What it is
Path of Exile Wiki (poewiki.net) is the official community encyclopedia for Path of Exile. It's a standard MediaWiki wiki with thousands of pages documenting items, skills, mechanics, NPCs, areas, historical leagues, and practically anything nameable in the game. It's maintained by volunteer editors from the community and hosted by Grinding Gear Games, which gives it official legitimacy without GGG controlling its editorial content.
It's the successor to the old wiki at pathofexile.fandom.com, which the community migrated away from Fandom in 2022 following public conflict over that platform's commercial practices (invasive advertising, tracking, fingerprinting, and unilateral content modifications by Fandom). The migration was massive and coordinated: the editor team moved the entire knowledge base to a new domain, and the community actively promoted the change.
Content is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA. The wiki is free, no ads, no tracking, and open to contributions from anyone with an account.
What problem it solves
Path of Exile has twenty years of accumulated mechanics. Every league adds new content, modifies existing systems, and sometimes removes things that leave traces in legacy items. The amount of information a player needs to understand what a specific unique does, how a skill interacts with a certain support, or how a mechanic from an old league worked, is massive and disordered.
The wiki solves this by being the narrative source of truth for the game. It's not just a data dump (that's PoEDB), but contextualized explanations: how a mechanic evolved through patches, which famous builds exploited it, what bugs existed historically, how it relates to other mechanics. It's the difference between a stat table and an encyclopedia.
Additionally, it solves the critical problem that the old Fandom wiki still ranks high on Google with obsolete information. Without a clear community-promoted replacement, thousands of new players consult information from years ago thinking it's current.
What people use it for
Main use cases:
Researching specific uniques. You search for a unique whose name you heard, read its wiki entry, and get complete stats, associated mechanics, historical builds that used it, drop sources, and narrative context.
Understanding combat mechanics. How Vaal Pact really works, what exactly Mind Over Matter does in interaction with ES, how the resistance cap is calculated with specific uniques. The wiki has detailed breakdowns no other resource offers as completely.
Consulting past league history. When someone mentions "the Heist 3.12 meta" or "broken Necropolis", the wiki documents what happened, what changed in each patch, and which builds dominated.
Information about areas, NPCs, and storyline. For players interested in lore or who need to know where to find a specific NPC, what a certain boss drops, or what requirements an area has.
Comparative lists and categories. "All unique boots", "all fire damage skills", "all uniques dropped by Sirus". The wiki has tables and categories that facilitate systematic exploration.
Differentiation from PoEDB
This is the key distinction because both are reference tools, but they serve different purposes:
PoEDB is an automatically generated database from raw game data. It gives you technical tables with internal IDs, exact probabilities, data GGG doesn't document officially. It's what you use when you want to know the exact weight of a mod on a base item, or see data the game client hides.
PoE Wiki is a human-written encyclopedia. It gives you contextualized explanations, comparisons with similar mechanics, history of how something changed, builds that used it. It's what you use when you want to understand a system, not just consult numbers.
The two complement each other. For a question like "what does this unique do?", the wiki is better because it explains context. For "what are the exact weights of each mod on this base item?", PoEDB is better because it has the raw data. A serious player uses both depending on the question.
Honest limitations
English only. The old Fandom wiki had partial translations to several languages. The new poewiki.net concentrated on English content and has no translated versions. For Spanish-speaking players, this is a real barrier, especially for complex mechanics.
Uneven coverage between topics. Iconic items and central mechanics have extensive maintained entries. Obscure mechanics or old leagues can have pages with incomplete or outdated information. Quality depends on how motivated the community was to maintain each area.
Update lag after patches. When GGG launches a new league, the wiki takes days or weeks to cover all the new content. Editors are volunteers and react at the pace they can. For day-1 league information, better to consult official patch notes and creator guides.
Lua errors on some old pages. Some pages from the migration still show errors like "Lua error: invalid field alias". They're artifacts from the technical migration being slowly cleaned up. Generally the page's main information is correct, but certain tables or widgets may be broken.
Not a source for current PvE meta. For builds and competitive meta, the wiki is a poor reference. It's encyclopedia, not curator. For meta use Maxroll, poe.ninja, and YouTube creators.
How it's used in practice
Typical flow:
- You have a question about something in the game (a unique, a mechanic, an NPC, an area).
- Instead of googling (which can take you to the outdated old Fandom wiki), you go directly to poewiki.net.
- You use the internal search or navigate by categories.
- You read the entry, paying attention to the date of the last update if it's information sensitive to the current patch.
- If you need raw data the wiki doesn't detail, you complement with PoEDB.
Useful practice: install the community project's "PoE Wiki Search" browser extension, which automatically redirects any link to Fandom toward poewiki.net. This solves the problem of Google ranking the old wiki without you having to think about the domain every time.
How to get started
Visit poewiki.net and familiarize yourself with the home page. Category navigation (Equipment, Skills, Mechanics, Areas, etc.) is the most useful path for initial exploration.
For recurring use, two steps:
- Bookmark poewiki.net visibly so it's your default consultation, not Google.
- Consider installing the browser extension that redirects Fandom → poewiki, especially useful if you share a computer or tend to reach wikis via searches.
If you're interested in contributing, you can create an account and edit. The community especially appreciates updates to recent league content, which is where the wiki most lags. The official project Discord coordinates editorial efforts.