Endgame Activities

Path of Exile 2 has multiple endgame activities that you can progress to gain a vast wealth of rewards. You encounter some of these during the campaign through things like the Trials of Ascension. But others are tied to the endgame mapping system. This guide covers the endgame activities available for the Path of Exile 2 early access, how they work, and the unique rewards offered by each. Adding multiple endgame mechanics to your maps is a great way to maximize your rewards. Alternatively, you can custom build a character able to take on the very hardest content a specific mechanic offers to obtain rewards out of reach of most exiles.

After you finish Act 3 on Cruel difficulty you unlock Atlas of Worlds. Use Waystones to explore this infinite endgame system of maps. Craft them to increase drops and difficulty of an area. During your exploration you may encounter areas which contain one of the endgame activities such as Breach, Ritual, Delirium or Expedition. Monsters spawned by these activities have a chance to drop Tablets. These can be used at the Precursor Towers to add additional encounters to surrounding zones and buff their rewards. While exploring the Atlas look out for special Coins and Inscribed Ultimatums that allow you to enter Trial of Sekhema and Trial of Chaos.

You first find the Trial of Sekhema in Act 2, this is a series of challenge rooms each of which has a new reward. Select your rooms with care as they come with a variety of detrimental passive effects. Unlike the rest of PoE 2, your primary resource is not health in the Trial of Sekhema, instead you use Honor. When you get hit, you lose honor and unlike health, you have no honor flask.

This takes inspiration from the roguelike genre, severely limiting your ability to recover your main resource. So where possible you need to avoid damage as much as possible. Play safely, and don't take unnecessary risks. All of the enemies within this area have been carefully selected to have avoidable mechanics. As you're going through, keep an eye out for Sacred Water. This is a special resource dropped throughout the trial which you can use to improve your odds of survival.

Challenge Rooms

Different rooms have different trials, so you might have a time trial where you need to survive for the specified duration. Alternatively, you might have a trial where you need to kill a requisite number of monsters before advancing. While completing these trials, keep an eye out for nasty environmental traps. Remember, each time you get hit you lose some honor and there are very few ways to recover it.

After you complete a room, you get that room's reward. These are usually keys instead of items, you can turn the keys in for a variety of rewards after defeating the floor's final boss. This system ensures you need to complete a floor to reap most of the rewards.

Sekhema Bosses

After defeating the floor boss, you gain access to the first altar of ascension letting you further specialize your class. In addition to the ascendancy points, the Trial of Sekhema offer a wealth of valuable loot. For example, you can acquire relics, these are craftable and have special modifiers that change your experience within the Trials. Occasionally, you can also get unique Relics which take the form of challenge runs requiring you to do things like complete the entire trial without getting hit once and rewarding you handsomely, including with exclusive unique items should you rise to meet the challenge! Think of relics as meta-progression, something you gain by doing Trials which makes subsequent runs easier.

Jewels

Each of the endgame activities in Path of Exile 2 offer a unique form of character progression. For the Trial of Sekhema that's jewels. These are socketed into your passive skill tree and provide a variety of effects. Some jewels provide affixes like you find on items. But others are more interesting, and modify all of your passives within a radius. This can add a new effect, make the passives more potent or completely transform them into something else. Like with many other things in PoE2 you're able to craft jewels so save your currencies and prepare to roll! While completing the endgame version of the Trial of Sekhema, keep an eye out for powerful unique jewels.

The second Ascension mechanic you find is the Trial of the Chaos god, you first find this in Act 3. Like with the Trial of Sekhema, the Trial of the Chaos God sets you a series of consecutive challenges that you must complete to reach the end. You need to complete multiple rooms in a row without dying. Some of the options include a time trial, killing enemies, or pushing an objective.

However, this isn't so simple because the Trialmaster offers you both a reward and a curse. In each room, you select from 1 of 3 negative modifiers which persist throughout the run. So the Trial of the Chaos God starts relatively simple, one mechanic is easy to deal with. But with each successful room you complete, another negative modifier gets added, increasing the difficulty exponentially.

Challenge Gauntlet

As you move to the next room, the Trialmaster offers you a new reward and adds on a new penalty. Pick your penalties carefully, if you take multiple modifiers which restrict the space in the arena or your ability to move freely it's going to be a lot harder to get around. On the other hand, if you stack a lot of modifiers that buff monsters or weaken yourself you may get an unkillable rare that brings your trial to an early end. In the early game you need to complete 4 rooms in a row to ascend, but later on, you can complete many more. Examples of the encounter types in Trial of Chaos include:

• Kill all the monsters.
• Survive the time trial.
• Escort the objective.

