Path of Exile 2 Ascendancy Trials Guide: Sekhema and Chaos Explained

Ascendancy points are the biggest power spike you grab during the Path of Exile 2 campaign, and the only way to earn them is through the two Ascendancy trials. The Trial of the Sekhemas opens up in Act 2, and the Trial of Chaos follows in Act 3. Each one has its own rules, its own currency, and its own way of killing you. Get them right and your character takes off. Botch them and you'll be repeating the same floors over and over.

Here's how both trials tick, how the Sekhema Honour system drains your run, and the safest order to claim all eight of your Ascendancy points.

Trial of the Sekhema Room Mechanics

Getting in and the floor structure

You enter the Sekhema trial with a Djinn Barya, a coin that drops off monsters from Act 2 onward. Before the run starts, you set up Relics on the Relic Altar. Then you walk in.

The number of floors depends on the area level of the Barya you used:

• Area level 24 to 44: 1 floor
• Area level 45 to 59: 2 floors
• Area level 60 to 74: 3 floors
• Area level 75 and up: 4 floors

Each floor is a string of seven rooms, with a boss and reward chests waiting at the end. You pick your path room by room on a map, and that map is where a lot of the strategy lives.

The five room types

You run into five flavors of room, and they get nastier as you climb floors.

• Escape Trial: Disable every Death Crystal before the timer runs out. Clicking one shows you the others nearby, so it's a chain reaction.
• Ritual Trial: Kill the Ritual Casters to close their portals. Big portals summon fewer but tougher mobs, small portals spit out weak ones.
• Chalice Trial: Defeat all the Rare monsters to fill a Blood Chalice. Clicking the chalice points you toward the rares you still need.
• Hourglass Trial: Survive until the timer hits zero. Killing Rares shaves big chunks off the timer, so hunt them down.
• Gauntlet Trial: Find the exit while dodging traps. This one's usually the meanest of the bunch, so skip it when the map lets you.

What each room pays out

Hover a room on the map and you'll see its reward before you commit. The good ones:

• Keys (Bronze, Silver, Gold): Used to open reward chests at the end of the floor. Almost always the top pick.
• Shrine: Restores some Honour for 5 Sacred Water, plus a bonus depending on the shrine. Honour Galai is the prize here, since it hands you a Boon and scrubs one Affliction.
• Sacred Water Fountain: Free Sacred Water, the currency you spend on Boons at Merchants.
• Merchant: Spend your Sacred Water on Boons and Relics.
• Pledge: A tradeoff that gives you one good effect and one bad one. Only grab these if the good side is worth the hit.
• Caches: You get plenty of these from floor rewards anyway, so they rank low.

Boons, afflictions, and the bosses

Boons are buffs that last the whole run. The standouts are Hare Foot (40% more move speed), Ornate Dagger (you and your minions deal 50% more damage), Sanguine Vial (monsters have 30% less life), and Silver Tongue (50% cheaper merchant prices). Snatch them up whenever a Merchant offers them.

Afflictions are the flip side, and you usually earn them as the cost of clearing a room. The rough ones are Blunt Sword (you deal 40% less damage), Dark Pit (traps hit 100% harder), Fiendish Wings (enemies are faster and can't be slowed below base), and Deceptive Mirror (you don't always land in the room you picked). Since you choose which room to enter, you're partly choosing which Affliction to swallow.

Four bosses guard the floors, always in the same order. Floor 1 is Rattlecage, the Earthbreaker, who drops volcanoes you need to sidestep. Floor 2 is a pair, Hadi of the Flaming River and Rafiq of the Frozen Spring, and the trick is to kill them together because the survivor fully heals and gets meaner. Floor 3 is Ashar, the Sand Mother, a scorpion with pressure plate traps and a burrow attack. Floor 4 is Zarokh, the Temporal, the time-bending pinnacle fight that drops a Unique Relic when you beat him.

Trial of Chaos Reliquary Rules

Entry and the round structure

The Chaos trial eats an Inscribed Ultimatum, which drops from Act 3 onward. Instead of floors, you get rounds, and the number scales with area level:

• Area level 39 to 59: 4 rounds
• Area level 60 to 74: 7 rounds
• Area level 75 and up: 10 rounds

Ten rounds is where the real money is, since the round 10 boss always drops a Fate you need for the pinnacle fight.

The rounds follow a fixed order: defeat all monsters, survive the timer, escort the statue or collect Soul Cores, beat the boss, and so on, repeating with small twists through round 10. Rounds 4, 7, and 10 are always boss fights, and they always pay out a Soul Core as your reward.

Pick your poison: the modifier choice

Here's the catch that defines the whole trial. Before every single round you pick one of three negative modifiers, and that modifier stays active for the rest of the run. Stack ten of them and things get spicy. There are a couple dozen options, and some are far scarier than others.

