Hello Exiles! Ritual Girl here, the name's Neeko!

Some people may know me from my Ritual profit breakdown posts I post every league. And here I am yet again with even more information about my favourite mechanic!

As the league is winding down and I found myself quite bored because of a lack of engaging endgame strats, I decided to do something which I have put off for multiple leagues already. I wanted to test if using Blood-filled Vessels tangibly affects the profits of Ritual. Or at least Ritual how I run it.

So I set out to run 400 maps, record and compile the data, and now share it here!

This time around I also made a YouTube video, so if absorbing the data by listening/watching is more your jam, watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMugcDWfBoI

If you want to see all the spreadsheets, graphs, and raw data I've collected, here is the link to that: https://drive.proton.me/urls/09AXMSYJHG#9iajACZMZVD1
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So Why Did I Do This?

To give everyone a quick overrun of how Vessels work: Vessels allow you to capture all the monsters you have just killed in a ritual, and then put these monsters in all rituals of another map by using the now filled vessel in the map device.

curious...

And right on the item it says "Rituals Have 20% Improved Favour Rewards". So the item itself states that it will improve Ritual loot if used. And that's quite interesting, because except for Ritual Scarabs of Abundance, this is the only other scaling factor we have to affect Ritual Loot. So I thought it's worth to try out to see if I can get a clear picture of how the vessels actually improve the loot, or if they even do it at all.
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The Strategy

The strategy itself is easy. Because I want to see how much vessels affect the profits of the strat, I want to run it the same way as I usually do. This means I open the map, check for possible boss altars, and then I just clear all the Rituals and speedrun through all the rerolls I have. Rinse and repeat.
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The Atlas

PoEPlanner

This is the atlas I have been using all league. It's all Ritual nodes + some Rogue Exiles and Mercs. If you run this strat you can switch mercs to anything else, it doesn't matter too much and I just wanted to fish for some good mercs and they drop nice scarabs or currency every now and then.
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The Map

T16 Alched City Square

City Square is my go to map because of the easy access to the boss, three unique mobs as a boss, and a very predictable and comfy layout.

I have just alched these maps and that's it. You could do 8mod maps or run them white, it would not make a difference in the grand scheme of things.

This is the regex I've used to roll these maps for my build: "!yers cann|ents$|from$|ss are|\d+ e|ills$|taunte"
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The Scarabs/Fragments

Because this is a two part test under two slightly different conditions, there's two different setups I've used.
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No Vessels

2x Ritual Scarab of Selectiveness

2x Ritual Scarab of Abundance

1x Ritual Scarab of Wisps
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With Vessels

2x Ritual Scarab of Selectiveness

2x Ritual Scarab of Abundance

1x Blood-filled Vessel

The only difference with these two setups is that I am using a Ritual Scarab of Wisps during the 200 no vessel maps. This doesn't affect the found loot and only helps me get a lot more tribute because without vessels you can sometimes struggle to get enough tribute to defer and get all rerolls.
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My Build

I am running a Winter Orb Elementalist. I didn't want to do power charge stacking again because I find it quite boring after the third time so I wanted to see how far I can take this build without pc stacking or a mageblood. So here's my own scuffed setup.

My build at the time of writing

My build on poe.ninja
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My Filter

This is the filter I am using. It's tailored purely to my own taste and needs. It's an insanely strict filter by most people's standards so beware when using it and make your own adjustments as needed. This is what I used for my entire 400 map run so if you plan on running Ritual this is a very well suited filter for that.

!!! Boss Uniques are disabled on my filter, watch out for that when bossing !!!

My Filter on the PoE Website

My Filter on Filterblade
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Loot Breakdown

First of all, let's see what I got out of these 400 maps in total.

Total Amount of Items Found and their Profits

1141 Items, totaling 138118c or ~678d. That's quite a lot!

And now let's see what each 200 map run yielded and compare!

If a category is marked in green, this means that the number of items found or the profit was higher in this run than in the opposite one. (e.g. currency marked as green in the vessel run means I found more here than in the no-vessel run). Red means the opposite.