Chaos God Bosses

The Trial of the Chaos God also includes several randomized boss encounters. Their exact order and difficulty depend on when you encounter them and also what modifiers you select. Bosses in Path of Exile 2 are no joke even before you add additional modifiers so always choose your penalties with care. After you reach the end of the trial, or decide the risk is too great, return to the Trialmaster to collect your rewards.

Sockets and Soul Cores

You get a variety of items from the Trial of Chaos, and if you're lucky some of them might have sockets. These hold Soul Cores, which offer you passive benefits when socketed into an item. You can also get these soul cores from the Trial of Chaos.

If you want to add sockets to your existing items you're going to need to use Artificer's Orbs. Using a Vaal Orb on an item corrupts it, rendering it unmodifiable. Adding a socket is one of the corruption outcomes which exceeds regular limit, but there's a significant risk that you destroy your item. Finding gear with sockets, and filling them with beneficial soul cores is a great way to become more powerful in the endgame, but don't worry about this too much during the campaign as you're unlikely to find these things reliably.

The keys for the Trial of the Chaos Gods have a variety of bonuses and downsides much like maps. This includes being able to sacrifice currency items, which gives you a double or nothing gamble should you complete the trial. Like with many other things, you can roll these using your crafting currency. If you want to specialize in the Trial of the Chaos God and run the most dangerous modifiers (which most players avoid) you might get some powerful exclusive unique items.

When you encounter a breach, mysterious hands appear within your map. Touch them to reveal the hidden demons lurking within the world. Kill these demons as fast as possible to extend the timer and maximize your rewards. This is a mechanic that favors builds with good clear speed and doesn't require much in the way of single target damage.

Breach Rewards

As you clear the breach you can earn a variety of rewards. First up, catalysts, which increase the quality of jewelry magnifying the potency of the modifiers. For example, you can catalyze life on your belt to give yourself a bigger overall health pool. Another reward is breach rings, these are special because they can be catalyzed up to 50% quality instead of the normal 20% quality.

Breach Boss

If you're lucky you can find breach splinters. Collect enough of these to combine them into the Breachstone. Use it at the Realmgate to challenge the ultimate breach boss Xesht "We Who Are One" a dangerous pinnacle encounter that combines the powers of each of the elemental breachlords. Should you succeed, you might be able to claim one of the demon's unique items.

Breach Atlas Passives

Kill Xesht "We Who Are One" to earn atlas passive points used to enhance the mechanic. This makes your future breaches and breachstones more dangerous while also magnifying the rewards.

Team up with the Kalguurans, to dig up the remnants of an ancient civilization. These remnants may be a bit angry in the aggressively undead sense of the word, after you kill them (again) remember to loot some valuable relics. You begin the mechanic by placing some explosives. Anything in the explosive radius is activated, this can be monsters to fight, chests to open or remnants. The remnants amplify the rewards for all subsequent monsters and chests in the sequence, but be warned they come with powerful downsides including immunity to damage types. Avoid remnants that make the encounter too difficult or otherwise brick your build, but try to hit as many as possible to maximize your rewards.

Expedition Vendors

After you complete some expeditions you can trade with the Kalguurans. Rog is particularly interesting as he offers a special form of crafting that lets you make very powerful items by enhancing the tiers of existing modifiers. Alternatively, you could choose to trade with Gwennen who offers random items, Tujen who gives various currencies, and Dannig who specializes in other expedition currencies.

Expedition Logbooks

If you want to specialize in Expedition, consider running some logbooks. These maps are one huge expedition. Because there are more explosives and more remnants you get more rewards but this also means that the mobs which appear later in the map are far more dangerous. If you're lucky you might encounter Olroth, the ultimate boss of Expedition mechanic.

Expedition Atlas Passives

Killing Olroth grants you atlas passives which you can use to further enhance the mechanics. One particularly notable node is extreme archaeology, which replaces your explosive sequence with one big boom. Remember to avoid anything that hard bricks your build, but aside of that this turns expedition into one single click.

When exploring Atlas, keep an eye out for rituals. These resurrect the monsters slain within them to be sacrificed. When you activate the ritual the circle closes, temporarily locking you off from the rest of the map. Slay all the monsters within the circle to end the encounter and gain tribute which you can spend on rewards. The monsters you kill here carry over to the next ritual in your map. One interesting thing about ritual is that when it overlaps with other league mechanics, you can resurrect some of those monsters as well.

