Welcome to our Breach league mechanic guide! Breach is one of the more straightforward league mechanics you can encounter in the endgame. In this guide we'll be taking a look at all of its components - the breaches themselves, breach types, Breachstones, Breachlords and all the loot in-between!

Breach is considered Extra content and has a baseline non-zero chance of being randomly encountered in maps.

Our league mechanic guides are structured according to "Depth" - the deeper you go into the article, the more complex the mechanics get. If it all becomes too much, take a break from this guide, play with the league mechanic enough to master the fundamentals then come back and delve deeper!

Difficulty: Generally easy, though some builds may struggle.
Complexity: Low, for Path of Exile standards.

The icon that denotes Breach content and rewards of the Breach type.

table of contents goes here

Depth 1 - Breaches in Maps

When mapping, you can come across spooky hands with a purple-reddish aura idling about on the ground. These are what we call Breaches. When you simply step over one, the following will happen:

• The Breach opens and begins to expand outwards.
• It keeps expanding for a random amount of time (minimum 30 seconds), which you can increase by killing Magic and Rare monsters.
• The more it expands, the more monsters pour into the map.
• Eventually, the Breach quickly closes, removing any remaining monsters from the map.

Your objective is to kill as many monsters as possible in the little time you have. Your main goal, however, is to collect the Breach Splinters dropped by these monsters, which you'll eventually use to form a Breachstone, but we'll get into that in Depth 3.

You may also notice smaller, or perhaps bigger Breach hands occasionally spawn from the ether as the Breach expands. Stepping over them will open them up and yield you even more Breach Splinters! Check out the short video below to see how a Breach behaves, and how you can spot these extra Breach hands before even opening the Breach:

video

Depth 2 - Monster Loot Pools, Monster Types

Breach loot is split into five groups, each one belonging to a Breachlord (the bosses of this league mechanic). Here's a table that better illustrates the general idea:

As you can see, each Breachlord corresponds to a damage type and has its own set of Breach Splinters and Breachstones. Note that each Breachlord's minions, which you will find when opening Breaches as well as inside their respective Breachstones, also deal the same damage type as their boss.

When you open a Breach, you'll get a random Breachlord's minions as well as loot. Xoph, Tul and Esh are fairly common, while Uul-Netol and Chayula are rarer. Occasionally, a Breachlord may show up in a map Breach as well! Kill it quickly before the Breach closes for a nice stack of Breach Splinters!

Depth 3 - Breachstones

Once you collect 100 Breach Splinters of a certain type, you can combine them to create a Breachstone of that specific type. 100 Splinters of Xoph transform into Xoph's Breachstone, and so on. When you place a Breachstone in the map device, it opens portals to that specific Breachlord's domain. Get ready, because Breach domains are even more of a race against time!

When you open a Breachstone:

1. Upon entering, you will find yourself in a very long and narrow, but very empty map. If you check the top-right corner dropdown under the minimap, you'll see the area has a set of random modifiers.
2. Next to your portal will be one of those spooky Breach hands.
3. When you step over it, it will begin expanding and a timer will start at the top of your screen.
4. As it expands, monsters will come into existence throughout the previously empty map.
5. You need to push through the hordes of enemies, killing them at a fast and steady pace, and reach the end of the map before the timer runs out.
6. When you successfully reach the end of the map on time, the timer disappears and a portal is revealed. All the loot you got from killing monsters explodes on the ground.
7. Now you have to enter the portal and kill the boss to get its loot!

These first three Depths mark the core gameplay loop of Breach. There is, of course, a lot more to it. Next up, let's dig deeper into Breachlords, their extra difficulties, more Breach loot as well as farming strategies.

Depth 4 - Breachlords

There are five Breachlord boss fights, with each of the bosses sharing the same arena but having different mechanics. The arena is tight, so like everything else with Breach, you'll want to kill the Breachlord quickly, before too many bad things litter the floor and you have nowhere left to go. Now, with a decent build, most of these bosses will not really pose a threat to you. Chayula is who you should watch out for. Open each of the boxes below to find out more about each Breachlord as well as watch a video of the encounter:

Now, Breachlords drop some Unique loot we'll talk about in Depth 6, but may also occasionally drop a Bessing. Let's talk about that first.

Depth 5 - Harder Breachlords & Blessings

So you killed a Breachlord, and it just so happened to drop a Blessing, such as Blessing of Xoph. This item has two uses, one of which we'll expand upon in this section:

1. A Blessing can be used to upgrade a Breach Unique to a stronger version.
2. A Blessing can be used to upgrade a Breachstone into a Flawless Breachstone.

