Ritual

• Unique Rewards:
  • Omen of Sinistral Exaltation, Omen of Greater Exaltation, Omen of Dextral Annulment,
  • Ritual Precursor Tablet
• Pinnacle Boss: The King in the Mists

Ritual altars are sacrificial sites built by the mysterious King in the Mists.

If you encounter this symbol on the Atlas, then you know that an area contains Ritual altars.

Ritual altars demand tribute. Every monster you slaughter in the circle will feed the altar.

After the sacrifice, touch it to begin the Ritual. The monsters you just killed will be resurrected by the King in the Mists’ dark magic, and you must fight to survive.

The tribute you have offered to the altar can be spent to buy powerful items, but they can be expensive. To gain more tribute, you will want to find more altars.

Each successive Ritual you do within an area will spawn the monsters revived by the previous ones, in addition to the ones you sacrifice next to it.

By the end of an area, you'll be fighting a truly imposing number of foes, but will have a significant amount of tribute to spend.

Storyline

• New Storyline: Aoife lingers as a restless spirit, bound to the Wildwood and searching for one who might answer her call. The King in the Mists has claimed her flesh, leaving her soul adrift, untethered and unable to pass beyond. She believes that only by reclaiming what was taken can she be made whole once more. Find out more at https://pathofexile2.com/ancients#ritual
• There a new Hub Area, "Caer Tarth" to the west of your starting location on the atlas. The maps around this location all contain Ritual encounters. Completing these maps gives you points for the Ritual Atlas Tree.
• The Ritual Atlas Passive Tree has been completely revamped with many new nodes and existing nodes changed.
• After completing a Ritual Altar encounter in a Map, locusts will point the way to the next Altar.
• All items in the Endgame Ritual Reward screen are now either Uniques or Omens.
• Any tribute not spent on rewards can now be sacrificed to gain an Audience with the King
• Killing the King in the Mists now drops a new key, The Head of the King. This key can be used in Caer Tarth to begin the Rite of the Nameless.
• The Rite of the Nameless is a new atlas mechanic in which you choose a series of 5 maps to complete a single continous ritual. The monsters from each ritual, including the map boss, will reappear in each map in the sequence making for a very challenging encounter. The unique bosses from each map will only appear in the final ritual of each map.
• While choosing maps for the Rite of the Nameless, each map after the first will contain extra modifiers which affect the difficulty and rewards of the rituals during the Rite.
• Each map in the Rite of the Nameless awards one element of the key used to access the Ritual Pinnacle Boss
• Added New Boss: The Queen in the Mists available after allocating a specific node on the Atlas Tree. This boss can drop three new corrupted Idols.
• Freythorn Rituals are now prevented from ever showing deferred items, to ensure items are not lost if returning to this area on a higher level character.

Omens

One of the rewards you can buy with tribute are Omens. These are special items that allow for meta crafting: crafting items that affect other crafting items.

Have an item with good prefixes but bad suffixes? This Omen will help you remove the mods you don't want while keeping the ones you do.

There are a bunch more of these with different effects, but we'll leave those for you to discover. Now don't forget that Ritual will also drop tablets, which can be used to specialize into getting more Rituals.

If you want to get to the pinnacle boss of Ritual, then you'll probably want to use them. They can also be crafted to grant mods, making your Rituals more rewarding.

The pinnacle encounter of Ritual is the King in the Mists, feared by the Azmeri people.

He is said to have brought eternal darkness to the Wildwood. We won't show the encounter, but just like Breach, there are a range of unique items you can get for defeating him and you will gain points in the Ritual section of the Atlas tree.