Atlas Tips and Tricks

There are a lot of tips and tricks you can use to progress your Atlas and have a smoother endgame experience in Path of Exile 2. Having trouble sustaining your high tier waystones? Want to get more loot out of the maps you're running? This guide helps you with some tips and tricks so you too can get to the pinnacle bosses and start earning currency to gear up your character!

Here are some key points of interest to keep in mind while exploring the Atlas of Worlds:

Progressing Atlas Quest

The first thing you should focus on upon reaching the endgame of Path of Exile 2 is progressing your Atlas Quest(Cataclysm's Wake). This gives you points in your Atlas Passive Tree(press Ctrl-U in-game to bring this up), Atlas passive nodes give you more loot and more Waystones from the maps you run, which means you can progress your Atlas quest even faster.

If you're playing Hardcore or your build is feeling a little on the weak side right now, you could opt to put your high-tier Waystones in hideout maps. These are relatively safe to clear and still progress your atlas quest if you clear them. Even in softcore these maps provide a lot of rares close together, so can be a way to quickly progress your Atlas quest.

Once you get into tier 6 Waystones and above you really want to start picking up nodes on your atlas tree that say "Waystones found have #% chance to be a tier higher". These really help you go up in tier on your atlas.

Finally: you can use the reforging bench to combine 3 Waystones of the same tier to get one Waystone back that's a tier higher:

Waystone sustain

Early on it's important to know that Doryani sells low-level Waystones. This means you can never run out of tier 1 Waystones to run, as long as you have some gold of course. This also means that for the first 6 points in your atlas passive tree the "Waystones found have #% chance to be a tier higher" is not that important yet. You want to spend your first 6 points like this:

Once you get into higher tier Waystones the key to sustain is boss maps. As long as you use boss maps you should never run out of high tier Waystones. An example: you have a bunch of Waystones below tier 8, and three tier 11 Waystones. What you want to do is use the tier 8 and below Waystones to travel between boss maps, and then use the tier 11 Waystones on the actual boss maps themselves. Bosses almost always return at least a Waystone of the same tier or higher, so they're great for sustain!

With that strategy you won't need to full clear the Waystones you use to travel between bosses, just complete the objective(usually killing all rares) and leave.

Bonus tip: if you see a boss icon on a Wetlands or Woodland map, you can opt to save it for when you're at tier 15 Waystones. Both these maps have 2 bosses in them, and each drops you more Waystones.

Using towers

Towers themselves don't provide you with much loot, but what they do provide is a place to put your precursor tablets. Do not be afraid to use tablets on your towers. The effect of the explicit modifiers from multiple tablets stacks, and the more you use the more tablets you get back.

If you use a tablet as soon as you unlocked the tower, any maps you run around the tower instantly get the benefit of the mods you rolled on the tablet. Don't delay using them unless you're doing some more advanced strategies where you force certain endgame activities on specific maps. However, that goes way beyond this guide and by the time you implement those strategies you'll have plenty of tablets anyway.

Surviving maps

Path of Exile 2 maps can be extremely deadly, especially when you use tier 11 Waystones and above. If you die in a map you lose the Waystone you used to get to it, and any icons above the map disappear, including boss icons. This makes it important to die as little as possible.

First of all: resistances. Fire, cold and lightning resistance should always be at 75%(or above), but in Path of Exile 2 chaos resistance is also extremely important. A lot of monsters deal chaos damage(and a lot of it), and chaos damage deals double damage to energy shield. By the time you get to tier 6 and above Waystones you ideally have a few chaos resistance rolls on gear to bring you to 40-50% chaos resistance, and when you start doing tier 11 Waystones and above you want to be as close to 75% as you can get.

Another strategy is that when you see an endgame activity like Breach or Ritual, leave it until after you completed the map objective and then go back to it. Endgame activities are never required to complete a map objective, and can be pretty deadly. If you die doing the endgame activity at least you got the map objective done.

For a more in-depth guide on survival, check out our Survival Guide!

Endgame activities

Currently, there are 4 main endgame activities in Path of Exile 2: Breach, Delirium, Expedition and Ritual. This guide doesn't go in-depth into these mechanics, but here's a short summary of the rewards and dangers presented by each:

Breach: Extremely deadly, very rewarding. Focus on this if your build is good at clearing large packs of monsters, you'll get easily overwhelmed if you can't do this though.

Delirium: Moderate difficulty, low rewards. You control the difficulty here, the further away from the Delirium mirror you go the harder monsters will get, but you can cancel it at any time. Rewards-wise this doesn't add much aside from some distilled emotions and simulacrum splinters, but since it's not very intrusive either you can run it on any build.

Expedition: Low difficulty, moderate rewards. Another mechanic where you control the difficulty yourself. Spawns a decent amount of monsters and these drop good loot as well. Especially useful in Solo-Self Found since the Expedition currency can be used to craft some great items.

Ritual: High difficulty, high rewards. Similar to Breach, it's very easy to get overwhelmed by monsters in Ritual. Ritual can give some good rares, currency and, if you're lucky, an An Audience with the King which is currently worth quite a lot.

FAQ

Here are some frequently asked questions about how to progress the Atlas of Worlds and the tips and tricks covered above.

An area I explored on the atlas is invisible now, what happened?

This is currently a bug, restarting your game fixes this.

Video

Check out this video with tips and tricks for exploring the Atlas of Worlds.

Summary

These Atlas Tips and Tricks have given you some ideas on how to sustain more Waystones and how to get more loot out of your maps.

• 3 to 1 Waystones.
• Invest in Atlas Passives to make your maps more rewarding.
• Use Towers to further boost your loot.
• Make sure you survive.
• Explore the endgame activities.

Credits

Written by: Zizaran
Reviewed By: Tenkiei