Path of Exile 2 Dawn of the Hunt is here, and the first major overhaul for the early access ARPG has pulled it back up the Steam charts. The update introduces the game’s seventh class, the Huntress, along with several more ascendancies, hundreds of new support gems and items to greatly expand the potential for builds, and a sizable endgame shakeup. It’s not been completely smooth sailing so far, however, with players running into ‘unknown object type’ crashes and an inability to play the new Smith of Kitava – fortunately, Grinding Gear Games has already deployed five hotfixes so far, with a sixth on the way.
This weekend’s Path of Exile 2 update is pretty colossal; you can keep playing on existing characters and still see the new content, but GGG recommends starting a new character in the Dawn of the Hunt leagues, and with the Path of Exile 2 patch notes delivering nerfs to almost all the most popular builds, you’ll probably want to anyway. Unfortunately, those who were attempting to try out the RPG’s new armor-modifying Smith of Kitava ascendancy for the Warrior found they were unable to select it, necessitating a hotfix.
That’s just one of the issues the developer has already addressed in its live-update thread. The Legion and Scourge Commander microtransactions have been temporarily disabled as they were causing crashes in town. Many players found themselves falling foul of a Path of Exile 2 ‘Unknown object type serialized by server’ message, which GGG says should now be resolved. Nvidia Reflex has also been turned off while FPS wobbles are being investigated.
The most recent hotfix, due to be the game’s sixth, tackles overly tanky enemies, with a particular focus on the midgame and the cruel-difficulty campaign playthrough. All non-unique monsters between level 15 and 46 now have 25% less life, and that tapers back up to 100 on either side down to level 8 and up to level 64. Very early and endgame opponents should therefore be unchanged. Additionally, the new rogue exiles have had their life slashed by 40% on top of the other adjustments.
While this sixth hotfix was initially rolled out, GGG quickly reverted it, stating that it would require a realm restart in order to safely deploy. “We’ll be including it in the next realm restart, which we’ll do as soon as we can,” the developer writes. You can follow the Dawn of the Hunt live update thread on the Path of Exile forum to stay informed.
Issues aside, the new update looks to have been a success so far, despite having to contend with Monster Hunter Wilds Title Update 1 arriving on the same day. On Friday April 4 with the launch of Dawn of the Hunt, Path of Exile 2 peaked at a high of 238,836 concurrent Steam players – a number it hasn’t seen since late January. It’s also back above PoE 1’s Steam record of 229,337, which it set in July 2024 with the release of its last league, Settlers of Kalguur.
Planning to give the new update a go? Take a look through our guide to all the Path of Exile 2 classes for a refresher of your options, and then see which of the best Path of Exile 2 builds you fancy.
If you’ve already chosen your loadout, tell us what you’re running on Discord. You can also follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides.