Last Epoch Season 5, Rage of the Frostborn, launches Thursday, October 1 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm GMT / 6pm CEST, marking Eleventh Hour Games’ return to its major-update cadence after several months without a significant patch. The timing slots the update neatly between the latest Diablo 4 season and Path of Exile 2‘s full 1.0 launch in December, putting Last Epoch squarely back into the ARPG conversation it helped shape at its 1.0 debut. Anyone tracking the genre’s current seasonal race, including our Diablo 4 Season 11 PTR breakdown, will recognize the stakes of landing in that window.
The update arrives alongside a leadership change. Founder and Studio Head Judd Cobler is stepping back from his Game Director duties, handing that role to Mike Weicker, a founding EHG member and the longtime host of the studio’s developer livestreams. Weicker says his focus is on building upon what already makes the game special, and he plans to revamp communication so conversations with the community happen more regularly.
Cobler notes the studio has grown past 100 people as it works toward the Orobyss expansion targeted for 2027, giving Season 5 a dual purpose: recover momentum lost since the strong 1.0 launch, and prove the team can sustain a live-service rhythm on the way to that bigger release. That balancing act echoes what other live-service teams are wrestling with, as seen in our looks at Escape from Tarkov’s seasonal modifier system and Arc Raiders’ update cadence.
- Rage of Morditas – a kill-speed event across the campaign and endgame Echoes that grants buffs, Bloodrage Charges, and a tracker leading toward the pinnacle boss Morditas, whose fixed-difficulty Woven Echo requires 400 Corruption and sits in difficulty between the game’s existing Abberoth encounters.
- Faction reworks – Merchant’s Guild adds price suggestions and automatic price-lowering settings, while Circle of Fortune redesigns prophecy rerolling to let players pick exact rewards, with more options unlocking at higher ranks.
- New skills – Paladin’s Radiant Lance, Bladedancer’s Dreamslash, and Shaman’s Summon Tide Elemental.
- Chase items – including the evade-resetting Death Dance boots, the potion-generating Eternal Font amulet, and the haste-and-frenzy Gift of the Eidolon gloves.
Eleventh Hour Games has promised a full week of deep-dives into the seasonal mechanics, new skills, and additional items before launch day. With Season 5 just two weeks out from its announcement, that pre-release window is the next real test of Weicker’s promised communication push.
Does a six-figure Corruption gate like Morditas’s Woven Echo sound like a fair pinnacle challenge, or another grind wall? And will the faction reworks finally settle the long-running Merchant’s Guild versus Circle of Fortune debate?
