A ladder you switch on one match at a time
Path of Glory is the competitive track, and the first thing worth knowing is that it never takes over your account. It unlocks at character level 6, and from that point you decide before each match whether the run counts. Opting in is a per-player choice, so one member of a squad can be scoring while the other two are not, and the developers have stated plainly that enabling it does not change who you are matched against. There is no separate ranked queue and no separate lobby — the same raid either counts for you or it does not.
The track consolidated three older boards. The Hunt Ranking, the Gylden Hunt board and the Demon Hunt board were all retired in favour of one ladder, so if you followed the game before release and remember chasing one of those, the name you are looking for no longer exists in the client.
Because everything is scored at settlement rather than during the run, Path of Glory measures finished raids, not exciting ones. A match that ends with you dead in a corridor produces nothing except a deduction, no matter how much you killed on the way there. That single design choice explains most of what follows, and it is the reason the ladder rewards a very different kind of play from the one most players default to.
Seven tiers, and a tier that changes the rules
The tiers run, from lowest to highest: Duskborn, Mistwalker, Dawnseeker, Fateweaver, Oracle, Exalted and Zenith. Each advance pays a milestone reward, so the ladder is worth touching even if you have no intention of climbing far.
The part players miss is that your tier changes which of your actions score at all. The developers have said that the set of point-awarding actions depends on where you sit on the ladder, so a habit that reliably earned points at Duskborn can quietly stop paying once you have moved up. If your score per run drops after a promotion and your play has not changed, that is the mechanism, not bad luck.
Zenith sits apart from the rest. It carries a server-wide points leaderboard that shows exact totals, which means the top of the ladder is a public number rather than a badge. Everything below Zenith is a tier label only.
Four ways to score, one way to lose
Points are awarded at settlement for a successful extraction, for killing monsters, for completing tasks and for acquiring assets. There is a cap on how many points a single match can produce, and — this is the important half — points are only deducted when you fail to extract. Nothing else in the match takes them away.
Read those two rules together and the optimal shape of a scoring run becomes obvious. The cap means a run has a ceiling you can hit well before the map runs out of things to do, so staying longer past that point is pure downside. The deduction rule means the only genuinely expensive outcome is not getting out. A fight you win but cannot leave from still costs you, because the loss is attached to the extraction, not to the fight.
One detail in that list of four is easy to skim past: killing other hunters is not among the published scoring actions. Monsters are named, tasks are named, assets are named, extraction is named — player kills are not. Whatever a fight with another squad does for your loot bag, the ladder's stated rules give you nothing for winning it and take everything from you for dying in it. Players who assume ranked is a PvP mode tend to bleed points for weeks before they notice.
This is also why extraction discipline matters more on the ladder than gear does. If you are not already comfortable with the run loop — securing a Soul of Return, reading which exits are live, deciding when the objective is finished — sort that out first, because the extraction loop is the thing being scored. Ranked does not add a new skill; it puts a number on one you already need.
The Fateweaver gate forces you up in difficulty
From Fateweaver I, Normal difficulty stops granting points entirely. This is the hard wall of the system and the reason most climbs stall exactly there. Up to that line you can farm the ladder in comfortable content; past it, the only way to score is to raid at a higher difficulty, and everything that goes with it — tougher enemies, better-equipped opponents, longer fights near your exit — arrives at once.
The practical response is to stop treating Fateweaver as a milestone and start treating it as a deadline. Bring your gear, your gem coverage and your squad habits up to the next difficulty tier while you are still scoring comfortably on Normal, rather than discovering at Fateweaver I that your kit does not survive the step up. Players who climb smoothly generally spend their last Dawnseeker runs deliberately over-prepared.
Nothing has been published about how far up the ladder that requirement escalates. Fateweaver I is the only stated threshold; whether higher tiers demand higher difficulties again has not been said either way.
What has never been published
There are no numeric point thresholds for any tier. The developers have not stated how many points a promotion costs, how large the per-match cap is, how many points any specific action awards, or how the deduction for a failed extraction is sized. Tables of tier costs do circulate, and they are estimates rather than published figures.
Point decay has also never been described. Whether an inactive account slides back down, whether a tier floor protects you once you reach it, and whether a losing streak accelerates anything are all open questions with no source behind them.
Finally, and most importantly for anyone thinking about a long climb: what happens to Path of Glory at a seasonal reset has not been published. Seasonal resets themselves are confirmed and some long-term progression is stated to carry over, but the ladder has never been named as part of that. If you are weighing how much of a season to spend climbing, read what a seasonal reset actually changes before committing months to it.
Building a kit you are willing to score in
Because the only loss condition is a failed extraction, a ranked loadout is a risk-budget question rather than a power question. Every piece you carry raises what a bad exit costs you, and none of it earns extra points for being expensive. Most players who climb steadily settle on a kit they can rebuild the same evening, then take the second-best weapon rather than the one they would be sick about losing. Plan that kit in the loadout planner and check what a replacement set of equipment would actually cost you before you commit to it.
Class matters less than the community suggests, but not zero. The most repeated observation among experienced ranked players is that classes with reliable disengagement are over-represented near the top, which follows directly from extraction being the scored event rather than kills. That is a community reading of a public leaderboard, not a developer statement, and it is one week old on a game that has already had a balance pass. If you play a class well, play it; if you are still choosing, the class database lays out what each one actually carries rather than ranking them.
The last habit worth building is the boring one. Opt in on the runs where your plan is complete — you know the objective, you know the exits, you have the consumables — and leave it switched off on the runs where you are exploring, testing a build, or helping someone learn a map. The ladder cannot punish a run you never entered it with.
What to do next
Set your gear one difficulty tier ahead of where you are scoring, then check which exits actually cluster on the region you intend to farm using the interactive map before you start opting in — a route you can reverse under pressure is worth more ladder points than any single upgrade.
If you are approaching Fateweaver, the next thing to read is the difficulty article linked above, because that wall is what ends most climbs.