“Poison in the Roots” is part of the main questline in Diablo 4 season 7, Season of Witchcraft. In order to complete it, you’ll need to help the witches of the Tree of Whispers by completing a special ritual. This quest includes some light puzzle elements, which can make it a little tricky.
In this Diablo 4 guide, we’ll give you a full “Poison in the Roots” walkthrough, including showing you how to navigate through the ritual puzzle.
How to complete the ritual in ‘Poison in the Roots’ in Diablo 4
When you turn in enough Grim Favors (by doing Whispers out in the world), you’ll be able to start the “Poison in the Roots” quest, and will be prompted to talk to the witches at the Tree of Whispers. The scene will fade to black and when you regain control, the witches will have set up a ritual. There are four parts to the ritual:
- Light the braziers
- Gather Nangari blood
- Trace the ritual circle
- Protect the ritual
We’ll detail each step below.
Brazier puzzle solution in ‘Poison in the Roots’
For the first ritual step, the witches will ask you to “invoke the tree’s old name in the correct order.” That’s fancy Diablo talk for “click on the three witches in the right order.” If you listen to what they say (or look in the chat log) each witch will have a spell word that they say in a certain order, which is the order you’ll need to repeat back.
Talk to the witches and activate their braziers in this order:
- “Ayh” (bottom left brazier, Gelena)
- “Yew” (bottom right brazier, Caidin)
- “Oun” (top brazier, Ouna)
Speaking to the witches and selecting their prompt in this order will cause all three braziers to light simultaneously, which will progress the ritual.
How to get Nangari blood
All you need to do for the Nangari blood step is to kill the three snakes in the ritual circle. When each dies, it’ll drop some of its blood, which you just need to gather like any other item.
How to trace the ritual circle with Nangari blood
The spreading the blood around the circle step is a little confusing, because it’s unlike anything else you really have to do in Diablo. When the witches ask you to “trace the ritual circle with Nangari blood,” what the game wants you to do is just walk your character around the outer circle of the ritual, basically where the braziers are sitting.
You may need to run the circle a few times before the blood starts to appear, but it’ll eventually show up around the area and you’ll finish this step.
How to keep Hollows out of the ritual circle
For the final step in this quest, you just need to kill all of the Hollows enemies who are trying to disrupt the ritual. These enemies are relatively weak in terms of health, and all but the boss-type enemies should pop under the pressure of even your most basic skills. If you’re struggling to keep the Hollows out of the ritual while you’re leveling, consider lowering the difficulty as low as you can until you complete this quest — you can always put it back up right after.
Once they’re all dead and the ritual completes, you’ll finish the quest, be teleported back to the open world map, and earn some minor rewards (a legendary and cache of assorted salvage). More importantly, you’ll be able to continue progressing the seasonal questline and unlock more witch powers.
Going into this season, here’s the best Spiritborn build, all Tenets of Akarat locations, and guides on how to unlock Mercenaries and get more loot in Kurast Undercity.
