PoE 2: Duelist Gamescom Demo First Impressions

I visited the Path of Exile 2 booth at Gamescom 2026 to try out the Duelist and Sword Skills! This article details my first impressions of the class and weapon type.

The Duelist at Gamescom

The Duelist is a Str/Dex hybrid Class that will start at the same location on the Passive Skill Tree as the Mercenary, right at the bottom. The Sword is being showcased with this Class, but keep in mind that you can use it on any class come launch in December this year.

I didn't have a huge amount of time to play around with the new Sword Skills and the character I played was a curated level 56 character with preselected gear, Skills and Support Gems. There were two characters to choose from: one focused more on Lightning and Sand Stance mechanics, and another focused on Bleeding.

Sword Skills & Stances

The Sword Skills immediately reminded me of the way the Spear was originally presented, particularly because many of the Skills have relatively weak base versions but become much more powerful when used in the correct Stance. This incentivizes you to actually want to interact with Stance mechanics, naturally weaving Skill to Skill, which is something Jonathan mentioned during the Duelist reveal livestream where combat flow was a big part of designing the new weapon type.

The combos also feel very strong, and there is a good balance between having to set up your Stance and being rewarded with significantly stronger versions of your Skills. Similar to the Spear at launch back in patch 0.2, I expect this will be something that will take some getting used to, but once the playstyle sinks in, it will feel very powerful.

The Sword Skill set has a fairly clear distinction between different use cases. Blood Stance seems to be a bit more focused on providing single-target damage, while Sand Stance offers stronger clearing options. However, due to the existence of Skills like Herald of Blood, I feel that the Bleeding archetype on Swords may end up being very powerful as a catch-all setup.

On the topic of Stances and preparing the right Stance before you use a Skill, I think it's worth mentioning that as with most mechanics in Path of Exile, you'll likely be able to bypass a lot of the busywork in the deep endgame once you can make use of some more specialised Unique items or Skills. This should allow for players to utilise more traditional 'one-button' builds if you want to, whilst still benefitting from powerful Stance interactions.

Something I noticed is that Swords and Spears also share quite a few thematic similarities. Both have Bleeding-focused mechanics, while the Sword also has the Sand Stance versions of its Skills that feel somewhat similar to the Wind Skills of the Spear. There are also Lightning Skills on both weapon types. The overlap in themes shouldn't be a problem and will probably be hard for GGG to avoid going forward with more and more weapon types and Skills to design, but it does mean that Swords and Spears may end up competing with each other for similar melee build archetypes.

Cyclone

Cyclone was one of the Skills I was most interested in seeing, as I'm sure it was for most fans of Path of Exile 1. The PoE 2 implementation of this Skill is an interesting one, and actually ended up being more similar to the original than I was expecting.

Rather than requiring any special setup with Charges, Cyclone can be channelled immediately and will last as long as you have the resources to pay the Skill cost. However, like with other Sword Skills, Cyclone interacts directly with the different stances - in Blood Stance, Cyclone deals more Damage, while the Sand Stance version adds Sand Disks that travel outward in different directions, making it a good option for clearing.

Cyclone will also interact with different ground effects, allowing it to pick them up and use them to further increase its damage like existing Wind Skills. This opens up the possibility of builds that effectively build around Cyclone as their primary Skill while incorporating way to generate different ground effects. As a main ability though, the primary concern with this Skill is going to be speed. Cyclone currently feels quite slow in terms of Movement Speed. The Damage is decent, but whether Cyclone becomes a major endgame option will likely depend on how fast you can become whilst using the Skill.

Buffed Bleeding

A lot of the focus for designing Sword Skills has been put into the Bleeding archetype, and one of the improvements that was mentioned in the Q&A that followed the livestream reveal was a general buff to Bleeding coming alongside the Duelist in patch 1.0 in December. The tooltip for the buffed Bleeding was visible in the demo, with the base Damage being doubled and the Duration also being improved when the Ailment is inflicted on Monsters.

These numbers are of course subject to change prior to the 1.0 full launch, but these types of improvements will also go a long way toward helping out the Bleeding archetype in general, no just for use with Sword but for other weapon types and Spells as well.

Duelist Ascendancies

There were no Ascendancies available during the playtest, so it's hard to say exactly how the Duelist will develop beyond the base Class. I did get to ask Jonathan some questions during a brief Q&A at the event, and I asked about the Slayer, to which he laughed and said we'll need to wait for Exilecon for any news on the Duelist Ascendancies.

However, during the livestream reveal, Mark Roberts did tease an image for two of the Duelist Ascendancies, one of which looks like some kind of weapon master, carrying one of each weapon type!

Video Review

You can watch my video review of the Gamescom Duelist demo, along with my thoughts on the upcoming patch 0.5.5, here.