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Path of Exile's December expansion feels an Affliction

Path of Exile: Affliction challenges players to fight off a growing darkness in this December expansion.

Ozzie Mejia

November 30, 2023 12:55 PM

Grinding Gear Games

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While Path of Exile 2 remains in the development oven, Grinding Gear Games continues to release expansions for the original game that takes players to interesting places. For the December 2023 expansion, PoE players will venture into a strange forest where an Affliction threatens to cover everything in darkness.

Path of Exile: Affliction will take players into the Viridian Wildwood. In the new Affliction League, Sacred Wisps will act as guides and point to a growing darkness that threatens to envelop everything it touches. The idea is to use the Wisps to clear the darkness. However, players will only have a limited time in the Viridian Wildwood. When the Wisps' power is used up, players will be returned to Wraeclast. The idea is to ultimately clear as much darkness as possible and uncover new encounters and rewards.

Wisps are both a positive and a negative in the Affliction League. When saved from the darkness, individual Wisps will find monsters to inhabit. Those monsters will become empowered and more difficult to defeat, but in exchange, they'll drop rare and powerful rewards. It's also possible for Wisps to possess bosses, so if that happens, be ready for a brutal fight.

The cursed forest also contains survivors called Azmeri Wanderers, who can teach players new specializations and allow them to earn new Ascendancy classes. The catch is that the players will have to defeat the source of the Affliction. The King of the Mists will not be easy to take down, so prepare your best builds.

Expect to find exciting new skills, items, mods, and more features in Path of Exile: Affliction. There's much more that this expansion is promising, including Ultimatum content joining the core game. Look for the Affliction expansion to come to PC on December 8 and consoles on December 13. For anything we might have missed, visit the Path of Exile website.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?