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

Last time I tried HCSSF was several leagues ago and it was Exarch that ended my run, so this time I may have over-farmed and over-leveled. It might not seem that special since thousands of people have already done this many leagues, but felt like I had to share it.

I'm looking to get all four voidstones this league. Wish me luck.

Was trying to get a Ralakesh with +1 frenzy, so I enshrouded 60 Darkray Vectors.

I know its not the biggest sample size but I ran out of gold ( seems like buying a bunch of uniques will drain your gold pretty fast) and got bored.

All boots were cooked to level 3/3 to increase the chances of rarer varieties.

Results: Didnt find a single Tier 1 Boot.

3x TIER 2 Boots found ( 2x Beacon of Madness, 1x Seven League Step)

57/60 were T3 or below ( didnt kept track of those , but all prettty common)

Conclusion: If you are trying to enshroud a t2 unique, it may take some time/patience, but you'll get it eventually, if you are trying to get t1 though... Good luck.

https://preview.redd.it/m1g0gl7wsbkh1.png?width=1906&format=png&auto=webp&s=c1d3ebd245d9631042c6832a692fff2474a91cd7

Damn the moment i hit level 100 and compare my build to someone else's i was thinking:

"Hmm… I think I'm missing a passive point somewhere."

So you check your entire passive tree, your bandit choice, everything… and you can't figure it out.

Then you realize you forgot to go back and complete one random quest that gives a passive point. 💀

This is the second time this has happened to me. -_-

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3998062/page/1#p26830591

I really hope that GGG keeps the gold at this level. I have not had to buy a single gold rota this league. IT has been amazing.

I did not really use my gold for kings march this league. I spent it on crafting related stuff and other projects. But past leagues I would spend upwards of 50 div on gold rota because the game just didn't give enough gold to play the game I wanted to play it.

edit-i look away and come back and see this struck a cord with alot of you guys. hopefully GGG sees this and takes positive action.

This patch, we got a complete overhaul of corrupt implicit for almost all items. That is sort of why I farm those vaal vessels too.

But one thing those vessels drop all the time is jewels with 2 implicits.

That is where the patch forgot to update anything. Last time we had implicit change on jewels was adding elemental pen rolls. But we are still stuck with outdated implicit like "You Cannot be Cursed with Silence". Frankly, in current game, people go for curse immunity. Also, who is cursing you with "silence" these days exactly? Does this mod even do anything? It so rarely happen as to be irrelevant. PoEWiki just say you can be cursed with silence by strongboxes and possessed monsters of a specific type.

Anyway, we could have used new implicit on jewels. Like carry over some modest synth implicit that exist on poe 2 jewels. Like some tiny stat or res bonus wouldn't be powerful, but at least does something unlike very situational stuff like "cannot be hindered" or "cannot be maimed", which is ok but I don't know anyone who is going out of their way to try to be immune to those slow effects. I'd rather we had something more generic like reducing the slowing effect of everything. A stat which exist in poe 2 there again.

Current jewel implicits could have used an update like everything else, because synth implicit on jewels included a bunch of things. Like hey, why not give us this 5% attack speed during onslaught as a abyss jewel implicit. Or for accuracy stacker, some %accuracy which was available as a synth implicit too. Anything at all would be welcomed since all other items got something.