Keepers of the Flame Mechanic Guide

Introduction

Keepers of the Flame is the first-ever sequel mechanic – expanding on the popular Breach mechanic! You’ll still be opening Breach Hands and killing hordes of monsters as fast as you can. But now also taking on Breach Hives, Hive Fortresses, new Bosses and Pinnacle Bosses… and rewarded with the use of powerful new Grafts and Genesis Tree Crafting!

A Sequel to Breach

As a “sequel” to the Breach mechanic, Keepers of the Flame acts as a replacement for ALL Breach content in the Keepers League.

This means that Breaches, Breach Atlas Passives, Breachstones, and Breach Scarabs will all be unavailable in this League. Breach content continues to be available in Standard… for at least the duration of Keepers League.

Encountering the Hive

In every zone in Keepers league, you’ll find one of four encounters: Hives, Breach Hands, a Hive Fortress, or a Hive Colony.

Each of these encounters will have you slaying hordes of Hive monsters – rewarding you with Graftblood, Wombgifts, and loot!

Ailith and the Monastery

You’ll first encounter Ailith in The Coast in Act 1. She’ll grant you your first Graft slot, Graft, and give you a mini tutorial on the Keepers mechanic.

Later in the campaign, she will also grant you access to the Monastery of the Keepers – a zone you can visit to cash in your Graftblood and Wombgifts.

Hives

Hives are the most common type of Breach you will encounter. They are structures consisting of a number of walls surrounding a central Breach. As you approach, any walls your character gets near are burned down and destroyed. Destroying more walls before starting the encounter will scale up the difficulty and the rewards.

Once you begin the encounter, you will have to kill several waves of monsters while protecting Ailith from dying. There are interactable abilities located in the environment that can help you kill the monsters faster, or keep Ailith safe. Use them liberally!

Ailith has health that displays above the wave number, displaying the number of hits she can take before being defeated. If she is defeated, you will fail the encounter.

Breach Hands

Breach Hands are rarer than Hives, and are similar to the old Breach Mechanic. When you touch a Breach Hand an expanding zone will appear, revealing swarms of Hive monsters. You’ll need to kill the Hive monsters as fast as possible, or the Breach will close.

Your progress is tracked with a bar on the bottom of the screen – if the tracker catches up to you before you max out the bar, the Breach will immediately close.

If you manage to max out the bar, either several Rare monsters or a boss – Vruun, Marshal of Xesht – will spawn where the Breach Hand was. Defeating these enemies closes the Breach.

Vruun always drops a random Breach ring upon defeat.

Once these enemies have spawned, you’re no longer on a timer – you can take as long as you need to fight the boss.

Hive Fortresses

Once you reach maps, you can begin to find Hive Fortresses. These are portals to mini-zones filled with Swarms of Hive monsters, and a Hive encounter with 24 waves of monsters at the end.

Hive Fortresses count as being a part of the Map they are in, and inherit all map modifiers – allowing you to scale the difficulty and rewards.

Fortress Loot

Loot dropped by monsters in a Fortress will be collected by the game invisibly, and will drop back inside the Map in one giant loot explosion upon successful completion of the Fortress.

However, if you fail to complete the Fortress (either due to failing the Defense or Escape), you will not receive any of this loot. (This is planned to be changed in an upcoming patch).

Grasping Coffers

Scattered across the Fortress are Grasping Coffers that can drop Wombgifts and Foulborn Uniques – make sure to loot as many of them as you can!

Escaping the Fortress

This zone ends with Ailith burning the zone down, and you have to race back to the exit. You will take continuous pulses of damage during this time, and monsters will continuously spawn.

All paths except one path will be blocked. Be sure to check the mini-map – hand icons will show which paths are blocked, allowing you to quickly figure out the path back to the entrance!

Hive Colony

In tier 13+ maps, you have a chance to encounter a Hive Colony instead of a Hive Fortress.

A Hive Colony is similar to a regular Fortress, but with a pinnacle boss fight encounter against both Esh and Tul in place of the wave defense.

You can also access a Hive Colony by placing a Hivebrain Gland in your map device. This map fragment can randomly drop from Hive Fortress encounters in high-tier maps.

Grafts

Grafts are a new type of equipment that can be placed in Graft slots unlocked by Ailith. In addition to granting stats, these Grafts each come with a skill that they grant, trigger, or cast automatically.

You can unlock up to two total Graft slots – your first is unlocked in Act 1 when you meet Ailith. The second Graft slot is unlocked by defeating Vruun after clearing a Breach Hand in maps.

Grafts cannot be crafted on with regular currency items – only with Unstable Implants.

Grafts visually add arms growing out of your character’s back. If you wish to disable this visual, an option will be added to the MTX UI in an update shortly after league launch.

Graft Skills

Graft Skills do not count as being used by your character. This means that they do not scale with any player stats, and damage they deal cannot be reflected to your player character.

Since they do not otherwise scale, Graft Skills have incredibly powerful base effects and damage – making them likely very strong in the campaign and early endgame progression.

Graftblood

Your Grafts also collect Graftblood from killed Hive enemies. Each Graft has a maximum capacity, which can be upgraded via modifiers on the Graft.

You’ll need to visit the Genesis Tree in the Monastery to spend your Graftblood – any excess blood beyond the cap will likely be lost.

Genesis Tree

The Genesis Tree is your primary source of rewards from the Keepers mechanic.

Wombgifts that drop off of Hive monsters can be placed in the Genesis Tree, and then fed Graftblood from your Grafts. Doing so will create showers of loot – the type of loot you get depending on the type of Wombgift used and your allocated passives on the Genesis Tree Passive Tree

Passive Tree

Each type of Wombgift has its own passive tree associated with it. These passives influence the type, quantity, and quality of rewards received from Wombgifts. These can be anything from weighting the modifiers on equipment, to additional currency items.

Points for this Passive Tree are unlocked as you complete Hive encounters and spend Graftblood at the Genesis Tree

For more information on the Genesis Tree, check out the “Genesis Tree” section of this guide:

Genesis Tree

Foulborn Orbs

Foulborn Orbs are a type of currency that can be obtained via Currency Wombgifts. These orbs function the same as their counterparts, but with higher level modifiers being more likely.

Unstable Implant

Unstable Implants are a type of currency that can be obtained via Currency Wombgifts. These function the same as their orb counterparts, but are used on Grafts instead of Equipment.

Breach Rings

Breach rings have been overhauled from their Breach 1.0 counterparts.

Breach rings now have an implicit that increases your maximum resistance, as well as preventing damage modifiers from other damage types from rolling.

Foulborn Uniques

Foulborn Uniques can be acquired from the Genesis Tree or from Grasping Coffers. These Unique items have one of their modifiers replaced at random with a new Foulborn modifier. With a specific Genesis Tree passive, it’s possible for a Unique to gain multiple Foulborn modifiers.

The pool of uniques that can become Foulborn, the modifiers that can be removed, and the modifiers they can be replaced with have all been hand-picked by GGG. This means that not all Uniques can become Foulborn, not all modifiers can be removed, and only a handful of modifiers can be added per Unique.

These Foulborn variants of existing uniques can likely be very powerful – especially with a downside removed or a new build-enabling modifier added.

Keep an eye out – it’s likely that specific Foulborn Uniques will be coveted and incredibly valuable.

Conclusion

Be sure to check out the other pages of this guide, covering even more topics related to Keepers of the Flame! This guide will continue to be updated in the future – if you have any feedback, or find something cool you want to share, head on over to the PoE Vault Discord, and let me know!

Good luck, and have fun farming Keepers of the Flame!