The mostly-harmless ones, once your resistances are capped:

• Stormcaller Runes, Burning Turrets, Shocking Turrets: Elemental hazards that are a non-issue at 75% resistance.
• Blood Globules: Falling blood blobs you dodge roll away from.
• Shielding Monsters: Enemies get energy shield. Slows you down, rarely kills you.
• Lethal Rare Monsters: Rares get two extra mods, but there are 30% more of them. More rares means more loot, so this one's often a net win.

The ones to dodge like the plague:

• Enraged Bosses: Bosses hit harder and tank more. On a boss round this can flat out end you.
• Reduced Recovery: 40% less recovery at rank 1, 75% less at rank 2. Recovery is the backbone of your defense.
• Damaged Defences: 40% to 75% less defenses, brutal for energy shield builds.
• Reduced Resistances: Drops your resists and your max resists. Rank 2 takes you from 75% down to 45%, which more than doubles the damage you eat.
• Petrification Statues: Turn you to stone if you stand in their gaze. Getting petrified mid-pack is a death sentence.
• Stalking Shade: An invulnerable shade chases you and stacks Ruin. Hit 7 Ruin and the trial fails, and those stacks persist the whole run.

Bail or push: the reliquary gamble

After every round you can pocket your loot and walk, or push for the next round. The catch is that if you fail a challenge, you lose everything you've gathered. So a pile of Soul Cores and corrupted items is sitting there tempting you, and one bad modifier choice can wipe it.

The safest play is to take easy modifiers early, bank the good loot, and bail the moment the only options left are Enraged Bosses, Reduced Recovery, or Petrification. Pride kills more runs than the bosses do.

Beat all three round 10 bosses and you collect the three Fates, one from each. Cowardly Fate drops from Uxmal the Beastlord, Deadly Fate from Bahlak the Sky Seer, and Victorious Fate from Chetza the Feathered Plague. Slot them into the doors of the Trialmaster's Tower for the pinnacle fight. The Trialmaster ignores your modifiers, which is a small mercy, and first kills drop his unique items like The Adorned and Hateforge.

Honour Resource and How It Depletes

What Honour actually is

Honour is a second health bar that only exists inside the Sekhema trial. It's sized off your combined Life and Energy Shield, so a tankier character starts with a bigger pool. Every time you take a hit, you lose the normal damage and a chunk of Honour on top. Hit zero Honour and the run ends on the spot, even if your life bar is full.

The good news is that running out of Honour isn't a real death. You don't lose experience, and you don't drop your gear. You just get kicked out of the trial and have to spend another Djinn Barya to try again. Small comfort, but it matters.

Armour, evasion, and why they double-dip here

Your normal defenses pull double duty against Honour loss. Armour cuts the amount of Honour you bleed per hit, and Evasion gives you a flat chance to take zero Honour damage from a hit. So the same Armour and Evasion that keep you alive in maps also stretch your Honour further. A squishy glass cannon that ignores Armour will bleed out in Sekhema even if it one-shots everything on the screen.

Honour Resistance: the 75% target

This is the single most important stat for the Sekhema trial. Honour Resistance straight up reduces how much Honour each hit costs you, and you want about 75% of it from your Relics before you attempt anything past one floor. Most players stop around that 75% soft cap, though specific Relic affixes can raise the cap higher, toward the 90% range.

Without Honour Resistance, melee builds especially get chewed up, since they take more hits by standing close. With it capped, you can soak a mistake and still finish the run. Get the resistance first, then chase max Honour, defenses, and move speed on the rest of your Relics.

Restoring Honour mid-run

You refill Honour a few ways. Shrines are the main one, costing 5 Sacred Water for a chunk back. The Honour Galai shrine is the jackpot, since it tops you up, hands you a Boon, and deletes an Affliction all at once. Some Boons and Relics raise your max Honour or your recovery rate. And farming the early, unlimited-access trial is the reliable way to roll Relics with Honour Resistance and max Honour before you push into the higher floors.

Relics themselves are the meta-progression layer. They drop inside the trial and craft only up to Magic rarity, in three sizes with their own mod pools. You slot them on the altar before each run, and they stick around between runs, so your altar gets stronger the more you farm it.

Best Ascendancy Order for Each Class

How the eight points are handed out

There are eight Ascendancy points total, doled out in four tiers of two. The trials come in four difficulty tiers, and beating a tier for the first time pays out its pair of points.

• Tier 1 (points 1 and 2): Complete the Sekhema trial in Act 2 after beating Balbala, the Traitor. This is what unlocks your Ascendancy class in the first place.
• Tier 2 (points 3 and 4): Finish the Chaos trial in Act 3, or run a higher-floor Sekhema.
• Tier 3 (points 5 and 6): A level 60-plus trial, which means a 3-floor Sekhema or a 7-round Chaos.
• Tier 4 (points 7 and 8): A level 75-plus trial, the 4-floor Sekhema or the 10-round Chaos. Beating the Trialmaster for the first time is what cracks open that fourth set.

You can mix and match trial types across tiers, so if Sekhema's Honour system is wrecking you, you're free to lean on Chaos for later points instead.

