Path of Exile 2 Ritual Guide

A complete Guide and overview for the Ritual mechanics in Path of Exile 2, including info on the Pinnacle Boss and possible rewards

Path of Exile 2
Ritual Guide

Last Update: 17/04/2025

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Ritual is one of the four major Endgame mechanics available once you finish the Campaign. It will randomly appear on your Maps while exploring the Atlas or Worlds, but you can also add it with the Ritual Precursor Tablets to your Maps in the radius of the Precursor Tower. It is a quite simple mechanic that can occasionally offer you very valuable rewards, but it requires a lot of patience, time, and knowledge.

Once Ritual appears on your Map, it will spawn 3 or 4 Ritual Altars scattered across the Map, each guarded by packs of monsters. Defeating them in the Altar radius will sacrifice their blood to the Ritual. Upon defeating all monsters, you will be able to interact with the Altar to start the encounter. The area around the Altar will close, and the sacrificed enemies will be resurrected to fight you once again. Each successive Altar resurrects all the previously sacrificed monsters, escalating the difficulty and rewards. Furthermore, the Altar defends itself too, creating various damaging effects that can often catch you off guard.

The monsters slain that way drop a bit of loot at the end of the encounter, but their main purpose is the Tribute you gain from each kill. After completing a Ritual, you can interact with the Altar again to check the available Favours, which are random Gear pieces, Currency Items, valuable Omens, and rarely an Audience With The King.

Buying Favours costs Tribute. In most cases, you won't be able to buy it outright - you will need to defer it, ensuring it will appear again in future Rituals for a cheaper price. You can defer an Item multiple times. Failing to defer an Item will revert one instance of the discount. If you fail to defer it when all the discount is gone, it will no longer reappear in future Rituals. The Tribute is unique to each Map - it accumulates across the Rituals, unlocking more Favours, but it will be lost once you enter a new Map.

Another important aspect is Rerolling the Favours, which grants you a new set of rewards. By default, you can Reroll only once per Map, and it costs 1000 Tribute. You can Reroll more times with the Tempting Offers Notable on the Ritual Atlas Passive Tree, or with a special modifier granted by the Ritual Precursor Table. Rerolling gives you another opportunity to obtain valuable Items or defer them again. Keep in mind, Rerolling is not always worth it - this new set of Favours is a separate instance of rewards, you will have to defer your current Items again, or the discount will regress. Unlike other mechanics, the combat and monsters are quite easy. The risk lies in managing your Tribute correctly and taking your chances at winning big rewards.

Ritual Final Challenge - The King in the Mists

The Pinnacle Boss of Ritual is the King in the Mists. You can challenge him by activating An Audience With The King at the Realmgate on your Atlas, opening the portal to Crux of Nothingness. As with all other Pinnacle encounters, there are 4 Difficulties, and completing each new one awards you two specialised Atlas Passive Tree Points for the Ritual. Upon defeating the King, he will always drop one of the 5 special Unique Items, some of them being locked by higher Difficulty levels. The Atlas Points massively improve your profits from Rituals, so you should try to unlock them as soon as possible.

Ritual Atlas Passive Tree

A fully unlocked Atlas Passive Tree is not necessary to enjoy this mechanic, but it will definitely make it more profitable. The Notables are not well balanced; a few of them are insanely potent, while the others barely add any value. The only problem might be the order in which you unlock the Notables first. Our recommendation is:

Tempting Offers
Spreading Darkness
Ominous Portents
He Approaches

Prerequisite	Notable
-	Spreading Darkness Your Maps with Ritual Altars always have four Ritual Altars
Spreading Darkness	Between Two Worlds Ritual Altars in your Maps spawn a Wildwood Wisp
-	Tempting Offers Ritual Altars in your Maps allow rerolling Favours an additional time Rerolling Favours at Ritual Altars in your Maps costs 25% reduced Tribute
-	Ominous Portents Ritual Favours in your Maps have 100% increased chance to be Omens
Ominous Portents	He Approaches Revived Monsters from Ritual Altars in your Maps have 20% increased chance to be Magic Revived Monsters from Ritual Altars in your Maps have 20% increased chance to be Rare Ritual Favours in your Maps have 30% increased chance to contain an Audience with the King
-	Promised Deviotion Deferring Favours at Ritual Altars in your Maps costs 50% reduced Tribute Favours Deferred at Ritual Altars in your Maps reappear 50% sooner Skills from Ritual Altars in your Maps deal 25% increased Damage
-	From the Mists Rituals in your Maps contain 2 additional packs of Wildwood Monsters
From the Mists	Reingivirotated Sacrifices Revived monsters from Rituals in your Maps have 20% increased Toughness and 10% increased Damage for each time they have been Revived Revived monsters from Rituals in your Maps have no penalty to Tribute granted