Ritual Rewards

Successfully completing rituals gives a variety of rewards. Among these the most valuable are omens. These are special items that take effect from your inventory when conditions are met. For example, the Omen of Dextral Annulment causes your next orb of annulment to only remove a suffix modifier. On the other hand, your Omen of Greater Exaltation causes your next Exalted Orb to add 2 modifiers instead of 1. These Omens grant you powerful crafting effects that can be used to make incredible endgame items!

Ritual Atlas Passives

While completing Rituals you have a chance to encounter King of the Mist. Killing him grants you atlas passives which you can use to further enhance the mechanics.

No, that's not just a voice in your head, that's the voice of Tang'Mazu. When your map is under the effects of delirium a silvery gray fog floods your map revealing dangerous creatures and making all of the enemies within the map both more dangerous and more rewarding. The deeper you travel into the mist the more rewarding and dangerous monsters become.

Delirium Rewards

Try to clear your map before the timer runs out to obtain special Distilled Emotions that you can use to instill your maps and items. For example, you can use Distilled Ire and Distilled Paranoia to instill your amulet adding the effects of one notable passive from the tree. This is handy because you can use it to grab something your class normally can't reach or save travel points on some sub-par nodes. Alternatively, you can use them to instill maps adding layers of delirium and increasing the rewards.

Simulacrum

Killed delirious monsters have a chance to drop Simulacrum splinters which can be combined into a Simulacrum. Enter it to encounter Delirium pinnacle encounter where monsters come in waves, becoming progressively more difficult. At the end of each wave you acquire rewards and can start the next wave up to maximum of 15 waves. Higher difficulty waves have a chance to spawn challenging Delirium bosses. Higher difficulty simulacrums could potentially increase the amount of waves and spawned bosses.

Delirium Atlas Passives

Completing Simulacrums grants you atlas passives which you can use to further enhance the Delirium mechanic.

There are several additional league mechanics which appear in your maps. The first is Strongboxes, these are full of loot and monsters. You need to trigger the trap, defeat all the foes which pop out and you can collect a nice pile of loot. Because Strongboxes are craftable you can spend currency to increase the difficulty and rewards.

From time to time you also find monsters trapped in Essences. When killed, these yield a unique crafting currency that adds a specific affix to your item. Use Essences to build your items up to create something much stronger than you're likely to roll naturally.

Precursor Artifacts are ancient monuments that that empower nearby monsters. Kill them to clear it from corruption and gain the temporary buff for yourself. This buff can make you faster, rain fire or lightning at nearby enemies or even grant you increased loot rarity or experience from killed enemies.

While exploring Atlas of Worlds you may encounter corrupted areas. In the zones affected by the corruption enemies killed close together create portals to a world that was overrun by the scourge. These demons surge forth, aggressively invading your map. Kill them to obtain special rewards but beware if you create too many portals you might find yourself overwhelmed.

Summary

Path of Exile 2 has a wide variety of endgame activities including a mapping system, trials, and league mechanics.

• Explore the Atlas Of Worlds by using the Waystones to discover various endgame activities.
• Trial of Sekhema takes the form of several rooms, you need to pass each challenge without losing too much honor.
• Keep an eye out for Relics to enhance future runs and Jewels to make your character stronger.
• Trial of Chaos is a survival gauntlet, each room adds a new layer of difficulty.
• Collect socketed items and soul cores to go in them.
• There are also several endgame activities each of which give their own rewards.
• Breach, kill monsters quickly to gain rewards including catalysts and breach rings.
• Expedition, place explosives to explosively excavate undead horrors then defeat them for artifacts, trade these to the Kalguurans for a variety of rewards.
• Ritual, sacrifice slain enemies in a circle and collect tributes which you can exchange for powerful crafting omens.
• Delirium, resist the whispers of Tang'Mazu and collect distilled Emotions to instill your items.
• There are few mechanics that can randomly appear in you maps.
• Strongboxes, open them for loot, but beware guarding monsters and traps.
• Essences, release trapped monsters only to kill them to loot essences, a powerful crafting currency that adds a specific affix to your item.
• Precursor Artifacts, kill enemies surrounding it to gain a temporary buff.
• Beyond, find corrupted areas on the atlas. Slain monsters within these areas spawn additional enemies for more rewards.

You can enhance these endgame mechanics using your atlas passive tree, as you participate in them keep an eye out for keys to pinnacle boss encounters where you can face off against poe2's strongest foes and obtain special unique items.

Credits

Written by: Zen_M, Tenkiei