Items Found (No Vessels)

Item Prices (No Vessels)

Items Found (With Vessels)

Item Prices (With Vessels)

So during the 200 map run with vessels, I have found 25d worth of stuff more than in the no vessel run. And now you might see all of this green on the Vessel data and say "Woah look at all this green on the Vessel side of things. This seems like conclusive proof that vessels improve the profits!". And while, yes, the profits in the 200 runs with vessels were higher and brought me roughly 25 divines more profit, it's sadly not as simple.

That is because Ritual is what I like to call a "high-variety strat". What I mean by that is, that the loot you get out of ritual is very varied. You have a wide range of profitable items and their drop rates also vary a lot. And I personally don't think a lot of these get affected by Vessels, and even if they were, the variance would be too much to account for. For example, a good chunk of the profits, roughly 10%, is going to be rare gear and bases. And a lot of that tends to be fractured gear, especially jewels. And I don't think Vessels will affect how many fractured items I get and what kind of fractures they are.

So what I want to do is try to "normalize" the data. What I mean by that is that I want to take out all the lucky drops like tigers or very rare divination cards, and all rare loot except for archdemon crowns. So all that will be left is what I would consider very average loot. So this way we get a better view of what I would consider the average and core Ritual drop pool and then we can see how Vessels might possibly affect it.

So here is that data:

Items Found (No Vessels, Normalized)

Item Prices (No Vessels, Normalized)

Items Found (With Vessels, Normalized)

Item Prices (With Vessels, Normalized)

As you can see, roughly 10% of the all items I found have been cut and all that's left is what I would consider very average loot. This consists largely of Divines, the common Omens (Amelioration, Trichromatism), the more common corpses (including Warlords and Turtles, they're not that rare), and the King invitations.

And even when leveling the playing field by normalizing the data, the 200 maps with vessels still pulled up ahead and yielded 12% more profits. I have found more items and got more profit out of each but one item category in the run with the vessels.
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Conclusion

So, does this data conclusively proof that vessels considerably improve ritual loot?

In my opinion: No.

It is definitely data which supports the idea that vessels improve the loot, but I would not call it definite proof. And that just comes down to the already mentioned high variance of ritual loot. 400 maps are too small of a sample size to get a good picture of what the loot actually looks like. You can get very lucky or unlucky in the span of 200 maps, even when normalizing the data. So there is no way to exclude the possibility that, for example, I just got a bit lucky with the divine drops in the vessel run. And there is no way to adjust for this except for just running more maps.

I think to get an actual good baseline, I would need to run at least 500 maps each, totaling 1000 maps. But that is beyond my capabilities for a single league. I'll get back to it next league and look to expand my gathered data. But for 3.29, I'll have to leave it at this.

In the end, Vessels definitely do something. What exactly they do and how much it affects high end profits is still quite unsure. But I still think you should always run as many of your Rituals with Vessels as you can. They might yield you an extra divine here and there and that already makes them worth it.

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Div/h Calculation

This is not what the post is about, but since I already recorded all the data for 400 maps anyway, why the hell would I not showcase this!

So first of all, what was my investment?

https://preview.redd.it/r2dd27u1yckh1.png?width=787&format=png&auto=webp&s=26938fca635fd03a355383525cb16f9bc44935fc

As you can see here, I spent ~93d on these 400 maps. Most of the cost is actually the astrolabes, but if you decide to run this strat and they are too expensive for your taste, you can just leave them out. Ritual works perfectly fine without the astrolabes!

Total Revenue/Profit

Now as previously establishes, I have pulled 138118c worth of stuff out of these 400 maps. On top of that I will add the 39d worth of stuff I got out of the astrolabe vaults, which brings me to 145723c worth of total revenue.

Taking out my 18100c investment, this leaves us with 127623c or ~654d worth of profit.

So how long did all of this take? I take around 2 minutes per map. I have reviewed my footage and getting in and out and dumping my loot into my stash takes 2 minutes per map, give or take. In total I ran 452 maps, because this includes the 52 immutable dogma maps I had to run to get my loot out of deferral jail.

452min x 2 / 60 = ~15h

And now:

654d/15h = ~43d/h

Now that's quite juicy if I do say so myself!

