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Sometimes I think I would be better off if I was one of those people who only likes one action RPG. But, sadly, I’m cursed to enjoy both Path of Exile 2 and Diablo 4, which means I’m forced to juggle both when they drop new stuff in the same month.
This week, we learned that won’t be the case for their upcoming major updates, as PoE’s next expansion has been pushed almost a month later than it was expected to release. According to a recent post on X by lead community manager Kelly, the expansion is “shaping up to be one of the biggest ones we’ve ever released; it just needs a little longer to cook!”
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Developer Grinding Gear Games will host an announcement stream for PoE 2: Return of the Ancients on May 7, but the expansion won’t be out until May 29. That gives me and everyone else who is excited to jump into Diablo 4’s new expansion, Lord of Hatred, on April 27 an entire month before it’s PoE 2 time.
The teaser trailer for Return of the Ancients doesn’t give away much about what’s coming in the update, even though we already know some of what to expect from GGG’s previous comments. A sprawling fortress rises out of the ground in the 30-second trailer, walling off a section of Wraeclast. The endless world map where the game’s endgame takes place will also be getting a massive overhaul in the update, which could mean that the new version will involve whoever these returinng “ancients” are.
Kelly’s suggestion that the expansion is notably bigger than the others has sent PoE 2 Reddit users into a Silksong-esque frenzy. One poster currently believes Kelly’s recent photo of a spider on a keyboard is actually an elaborately disguised teaser for the duelist class.
This expansion is shaping up to be one of the biggest ones we’ve ever released; it just needs a little longer to cook! We’ve got some plans for the lead-up to GGG Live on May 7th PDT. Stay tuned, guys 😄April 22, 2026
“At first it seemed completely random… until I remembered the 2023 ExileCon trailer,” PuzzleheadedHair2331 wrote before explaining their theory. In that trailer, a duelist character fights a spider in gladiator armor. Kelly replied to someone with a Gladiator movie GIF about a completely different post four days earlier, and new art of the duelist class appeared on a popular PoE 2 database website recently. “I have come to the conclusion that the duelist will appear in version 0.5,” they wrote.
I’m not sure I need to analyze random social media posts and a three-year-old trailer to predict that a new class or new campaign act might be added in the update. PoE 2 is supposedly coming out of early access this year, and I imagine GGG will be adding a lot over the next several months in anticipation of that.
Regardless, it sounds like the expansion will be bigger than some of the recent ones. Luckily there will be plenty of time to dig into it all once I’ve started to wrap up my time with Lord of Hatred. Blizzard has reworked Diablo 4’s endgame to have more meaningful progression over a slower timeframe—something I’ve wanted for a while. A month is a healthy amount of time to push a character pretty far before PoE 2 starts eating into my Diablo time.
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