The Ritualist, the newest archetype of Remnant 2: The Awakened King, brings a miasma of death and decay onto Losomn. Whether you’re burning through the Root or turning Dran into corpses, the best Ritualist build will cut through any crowd like butter.
However, knowing exactly what you’re looking for with the Ritualist can be difficult at a glance. The class hides many secrets from you which unfurl as you level up. Let’s look at an example of the strongest build a Ritualist can manage so you can adjust your character accordingly.
The best Ritualist build options in Remnant 2
The strongest Ritualist build deals high area-of-effect damage and applies five different damage-over-time types to enemies consistently. Because of that, it’s a good idea to find weapons, amulets, and rings that synergize with negative status effects.
Our build centers around the incredibly powerful Devoured Loop, an Apocalypse-only ring for any class, and Miasma, the second power of the Ritualist unlocked at level five. However, we understand that unlocking the Devoured Loop might not be feasible for all players. So, we will offer alternative items for a version of the build available for players who play on any difficulty.
Best secondary archetype for Ritualists
By far the most effective sub-archetype for the Ritualist is the Archon. The Archon delivers high mod power regeneration, which is very important for mobbing and dealing high Elemental damage in Remnant 2. It synergizes with the Ritualist naturally, allowing you to get the stacks of negative status needed without much difficulty.
This difficult-to-acquire archetype is recommended due to its high mod power regeneration and its impressive list of skills. Havoc Form is an innate source of Shock damage, but Reality Rune allows for easy access to the Slow status, which is great for keeping you safe. We recommend the latter, though the former works with builds that don’t have easy access to Shock.
Our honorable mention is Handler, whose good little boy deals Bleed damage on each attack without any input from you required. However, if he gets stuck in a wall or distracted by a shiny vase, you’re suddenly without a big source of Bleed. Archon is a bit more consistent and brings us to our goal more readily.
Best traits for Ritualists
The Ritualist’s traits are pretty crucial to the build, so keeping a close eye on them is a good idea. You’ll already have Affliction and Flash Caster, so the other traits we recommend include:
- Regrowth (Summoner) to counter-act the bleed from Atonement Loop.
- Expertise (Core) to lower your skill cooldown in worst-case scenarios.
- Vigor (Core) to hopefully prevent one-shots.
- Amplitude (Reward for Labyrinth’s horde boss) to improve the size of Miasma.
- Spirit (Core) to improve mod power generation.
- Barkskin (Quiz in the Far Woods or Forbidden Growth on Yaesha) for damage reduction.
- Siphoner (Dormant N’erudian Facility) to give you some lifesteal.
Your other 15 or so points can go into whatever best informs your playstyle. As a run-and-gunner who liked heavier armor, I appreciated Swiftness and Strong Back.
Best long gun for Ritualists
The best primary firearm for Ritualists is the Chicago Typewriter. Like many skill-based builds utilizing Devoured Loop, the Chicago Typewriter has a ridiculous rate-of-fire that has a good chance to crit multiple times per second. Since the Devoured Loop only can proc on critical hits, it’s a good idea to maximize how many of those you do.
For the sake of the Devoured Loop, we also recommend using the Momentum Mutator. This boosts critical hit rates to the moon, further improving your chance to proc your Loop. Your mod will likely be Creeping Mist—a craftable for shooting down the Sunken Witch—which boosts Status effect damage and crit chance. Since this entire build is all about status effect damage, this is a real kicker.
Honorable mentions go to:
- Sparkfire Shotgun, a new DLC weapon beneath the Lighthouse, which deals fire damage innately and has an open Mod slot. This is great if you have a utility mod you want for your build, like Creeping Mist for extra status effect damage.
- Merciless, a craftable from killing the Ravager while allowing it to consume the Doe, deals Bleed damage innately. This lets you stack your Amulet while simply shooting your gun.
Best hand gun for Ritualists
The best handgun for Ritualists is the Enigma. While your primary gun is useful for dealing damage and resetting your Skill, Enigma is here to spread Overloaded in a massive area of effect. For mobbing, Enigma is hard to beat.
Enigma comes with its own mod, but you can mutate it just fine. For that, we recommend Maelstrom. This mod, found alongside the Forlorn Coast, boosts Elemental damage by five percent per effect applied base and improves by .5 percent per upgrade. This stacks quickly.
Honorable mentions include:
- Hellfire, a gun found early on Root Earth, applies Burn innately.
- Nebula, a gun crafted when you kill Tal’Ratha after deciding not to be eaten by him, applies Corroded innately.
- Both of these guns are similar to Enigma in that they deal elemental damage and apply elemental status effects consistently, but do slightly worse at dealing with swarms of mobs.
Best melee weapon for Ritualists
Melee weapons aren’t super important for the optimal Ritualist set-up, but the Ritualist Scythe works fine. This melee weapon deals additional damage to targets with status effects on them, so it can deal a lot of burst during an emergency situation.