And with that my post is concluded! I hope you learned something or have been enlightened about the ways of ritual c:
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TL;DR

Ritual Vessels definitely do something. The extend of that is still quite unsure and even after 400 maps there is no solid proof for anything, although the data hints at them increasing my profits. I think they're definitely worth running, even if they just add an occasional extra divine or increase your chance at jackpot items even just a tiny bit.

Also, Ritual is good!

Neeko out :3

EDIT: I updated the div/h calculation because it was pointed out that I accidentally calculated with only one Abundance and Selectiveness Scarab each map instead of two! Very basic mistake, no idea how that slipped past with how often I looked at these charts. Sorry about that :3

Vor ungefähr zwei Monaten hatte ich schon über die Sonnenfinsternis gelesen und diese dann sofort wieder vergessen bis mich heute Reddit dran erinnert hat. Jetzt hab ich natürlich keine Brille um sie anzuschauen weil die anscheinend überall ausverkauft sind. Tja.

Gibts noch irgendwelche Läden wo man eventuelle welche kaufen kann?

Hi, Ritual Girl here, the name's Neeko!

Some people might recognize me as the person who posted about ritual a few times the past leagues.

Here's my posts from 3.27 and 3.28.

And as is now tradition, I am back yet again with another post to see if anything about Ritual has changed.

I am quite late with my post compared to last league, I wasn't really able to play for the past 8 days because I was on vacation. So this time around the gathered data shows the profits in the more stabilized mid league.

 

What changed in 3.29?

The only major change is some things getting removed from the Ritual drop pool or from the game entirely. These things being synth items, abyss jewels, and catalysts. You won't see any of those in your Rituals anymore. Seems like a nerf on paper, but that really isn't the case as you'll see below.

One other very minor thing which changed (and I'm not sure if it's intended or not) is that Nameless Rituals now seem to not spawn one guaranteed Audience with the King per reroll anymore. Sometimes they're just missing, which hasn't been the case in the past leagues.

 

My Build

I am running a Winter Orb Elementalist. My build is really zoomy and very comfy for Ritual with the auto-targeting and the big explosions. I'm also chaos immune because of CI, which is very nice for Ritual as well.

My build at the time of writing

My build on poe.ninja

 

My Filter

A strict filter is the key to fast and efficient Ritual window shopping!

Here's my personal filter for anyone who's interested:

Path of Exile Website

Filterblade

For some people this might be too strict, not visually appealing, or the sounds are not your type, so please make adjustments as necessary!

 

The Strategy

The Atlas Tree

PoePlanner

This is the Tree I am currently using. The only thing which changed compared to last leagues is that I opted into Mercenaries. I think they go well with Ritual since you only need to quickly check them out and they sometimes have some nice gear, scarabs, or currency. And if you're lucky you can even find a good merc to sell to Luminaries.

 

The Scarabs

2x Ritual Scarabs of Selectiveness

2x Ritual Scarabs of Abundance

The same as always, nothing really changed here. If you're running on a tighter budget, you can also run only one Abundance Scarab instead of two. There's also an argument to be made for running one abundance and two blood-filled vessels. But I've never personally done that since I don't like constantly filling up so many vessels or buying them.

 

The Map

White T16 City Squares

As always, I am running my maps white since the only way to affect Ritual is to get more pack size of naturally spawned monsters on the ritual area. You can and probably should just alch the maps and get a bit more tribute with the increased pack size, but I've never found that it made a very noticeable difference overall. So I just run my maps white since I don't care about ground loot here anyway.

As for the layout, City Square is very comfy layout with quick access to the boss, which consists of three unique monsters. That'll boost our tribute numbers a lot should we get boss rituals.

Another good choice for a ritual map layout is Toxic Sewers, which made a return to the atlas this league! Toxic Sewers is also really good and fast to run. It also has the benefit of the Ritual spawning in these small rooms which increases the average monster density on them and also makes the chances of rogue exiles spawning on them much higher.

Overall the layout makes no real difference and you should run whichever map you find the most fun.

 

What does the strat look like?

We immediately rush to the boss and kill it to see if there's a boss altar. After that you just clear all the Ritual altars and start window shopping.

Always prioritize using up all your rerolls to not miss out on potential loot. Defer instead of immediately securing the loot.