Tactics

For the combat, there is only one rule - never stand still. There will be lots of enemies, and even more ground effects or on-death explosions. It only takes one Stun or Freeze to be completely swarmed by monsters. It is a major loss even if your Maps allow for more attempts - you permanently lose the potential Tribute from enemies.

To optimise your gameplay, you should remember which Altar had the most enemies spawned initially, and start activating them in that order to respawn as many of them as possible. However, the difference is not always that impactful, and the backtracking required to access Altars in a specific order can take a lot of your time for minimal gains, so it is not always recommended.

Defering an Item costs 15% of the full value - 10% for the future discount, and 5% as a fee. Defering an Item costs more than buying it outright, but allows you to buy more items at once, which is usually more beneficial. Since failing to defer an item reverses the discount, usually you should focus on deferring all the valuable items, buying them only if you don't have anything else to spend your Favour on. It lets you Reroll Favours more often, which is the best way to speed up your profits.

At first, you should focus on Quantity over Quality and buy most of the lesser Currency Items offered in the Ritual Altar. You will be Rerolling less often, but you will have a steady source of income to buy small upgrades for your Build. To get more rewards, you should simply run more Maps with Ritual. You will still occasionally get the valuable rewards, just less often.

The majority of your profits come from the Audience With The King or High-tier Omens, which can cost multiple Divine Orbs. However, it also costs tons of Tribute, so you will spend a lot of time deferring it once it finally appears in your Ritual, testing your discipline and Tribute management. In the later stages, you should maximise the amounts of Rerolls and Tribute available to you by skipping the smaller rewards for the sake of a bigger goal, using Waystones with 6 or 8 modifiers to get more Tribute from monsters, and applying 3 Ritual Tablets to your Maps.

While completing the Rituals, you will drop a lot of Ritual Precursor Tablets. You should augment them with two magic modifiers and freely use the weaker ones just to add Ritual encounters to your Maps regardless of their modifiers. Individually, they are not very impactful, but once you stack 3 Tablets with beneficial modifiers, you will get much more Tribute to spend on your Favours. Keep an eye out for the "Ritual Altars in your Maps allow rerolling Favours an additional time" modifier. It is the best modifier available on the Tablets, and can be quite valuable on the market by itself, or you can use it in a late-game setup by yourself.

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Ritual Rewards

The Ritual is the only source of Omens, which are very important for the endgame Crafting system. The rare variants of Omens are insanely expensive, while the popular ones are cheap and not worth your Tribute. You can find the full List of Omens here. You will also get a few individual Currency Items - it is not a lot, but you should be offered Divine Orbs quite frequently.

List of regular Ritual Loot
Icon	Name and modifiers
	Omens <various types>
	Ritual Precursor Tablet (12-18) Maps in Range contain Ritual
	An Audience with the King Travel to the Crux of Nothingness by using this item at The Realmgate.

List of The King in the Mists Loot
Icon	Name and modifiers	Required Tier
	Beetlebite (20–30)% increased Movement Speed (60–120)% increased Evasion and Energy Shield Aggravate Bleeding on Enemies when they Enter your Presence 100% increased Thorns damage	1
	Ingenuity (20-30)% increased bonuses gained from Equipped Left Ring (20-30)% increased bonuses gained from Equipped Right Ring +(1-2) Charm Slots (-20-20)% increased Charm Charges Gained (-10-10)% reduced Charm Charges Used	1
	The Burden of Shadows (20-30)% increased Cast Speed Skill Mana Costs Converted to Life Costs Skills gain 1% of Damage as Chaos Damage per 3 Life Cost	1
	Pragmatism (200-300)% increased Armour and Evasion +(10-20)% to all Elemental Resistances -17% to Chaos Resistance Charms use no Charges	2
	From Nothing Passives in Radius of <Keystone> can be Allocated without being connected to your tree	4