Ascendancy expansion . Developer Grinding Gear Games' lead designer Chris Wilson tells me they're introducing the new Elementalist class as a specialization for the Witch, which channels the class' energies into a purer focus on fire, ice, and lightning. It's not concerned at all with chaos damage. If your magical inclinations thus tend to favor Warcraft's Jaina Proudmoore over, say, Dragon Age's Morrigan, you might want to jump in when Ascendancy drops in March.

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Path of Exile Elementalist 8 IMAGES

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Ascendency classes like the Elementalist represent the heart of the expansion, and most of the existing seven classes can unlock Ascendancy specializations by completing the new Lord's Labyrinth dungeon, a forbidding place with traps and layouts that change randomly each day. You can then extend an Ascendancy class' skill tree by completing the Lord's Labyrinth's on each of its difficulties, which will leave with you with six points to work with in the tree. It's not enough to fill it completely, though, so you'll need to be careful about where you slot your points.Back in November, Grinding Gear announced the Necromancer Ascendancy class, which feels like a logical extension of the Witch foundation. But the Elementalist is a straight-up damage-focused mage, apart from a perk that summons golems after dishing out some damage. As Wilson points out, the specialization helps sidestep the existing need to augment elemental damage with peripherals like the Witch's curses. One perk, Paragon of Calamity, briefly boosts the effectiveness of, say, cold spells after you've unleashed a fire spell, which Wilson says helps avoid the need to focus on a single element. Another, Pendulum of Destruction, increases your elemental damage for four seconds every 10 seconds."This means you really want to change your playstyle," Wilson says. "That means you're on the defensive for six of the ten seconds, and then you destroy everything on the screen."As Wilson notes, though, roughly 20 percent of Path of Exile's total players are already sort of playing like Elementalists. He says the team has had trouble coming up with three Ascendancy classes for the jack-of-all-trades Scion class, thus resulting in their decision to create only one Ascendancy class for it, but coming up with the Elementalist was a "nice, easy thing.""It's a case of players already doing this, so we just want to make sure players feel really powerful while they're doing it," he says.This, in fact, seems to be the driving force behind many of the already announced Ascendancy classes, such as the Berserker for the Marauder class and the Assassin for the Shadow class. Wilson also tells me that Ascendancy classes give the leveling process a sense of direction it didn't have before, particularly for newcomers who might be intimidated by Path of Exile's sprawling, interconnected talent tree.Ascendancy classes also lock you into a certain class to an extent, though, and you can't have points in two of them at once. I expressed my worry that this takes away a bit of the free-form character development Path of Exile's known for. But that just isn't the case, Wilson asserts."They could either increase the skills you've chosen or shore up some weaknesses," he says.He tells me he's seen builds for classes not focused on summoning, for instance, that incorporate summoning elements just fine, and he says there's an unannounced Ascendancy class that has an ability with great potential for unique summoning builds: "whenever you're doing things that benefit your teammates, your summons get affected as well." Ascendancy classes mainly give direction, and Wilson says it's technically possible to play endgame without them."You'll be doing it as a challenge, so I suspect this will be a bit of a prestige thing," he says. "If your class just says 'Witch' in the endgame, that means you've purposely handicapped yourself. You're doing it on hard mode essentially."And how hard will that be? Fortunately, we've only a month left to find out.

Leif Johnson is a contributing editor to IGN who exclusively played mages in RPGs for years, but now he mainly likes to smash things with big hammers. You can chat with him on Twitter at @leifjohnson