Path of Exile 2 Forbidden Rites 0.5.5 explained: campaign Rituals, Trial of Chaos resume, Expedition to core

Path of Exile 2 sits inside Steam’s top concurrent charts on 24 September 2026, and Softcap’s first PoE2 desk piece covers the live 0.5.5 Forbidden Rites event league — the September Early Access cycle Grinding Gear Games launched at 1:00 PM PDT on 4 September 2026. Softcap sticks to the official 0.5.5 Patch Notes, the Steam Forbidden Rites patch-notes pointer, the 0.5.5 Event League & Duelist Deep Dive, and the later 0.5.5c hotfix thread. Softcap is not inventing league economy prices, Atlas soft-brick rankings, or unpublished DPS math.

Primary spine: Ritual encounters through the campaign, a rebuilt Trial of Chaos that can be left and resumed, Expedition / Runes of Aldur moving into the Atlas core, Abyssal Ravines, a stack of new Soul Cores, and the Forbidden Rites challenge / Twitch Drop window. Duelist is framed as a 1.0 (11 December 2026) class — not a 0.5.5 unlock.

At a glance

Beat	Published detail
Live window	4 Sep 2026, 1:00 PM PDT (PC + console)
Event league	Forbidden Rites — Standard / Hardcore / SSF (+ private leagues)
Campaign mechanic	Ritual in every campaign area; boss-effigy clusters twice per Act, once per Interlude
Trial of Chaos	Leave/resume mid-run · per-room reward chests · Currency + Soul Core finals · Uxmal arena redesign
Core systems	Expedition to Atlas core from Act 4 · Abyssal Ravines · Arbiter fortress shortcuts
Rewards	8 Forbidden Rites challenges · Locust / Wildwood cosmetics · hideout Totem Pole
Follow-up	0.5.5c Legacy of the Precursors / Ritual / Trial fixes (forum thread)
Not in 0.5.5	Duelist — ships with 1.0 on 11 Dec 2026

What Forbidden Rites is selling

GGG frames 0.5.5 as a fresh-economy event league while leaving Runes of Aldur characters and that league available in parallel. The King in the Mists and his cultists push Ritual into the campaign: every area gets a Ritual encounter tuned toward levelling currency and gear, not endgame Favour fishing.

Twice per Act and once per Interlude, the World Map marks Ritual Effigy clusters. Those effigies sit on the area boss — clear the boss Ritual, and that boss carries forward into the next cluster fight as an escalating wave set. Finish the series and Tribute spends open Unique Items. Sacred Blooms (Forbidden Rites–only Ritual reward) can stamp the Viridian Wildwood onto a Map cluster; collect Wisps inside, then leave so Map monsters inherit that Wisp power.

Challenge track (rewards only from this league): complete 2 / 4 / 6 / 8 challenges for Locust Footprints, Locust Swarm Rare Finisher, Wildwood Guardian Pet, and Wildwood Affliction Level-up. From challenge 1 onward you also earn pieces of the Forbidden Rites Totem hideout decoration that permanently records how many challenges you finished.

Ritual party rules and Atlas tweaks

Party members now earn their own Ritual Tribute and a limited Favour set they can buy or offer to the King — those party rewards cannot be rerolled. Multiple Ritual Tablets stack toward an extra Altar when possible and raise Azmeri Wisp quantity inside the Wildwood. New Atlas Notable Royal Lenience lets Tribute already offered to the King defer items (at 500% more Offered Tribute cost). In party play, everyone in the area must hear Aoife’s introduction before the Ritual starts. The Viridian Wildwood Unique Map is disabled; existing copies reroll where possible.

Trial of Chaos: leave, resume, get paid per room

The notes call out the old “finish the entire run or lose the night” friction. You can leave Trial of Chaos and resume later from the same room. Each room now drops a reward chest, so a death does not wipe the whole run’s payout. End-of-run rewards are Currency and Soul Cores only — corrupted items are out of that pool. The Trialmaster no longer drops Magic Inscribed Ultimatums.

Area-level inherent bonuses (magic/rare pack odds, rare modifier counts, boss drop quality/quantity, Exceptional-item chance) compensate for Atlas passives not applying inside the Trial. Completing a 10-Trial Inscribed Ultimatum lets you continue immediately twice without another Ultimatum item, carrying modifiers and reward quality, with a different Trialmaster Fragment per success and an optional double-or-nothing Currency wager.

Uxmal, the Beastlord gets a full arena redesign so the fight no longer depends on flying around the old layout. Modifier text is more explicit (e.g. Shielding Monsters now prints the Energy Shield percentage). Turrets and Petrification Statues are no longer mutually exclusive; placement is more even. Escort / Sacrifice / Implant encounters appear less often than Slay-all and Survive. The Trialmaster’s timestop is cut to the start of the run instead of nearly every room; doors and elevators open sooner for faster room-to-room traffic.

