How to beat Trial of Sekhemas and get Ascendancy in PoE 2. Guide to Trial of Sekhemas in Path of Exile 2

The Trial of Sekhemas represents one of Path of Exile 2’s most demanding Ascension Trials, encountered during Act 2 progression. This punishing gauntlet tests both your combat prowess and strategic decision-making under pressure. Understanding its core mechanics before attempting the challenge significantly improves your chances of securing the valuable Ascendancy rewards.

Initiate the trial by placing Balbala’s Barya on the Relic Altar, which transports you to a sequence of seven meticulously designed rooms filled with deadly traps and environmental hazards. The trial employs a unique honor system where you begin with a predetermined honor pool that progressively depletes whenever you sustain damage from any source. Once your honor reaches zero, the trial immediately fails, forcing a complete restart from the initial room.

Successfully clearing individual rooms grants valuable rewards including the Sekhema’s Cloak – a single-use resurrection item that automatically revives you upon death – and Sacred Water consumables. These sacred waters can be exchanged with Balbala between rooms to restore lost honor points, acquire powerful boons, or remove detrimental afflictions that hinder your progress.

Before entering the trial, prioritize acquiring maximum Honor Resist stats from available relics, as this stat directly reduces honor loss when taking damage. Carefully plan your navigation path through the interconnected rooms, deliberately avoiding afflictions that specifically counter your character build’s strengths and weaknesses. For optimal efficiency, specifically avoid Smoke and Mirror Afflictions which create visual obscurement and duplicate enemies, dramatically increasing difficulty.

One of the most valuable boons to pursue is the Scrying Crystal, which reveals an additional room ahead on your minimap, allowing for informed path selection. This strategic foresight enables you to bypass particularly dangerous room combinations or target rooms containing essential resources.

Common beginner mistakes include underestimating environmental damage sources and failing to conserve sacred water for critical moments. Advanced players should focus on memorizing room patterns and developing muscle memory for trap-dodging sequences to minimize honor depletion throughout the entire run.

Throughout your progression, you’ll encounter five distinct challenge types with varying difficulty levels. Smart players prioritize the easiest trials first to conserve resources for more demanding encounters later. While difficulty perception varies by build specialization, the following ranking provides a reliable general guideline for strategic planning.

• Escape Trial (Easiest): Rapidly navigate to Death Crystals and deactivate them before time expires. Mobility skills and movement speed bonuses provide significant advantages here.
• Ritual Trial (Easy): Eliminate enemy casters as quickly as possible before they complete their channeling rituals. Burst damage capabilities excel in this trial type.
• Hourglass Trial (Medium): Survive for a fixed duration against continuous enemy waves. Tank-oriented builds with strong sustain mechanics perform exceptionally well.
• Chalice Trial (Medium-Hard): Defeat specific monster groups, particularly favoring single-target damage specializations with precise targeting abilities.
• Gauntlet Trial (Hardest): Locate and activate hidden levers to unlock progression doors. This trial demands strong spatial awareness and puzzle-solving skills alongside combat proficiency.

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The trial culminates in four sequential boss encounters, each presenting unique mechanical challenges and specific elemental considerations. All bosses possess significant fire resistance, making fire-based builds particularly challenging. The first three bosses demonstrate vulnerability to cold damage, while the final boss lacks any specific elemental weakness, requiring adaptable combat approaches.

1. Rattlecage, the Earthbreaker: Deals primarily fire and physical damage while resisting physical, fire, and lightning elements. Kite this boss to avoid ground-based area attacks and focus on cold damage output.
2. Terracotta Sentinels: Utilize cold, fire, and physical attacks while maintaining resistances against physical, fire, and cold damage types.
3. Ashar, the Sand Mother: Employs chaos and physical damage attacks, with defensive resistances against physical, fire, and lightning elements.
4. Zarokh, the Temporal: Deals exclusively physical damage while resisting cold, fire, and lightning elements, making her particularly durable against elemental specialists.

Critical Phase Alert: When Zarokh’s health drops below 60%, she initiates a time-stop sequence, vanishing from the battlefield and leaving a distinctive glowing marker at the arena’s center alongside multiple hourglasses. You must immediately reposition to this central location and collect all hourglasses before the timer expires. Failure to complete this mechanic results in immediate character death and trial termination.

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No reproduction without permission：Game Guides » How to beat Trial of Sekhemas and get Ascendancy in PoE 2. Guide to Trial of Sekhemas in Path of Exile 2 Master the challenging Trial of Sekhemas in Path of Exile 2 with expert strategies for bosses, traps, and Ascendancy rewards