With heist and delve activities going on every couple of maps runs. It was time for some further runs to start pushing up the tiers. It was slower going than I would have liked. At least I was making some progress.

A lot of the time I was darting in and out of maps filling up some spare stash tabs with extras of everything but amulets since those were hard to come by drops for doing the chaos recipe. Thankfully I had a heist bringing in a mountain of amulets. At points, I could not farm enough of everything else to up.

As the game would cycle through a shortage of different items. For a few hours I'd be short on glovers, then boots, then helms and the cycle would repeat. I’d make sure to pick up quite a few extras of everything. There were however only so many stash tabs in the bank I wanted to commit to the chaos recipe.

One thing I was trying to work out on my map runs was how much risk to take any time I encountered verisium outcrop. Unlike the other ores, you farm for your settlement. For this one you had to decide just how much risk to take. The longer you let it power up the harder it would become.

I did try a couple of times just letting it max out. After all, I was quite short and still am on verisium. I would however get killed quite a few times even more so the higher in-tier maps I'd be going into. Later on, it would be quite hard to not want to go for 500 verisium at the later stages when that started to become a thing.

More times than not I ended up going for around 80% of the total amount before I'd stop channeling and let the creature's spawn. Even then sometimes a powerful rare would spawn giving me quite some trouble.

Once I had some decent atlas skill points spent on heist and delve, I went for Kirac nodes. While I did not pick all of them up. I wanted an increased chance of getting Kirac missions and drops to roll those missions.

I’m not one of those people who like to buy maps from other players even if I'm struggling to get a certain map to drop. I want to get the bonus objective finished for as many of them as possible for Atlas skill points. Using Kirac was a great way to get what I was missing.

Every once in a while after defeating a map boss I'd get another mission from him. You can just allow them to stack up. So, I wanted before I had a lot of the early tier maps done before going on a bit of a rampage of looking for and rerolling if needed till I got maps I had yet to run.

While I was working on yet another map I had yet to get the objective finished in I came across a kaon's cache. My eyes lit up for a moment at the possibilities. Sure, enough I got a Kaom’s Heart to drop.

While these things don’t sell for a lot. As far as standard map drops go it’s one of the better unique you can loot. At the time I might have sold it for like 20 chaos or something. While not an insane amount by any means. It’s things like this that keep me wanting to do just one more map late into the night.

After so many maps runs among all the other stuff I was doing. I’d stop for a moment and go list all the scarabs I was getting. It was around this point when I started to spend my atlas skill points on scarab nodes and it was slowly starting to pay off.

While many scarabs might not be worth much at one point in time. All it takes is a meta change and suddenly everyone is running out to get whatever latest Strat for making money came out that used scarabs that used to sell for next to nothing.

There is also nothing like getting some instant sales when you need chaos to buy some upgrades. Along with noticing there is a 50% difference between the buying and selling margins. I sometimes would even buy up some of my own and resell them for a little profit.

I was also starting to get a few that were worth 7 to 12 chaos a piece. At the time a divine orb was going for less than 165 chaos. On a good map runs with it raining scarabs I was making some phat bank.

Early on I was ignoring things like Maven. I guess you could say it was an old habit. When you did not have a choice to have a different atlas bosses changed how a map works if they started to influence an area.

Nowadays and it’s been like this for a while now. You have to select and even get to choose if you want one or none of them to have any influence on a map you are running. Assuming that the map is at a high enough level.

I decided I should start to at least get some work done on the atlas progress regarding the bosses. As expected, the first maven fight with the four lower-tier map bosses was a cakewalk. I killed them all so fast that I did not even get time to get a screenshot of anything alive.

Once I did the first one I started to get the drops to unlock the other two bosses that influence the map. For the most part, I'd go back to ignoring them. My main focus was just getting maps cleared for the first time.

Final Thoughts

The last thing I needed was for the only map to a zone I had to end up being a failure. For a while, I was kind of stuck in the white map tiers of the atlas. My character could just not take damage. He sure could dish it out. Anytime however he could not kill things quickly enough I'd find myself running out of portals and failing a map or two.

Over time my income from the heist and the scarabs I was getting from maps started to roll in. Then I could start making some rather big investments into some better gear that would allow me to catapult into much higher-tier maps.

For the early days of the league, however, I was kind of stuck grinding the lower-level stuff. Till I could acquire some much better gear. Thankfully that wait would not be too much longer.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Path Of Exile.