Atlas Passive Skill Tree Strategies Guide

GhazzyTV

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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.
This is intended for newer players who are not comfortable rushing through map tiers. If you are, please see the next entry instead.

Early Progression Atlas Tree
Follow the line to the left. Once you take Shaping the Skies, take the gateway over to Shaping the Mountains. Then Proceed up to Shaping the World. Then fill out the rest of the tree.

Wandering Path

Wandering Path is currently the meta league start atlas tree. It takes nothing but small nodes that focuses on map sustain.
In order to make this as smooth as possible, we have broken the tree down into progression stages for you.

Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3 – Fully grab 100% chance to drop connected.
Stage 4 – Grab all the hyper-efficient Duplication nodes

This stage is where you as a player need to make a choice. You can either keep taking small nodes, like “increased effect of map modifiers” to get even more map drops and progress even faster, or you start taking nodes leading into mechanics you wish to engage with later.
This choice is entirely up to you. Just make sure you get your two first void stones as early as you possibly can.

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 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, Expedition, Essences & Blue Altars.

Abyss, Expedition, Essences and Blue Altars Atlas Tree

Hybrid Bosser shrines and Essences

This tree allows you to pick your favourite mechanics while picking up the major bossing nodes, allowing for a relaxed, hybrid playstyle that also grabs Shrines for speed and Essences for pure profit.

Hybrid Bosser Atlas Tree

Breach, Essence, Shrines and Harbingers.

This tree embraces Breach and grabs a variety of mechanics that also spawns volumes of mobs. It also grabs Essences, because Essence is free money. Shrines for speed.

Breach, Essence, Shrines and Harbinger Atlas Tree

Legion, Blue Altar and Shrines.

This tree focuses on Legion and takes Blue Altars for divine gambles as well as Shrines for speed. It is important that you use at most Polished Legion Scarab, as Gilded Scarab would guarantee a boss spawn and they simply take too long. There are free points in this to throw in whatever mechanic you want, or more boss-rushing nodes.

Legion, Blue Altars and Shrines Atlas Tree

Atroz’s Lazy farm

This tree will focus on Expedition and Harvest. It also grabs Essences because essences are free money. It’s designed to be played with Stream of Consciousness and does not need any scarabs or sextants or anything complicated. It blocks everything else and takes some boss rushing nodes for more free money. If you want to switch off your brain and farm large bulks of things, this is the tree for you.

Atroz Lazy Farm Atlas Tree

This tree leaves some points towards the end open. You can fill these with what you want, but I personally add harbingers if I am not yet 100, and more raw quant (through map effect nodes) otherwise. You spend them however you want, really.

Atroz Lazy Farm With Voidstones Tree

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, Boxes and Beasts will still occasionally grant us a nice chunk of change alongside the currency from the altars. This strategy requires four void stones, 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.

This tree WILL require pack size rolling and math. The formula is essentially: Atlas quant + Scarabs + map pack size = 100%

Atlas tree pack size = 45%.
Growing Hordes provides us with 7% pack size per Polished and 10% per Gilded. These are our numericals and it’s important to understand what this does.
2 Polished + 2 Gilded = 34% – This is cheaper than the below version
4 Gilded = 40%

So what you do here, is you take the base number (tree pack size) + your combination of scarabs and add those numbers together. You then have the number you need to roll on maps.

Example: 45% + 34% = 79%. This means your maps need to be rolled to 21% pack size.
Example big: 45% +40% = 85 This means you cannot get below 100%. The lowest possible pack size is 16 on a rare map.

If gilded scarabs are cheap, the gilded option is therefore preferable as no math is required and only modifiers matter now.

Red Altar farming Tree

Wildwood Abuse featuring Abyss

The core idea of this strategy is to take all the Quantity, Rarity and Currency Conversion mechanics offered by the Wildwood and super-juice them with the use of pre-existing in-game mechanics. In this case, that would be primarily Abyss, with a side entry of Beyond and Harbingers.
You go into the Wildwood and collect as much juice as you possibly can, and then proceed to wade through an ocean of mobs hoping as many of them as possible get a benefit of Wildwood.
This sounds pretty simple, and it is. It will involve a bit of trading for specific Scarabs and Sextants, and it will require a reasonably defensive build to do this in red maps. Squishy bow builds should likely avoid this strat entirely, even in lower map tiers.
This is NOT a super low-entry farming strategy, and it will probably kick your ass if your build is not super strong. You most likely will also need to play quite well to handle this.
You’ve been warned Exile!

To do the strategy efficiently you want to hunt for a trail of each colour. Scout the edges to find a trail of colour and follow that trial until you have around 2k wisps. After you gather 2k of a colour you go hunt for other colour trails, and slowly walk to the edge to see if you agro mobs in the Wildwood as they will reveal a new trial for you most of the time. The best outcome would be 2k of each colour but it does depend on rng. Try not to pick up any let-over wisps, you pick those up after the portals spawn so you don’t waste any light.

Examples:
  • Purple + Yellow + Blue = GG
  • Blue + Yellow = Currency
  • Purple + Yellow = Uniques

if you can’t find any trials, “Try to hunt for the little light bubbles (as they will make you stay longer in the wildwood)” Not the big light bubbles as they will just explode and reveal the area around.

You want to make sure you are running a map that doesn’t have a boss. What we mean by that is a map in which the boss is NOT spawned when we enter the map, and requires us to do something in order to spawn it ourselves. The reason for this, is that it eliminates the “boss” mod options from the altars, leaving us with a very high likelihood of being able to pick the player quantity option, which is why we are running blue altars. The map having Fortunate is a huge bonus.
Wildwood spawns more monsters. Makes monsters drop more stuff. Quantity makes monsters drop more stuff. It all makes sense.
This league that means Jungle Valley, as it’s our only good option. Arachnid Nest exists, but it is infinitely inferior.

Absolutely required items:

Gilded Abyss Scarab
Abyss Sextant – “Your Maps can contain Abysses Your Maps contain an additional Abyss”

Optional Sextants:

Delirium
Beyond
Fourth Sextant is entirely up to you. We prefer to go with “Hunted Traitors” because it adds mobs, and it’s funny to watch the mobs fight each other.

Optional Scarabs

Harbingers – Adds more Pack size
Divination – Adds more Divination Cards
Reliquary – Adds more Unique Drops

You can really run whatever you want in these optional slots, but we believe these are the best results.

Wildwood and Abyss tree

Questions?

To guarantee that my guides are tools you can utilize to enhance your experience in Path of Exile, all you need to do is post your question in the comments and I will personally attend to them as soon as possible.

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!

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