Do note that getting all the rerolls can sometimes be hard because you get two extra rerolls which will cost 1340 tribute each. With the Astrolabe bonus you can get up to two more rerolls on top. So sometimes you would have to pay for four out of 9 rerolls, putting you at a ~5k tribute cost for rerolling per map. That can often be tough because you also have to use tribute to defer and secure items.

This is why it would definitely be most optimal to farm up blood-filled vessels and use one on every map you run. But I personally don't do that all the time and sometimes just miss out on one or two rerolls, it really doesn't matter too much.

 

The Profit Breakdown

Alright, now let's get to the numbers which we're all here for.

Please note that a lot of the prices for all the items involved in this strat constantly change a lot, I am using the numbers which I recorded in my spreadsheets, a lot of which may already be outdated once this post goes live.

I will be using a Divine price of 200c for the purpose of all my profit calculations.

 

The Investment

200x Ritual Scarab of Selectiveness - 1c each - 200c

200x Ritual Scarab of Abundance - 9c each - 1800c

16x Nameless Astrolabes - 100c each - 1600c

50 Ritual Vessels - 4c each - 200c

200 T16 Maps - 1c each - 200c

Full investment: 4000c or 20d

I bought around 10 of the Astrolabes a bit earlier when they were still around 70c, but I just averaged all of them out to 100c for a nicer number.

Also, the price for Ritual Vessels on the Exchange tends to fluctuate a lot. Make sure you don't overpay a lot. Put up a buy order for a reasonable price and wait a bit, it'll get filled eventually.

 

The Loot

What did I get out of my 100 maps this time around?

Below is a table that will show the amount of chaos I got in total by item type. And below that I will highlight the drops which I consider very lucky.

Item Type	Item Amount	Total Price in Chaos
Divines	47	9400
Other Currency Items	14	6663
Unique Items	5	284
Omens	37	8345
Divination Cards	49	2881
Rare Gear / Bases	37	3066
Corpses	14	21548
King Invitations	58	5220
Misc Items	36	3347
Total	297	55534

https://preview.redd.it/fga6mgp5jzhh1.png?width=1085&format=png&auto=webp&s=6cbe0f3b3fb7b9831f965635dbc45dd17eef56b4

https://preview.redd.it/d3vi4306jzhh1.png?width=999&format=png&auto=webp&s=f26ab070e7dde428ec528c13636f5d16748a198e

So this is everything I have found and sold.

I think I was very lucky this time around, especially for just 100 maps. I've found two perfect forest tigers and a mirror shard. These items combined make up nearly half of the entire profit.

Other than that, the loot is very average and about what I would expect from ritual.

Do note that only 27 of the divines came from Ritual itself. The others were either found from mercs (3), ground loot (2), and astrolabes (15). A lot of the scarabs also came from Mercs.

 

The Profit

Now that we've seen what 100 maps yielded, let's see how that translates into profit numbers.

In total I sold 55534c or 277.67d worth of loot.

My investment was 4000c or 20d.

Taking the investment out, we arrive at 257.67d worth of total profit.

So how long did all of this take?

I need roughly two minutes per map because my build is rather fast and my filter very strict. Of course the time varies a tiny bit each map, but I think two minutes is a very good average for our calculation.

Now, the title of this post says I ran 100 Ritual maps, which is technically true. But I also ran 40 more maps without scarabs and Immutable Dogma allocated to get my loot out of deferral jail.

So in total I ran 140 maps which took 2 minutes each.

140 x 2 / 60 = ~4.7h

For the purpose of the calculation and to adjust for the few maps where I have taken a bit longer, I'll round up and use a time of 5 hours.

So this is the final calculation:

257.67d / 5h = ~51.5d/h

That's quite the juicy number if I do say so myself! But as I noted above, I think I've gotten very lucky in these 100 maps. So to be fair, I'll also do the calculation while excluding the three lucky drops.

The two tigers and the mirror shard made up 23600c of my 51534c of profit.

51534c - 23600c = 27934c or 139.67d

139.67d / 5h = ~27.9d/h

This is the best average loot div/h I have ever recorded for ritual! And overall this is really strong with the current farming meta being very homogeneous overall in terms of div/h. If you want to try out Ritual, now is a better time then ever before!

