.

In addition, Passive Tree may also face a rework, especially the smaller wheel part, so that players can find their own activation path on this huge tree with many branches and make it more influential.

Rogers also said frankly that the developers have realized that the current game content lacks Strength/Intelligence hybrid section, so this part of the construction options may become the focus of subsequent developers.

From these statements, we can actually know that the developers really want to make the players’ combat rhythm and style in POE 2, a dark-style action role-playing game, faster and more flexible. So if you have enough POE 2 Currency, try to invest in those constructions with strong mobility and clearing capabilities at this stage.

Classes and builds that focus on melee attacks like Monk and Warrior may be better suited for endgame or higher-tier maps, while farming large amounts of experience and loot may require classes with high intelligence and strength stats like Ranger, Huntress, or Sorceress.

More Endgame Content

The developers also revealed that more content will be added to POE 2’s mid-tier endgame content in the second half of the year to bridge the gap between encounters such as Doryani’s Trial and bosses such as Arbiter of Ash, Zested, and King in the Mists.

Although Rogers said in the interview that the game’s content is balanced to make players’ progress more smoothly, in fact, this is likely another scam. In this balancing, there is only a small chance that the developers will make the most challenging encounters easier, and in most cases, they will directly increase the difficulty of all encounters.

This will cause more players to experience very severe death penalties in the game, and then spend more time and energy to farm better gear or more crafting materials to improve their build capabilities, thereby achieving the retention of some player groups.

Of course, this is just some speculation based on what the developers have done before, and there is no guarantee that they will do these things that will greatly damage the trust of players. In addition, the tower changes in the previous Dawn of the Hunt were not mentioned in this interview, so we still have to wait for the final information to be released.

New Patches & Other Improvements

In addition to the above update information that can be announced, there is some hidden information in some leaks or communities. For example, POE 0.3.0 patch is likely to be released around Friday, August 8, which is exactly four months after the release of 0.2.0, which is very consistent with the developer’s regular rhythm of releasing the latest patch.

Most importantly, this event just avoided the release of a major update of the same type game Last Epoch at the end of August, and the release of the new Season 10 of Diablo 4 in September, which may give players who linger on these similar games more time to try to get into the new 0.3.0 patch, thereby increasing the number of concurrent online players.

In addition, the developer is also collecting skill usage and frame data for each server in order to optimize the experience provided to players with the worst performance gaming devices, especially on those consoles that are about to be eliminated by the gaming market.

The above changes may be given priority to Softcore mode, while Hardcore mode tried by players who are keen to challenge more difficult game content is likely to be changed accordingly in the future because only 3%-4% of the player base is in it.

I need to remind you again that the changes and improvements to the game content provided in this guide are based on public interviews accepted by the current developers and some player community feedback, and cannot be regarded as the final result. But in general, I still hope that all players can have fun in POE 2, which has experienced a lot of trials and controversies!

The new mercenary mechanism is introduced in Path Of Exile 3.26 Mercenaries of Trarthus league, allowing players to challenge and recruit mercenaries as their allies to start a new challenge journey together.

These mercenaries will join you when you play the game and help you kill enemies and collect loot. Therefore, in your exploration process, please do not underestimate the power of these mercenaries. Proper equipment can greatly speed up your game progress.

Here, we are going to introduce a completely support build, but please note that the power of this build itself is not the point at all, because our purpose is to use it to enhance the mercenaries in POE 3.26! This is Defiance Banner Champion.

The highlight of this build is that we do not output damage ourselves, but fully support the mercenaries and make them the main output. In this way, we can see a large number of enemies turn into ashes in front of our eyes while ensuring our own survivability, and enjoy the fun of POE currency falling like raindrops.

Skills

For this build setting, let’s take a look at its core skills first.

Destructive Link

Let’s start with Destructive Link. This is a skill gem that allows the player to link with a mercenary ally, giving the ally the critical strike chance of our main-hand attacks. But using this gem also has certain risks, if the linked mercenary dies, we personally will die. And this skill is usually used in support characters to enable a build based on critical strikes.

So, Destructive Link skill will connect us to the mercenary, transferring our critical strike chance to them. For example, when we use Trypanon Two Hand Mace, it can provide 100% critical strike chance, and the mercenary will inherit this critical strike chance.

In addition, we can also combine it with Marylene’s Fallacy Lapis Amulet, which can greatly increase the critical strike multiplier, but reduce the critical strike chance.

Since our mercenary gains our critical strike chance instead of their own critical strike chance, this not only allows them to avoid disadvantages, but also gain all the benefits!

Defiance Banner

The next skill is Defiance Banner. This is a defensive aura skill that increases movement speed and spell suppression, and reduces all incoming damage. We also gain elemental resistance through Rallying Icon passive skill.

What’s special about this skill is that it consumes all accumulated Valour stacks to enhance the effect, and its effectiveness scales with Valour consumed. So, even if the stats of Defiance Banner skill look mediocre, the more Valour you consume, the stronger its effect becomes.

So, how do you get Valour Normally, Valour is obtained through melee attacks, but since we don’t attack actively, we can make up for it by using Banner Mastery, which provides 5 Valour every time Warcries are used.

Secondly, I also automatically use General’s Cry, a Warcry skill that summons Mirage Warriors from nearby corpses to attack enemies. These Mirages will imitate the player’s attacks, making it a powerful skill for map exploration and boss battles. Because it has a short cooldown, it allows us to obtain a stable Valour.

We also use Bannerman passive, which keeps the banner effect for 3 seconds after leaving the banner area. Combined with Champion’s Inspirational passive, we can recover some Valour when leaving the banner area.

Finally, with Perfidy body armor, we get 50% more Valour, and it only takes 3 seconds to fully recover, so it lasts.

Pyroclast Mines

The last major skill is Pyroclast Mines. This mine grants an aura when it lands, causing enemies to take additional fire damage. So, if you are willing to invest more in the gem level and aura effect of Pyroclast Mines, it can even deal an additional 4,000-5,000 fire damage.

Gear

For our weapon equipment selection, in the early game, we will use Trypanon Mace because it has a 100% critical strike rate. After that, you can switch to a high crit wand, and with Ungil’s Harmony Amulet, you can maintain 100% crit rate.

March of the Legion unique boots are also a good choice, focusing on mods that increase the aura gem level by +5, which can enhance the effects of Defiance Banner and Pyroclast Mines.

Finally, the chest armor, as we said before, Perfidy can provide continuous Valour generation when mapping, so it is definitely our best choice. And the rest of the equipment just needs to use some rare items.

Mercenary Settings

Now let’s talk about the mercenary settings. My mercenaries use Ice-based bows because they not only have a long range and clear the field quickly, but also don’t cast strange spells to disrupt your plans.

But since mercenaries don’t have a passive skill tree, they seriously lack the ability to increase damage and penetration, so we can only solve this problem through equipment.

And the best source of damage is The Taming Prismatic Ring, which can increase the enemy’s elemental damage for each ailment effect, which is a huge multiplier.

For armor, we use Shroud of the Lightless, which provides elemental penetration for each Abyss Jewel.

It is worth noting that since this armor only has 2 jewel sockets, for gloves and boots, we need to look for items with multiple Abyss jewel sockets. When we stack more Abyss Jewels, they will increase more damage and penetration. More importantly, Abyss Jewel can also increase some life and mana for the mercenary.

In short, this Defiance Banner Champion may not have much highlights on its own, which is why it has been forgotten in the previous challenge league, but in POE 3.26, with the support of the mercenary allies, this will become your best support build choice!