Essences are a core crafting currency in Path of Exile and because of that there’s always a demand for them in POE 3.22.
Essential Mechanics
Luckily, Essences are a frequent flyer on Kirac Map device, so it is one of the easiest and most reliable ways to make POE Divine Orb, especially if you’re a new player and especially if you don’t have a good build or can’t invest a lot of POE Currency into your Divine Orbs making strategy.
Unlike many other league mechanics in Path of Exile, Essences don’t scope map tier and they don’t scale with map quantity. So, as far as Essences themselves go, there’s no difference between killing them in a Tier 1 map or a Tier 16 map. No matter you’re alching it or corrupting it, any of that stuff doesn’t matter at all.
All that matters is the number of essence monsters that you take and the Atlas passives associated with those essences. And that’s why Essence is not only an incredible farming opportunity early league but it’s one of my favorites as I’m progressing through the Atlas.
Whenever it’s available on Kirac Map Device, I’ll often stop at either white or yellow maps before my builds really progressed into red maps and far enough POE Currency to get me over that difficulty hump.
Does it mean that I hit red slightly slower than ever people? Absolutely yes. It also means I hit Reds with much better gear and can absolutely blast through the content without any difficulty. Or, you’re just looking to earn Divine Orb since Essences tend to rise in price as really goes on becoming more valuable. Then, this is the farming guide for you.
How Do You Farm Essences?
To start off with, how do you farm Essences?
First up, you walk up to an Essence and you have to interact with it because normally Essence monsters begin in stasis. And you click it three times to break them out.
Once you do, you will fight a very scary monster whose modifiers scale based on not only the number but also type of Essences they possess. Luckily, like I mentioned, you can do this in Tier 1 maps, so your build should evaporate from almost instantaneously. But beware they can be quite tanky and dangerous in Tier 16 maps, especially if you get the notorious Essence Beast fits resistant to your damage. That thing is kind of just a raid boss and you should probably bring some friends to kill it.
Another important part of Essence mechanics that you need to be aware of is corruption. Knowing when to use a remnant of corruption on your Essences is the key to maximizing your profits.
Essence corruption outcomes include a chance to do nothing, randomizing the Essences, upgrading them to a higher tier, and if you’re not expect for them, a transfer of a monster to angrily break out early. But you should always spec such on your Atlas Tree that there’s no chance of a monster will break out early.
Now, the general rule of thumb vigil here is to corrupt Essence monsters with purple Essences, those being the Essence of Dread, Essence of Envy, Essence of Misery, and Essence of Scorn. These four Essences can all be corrupted into special Essences: Essence of Delirium, Essence of Horror, Essence of Hysteria, and Essence of Insanity that each offer unique bonuses. The Essence of Horror is probably the most popular as it’s used to make Pseudo-Link helmets for builds like Righteous Fire.
But if you’ve correctly specced out your Atlas Tree, you can also corrupt Essence monsters that have one Screaming Essence and 2-4 Shrieking. The exact amount here does vary a little bit based on the economy.
Let’s just split the difference and call it three. This is because when you have Amplified Energies, Essence monsters that possess a Shrieking Essence double. So, if all of your Essences upgrade, then you had multiple Shrieking. You then upgrade all those to Deafening. The Screaming becomes a Shrieking and it’s doubled. You get a whole bunch of Path of Exile Divine Orbs as rewards.
And if you want to go all in on Essences, you can also use Atlas Memories specifically Einhar’s Memory of Crystal Prisons. This involves fighting a series of Rogue Exiles imprisoned in Essences. But they’re extremely dangerous they inherit all the Essence modifiers while retaining their skills and base stats.
So, I strongly recommend that you remove all of your Voidstones and run the maps without adding any modifiers. This is especially important because these maps have increased effective modifiers, so the maps will be exponentially more dangerous, especially as you progress the sequence. But they won’t be exponentially more rewarding when out.
Remember, Essences do not scale off of map quantity or tier. So, by alching your maps, you make them more dangerous and you make the Essences scarier. But you don’t make rewards better. Instead, rewards scale completely linearly, with the first map within the sequence being the least rewarding and the fifth map in the sequence being the most rewarding.
And last but not least, in terms of the Atlas Memories, it should be noted they completely ignore your Atlas. They have their own special modifiers. You will still get most of the effects you’re used to from your Atlas. But they ignore it. You don’t have to have your trees back out for Essences or anything like that. Just purchase a memory, run through, corrupt as normal, and you’re good to go.
Last up, you can also combine Essence with other strategy because Essence provides a very high level of baseline loot. It’s ideal to combine it with other things that provide high levels of baseline loot, like Beasts.
In fact, Essence Beast is one of the most profitable farming strategies you can do with a bad build because it works in Tier 1 maps. Furthermore, you can throw in Harbingers, who also don’t really scale off stuff and there you go. You’ve got 3 powerful and profitable league mechanics, all of which combine together.
But alternatively, Essence is a relatively low investment on your Atlas Tree so you could toss it into an Alch and Go Harvest setup, Expedition, or Heist. And if you have a strong build, it’s totally fine to do this in Tier 16 maps for more rewards from other aspects of your map, like altar farming. Just keep in mind again that the Essences themselves do not scale with your map tier.
Atlas Passives
Now that I’ve talked about the concept, let’s start setting up a basic Essence farming strategy, beginning with Prolific Essence.
Your maps contain in additional Essence. It does exactly what it says. It gives you more Essence Monsters, which themselves drop more Essences and this does stat with Essence from a map device.
So, if you pay 2 Chaos Orbs and get plus two with Prolific Essence, you’re paying 2 Chaos Orbs for plus two, and you have 1 for free for a total of 3 guaranteed Essence Monsters on your map.
