Path Of Exile's Echoes Of The Atlas Expansion Goes Live This Friday

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Path of Exile’s Echoes of the Atlas expansion is going live on January 15, 2021 and just like previous expansions, it comes with a variety of new game mechanics that further expands the free action RPG even further.

Echoes of the Atlas was just revealed last week. Originally planned for December, this expansion is mainly focused on Maven as she asks you to summon her so that she can watch you fight challenging boss encounters. Defeat three map bosses and you’ve entertained The Maven well enough to be invited to her realm, where you are tasked to defeat the bosses again but this time simultaneously. If you succeed, the encounter gets harder as you now have to beat four bosses, then five, then lastly, fight and beat 10 bosses all at once. All that effort will eventually grant you to fight The Maven herself which was fined tuned to test the most experienced Path of Exile players.

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The devs at Grinding Gear Games found more ways to expand the already complex character progression, as the expansion adds the new Atlas Passive Skill Tree that opens up more viable builds to the game. These new passive trees allows players to specialize on specific regions, giving players the option to play their preferred end-game activity.

There will also be the Ritual League, the game’s upcoming Challenge league that adds more mechanics to further test your knowledge of the game and adds more difficulty for avid players. For those unfamiliar, this league is separate from the standard and hardcore leagues, meaning everybody starts with a fresh character.

Harvest and Heist core features now part of the main game

When Echoes of the Atlas goes live, the Harvest feature as well as the Heist feature — which are systems added to the game during the launch of their respective expansions — are now part of the core game.

Last but not least, Echoes of the Atlas will also include 11 more maps that will host waves upon waves of enemies for you to slay, as well as new skills and tweaks to some ascendancy skill trees.

The Echoes of the Atlas expansion was originally planned to be revealed and released last December, but due to Cyberpunk 2077 being pushed back to a December 2020 release, Grinding Gear Games decided to delay the massive 3.13 patch launch to make way for Cyberpunk as they didn’t want player to choose between the two games during the holidays. Smart lads.

I’ve started playing Path of Exile again in preparation of the expansion’s release and it’s intimidating but fun to say the least as their complex passive skill tree and unorthodox economy and gem system still remains to be one of the unique systems in an action RPG to date. It’s still very difficult to know all of the content is free with fair microtransaction options that will not alter the overall gameplay.

Path of Exile was released back in 2013 and since then have been updating the game on a regular basis, with Grinding Gear Games now expanding the franchise further with studio currently working on Path of Exile 2 and the mobile version of Path of Exile.

You can read up on all the details on Path of Exile’s Echoes of the Atlas expansion in their official website. will go live on January 15, 2021 PDT for PC players with console players getting the update on January 20, 2021 PDT.