Path of Exile heralds August’s Trial of the Ancestor league while smirking at Diablo IV

While visions of next year’s Path of Exile 2 are swimming in the heads of fans, Grinding Gear Games hopes that they’ll spare some attention and energy for something far more imminent: the release of the Trial of the Ancestors next month.

On August 18th, the Path of Exile expansion releases with a new challenge league, a rework of the Guardian and Chieftain ascendency classes, and the return of the Forbidden Sanctum league. “In this expansion, you will visit the Karui afterlife and defeat ten tribes in a series of tournaments to earn valuable new rewards,” the studio said.

Grinding Gear did get in a good-natured ribbing to its competition as Director Jonathan Rogers remarked upon Diablo IV’s recent balance patch and the huge backlash for the excessive nerfs.

“I feel very bad for the developers, because I’m sure that they mean well, but yeah, it’s a hard lesson to learn,” he said to IGN. “I think that you [have to] get the balance correct at launch, because once you have something a certain way, players are very resistant to changing it, in particular in a downwards direction. So therefore we really have to make sure that we’re going to have a good beta that actually tells us everything we need to know about that.”