Picking your subclass and first notable

Your class decides which Ascendancy subclasses are on the table. Here's where the current meta lands for trial-clearing, with a rough first-notable priority for each.

• Warrior (Titan, Warbringer, Smith of Kitava): Titan slams hit huge areas and clear rooms fast, which keeps Honour safe by killing things before they hit back. Lean on your area and slam notables early.
• Mercenary (Witchhunter, Gemling Legionnaire, Tactician): Witchhunter is the safe, generically strong pick. Culling Strike, Decimating Strike, and the explode notable carry basically any build through both trials. Gemling scales harder later but wants more gear to get going.
• Monk (Invoker, Acolyte): Invoker is fluid and dodge-friendly, which is exactly what Sekhema rewards. Point toward the combo and energy shield notables so you can slip hits.
• Ranger (Deadeye, Pathfinder): Deadeye clears screens from range, so you take fewer hits and bleed less Honour. The flask and evasion notables from Pathfinder also help Sekhema a lot.
• Witch (Infernalist, Blood Mage): Blood Mage's sustain keeps your life topped up, which keeps your Honour pool large. Infernalist's minions body-block damage for you, which is huge in a mode built around not getting hit.
• Sorceress (Stormweaver, Chronomancer): Both kill from range. Stormweaver's elemental weaving deletes rooms fast, so grab the damage notables early and let fights end before Honour drains.
• Huntress (Amazon, Ritualist): Amazon's crit and parry playstyle hits hard up close, which is riskier in Sekhema. Lean on the parry defenses early so you avoid the chip damage.

The pattern across all of them is the same. In Sekhema, anything that kills faster or dodges better protects your Honour, and anything that adds defense or sustain keeps the pool full. In Chaos, raw damage and capped resistances matter more, since there's no Honour to manage.

Common Trial Deaths and How to Avoid Them

Sekhema death traps

The number one Sekhema killer is going in without Honour Resistance capped. A build that face-tanks maps will still bleed out here, because Honour loss is a separate clock from your life bar. Fix the Relics first, every single run.

Next up is taking a bad Affliction for a room reward that wasn't worth it. Dark Pit stacked on top of a Gauntlet room is a quick way to get shredded by traps. Fiendish Wings makes everything faster and uns slowable, which is rough for any build relying on chill or stun. Read the affliction before you walk into the room, and route around the nasty ones when the map gives you the choice.

Melee characters die to chip damage more than anything else. Standing in the pack means lots of small hits, and lots of small hits drain Honour fast. Pull mobs toward you, use your dodge roll to reset, and don't tank things you can sidestep.

The Zarokh fight has its own killer. When he vanishes, poison clouds linger until you find him again, and new players stand still looking around and melt. Keep moving, sweep the arena, and re-engage the moment you spot him. The twin fight on floor 2 ends runs too, when someone leaves one boss alive and it heals to full and enrages. Damage them evenly.

Chaos death traps

In Chaos the deaths come from modifier math, not a separate resource. Stack the wrong three modifiers and a comfortable fight turns into a one-shot.

The classic killer combo is Enraged Bosses plus a damage amp like Escalating Damage Taken (1% more per second up to 50%) or Monster Speed. A boss under all three hits like a truck, faster than you can react. If Enraged Bosses is on the table and a boss round is coming, take something else or bail out.

Reduced Recovery and Damaged Defences together collapse your sustain, so a build that was fine suddenly can't out-heal the chip. Reduced Resistances rank 2 takes you from 75% to 45% resist, which more than doubles incoming elemental damage, and that's before Vaal Omnitect or the turrets pile on more of it. Vaal Omnitect and Impending Doom are sneaky because they also overlap with boss abilities, which is why those two make boss rounds so nasty.

Stalking Shade is a quiet one. The shade itself doesn't hit that hard, but the Ruin stacks persist the whole run, and at rank 2 and 3 the ranged projectiles rack up Ruin fast. Hit 7 and the trial fails outright. If you took it at rank 1 early, keep your distance for the rest of the run and don't let the stacks snowball.

Volatile Fiends and on-death explosions punish builds that blow up whole packs at once, since a screen full of volatiles goes off together. Stagger your kills, dodge roll out of the death burst, and watch for the larger volatiles that rares leave behind.

Petrification Statues are the silent killer. You get turned to stone, and the pack around you gets a free hit. Never face the statues, and if the modifier's rank 2, skip it entirely because the gaze window gets brutal.

General survival habits

A few things save runs across both trials. Dodge roll is your best friend, and rolling through lasers (Pyramid Beams) and on-death bursts is the difference between living and loading a checkpoint. Top off your flasks at the wells before every Chaos boss, since there's a well right before each one even with the Drought modifier active. Keep your elemental resistances capped at 75% before you walk in, because half the Chaos modifiers are toothless at capped resists. And know when to walk away. In Chaos, banking a stack of Soul Cores beats losing them to one greedy push. The trial's still there next run, and a fresh Inscribed Ultimatum costs a lot less than a full clear's worth of loot.