After that, you want to come over and get the 2 most powerful Essence modifiers:
- Crystal Resonance, where monsters imprisoned by a Shrieking Essence will be duplicated when released and corrupting the monsters cannot release them. This is the duplication effect that is so important for corruption. You cannot farm Essences without Crystal Resonance.
- Amplified Energy, where Essences in your maps are found when tier higher. So, a Screaming Essence will become a Shrieking. A Shrieking will become a Deafening, etc. This means that your profits are far higher than they would be otherwise.
I would never farm Essences without Prolific Essence, Crystal Resonance, and Amplified Energy.
Then last up, slightly more optionally but still quite good, is Crystal Lattice – “imprisoned monsters in your maps have a 15% chance to have 3 additional essences”. Just think of this as a 15% chance to double your profit roughly speaking. Not all of them will be high tier, but enough will that it’s absolutely worth it.
Now last up, most of a small passives give 5% chance to have an additional essence of a monster, which can lead to some crazy 8 or 9 Essence stuff and there’s one node that you should avoid at least most of the time. That is monsters in prison by Essences have a 10% chance to contain a Remnant of Corruption.
The reason that in most cases this is bad is that a monster of it already has a Remnant of Corruption cannot be further corrupted. So, you’ll find that super shiny Misery Essence when I corrupt it to get a chance at Horror.
You don’t actually get to do that because it already has the corrupted tag. There are times when Remnant of Corruption is expensive enough that it is genuinely worth farming for these and when it is worth farming for Remnant of Corruption, you should also invest in the Sextant as it gives additional Essences and Remnants of Corruption from your Essences.
However, I found that to be the rare exception rather than rule. So, just to use a theoretical example, if the Remnant of Corruption was 3 Chaos Orbs each, that’s pretty darn good. And if on average a Shrieking Essence was only worth 1 Chaos Orb each even in bulk, that might be a time where farming those Remnants of Corruption would be better.
In most cases, though, especially as the league progresses, Shrieking Essences in bulk can be upgraded to Deafening and those Deafening can be sold for Divine Orbs. Usually, the price of an average Essence is more like 8 Chaos Orbs per Deafening, which puts you at about 1.5 Chaos Orbs per Shrieking. And that’s a lot better than the roughly 2 Chaos Orbs that Remnants of Corruption tend to average.
But of course, these are all average prices change every league and realistically you should do your own research. Run two test sets of 40 maps with and without the nodes or with and without the Sextant. See how it goes and try it for yourself.
Speaking of how do you run the Essences, that’s pretty darn simple. Thread through your map until you encounter an Essence Monster. Check to see if it needs to be corrupted. If it does, corrupt it. Then, activate the monster and kill it. Collect the Essences. Repeat this until there are no other Essence Monsters remaining, at which point you can leave. If you added 3 for sure, then it’s probably only gonna have 3 and you can just run through.
Certain map layouts are better for this than others. In general, you want to do something, like Strand, atoll, or Jungle Valley if it’s available just because that way you can run straight to an end goal. The Essences are easy to spot in these linear layouts. Beach is another good one and you don’t have to worry too much about killing monsters along the way.
If there’s something like the Fortunate Divination Card as a reward, that’s also cool. But your goal isn’t to kill general monsters on your map, it’s really to go from Essence to Essence. Or, if you added Beasts, Essence to Beast to Essence or Essence to Beast to Harbinger.
Hit all the major points of interest and skip rest because it’s really not that important.
Selling Essences
But after you’ve foamed up all those Essences, you’re going to need to sell them.
The way that I personally prefer to do it is by getting a rough idea of price checking with TFT Bulk Selling Tool, then doing one of two things. If I only have a few Essences, (like let’s just say the seven-ish divines that I’m showing here), I’d probably just go sell this whole thing to someone on TFT in the bulk want to buy entire tab section.
Do not go to the bulk ‘one to sell Essence’ section. Go to the bulk ‘want to buy the entire tab’ section so that you can sell to people in a single trade and get rid of all of them. This is what you do when you have relatively small amounts of bulk Essences and you need for Divine Orbs immediately. It is not the most effective value for your Essences, but it is the most effective value for your time because you’re getting rid of all of them in a single trade.
If you want the most effective value for your time, on the other hand, you want to start Min maxing with profit that uses Harvest, specifically Primal Crystallised Lifeforce. You spend 30 Primal Crystallised Lifeforce per Essence re-rolled to re-roll Essences into a different type. The Essences become a different random type within their tier. So, this is very good for taking low value Essences, like Misery or Doubt and turning them into high value Essences, like Wrath or Loathing.
And fun fact, you can also do this with Corrupted Essences. Let’s just say you find out that Essence of Hysteria is underpriced and Essence of Horrors overpriced. You can re-roll Essence of Hysteria and the outcome will be Insanity, Delirium or Horror.
Let’s just say it picks Insanity. Well, it can’t pick itself again. So, now the options are Horror, Delirium, or Hysteria, which means on average within a couple of rerolls, you’ll end up converting over the Essence of Horror or whatever other Corrupted Essence is the most expensive because Corrupted Essences always reroll into a different Corrupted Essence.
Conclusion
Those are the basics of how Essence works, the mechanics of farming Essence, Atlas passives involved, general strategy, and how to sell the loot.
Personally, I find that Essence farming is one of the most reliable early-game strategies. And surprisingly, if you just need a bit of POE Currency here or there, and you don’t have the best build, it tends to remain one of the best strategies even late into a league.
This is because crafters always need more Essences and over time crafters are willing to pay more currency for essences in bulk, which means for someone providing the base currency you’ll always have demand for your product.
