POE Heist isn't what it used to be back when it first released, in a good sort of way. Due to its bad reception and less than entertaining gameplay, the league was shunned and mostly ignored by the players. It spanned over four months compared to the usual three-month cycle of Path of Exile leagues with plenty of bugs. However, over the months, Heists went through lots of changes, and finally, in PoE 3.14 Ultimatum, it offers great value in terms of items as well as raw exalted orbs. Now the majority of the loot will come from farming deception contracts. You collect blueprints by running maps or buying them from other players. The profits outweigh the investments, so don't be afraid, and without further ado, let's get started.
What are the goals of running Heists maps in PoE 3.14 Ultimatum?
There are two ways you can farm Heists in Path of Exile. For beginners who want to avoid planning too far ahead and want to have fun for a week or so, running Deception contracts with Gianna. Though the process is quite lucrative in terms of loot and exalts, it's not quite as efficient in the long run.
However, with a little bit of planning and prior time investment, you can significantly lessen the farm time to yield way more loot. Now, this where you need a bit of game sense. You can still get by using minimalistic gear, but you still need to plan and be more disciplined when planning Heists. With that said, let's take at the possible profits you stand to gain with the newly improved Heist missions.
Farming/Profit Expectations
Roughly speaking, you can earn around a hundred exalted orbs over 20 hours just by running deception contracts. During the farm fest, you'll come across raw currency items such as exalted orbs themselves, primary and secondary regarding lenses alongside tons of other raw currencies. They can be anything from skills gems, divination cards, stack decks, scarabs. All of these for farming roughly contracts.
Here are a few currency items that you should be on the lookout for, as they can fetch quite a few exalts.
Fertile catalysts are quite popular now, and they sell for roughly 12 chaos orbs each. Scarabs are also very popular and are a good way to earn some cheap currency early on during your run. There are also divination cards and stack decks. You can get a lot of PoE currency if you manage to bag a few good divination cards. Lastly, you have the skill gems. A good roll on a skill gem can fetch you loads of exalts. For example, an Ultimate quality skill gem usually goes for 5-6 exalts, and you're going to get a few hundred of them and sell them for a total of thirty chaos orbs.
Effective Builds for Heist Leagues
In terms of builds, you can use almost anything and get away with it. This strategy aims not to kill the enemies but to zoom through the map, opening chests as fast as possible. The toxic rain raider is best for heist simply because of the speed bonuses. You complete the contract in a matter of 5-6 minutes if you know what you're doing.
In terms of gear, you can start with a tabula rasa, quill rain, and a thief's torment. You can invest more as you progress, but it's mostly not required. To begin, you need these simple gears and maybe 60-100 chaos orbs for deception contracts. For the next week, you can easily earn over a hundred exalts. However, you need to farm constantly, roughly five hours per day over a week, and you need to have some prior experience.
Preparing for Heists
Now investing that amount of exalts might not seem too appealing to new players. After all, they would rather avoid spending their hard-earned chaos on farming deception contracts only if there was a way to get chaos orbs without grinding long hours, which there is. Now you can easily buy PoE currency orbs from online websites. They are super cheap and safe. With only a few clicks, you can buy tons of chaos orbs at a fraction of the price. You can entirely bypass the process of accumulating chaos to buy contracts. Simply buy a hundred orbs, get the contracts and start farming right away. It's that simple. These websites always have PoE orbs for sale, so you're sure to get a deal if you stick around long enough.
Buying and Revealing blueprints
A major part of running Heist missions is to reveal your blueprints and plan heists accordingly. You need Rogue's markers to unveil maps, possibly five thousand to six thousand markers per map. Each time you unveil a wing, the cost goes up. Make sure to choose Gianna to get the maximum discount for these unveils.
Once you've unlocked the winds, you'll get to further unveil the rooms. The rooms that offer the most value are divination cards and currency rooms. They are the most important rooms to farm in PoE 3.14 Ultimatum as you'll be making most of your money from selling divination cards and currency rooms have a chance of dropping raw currency items such as exalted and chaos orbs. The next rooms you should prioritize are harbinger which has a chance of dropping exalted shards, and metamorph rooms which drop scarabs that you sell for chaos or two each.
Delirium and fossil rooms aren't that valuable in terms of raw chaos, but if you have some spare coin lying around, you can reveal them for some quick currencies.
That's all for now. Remember, whatever currency you invest in heists, you will eventually make it backer a week or two, provided you put in the effort. Heists are now more profitable than ever, and in Part- 2 is where you'll get the good stuff. Everything you've learned here will be put to the test. The next Part covers rolling your blueprints for favorable modifiers, setting up rogues for the mission, and much more.
