How to Defeat The King in the Mists in Path of Exile 2

The King in the Mists is one of the many challenging bosses you can fight and (hopefully!) defeat in Path of Exile 2.

You can encounter him as you explore the Freythorn area, and defeating him is required for a quest. Path of Exile veterans should be familiar with him, as well. After all, this is a returning boss from the previous game! His mechanics remain largely the same, too, with a big focus on Rituals.

Whether you’re a PoE veteran or not, though, read on and we’ll give you tips on how to easily defeat the King in the Mists in Path of Exile 2!

How to Defeat The King in the Mists | Path of Exile 2

The first thing you need to do starts before the fight even begins: upgrade your Life Flasks. You should have them upgraded as much as possible so that you can fully heal yourself with a single Life Flask, or at least close to it.

Additionally, it’s a good idea to upgrade your Skill Gems as much as possible. However, we won’t be focusing on which Skills to choose or anything like that. Those are purely dependent on your build, after all.

Anyway, the first part of the fight is simply a group fight against mobs. It’s fairly basic, and our main recommendation here is to simply stay mobile. Don’t let the mobs surround you, as they can shred your HP quickly in that case.

Take out the waves of mobs and the King in the Mists will finally spawn, initiating phase 1 of the boss fight proper.

Dealing with Phase 1

The first phase of the fight lasts until you get the King in the Mists to about 30% or HP. At this point, he’s mostly a very slow-moving enemy who primarily tries to attack you by shooting magic bolts at you. You can easily avoid those by simply staying on the move.

On top of that, the arena will be covered by red puddles sporadically. Standing on them will damage you, so keep an eye out for them.

The boss will also periodically summon Affliction Totems around the arena, which it can use to debuff and attack you. You can break them down quickly with just a few hits, though. They shouldn’t be a problem as long as you don’t ignore them.

All that aside, the main gimmick of the fight at this point are the Rituals. The King in the Mists will periodically afflict you with one of two Rituals. A colored circle will appear around your character when this happens. You’ll also notice an icon on the top left corner of the screen. The Rituals are as follows:

Ritual of Meditation – This one is signaled by a red curse circle around your character and a red icon on the top left corner of the screen. You’ll need to stay still and stop moving for 4 seconds until the Ritual clears.

Ritual of Dance – Signaled by a purple curse circle on your character and a green icon on the top left corner of the screen. To deal with this one, keep moving for 4 seconds until the Ritual ends.

Failing to do what the Rituals ask will make the King in the Mists imprison you, allowing him to deal damage to you freely. This can quickly cause you to die, so avoid it at all costs!

Phase 2 of the Fight

The second phase of the fight begins once you get the King in the Mists to around 30% of his HP. He’ll kneel for a few seconds and then stand back up, fully healing himself in the process. He’ll also become somewhat more mobile, and Rituals will now last 8 seconds each time.

On top of that, the King in the Mists will get a few new attacks. The first one is that he no longer shoots a single magic bolt. He instead throws a scattered bunch of them toward you. It’s still easy to dodge if you keep moving, though.

The second new trick is that he will fire large balls of purple energy at you. Aside from dealing high damage if they hit you directly, the energy balls will also explode upon contact with the ground.

What’s more, they’ll spawn some purple blisters on the ground. Touching these blisters will make them explode, damaging you. However, they disappear on their own after a short while.

Lastly, he’ll now do a slow slamming Area of Effect attack around him when you get close. This move is extremely slow, though, so you can try to bait and punish it if you’re playing a melee-focused class. It does deal high damage, though, so make sure to run away before he finishes the attack.

Truthfully, this second phase is actually not too difficult. The one thing that’s very likely to ruin your day is the Ritual of Meditation, as it forces you to stop moving. You can somewhat ignore it by dodge-rolling once or twice, but it’s unreliable and pretty risky.

Nonetheless, that’s everything you need to know to be able to defeat the King in the Mists in Path of Exile 2. We wish you the best of luck with this fight! Hopefully, he won’t spam the annoying Ritual of Meditation too much…