Atlas Passive Skill Tree Strategies Guide (PoE Crucible 3.21)
Introduction
With the release of Siege Of The Atlas, we were yet again amazed by a mind boggling Passive Tree to learn and incorporate into our endgame strategies. For newer players, this may be just as overwhelming as first pressing the level up button when progressing through the Twilight Strand.
While this is not an exhaustive list of all of the different combinations of mechanics, these are some of our favourites for a variety of gameplay strategies.
Some investment into map sustain nodes should be considered absolutely mandatory until one has acquired all four voidstones. Thankfully these nodes are readily available and located reasonably close to each other, allowing us to easily pick them up while speccing into mechanics we enjoy and want to invest in.
Early Atlas Progression
As a baseline when beginning your atlas journey, we highly recommend optimising the amount of higher tier maps you gain to force your progression up as efficiently as possible. This kind of setup doesn’t require too many nodes and can be converted to your desired strategy later on without much effort. Picking up essence nodes early can make your gearing & progression significantly easier in the early days of the league, though you will want to prioritise the map sustain nodes.
Alch & go Heist, Essences & Blight with Searing Exarch
This strategy focuses on picking up Essences, Blight and Heist. Blight is your big mechanic to lean into here, while Essences and Contracts serve as simple click-collects that you hoard and unload in bulk. Blight on the map device may also be extremely profitable in this Atlas Tree, it is however usually one of the more expensive options on the device and it may be difficult to sustain without building up a large currency base
Essences have been extremely underrated when it comes to crafting, and with their recent buff, they are often on par with tier 1 modifiers, such as the 
Deafening Essence of Contempt being just slightly below the Flaring modifier. Selling Essences in bulk and collecting them over time can be useful for both crafting and building up currency
Alch & Go Tree with Blight Atlas Tree
Abyss Farm
With the addition of Corrupted Gaze, you can now drop corrupted abyssal jewels with 5 or 6 affixes, these are incredibly important for just about any build looking to min max their setup and are sure to fetch a good price.
The monsters in abyssal depths tend to drop more currency thanks to their increased quantity of items found, and Stygian vises are also often desired for endgame min maxing. Selling Essences in bulk and collecting them over time can be useful for both crafting and building up currency. Augmenting your maps with 
Rusted Abyss Scarab or its higher tier variants may be profitable for this strategy. The tree below contains all of the necessary nodes at as low of a skill point cost as possible.
Hybrid Bosser with your choice of mechanics
This tree allows you to pick your favourite mechanics while picking up the major bossing nodes, allowing for a relaxed, hybrid playstyle that leaves enough points to choose your preferred mapping mechanics alongside the boss nodes.
Blights & Boxes pure mapper
Blighted Maps are not for the faint of heart, but this strategy can help you acquire large amounts of them when running maps like Toxic Sewer. As well as this, this tree picks up Strongboxes, Essences, Contracts and Alva for steady income over time.
Abyss and Breach Pure Mapper with Grand Design
This tree fully embraces Breach and Abyss, and to further utilise these mechanics absurd scaling with packsize it grabs Grand Design. This tree will require you to have your atlas nodes and your voidstones, but other than purchasing Scarabs it will not require much effort on your part.
Red Altar farming with Grand Design.
This strategy leverages the altars themselves and their interaction with pack size to give quite an astounding amount of raw currency drops. Most of the mechanics this tree specs into, are used purely to further scale pack size through Grand Design. While altars are our main focus in this, Expedition, Boxes and Beasts will still grant us a nice chunk of change alongside the currency from the altars. This strategy requires four voidstones, all atlas points and your favourite map slots to function. It is important that you favourite your map of choice with all but one favourite map slot, and favouring a map connected to that one with the final favourite slot. Which exact map to run is up to you, but we would suggest you pick a map “without” a boss. What I mean by this, is that you select a map that doesn’t normally have its boss spawned. This is to eliminate boss reward altars from the altar pool, leaving us with only Player and Monster altar pools, thus drastically increasing our ability to stack up high amounts of reward altars.
Questions?
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Final Notes
As much as I love making guides, it is very crucial in a game like Path of Exile that you play the game the way you enjoy playing it. With that said, if you’ve made any tweaks to the trees compared to what I’m showing in this guide I would love it if you shared in the comments! It’s an effective way to show other approaches and it helps me grow as a guide creator!