The alternative is the Labyrinth Staff, a weapon that generates about one million Mod Power on each charge attack. This weapon is much worse in scrambles and much better between fights, since it only takes a pile of jars to fill both of your mods to full with this thing.
As for your Mutator, we recommend Tainted Blade as a method to apply Corroded and deal more damage to a Corroded target. Those five percent can be the difference between being sawed in half by an angry peasant or not.
Best amulet for Ritualists
The strongest amulet for the Ritualist is the new Death-Soaked Idol, obtained by exploring the Mansion within the Forlorn Coast, typically after the first required dungeon. This Idol improves all damage you do by five percent for each unique status effect on enemies around you, capping at 25 percent.
The Ritualist is extremely adept at getting all 25 percent damage the Death-Soaked Idol hands out. With your second skill Miasma online, you’re already getting all 25 percent. So, our focus is to keep this full bonus on at all times so our headshots with the Typewriter, damage from Miasma, Mods, and Skills all deal a quarter additional damage.
A very viable alternative to this Idol is the Energized Neck Coil. This coil only improves the damage of status effects by 25 percent, but also causes afflicted targets to explode for 20 percent of the status effect’s total damage.
This is quite a lot, but it only procs on each target once per five seconds. It also only applies to your status effect damage, so your guns will be plinking away for significantly worse damage while the cooldown resets. Still, very viable version of this build that works quite well with both Miasma and the first Skill of Ritualist, Eruption.
Best rings for Ritualists
The best setup for Ritualist Rings is as follows:
- Devoured Loop
- Atonement Fold
- Ahanae Crystal
- Lighthouse Keeper’s Ring
The Devoured Loop, as stated earlier, is our build’s centerpiece. By landing critical hits, you have a one percent chance to reset your cooldown on both of your Skills, leading to loops of Miasma being online. With Miasma online, you deal 25 percent extra damage with everything. This combos perfectly with the Ahanae Crystal, which boosts damage by five percent per negative status effect on a target—though, this ring is a reward for killing a Yaesha boss on Hardcore Mode.
The Atonement Fold and Lighthouse Keeper’s Ring are two DLC rings. The Atonement Fold bleeds the wearer to deal extra critical damage while the Lighthouse Keeper’s Ring generates mod power based on the status effects inflicted around the user. Atonement Fold is a backup plan which boosts you damage a lot if your Devoured Loop doesn’t feel like activating, while the Lighthouse Keeper’s Ring is necessary for keeping mobs under control through your Mods.
Two of these rings are extremely hard to get, but there are replacements. The Devoured Loop can be swapped for the Sapphire Dreamstone, a ring that reduces your Skill cooldown by three percent per crit. While a shallow version of Devoured Loop, this ring is both more consistent and procs more often, leading to Miasma usually being online whenever you need it.
The Ahanae Ring can be replaced with the Alumni Ring from Morrow Parish in Losomn, in a tomb after you defeat the Nightweaver. While a shadow of the Ahanae Ring, the Alumni Ring increases elemental damage by 10 percent, which works well for most status damage-over-time effects.
If you can keep Miasma online all of the time, you can instead try Band of the Fanatic for a 25 percent boost in effect damage but a 65 percent loss in duration. This shouldn’t matter much if you’re constantly refreshing status durations within Miasma’s grasp, so it’s basically just 25 percent free damage. You get this by wearing the entire Zealot’s set and walking up to the preacher who is speaking to the crowd in the center of the Forlorn Coast.
Best relic for Ritualists
We recommend Runed Heart for Ritualists. This Heart is good for generating a massive amount of mod power over the course of 10 seconds, allowing you to spam out status effects early on in the fight and make use of your 25 percent damage boost. The 50 health from it comes slowly, but will easily give you half of your health back, making it a good middle ground between a pure healing heart and a damaging one.
For Fragments, we recommend Elemental Damage, Fire Rate, and Ranged Critical Chance. This is good for damage and improving the chance that you activate the Devoured Loop or the Sapphire Dreamstone.
The Reprocessed Heart, from the Labyrinth, can be useful for players to deal even more damage through their mods. We found this to be a bit risky for higher difficulties, but it’s certainly powerful for someone who is with their friends in multiplayer or who knows they won’t get hit.
The Tranquil Heart, crafted by Nimue with the Tormented Heart, is great for a character who wants to make good use of health regeneration, as it naturally gives health per second. Considering we plan on using the Atonement Loop, this will not be out of the question.
Best armor for Ritualists
Armor doesn’t really matter for Ritualists. We recommend wearing whatever your build has that allows you to roll under the quick-roll cap.
For us, we ended up using the Leto Mark II Helmet and Gloves, the Fae Royal Breastplate, and the Labyrinth Treads. This got us right under the mark with Strong Back.
We value a quick roll for this build since enemies will often be slowed by our Reality Rune. So, locking down enemies and sprinting away is useful. Try to stay in green encumbrance with whatever armor set you have, and it’ll be alright.
If you prefer, you can absolutely go into medium encumbrance. That can let you soak an extra hit, but make you more likely to soak hits in the process. Be careful with this strategy.
