Path Of Exile’s ‘Trial Of The Ancestors’ Will Pit Players Against Dead Tribal Chieftains

While Grinding Gear Games as the studio shines the spotlight on the next expansion coming soon to the original Path of Exile game.

Dubbed Trial of the Ancestors, the expansion is set to come out on August 8th and will mark the start of a new challenge league and the return of the fan-favorite Forbidden Sanctum challenge league. The expansion will also introduce 16 new Atlas keystones, 14 new gems, and the promised reworks of the Guardian and Chieftain Ascendancy classes.

As for the new challenge league, players will participate in an eponymous tournament in the Karui afterlife that will pit them against fallen chieftains of each of the ten Karui tribes to earn valuable rewards.

“In this league, use tradeable silver coins to gain age to the Karui Afterlife,” Grinding Gear explains. “You'll start out with a basic team of three Karui warriors to enter the Trial of the Ancestors. In each match, you can select which tribe to compete against, based on the reward offered. You can examine the battlefield configuration of the enemy team and strategically place your warriors to challenge theirs. Then you and your party will compete alongside your warriors to destroy the opposing team's totems and win the match.”

Grinding Gear also took time to throw a friendly jab at the Diablo 4 team following the massive backlash that they received following Season 1’s surprise class 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,” Game Director Jonathan Rogers told 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.”