The Artifact Altar is a location artifact holders are required to go to maintain ownership of their artifacts.
The ritual consists of 3 main stages:
This is when the actual ritual takes place. It has a base duration of 12 minutes, but is affected by the following things:
For the first 3 minutes anyone who knows the location of a rift can access the altar, then after 3 minutes a publicly known rift is opened for anyone to go through.
The ritual only progresses while the artifact holder is inside the guilded blackstone ring, then once the ritual progress completes the Post Ritual Fight stage starts.
After the ritual is complete a rift opens for players to exit the altar.
You cannot use rifts while in combat however so you need to kill all remaining enemies to leave.
Players also cannot re-enter the altar during this phase.
The Fog is how the Post Ritual Fight is forced to end. After 5 minutes The Fog starts, which gives Wither I to everyone besides the artifact holder. The wither level then increases every 5 minutes. Once the artifact holder is the last player in the arena, they then are also affected by The Fog.
This occurs after the post ritual fight endes, and is just a cooldown period where a new ritual cannot start.
The first 2 times a user uses the altar they are given defenses themed around their artifact to help them win any fight.
The defenses are active for the entire ritual and post ritual fight.
The Totem of Life creates 5 totems every 45 seconds (20 seconds after the last totem from the previous cycle is used) that do the following:
Neptune's Trident is much simpler than the Totem of Life.
Every 20 seconds 8 tridents are spawned that are then thrown at a random non ally in the arena.
The artifact holder also has their armor healed and gains regen when the tridents are spawned.
Rifts are how you get into and out of the altar.
Each artifact holder has a private rift that spawns in a random location (ouside of claims) in Atlas.
During the ritual a public rift is also created as mentioned in the Ritual stage.
In order to start the ritual you need to meet the following requirements (these are also told to you ever time you log in).
/scactivity) of at least 4.0