 

My Thoughts on Ritual in 3.29

As I've expected after the patch notes dropped, ritual is not dead at all like a lot of people cried out before we even got to play. Ritual seems stronger than ever when you look at the average loot you get. But also, quite some jackpot value was lost with the removal of synth items, which I find quite sad. So even though Ritual is alive and well, I do find it disappointing that we seem to be losing more and more loot variety in Ritual as time goes on. I really hope this direction of game design doesn't go much further and that synth items maybe get reintroduced at some point.

 

TL;DR

Ritual is good! Even after the "nerfs" it seems very alive and not gutted how many people feared. Overall the profit numbers are better than ever before, so this might have been a buff in disguise. But maybe I'm also just insanely lucky, so take my data with a grain of salt because that has just been 100 maps and only my personal experience!

If you have more questions about the strat itself, maybe check out my Ritual posts from the past leagues, I've gone a bit more in-depth about the strat itself there. If you have any more questions you can always message me on reddit, in-game, or on discord.

My IGN in PoE is NeekoTheFurry and I'm ytera on discord, don't hesitate to shoot me a message if you want to ask me basically anything!

Thanks for reading!

Neeko out :3

EDIT:

Ritual Map - YouTube

Here's a link to a short video to see what an average map for me looks like. Kind of a terrible example since shaper decided to trash talk me here and some rituals spawned the monsters a bit weird which also added some time. And that's exactly what I mean, sometimes maps take 2min30s, sometimes they take 1min50s, it all averages out to around 2min per map and the 5h I used for my calculation should be rather accurate.

Heya! Ritual Girl here, the name's Neeko!

Ritual is my all-time favourite mechanic in the game and I have been running it every league and every event ever since I've started playing.

And every league I record and break down my profits in spreadsheets and publish the findings of one of these runs on reddit to see how ritual is doing.

Here are the posts from the past two leagues: 3.28 - 3.27

Now, I know that a lot of people are panicking because more and more loot is getting taken out of the ritual loot pool. I myself don't really like those changes because I love ritual for the loot variety, so I get why people might be upset. But I don't really understand why a lot of people assume that ritual will be a poor person's mechanic now. I've already seen quite a few posts of people freaking out and being angry at GGG because they think Ritual has been gutted.

In my experience, looking back at all my recorded data, the main profits from ritual will always come from raw currency, div cards, fractures, and omens/invitations. The synth items were always a nice addition and had huge jackpot potential, but they've never made up the biggest part of the profits. If you take them out you might be missing around 10% of the overall profits, which I think is the absolute worst case. And even that would still leave Ritual as a very consistent and profitable mechanic.

Also, 98% of synth items are sub 1c junk. So them being taken out will most likely fill the remaining generated items per window with other things, lots of it potentially worth a lot more than the average synth item. At least I would assume so, as that also seemed to be the case after the removal of fossils and resonators. After that I found noticeably more currency and div cards in Ritual.

Same goes for the abyss jewels. Having a supply of them for rolling and finding the occasional good fracture was nice. But losing them really isn't that big of a deal on paper and you might find more other good stuff now.

Also, with +1 Charge being a corruption implicit on rings now, and there being much stronger corruption implicits in general, you might find a good corruption here and there now, especially earlier in the league. So that might be a nice little addition to the loot pool as random corrupted items you found in ritual were always really bad before.

Obviously neither I nor anybody else will know for sure how things will turn out until we actually get to play the new league. But with all my past experience I am quite sure that the loot changes are not really that big of a deal (in terms of profit) even though they kinda suck in my opinion.

The bigger problem in my eyes are the potential issues with scarab supply which could make ritual really expensive to run. But that's beside the point of this post and we'll have to see how everything turns out.

TL;DR

I think some of the changes made to a lot of mechanics and ritual specifically over the past leagues are not really enjoyable for me and go the wrong direction. But personally I still don't think the removal of synth items, abyss jewels, and catalysts from the Ritual loot pool will impact the profits too much. It might, but chances are low in my opinion. Please don't freak out or ask for buffs to Ritual before we have even had the chance to play!

Stay sane Exiles :3