Hello, still SL. Today I’m not talking about a build, and I’m not talking about patch notes. I’m doing one thing only: taking a POE 2 boss that “looks farmable,” grinding it 300 times, and then honestly breaking down how much I made, how much I lost, and whether the drop rates on the Wiki can be trusted at all.
You’ve probably run into this boss at least once while unlocking the Ritual Atlas, and you may even have been worn down by its phase-transition animations to the point of wanting to close the game. So this article won’t repeat “how to unlock it.” It only answers the most practical question: if I repeat this boss like a job, does the POE 2 Currency return justify the time I spend?
First, Count the Entry Cost: Before You Even See the Boss, the Cost Is Already There
In POE 1, Vodak’s entry item is Call of the Shadow, and five of them open the portal once. In POE 2’s Forbidden Rites league, the logic hasn’t changed; only the names and acquisition paths have been reskinned. You need to roll the corresponding invitation/fragments from the Ritual mechanic, or directly trade for the entry item using POE 2 Currency on the trade site.
This leads to the first fact that makes a lot of people uncomfortable: entry cost is a rigid expense, while boss drops are a probability event. Across my 300 runs, the entry cost worked out to about 550 Divine—note that this is POE 2, and the purchasing power of Divine is not the same as in POE 1, but the structure of “pay first, gamble on RNG later” is the same. You can slowly exchange through the in-game Currency Exchange, or you can watch the trade site for deals, but if you don’t want to spend half your playtime on Merc trading, buying POE 2 Currency at the MMOEXP online store is at least an option that saves you from repeatedly refreshing search pages. MMOEXP has a 4.8 rating on Trustpilot, and most POE 2 order feedback is “delivery in the range of a few minutes.” For the scenario where “the entry items are already bought, and you’re only a few currency stacks short before you can start,” it is indeed more straightforward than idling and waiting for a seller to reply to a whisper.
But SL’s position has never changed: if you can farm it yourself, farm it yourself. A third-party option is just an efficiency reference point, not a must-buy. At the very least, you should use it as a mirror to see whether the POE 2 Currency you earn from an hour of farming, versus directly filling the gap, actually makes sense in terms of time.
Boss Fight: Not Hard, but It Is Wasting Your Life
The fight itself isn’t complicated, and it’s the same as described in the original: break the energy shield → wait for it to disappear → a group of enemies appears → keep waiting → follow the two green spheres along the path → the boss reappears → after you hear a thumping sound, invulnerability is removed → the damage window opens.
The problem is that the length of this entire animation sequence is the kind of thing where “the first time you see it, it’s fine; by the 50th time, you want to smash your keyboard.” In my testing, each kill took about 2 minutes, and less than half of that was actual damage time; the rest was waiting for phase transitions, waiting for the spheres to float, and waiting for invulnerability to drop. Across 300 runs, the animations alone ate several hours. If you want to compare it with the tighter Ritual farming methods in POE 2, many tested hourly profits float between 40 and 110 Divine. The boss farming method is naturally at a disadvantage in “profit per unit time” unless its high-value drops can pull the expected value back up.
Results After 300 Runs: 1160D Revenue, 550D Expenses, 61D Hourly Profit
Let’s lay out the numbers clearly.
Total revenue was about 1160 Divine. The bulk of it was not the pile of “looks like a lot, but is annoying to sell” uniques that the boss itself drops—131 Alluring Bounty, 94 Forgotten Omen, 33 The Forest’s Embrace, 22 Bound Fossil, and 20 The Progenitor. If I carefully pick the good rolls and sell them slowly, I think I can recover around 50D. What really held up the ledger was the Lineage gems and the “Sculpted” series. I got 12 Kesa’s Radiance, 18 Morrigan’s Insight, as well as 6 Sculpted Playfulness, 2 Sculpted Peril, 18 Sculpted Patience, and 5 Sculpted Arrogance.
The key drop is Sculpted Peril, and I only got 2. This is the most painful part of the whole experiment. If we calculate based on the 2% drop rate listed on the Wiki, 300 runs should have produced around 6 Perils, which would push the hourly profit directly to around 108 Divine. But I actually got only 2, putting the hourly profit at 61 Divine. It’s not a bloodbath loss, but it absolutely cannot be called “quietly getting rich” either.
What’s more subtle is that the market price of Sculpted Peril climbed from about 380D when I started farming to around 470D over those two days, and there are fewer than 10 listings on the trade site. Price volatility is extreme, and listings are extremely thin. That means you’re not trading with “the market”; you’re playing a game against the inventory in the hands of a few sellers. If the Wiki’s 2% is correct, this should be a farming method with over 220D per hour; but the deviation between my 300-run sample and the Wiki makes me lean toward believing that the user-collected drop-rate data on the Wiki is very likely inaccurate. Of course, 300 runs is not a large sample, and bad luck cannot be completely ruled out, but “being off by such a consistent margin” is itself a signal.
So, Is This Boss Actually Worth Farming?
It depends on what reference frame you use.
If you’re chasing stable cash flow, it’s not a good choice. In POE 2’s Forbidden Rites, the Ritual mechanic has more direct currency output paths. Many ordinary map-farming strategies don’t need to gamble on a unique with fewer than 10 listings, and they can still keep the hourly return of POE 2 Currency steadily in the range of several tens of Divine. The essence of boss farming is trading time for a lottery ticket, and when the credibility of the Wiki data is in question, no one can guarantee you the winning rate.
If what you enjoy is the feedback of “gambling on that one drop,” it still has its place. The wait before each kill, the half-second before identifying each drop—those feelings are something stable map farming cannot give you. SL isn’t going to tell you to quit gambling; I’m only responsible for laying out the odds.
One last honest note about third-party options: if after farming you find you’re only a few dozen D short of completing your next build, buying POE 2 Currency at the MMOEXP online store can serve as a reference for “at least I don’t have to soak in the trade site all night.” Its POE 2 page clearly separates Chaos, Divine, and Exalted, and the delivery process is written plainly. It suits the state of “I know what I want, and I don’t want to farm anymore.” But if you still have time and can still grind, currency you farm yourself will always carry an extra layer of certainty: “I won this run myself.”
After 300 runs, SL’s conclusion is simple: this boss can make money, but its hourly profit depends heavily on a drop you cannot control. You can treat it as a change of pace, but don’t treat it as a plan. See you next time.
