It finally feels real now. Grinding Gear have stopped dancing around it and given us a date: December 12, 2025, Patch 0.4.0, “The Last of the Druids”. If you have been lurking in Discord or refreshing Reddit like a maniac, you know how long people have been waiting for this moment. This is not some tiny balance pass either. We are looking at a fresh meta, a full reset, and the class reveal everyone has been theory‑crafting in their heads for months, and if you care about getting into maps fast you have probably already checked sites like u4gm poe currency just to be ready when the servers go live.
Druid Hype Becomes Real
The Druid sounds like the class you roll when you cannot pick between caster and bruiser. You flip between human and beast on the fly, not just as a one‑off cooldown. One second you are dropping lightning across the screen or cracking the ground with lava, the next you are a hulking bear soaking hits in melee. It is the kind of flow where you see a telegraphed slam, swap form, and just plant your feet instead of kiting like a coward. The new Ascendancies make it even spicier: you have paths that lean into pets, others that push pure elemental nukes, and some that just scream “hit me harder, I dare you”. You can already imagine people in league start chats arguing over whether to go minion Druid or full spell Druid before they have even finished the first act.
Support Gems And Old Favorites
Even if you do not touch Druid on day one, this patch is still going to hit your stash. New support gems are going to shake up old builds that felt solved months ago. That forgotten skill you parked at level 12 might suddenly become viable again because some weird interaction got buffed. Players who like to stick with one comfy build every league will probably log in, toss a couple of new supports into their old setup, and realize it suddenly clears way faster. People who love to break things will be all over PoB, trying five different versions of the same tree just to shave a second off boss kills. You will see it in chat: “anyone got that new support yet?” five minutes after the league goes live.
Fresh Economy, Fresh Problems
The league reset might be the best bit, though. Your “Rise of the Abyssal” heroes get shipped off to Standard, and you wake up on the beach again with nothing but driftwood. Day one is always a race: first to maps, first to craft something insane, first to steal a good trade before prices explode. The new Druid loot is going to be a warzone on the trade site. At the same time, that fresh economy cuts both ways. Early chaos feels painful. Simple items that would be vendor trash a month later suddenly cost way too much. A lot of people will still brute‑force it, grinding campaign zones way longer than they want just to scrape together their first few trades.
Weekend Plans And A Small Shortcut
GGG running a free weekend from the 12th to the 15th is a perfect excuse to drag that one friend who keeps saying “I will try it next league” into the mess with you. You will probably spend half the time helping them with resist caps while trying to rush your own Atlas, but that is kind of the fun. Still, not everyone wants to sit there farming chromes and low‑tier maps for days just to turn their build on. Some players cut the grind a bit by using sites that track things like the poe 2 divine orb price so they can trade smarter and get to the good part faster. One way or another, December 12 is going to be loud, messy, and full of people racing each other up the ladder, and you will know pretty fast who came prepared.