Grinding Gear Games is rolling out a big mid‑season shakeup for Path of Exile 2. Patch 0.4.0, known as The Last of the Druids, lands on December 12 and brings a playable Druid class, a fresh challenge league called Fate of the Vaal, sweeping balance and endgame tweaks — and a few reminders that PoE 2’s full 1.0 launch is still some way off.
Three forms, one complicated fantasy
If you’ve ever wanted to stop being “fragile human” on principle, the Druid will be a difficult temptation to resist. The class is a hybrid Strength/Intelligence caster that literally hands you three new bodies to play with: Bear, Wolf and Wyvern — unlocked by equipping Animal Talismans.
- Animal Talismans serve as a new weapon type and graft the chosen animal’s basic attack to your character. Using that attack transforms you immediately into the corresponding form, and swapping between forms is designed to be seamless so you can weave casting and mauling together.
- Bear is the slow‑devastating bruiser. Generate Rage with basic attacks and spend it on huge stomps and slams. Notable abilities break armour, run you forward in a ripping rampage, and a costly “ultimate” summons a firestorm while generating more Rage.
- Wolf is the hit‑and‑run predator. It emphasizes speed and cold: lunges, leap attacks that mark enemies, and interactions that spawn wolf minions or trigger explosive ice fragments when marks are consumed.
- Wyvern mixes ranged breath patterns with corpse‑devouring mechanics to create and spend Power Charges, turning wings and breath into long‑range devastation.
Human form isn’t a mere placeholder. Most Druid spells are persistent: volcano geysers, entangling vines and a thunderstorm that wets foes — designed so you can lay down environmental effects as a person, then shift into an animal form and let those effects keep working.
There are also more than 30 new support gems aimed squarely at hybrid and movement‑heavy playstyles, plus two Druid ascendancies: the stormy, rage‑driven Shaman and the foresight‑obsessed Oracle, which folds clone/vision mechanics into its kit and even expands the passive tree with new nodes.
And for the animation nerds: the team even answered player outrage over whether animals could dodge roll. Early alphas reverted you to human when you tried; community pushback forced GGG to invest late in new animations so the forms can dodge and sprint without snapping you out of them.
Fate of the Vaal: build your own temple
This league feels like a love letter to Incursion but with modern PoE complexity. The core loop: find Temple Consoles scattered through zones, activate a run and place six rooms onto a modular temple grid. Rooms do everything from spawning bosses and loot to adding new crafting options — and adjacent room placement can level those rooms up for better rewards and risk.
Tiered rooms matter. A Tier 3 Corruption Chamber can attempt a second corruption on an already corrupted item (with a ruinous 50% destruction chance). A Tier 3 Sacrificial Chamber can splice or replace Unique modifiers in ways that can flip downsides into benefits. Some rooms offer unique rewards you can bank and trade on future runs.
Progress through the temple to reach the Architect and ultimately face Atziri, the Vaal queen, in a Pinnacle encounter that grants exclusive items and a skill called Mirror of Refraction — which spawns mirrors that amplify projectile novas.
There are also mechanical curiosities: a Flesh Surgeon that lets you replace limbs for temporary bonuses (but you lose them on death) and ways to “stabilize” rooms so you can stack benefits across multiple expeditions.
Endgame, performance and the road to 1.0
0.4.0 tweaks several endgame pillars: Abysses now behave more like other map mechanics (less frequent outside of endgame), a new Abyss Atlas Tree appears, waystone Abyss crafting was removed and Abyss Tablets were buffed to compensate. Delirium fog visuals have been toned down, and monster density shifts toward fewer but tougher foes with ~40% more life and loot to make each encounter feel weightier.
On the technical side, the studio claims substantial CPU optimizations that lean on more cores and should deliver noticeably higher and less spiky frame rates — a welcome change for consoles and lower‑end PCs.
If you play anywhere but desktop, a quick aside: PoE 2 remains available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series consoles, and a weekend free trial (December 12–15) will open the update to new players. If you’re considering a console hardware refresh for ARPG play, the new PlayStation 5 Pro is one option some players will look at; and handheld PC fans have recently gotten useful Steam Deck improvements that make long sessions easier (/news/steam-deck-display-off-downloads).
Timing and the big picture
The druids update is a sizeable content injection, but it doesn’t change Grinding Gear’s broader timeline: the studio has pushed back expectations for the 1.0 release. Director Jonathan Rogers told Eurogamer the team likely won’t make the earlier March 2026 hints and hopes to avoid slipping into 2027 — a cautious, realistic note for a live service with lofty ambitions.
That delay matters because PoE 2 will transition to free‑to‑play at 1.0, and GGG is balancing continued early access expansion with long‑term polish. For now the company is shipping significant mechanical depth — a new class with genuinely new design space, a modular league that rewards planning and repeat runs, and a raft of rebalance and quality‑of‑life work.
If you want to see whether the Druid’s shapeshifting fantasy lands for you, the December 12 launch (and the accompanying free weekend) is the earliest practical test. And if you play on PlayStation hardware, remember there are recent platform updates that change how you might stream or access your PS5 library (/news/playstation-portal-cloud-streaming-update).
Expect a lot of experimentation: new support gems, new passives (250+ added), rebalanced ascendancies and a sizable wave of unique rebuffs and additions. Whether you’re in it for cinematic beast animations or temple‑building chaos, 0.4.0 is built to be played, mined and, inevitably, debated in equal measure.