Use your favourite features in-game with our Desktop AppRitual is a core mechanic in Path of Exile 2 and can be found on any Map once you reach the endgame. It can be an extremely profitable farming strategy when utilized correctly and is still worth doing passively if you are running another strategy.
This guide will cover the basics of Ritual, how to farm it profitably, and some more advanced farming strategies.
This guide was written by FearlessDumb0
The Ritual mechanic consists of three or four runed circles with totems in your map. These circles spawn packs of monsters and as you kill them, their blood will drain into the totem. Once a threshold is reached it will become clickable and you can run the encounter.
When activated the monsters you killed originally will be revived and attack you again but this time in an enclosed area slightly larger than the runed circle. The Ritual itself will also attack you with a special mechanic.
If successful, Ritual offers a myriad of gear, currency, Waystones, and special rewards. Such as "Audience with the King" and a new type of item called Omens which are exclusive to Ritual. Audience with the King and many Omens are highly desirable and can be traded for many Divine Orbs.
If you are successful in killing the monsters again, Ritual will reward you with Tribute. The higher quantity and difficulty of the monsters, the more tribute you will receive. Once you’ve successfully completed the first Ritual you will have access to the Favours window which you can use to spend your Tribute.
As you complete more of the Ritual encounters in your map you will accrue more tribute to spend in the Favours window. Make sure you use most (or all!) of it before you leave the map as the resource is lost once you move on to the next Waystone.
After your first Ritual you will see a square button you can click that will bring up the Favours window. Be careful, it DOES NOT pause the game and you are still vulnerable while looking. Make sure the area is clear or you have finished the map. If you’ve only done one Ritual some of the more valuable contents will be hidden and you’ll need to complete three before all will be revealed. The loot varies from magic/rare items, uniques, currency, Omens, and a special invitation for the boss fight called Audience with the King.
Your tribute is spendable to acquire favours in one of three ways:
Each of the Rituals you encounter will attack you in some way. Many of them do Chaos damage, so make sure you have decent Chaos resistances before attempting them.
Nodes in your Atlas that look like this will contain Rituals. You can influence which maps have Rituals by running Lost Tower encounters and when complete, socketing a Ritual Precursor Tablet which will add 5-10 Ritual encounters to nodes within the radius of the tower. For more details on Towers, check out our full PoE 2 Endgame Guide.
Modifiers for your Ritual Precursor Tablets affect all atlas nodes within the radius of the Tower and are an important way to improve the currency output of the mechanic. Make sure you Transmute and Augment every Precursor tablet you use; there are no downsides except skipping it because you didn’t realize it was craftable.
Once you find (or buy) Audience with the King and successfully run it, you will be granted two special Ritual Atlas passives that will improve your ability to run Ritual in general. Each time you beat the King of the Mist you’ll be granted the ability to try again in a harder encounter three additional times for a total of 8 Atlas passive points.
Promised Devotion 
From the Mists 
Reinvigorated Sacrifices 
Spreading Darkness 
Between Two Worlds Ominous Portents 
He Approaches 
Tempting Offers Recommended Atlas Passive Points and Order
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Tempting Offers - This gives you 50% more of everything as you get an additional Favours window, going from two to three. This is the first one you should take and the most important passive on the Atlas.Ominous Portents - This gives you 50% more Omens, which are some of the more valuable Favours.He Approaches - This improves your chances for Audience with the King, which sells for several Divine Orbs and is critical to acquiring more atlas passive points. This is 3rd, and not 2nd, because Tempting Offer is a better value. It gives 50% more chances at an Audience with the King and ALSO a full window of loot.Spreading Darkness - Having four rituals guaranteed will maximize your ability to take advantage of all three re-roll windows and have plenty of Tribute to play with.
How you spend your tribute is a critical factor in how profitable Ritual will be. If you find a big item in the first or second window, it’s almost always worth Deferring that item in order to see the loot from the third window instead of pulling out the item immediately.
To optimize your total rewards make sure you have enough to still defer anything large you have pending, then re-roll the window to see all three sets (or two sets, if you don’t yet have Tempting Offers on your Atlas passive tree).
I earned this second Audience with the King by deferring the first one when I could have purchased it outright.
The number of monsters that spawn in your map directly affects how much tribute you will have available to you. This means that modifiers that improve your % of magic monsters, % of rare monsters, % pack size and similar all indirectly improve your Tribute available when doing a Ritual.
There are also special modifiers that can reduce the cost to reroll your favours or improve the quantity of Tribute that monsters give in the map:
Tablets can be socketed into completed Lost Towers to boost your Rituals.
The most desirable affix on Tablets is % increased chance to include Omen. These stack and will apply to every map within the radius of the Lost Tower, not just the maps which are randomly picked to add the Ritual Encounter. [LINK TO GUIDE FOR TOWERS]
Ritual, as described earlier, consumes the monsters that spawn within the runed circle to feed the encounter. The more monsters you have, the more opportunity for tribute you will receive. Importantly, monsters spawned from Delirium Mirrors WILL NOT be included, but monsters spawned naturally in maps that have Delirium applied to them directly WILL count.
If your build is strong enough it is almost always worth it to add the lowest tier of Delirium currency Distilled Ire to increase the amount of tribute you have to work with.
This also extends to special Delirium bosses like Kosis and Omniphobia who you can see up to four times in a single map.
Omniphobia being resurrected by a Ritual
In some maps, notably Hidden Grotto and Oasis (and occasionally others) you can kill all monsters in the area and the Ritual will not be clickable.
Workaround: If you are only able to click one or two of the Rituals in the map, you can still hit the re-roll button to spend favour to see a full inventory of items.
Some Precursor table modifiers DO NOT show on the maps themselves. I thought this was a bug but did some testing on some modifiers that numerically change how Ritual works, like favour cost. These DO work on the Rituals themselves within range of the tower even though they do not show. Importantly, % increased chance of Omens is one of the mods that does not show up on the atlas node, and while I can’t perform a test with enough fidelity to prove it works there is some comfort in knowing that others that are testable do in fact work.
This map has also has 6% increased chance of omens, but it won’t show it on the card.
The King in the Mists is the pinnacle boss of the Ritual mechanic. Fighting him rewards special loot and 2 Ritual Atlas Points.
As you add points on your Ritual Passive Tree, the difficulty of the fight will increase, from level 0 up to a max of level 4. (The small passives increase the difficulty by 1)
Defeating the boss on levels 0 through 3 will each grant 2 Ritual Atlas Passive Points.
We'll be working on a Boss Guide soon, but for now check out the drop rates for King in the Mists. This data was gathered by the community to see the rarity of the boss-exclusive drops.
