Path of Exile’s Covens of Umbra league starts 13 November and scraps Scarabs

The next Path of Exile expansion, Covens of Umbra, goes live on 13 November, Pacific time, on every platform the game is on. For players in the UK that means the evening of the 13th or the early hours of the 14th, depending on when Grinding Gear Games flips the switch. Like every league, it is free to play.

The new challenge league is built around a witch cult trying to summon its queen. Beat the cult's members and you choose a Fate for the area's boss, which makes that fight harder and its rewards better. Remains taken from those bosses can then be attached to your own Wickerman to borrow a piece of their power, and a tougher version of the system reaches the pinnacle bosses of the Atlas.

The bigger change for long-time players is in the endgame. Scarabs are being removed. In their place, Threads of Creation go into the Map device and add a league mechanic of your choice to a map, raising monster difficulty and rarity as you add more. The Atlas passive tree has been rebuilt with a new layout, and many effects that used to come from Scarabs now sit on it instead.

Most older league mechanics have been reworked too: Mirages return as a random map feature, the Sacred Grove leaves maps, and Atziri moves into the Temple of Atzoatl. Grinding Gear Games also promises a large rework of how loot drops, plus new unique items.

Path of Exile's Steam numbers swing hard with each league, rising at launch and falling in the weeks after, which is why September's peak was well below August's. The Path of Exile game page tracks those monthly peaks.