Flawless Breachstones work functionally the same as regular Breachstones, but are exceptionally harder. Here are the key differences:

1. Flawless Breachstones have increased Quantity and Rarity of items found.
2. They are area level 84, while regular Breachstones are level 81 (Xoph, Esh, Tul), 82 (Uul-Netol) and 83 (Chayula). This translates into increased monster strength, experience granted and pack size.
3. They have more random area modifiers compared to regular Breachstones.
4. The timer is significantly lower, requiring well-polished builds in speed, damage and survivability.
5. "Flawless Breachlords" are the only ones who can drop the Unique amulet Uul-Netol's Vow.

Only attempt a Flawless Breachstone if you're really confident you can complete it! In addition, there are two other opportunities to fight Breachlords in harder-than-normal situations:

• You can fight Xoph, Tul, Esh and Uul-Netol all at once in the Maven's Invitation: The Hidden.
• You can fight Chayula alongside the Uber Elder, the Shaper, Cortex bosses and Atziri in Maven's Invitation: The Feared.

For more information on these encounters, check out our Maven Invitations Guide.

Depth 6 - More Breach Loot

Now that we're more familiar with how Breach loot works, including the upgrade system, let's take a look at this table, with explanations right below:

This is the Unique loot associated with each Breachlord. These items can drop from both their respective Breachlords and their minions. They can also be sold to vendors for 3x Breach Splinters of their corresponding type. Now, remember the Blessings we previously alluded to, that exclusively drop from Breachlords? They not only upgrade Breachstones to their Flawless variants, but also upgrade the above Uniques into more powerful versions! Let's see what they turn into:

A little cooler, right? These, when vendored, grant 10x Breach Splinters of their corresponding type, but please just sell them to players for an actual profit. These upgrades do not have the same drop restrictions as their regular counterparts:

• They do not drop from Breach minions, regular Breachlords or Breachlords in Maven Invitations.
• They can occasionally drop (fully upgraded) from Flawless versions of Breach bosses. This and using Blessings are the two most reliable ways to acquire them.

Depth 7 - Breach Rings & Grasping Mail

During your Breach encounters, you'll come across Breach Rings fairly commonly. They:

• Always drop Corrupted.
• Have the unique modifier "Properties are Doubled Within a Breach".
• Are largely useless for actual wearing these days and are outclassed by lots of other rings.

So, why bother mention them? Well, Breach Rings have a hidden vendor recipe. When you sell a whopping 60 of them to a vendor, you'll receive a Grasping Mail! These body armors aren't only really cool because they have Armor, Evasion and Energy Shield, but they always roll 1-3 unique Breach mods on the item. Beware, however, that the mods cannot be re-crafted on the item, so be very careful when crafting Grasping Mails!

Grasping Mails also occasionally drop in Flawless Breachstones, with a random fractured exclusive Breach modifier. A fractured modifier persists through all "reroll" crafting methods.

small showing of a few random grasping mails

Depth 8 - More Breach Loot & Breach Scarabs

Want to focus on Breach content? There's plentiful ways to go about it, from increasing the prevalence of Breach content in your maps, to exploring other game systems where you can find Breach loot without directly interacting with Breach.

First up, there's three ways to artificially increase or even guarantee Breach encounters in your maps:

• Using the Breach map crafting option to guarantee 2 additional Breaches at the cost of 6 Chaos Orbs.
• Using a Breach Scarab, which does the same thing. You can use up to 4 of these per map!
• Allocating certain passive nodes on the Atlas Passive Tree that increase the chance of Breaches showing up in your maps or eventually outright guarantee it.

There's also 4 other Breach Scarabs you can use to further enhance your Breaches. Note that they do not guarantee Breaches in your maps; you'll need to use them in conjunction with at least one of the above options to ensure they don't go to waste.

• Breach Scarab of the Dreamer - Nice.
• Breach Scarab of Lordship - Even nicer.
• Breach Scarab of Splintering - These just keep ramping up, you can get dozens of Splinters per map by combining some of those! You can use up to 2 Splintering Scarabs per map!
• Breach Scarab of Snares - When will it end?!
• Breach Scarab of the Resonant Cascade - Loot is greatly boosted, if your build can keep up with the speed at which Breaches open and close.

In addition, you can get Breach loot from a plethora of other leagues' content. Open the box below to check them out!

Depth 9 - Breached Atlas Passive Tree

Once again, leaving this empty until we got a proper in-house Atlas.

Other Considerations

Things to consider!