Seventeen new Soul Cores (and a pile of retunes)

0.5.5 adds seventeen named Soul Cores (twelve Jiquani’s, four Atziri’s) and retunes a long list of existing cores — Atmohua, Cholotl, Estazunti, Jiquani Thesis, Uromoti, Opiloti, Puhuarte, Tacati, Ticaba, Topotante, Tzamoto, Xopec, Zalatl, Zantipi, and the requirement-conversion cores. Softcap is not reprinting every socket line here; the patch notes are the authoritative table. The systems takeaway is that Trial of Chaos’s new Currency + Soul Core reward spine feeds this expanded socket economy.

Runes of Aldur → Atlas core

Farrow, Dannig, and Expedition become Atlas core content, including Standard, findable from Act 4 onward. Expedition Tablets drop in Standard and Forbidden Rites (not in the continuing Runes of Aldur league). Tablet stacking:

Tablets	Published bonus
1	Add a Kalguuran Expedition
2	Add a Verisium Remnant + 35% Expedition density
3	Add an additional Kalguuran Expedition
4	Add an additional Verisium Remnant + another 35% density

New tablet modifiers cover explosive area, Logbook quantity from Runic Monsters, extra ice-encased bosses, and extra Verisium Sentries. Aldur’s Saga stays league-locked, but its special modifiers can appear naturally on Grand Expeditions via Logbook in Standard / Forbidden Rites. The Verisium Anvil unlocks from The Runeseeker quest in Act 4 outside Runes of Aldur; Farrow can move to Hideout after that unlock. Expedition Uniques can sit in the Unique Item Stash Tab in all leagues. The Runes of Aldur league itself keeps running for players finishing endgame and challenges there.

Endgame: Abyssal Ravines, Arbiter shortcuts, Trial of Sekhemas parity

Large Abyssal Ravines can appear on the Atlas; Maps on those ravines are guaranteed to contain Abysses. Defeating the Arbiter of Divinity with the non-quest Origin Core now completes the entire Precursor Fortress for the Map owner. Several pinnacle bosses lose blanket All Elemental Resistances in favour of narrower resists/vulnerabilities (Arbiter of Ash → Fire Resist + Cold Vulnerability; Arbiter of Divinity → Lightning Resist + Fire Vulnerability; Omniphobia and Raven Trickster lose All Elem Res). Corrupted Nexus Maps can be retried after failure. Unstable Breach rare spawns after stabilising arrive in waves of five. Delirium Fog from a Grand Mirror spreads to 10 Maps (down from the prior tiered 8–14 / 10–16 ranges). Trial of Sekhemas gains inherent area-level bonuses from level 65, mirroring the Trial of Chaos compensation pattern. Doryani’s Refined Formula Master Option is replaced by Archaic Corruption (Essence-released monsters become Corrupted).

Launch window, Twitch Drop, and the 0.5.5c scrub

GGG’s Forbidden Rites Starts Soon post set realm downtime near 2:00 PM EDT on 4 Sep with live servers at 4:00 PM EDT, patch size roughly 17 GB standalone/Steam and 12 GB console. Twitch Drops for the Blade of the Champion Pet ran 4–11 Sep 2026 (2 hours watch in the PoE2 directory, account linked).

0.5.5c (official forum patch-notes thread) later tightens Legacy of the Precursors progression — you must be present for Patriarch / Matriarch Halls and Enigma Chamber boss deaths to pick up Origin / Crisis fragments — plus Ritual Deferred-item cost bugs, Trial of Chaos terrain / Wager of Chaos reward tiers, Balbala Identify Items in Trial of the Sekhemas, and a set of crash fixes. Softcap treats 0.5.5c as the live hotfix layer on top of the Forbidden Rites systems pass, not a separate league.

What Softcap is not claiming

• Softcap is not ranking league starters, soft-brick Atlas nodes, or currency inflation.
• Softcap is not treating Duelist as playable in 0.5.5 — GGG’s deep dive pegs the class to the 11 December 2026 1.0 full release.
• Softcap is not inventing Sacred Bloom drop rates, Wildwood Wisp math, or unpublished Soul Core DPS.

Primary checklist for readers: open a Forbidden Rites character if you want the fresh Ritual economy; keep Runes of Aldur if you are mid-challenge there; expect Trial of Chaos to behave like a resumable, per-room-paid dungeon rather than an all-or-nothing lock-in; and treat Expedition as a permanent Atlas tool from Act 4 onward.