PoE 2 Trial of Chaos After 0.5.5: Exit and Return, Chest per Room, New Uxmal Arena

Patch 0.5.5 reworked the Trial of Chaos in Path of Exile 2: you can now leave a run and pick it back up later from the same room, every room drops its own reward chest, and completed-run rewards are limited to Currency and Soul Cores. Grinding Gear Games, the game’s developer and publisher, shipped the change alongside the Forbidden Rites event league on September 4, 2026, and it also touches the Inscribed Ultimatum loop, the Trialmaster’s modifiers, and the arena for the Uxmal boss fight. This piece walks through what changed, how a run plays out now, what Soul Cores are actually for, and which specifics Grinding Gear Games still hasn’t put a number on.

Before 0.5.5, starting a Trial of Chaos meant finishing the entire run in one sitting — there was no way to step out and come back. That’s gone now: you can leave at any point and resume later from the same room you left. Rooms also pay out individually — there’s a reward chest at the end of each one, which means dying partway through no longer costs you everything you’d earned in that run. You first meet the Trial of Chaos in Act 3, at the Temple of Chaos; the 10-Trial form this guide covers is the endgame loop, run once the Map Device is open — the way there, four acts and three Interludes, is in neonsect’s campaign route to the Map Device.

On the rewards side, finishing a run now pays out Currency and Soul Cores only — Corrupted items have been removed from the possible outcomes, and the Trialmaster no longer has a chance to drop Magic Rarity Inscribed Ultimatums. Encounters got tuned too — elite monsters that spawn mid-run hit harder but reward more, and the Modifiers you pick between rooms now display their actual numeric effect instead of vague wording, with more Modifier Tiers available and their overall difficulty toned down.

Three numbers frame the scope of this patch: seventeen new Soul Cores entered the game, one 10-Trial Inscribed Ultimatum can be continued for up to two extra clears, and Grinding Gear Games followed 0.5.5 with ten numbered hotfixes and the 0.5.5b patch inside the first week.

Soul Cores are socketable items, and their effect changes depending on which equipment slot you put them in — the same Soul Core can grant one bonus when socketed into a Focus and a different one in Boots. Per the official 0.5.5 patch notes, Grinding Gear Games added 13 new Jiquani’s Soul Cores and 4 new Atziri’s Soul Cores — 17 new Soul Cores in total — and adjusted the numeric values on a number of existing Soul Cores, with several of those reworked cores now capped at a Limit of 1. Eight existing cores now carry that Limit of 1 — Jiquani, Opiloti, Puhuarte, Ticaba, Topotante, Tzamoto, Xopec and Zalatl — so a second copy of any of them no longer adds anything.

Ascendancy points earned through Trials aren’t part of this rework, and how you actually unlock them — plus what is and isn’t reversible once you’ve picked an ascendancy class — is covered in neonsect’s Path of Exile 2 ascendancy points guide rather than repeated here.

Grinding Gear Games hasn’t published drop rates or quantities for the Currency and Soul Cores that come out of chests and completed runs, so there is no honest hours figure for farming them. What is fixed is the shape of the grind: leave-and-resume splits a session across several sittings, and the continuations stretch a single Inscribed Ultimatum into up to three completions before you need another one.

The most visible change is to Uxmal, the Beastlord boss fight — its arena was redesigned entirely so the boss no longer needs to fly around, which in practice means less chasing and more of the fight with Uxmal on the ground in front of you.

Modifiers picked between rooms are more transparent now — a Modifier like Shielding Monsters now states the percentage of Maximum Life that monsters gain as extra Maximum Energy Shield — an added shield layer on top of their life, not life converted into shield — instead of just saying they are protected by Energy Shield, and Modifiers overall gained more Tiers while applying less difficulty per Tier. Turrets and Petrification Statues used to be mutually exclusive — picking one meant the other stopped showing up for the rest of the run — and now both can appear together, spread more evenly across rooms. Burning and Shocking Turrets fire a single projectile at a fixed rate regardless of Tier, starting at three Turrets per encounter and adding more at higher Tiers; Petrification Statues start at two per encounter under the same scaling. Any Modifier that raises difficulty between rooms now also raises the quality of drops from monsters killed in that room.

Room objectives were rebalanced too — Escort the Statue, Sacrifice Monsters, and Implant the Soul Cores now appear less often than Slay all Monsters and Survive, so most rooms lean toward straightforward kill objectives. Escort the Statue itself got a grace period before the statue stops moving if you step outside its effect radius, plus a Vaal-themed visual pass with a clearer edge on that effect. Survive now spawns its next wave faster once every monster from the current wave is dead, guarantees Rare monsters on certain waves, and killing those Rares shortens how long the encounter takes to finish.

A handful of Trial-of-Chaos-specific bugs were fixed in the same patch: monsters no longer appear out of thin air when they should be descending from an elevator, the invisible-but-still-damaging Rings of Doom Modifier is fixed, culling issues with non-Monster objects like those Rings are resolved, and desyncing Pyramid Beam visuals were addressed.

The patch notes never use the number thirty, but the mechanic adds up to it: a 10-Trial Inscribed Ultimatum can be continued twice, so one item carries you through three consecutive tens — thirty rooms — without a new item, and each successful ten pays a different Trialmaster Fragment. That is a sequence of continuations on one item, not a separate 30-room Ultimatum; no such item exists. What Grinding Gear Games has not put numbers on is different: the Trial’s new area-level bonuses are described only as categories (chance of Magic or Rare monsters, pack size, the number of modifiers Rares can carry, quality and quantity of boss drops, Exceptional items) with no percentages attached, and the same is true of drop rates for the Currency and Soul Cores you actually walk away with.

Before assuming a pre-patch build is untouched, check two things in the notes. Eight existing Soul Cores now carry a Limit of 1 (Jiquani, Opiloti, Puhuarte, Ticaba, Topotante, Tzamoto, Xopec, Zalatl), so a doubled core has stopped working. And several Weapon Set interactions were fixed: Auras and Support Gems from an inactive Weapon Set no longer apply, a Skill from the alternate set now needs the actual swap, and a Unique-granted Skill no longer works with non-Unique weapons equipped in the other set. A build that leaned on any of those plays differently now. The larger balance pass is expected with the full release on December 11, 2026.

Myth: You Can Still Farm Corrupted Items From the Trial of Chaos

Completed-run rewards are Currency and Soul Cores only now — Corrupted items are no longer a possible outcome, so a Trial run isn’t a Corrupted-item farm anymore.

Myth: There Is a 30-Room Inscribed Ultimatum

There isn’t. The thirty comes from continuing one 10-Trial item twice — the item stays a 10-Trial item; the run is what gets extended, ten rooms at a time.

Sources and Confidence

Official means Grinding Gear Games’ own patch or hotfix notes. Nothing below rests on a third-party report.