PoE2 Shadow Hides, Sets Traps, Then Strikes

Traps laid without being seen, and nothing happens as long as the player stays hidden. At the first strike, everything explodes, in the exact order the traps were thrown. That is the idea behind the Shadow, the new Path of Exile 2 class that Grinding Gear Games presented at ExileCon on November 6, 2026, among all the Full Release announcements for December 11.

Stealth, a Brand-New Mechanic for the PoE2 Shadow

The official Full Release page presents the Shadow as a class of daggers, Traps and shadows. Its story: a descendant of the Perandus bloodline, who drew on his father’s fortune to save his own life and remains indebted to the dark god Prospero. The trailer opens on “Prospero sends his regards”.

On the mechanics side, GGG calls Stealth “an entirely new mechanic in Path of Exile 2” in its Steam announcement. While you are Stealthed, monsters do not see you until you are very close. Game director Jonathan Rogers summed it up, according to Output Lag, as “a totally new mechanic to PoE”.

The demo showed the details. According to PCGamesN, enemy vision cones and circles are displayed on screen, and striking from outside those zones grants big bonuses. A kill resets Stealth, which lets you chain finishing blows. The class is played through positioning: where you stand relative to the monsters’ gaze matters more than how fast you move.

Traps Explode in the Order You Throw Them

Traps are a new weapon type. According to the official page, you prepare them while Stealthed, they trigger automatically when you attack, and they explode in the order they were thrown. Each trap interacts with at least three others. PCGamesN and Output Lag count eight traps in total, including the freezing trap, the Concussive Trap, the Poison Gas Trap, the Fire Trap, the Electrocution Trap and the Shrapnel Trap. GGG has not published the list.

Output Lag reports that traps stay dormant as long as you remain Stealthed. Rogers put it plainly: “It really does feel like an ambush.” Here are the combos described by PCGamesN, with Output Lag filling in the electric trap.

Trap order	Reported effect
Freeze, then Concussive	The frozen target is shattered
Poison Gas, spread by Concussive, then Fire	The gas cloud ignites
Fire, then Concussive	Flames spread to enemies already on fire
Planted knives, then Electrocution	The trap charges the planted blades and amplifies the shock on big enemies

The explosion order turns placement into a real sequence: with the same traps, the throwing order changes the result. GGG gave no damage values or delays, so none of these combos can be quantified.

Daggers, Darkness and Shadow Clones

Being in the shadows improves dagger skills, according to the official page: poison explosions, shadow clones to distract monsters. Here are the PoE2 Shadow skills seen during the demo, as reported by Output Lag and PCGamesN.

• Viper Strike, cast from Stealth: the blade is coated in poison and the following hits cause small poison explosions (Output Lag).
• Ethereal Knives: knives planted in monsters, then detonated for Chaos damage (PCGamesN), usable without breaking Stealth (Output Lag).
• Blade Vortex, reworked: it now expires after a number of hits rather than over time (Output Lag).
• Blade of Night builds up Darkness. PCGamesN describes it as “a sort of anti-Rage”: you defeat enemies to fill the gauge, then spend it to empower other attacks.
• Shadow Extraction turns marked enemies into shadows the player controls (PCGamesN).
• Eclipse: with enough Darkness, the player enters the shadow realm and each of their attacks counts as stealthed for a limited time (PCGamesN, Output Lag).

Rogers used Eclipse to beat Armando the Showman, the Den of Pleasure boss, during the demo, according to PCGamesN. A demo run by a developer says nothing about the difficulty players will face, and nothing in 1.0 is playable before December 11.

Assassin and Infiltrator, Two Ascendancies Still Opaque

The Shadow arrives with two Ascendancies. The Assassin “eliminates his targets before they have even laid eyes on him” and pays his debt to Prospero in blood, according to the official page (translated from the French official page). The Infiltrator is described as “a seasoned thief who has stolen many of Wraeclast’s best-kept secrets”, who keeps for himself the artifact that could serve his own ends (also translated from the French). Neither has been shown in detail: their nodes are not published, and no source says which one favors Traps or daggers.

The Shadow will play its first league in Conquerors of Wraeclast, the launch league. The full patch notes, with the values of every skill, are still to come: until they are published, any number on the PoE2 Shadow is an extrapolation.