Path of Exile: Heist League Mechanic Guide

oooh boi this is a big one

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: Average
Complexity: High

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

Depth 1 - The Basics, Rogue's Markers

Heist is an out-of-map league, meaning the vast majority of Heist-related activities take place outside of the usual endgame system. Because of how much there is to talk about, we urge you to complete the in-game 'tutorial' if you haven't yet, which can be started in Act 6. That'll give you a quick idea of how Heists generally work. Now, let's list some of the basics of Heist:

• Rogue's Marker is this league's main currency. It has two uses:
  • Right-clicking one will open a portal to the Rogue's Harbor, the league's friendly town area. This is where you'll conduct all your business: Running Contracts, preparing Grand Heists, chatting with the thieves...
  • It is used to purchase Contracts, hire Rogues, pay Job fees and reveal hidden rooms on a Grand Heist's map. We'll get into all of these shortly.

Once you've visited the Rogue Harbor and introduced yourself to your new friends, you'll unlock the Heist Locker Hideout Decoration. Plop this in your hideout; it'll store Contracts, Blueprints and Rogue's Markers!

Once you start getting into the league more seriously, you'll soon find out you want lots of Rogue's Marker. They are "sunk" into Grand Heists, the most lucrative Heist content, and you'll want to be making a steady amount in order to keep the rewards flowing. Rogue's Markers are gathered in many ways. Here are the most common, from the lowest to highest amounts:

• Randomly dropped by monsters starting with Act 6.
• Found in Smuggler's Stashes, fancy chests that always drop Rogue's Markers and at least a Contract or Grand Heist.
• Rewarded at the end of Contracts. We'll take a look at this in the next section.

Bear in mind, you'll also find quite a few Quest Contracts in your Smuggler's Stashes, indicated by their green text. They:

• Can only be completed once.
• Are a great way to earn large amounts of Rogue's Markers.
• Many of them are part of a 'Quest Contract Chain', with increasing rewards.
• Some of these quest chains end up unlocking a Heist boss battle!

Right, so we understand that Rogue's Markers are important to hoard, great. Now let's take a look at the most basic gameplay loop of Heist.

Depth 2 - Contracts

Incoming wall of text. We've got a video for you at the bottom of this section to bring it all together.

Essentially, Contracts are Heist's version of maps. They have different tilesets with distinct monsters, are randomly generated and are the bread and butter of the league mechanic. Each Contract:

• Takes place in one of nine tilesets.
• Has a "Job Type", for which you need to hire a certain Rogue. More on Rogues and Job Types in the next section.
• Costs a varying amount of Rogue's Markers to start, which will always be recouped (with a lil' extra on top) if the Contract is successfully completed.
• Always has the same objective: Reach the end of the area and steal an artifact from a glass case, then escape.
• Items you pick up in the Contract are marked "Contraband" and don't belong to you until you successfully escape with the artifact in tow.

Now, the main mechanic you have to keep in mind when Heisting is not getting caught. You'll notice once you enter the Contract area that you've got an Alert Level bar at the bottom center of your screen. Here's how it works:

• Whenever you open a 'normal' chest, the Alert Level goes up.
• Special reward chests, which are only found in locked rooms, raise the Alert Level by more.
• If your Alert Level maxes out, you'll trigger a lockdown and a timer at the top will begin counting down.
• You have until the timer expires to steal the artifact (your objective). Opening any chests during this pre-lockdown phase will shave precious seconds off your timer.
• Once you've entered lockdown, you can no longer break into the artifact room and you have to escape, artifact in tow or not.
• If you die while lockdown is in effect, you drop all the items you stole during the Contract, and you can't go back in to pick them up.

Oh boy. Things are getting complicated. So we know you're sneaking in to steal an artifact, but can't afford to be too greedy, else you'll trigger the lockdown and possibly fail the Contract. If you die before lockdown, you can still go back in, pick up your Contraband, and carry on. If you die during lockdown, you get nothing. Pretty brutal, but that's part of the fun!

Now that we've got more of the Contract fundamentals ironed out, we can properly talk about the gameplay loop:

• You enter the Contract area, and start making your way to the objective, the room that houses the artifact.
• With the help of your Rogue, you travese the labyrinthian map, disarming traps, opening doors and so on.
• On your way, you open chests, and rooms that lead to better chests, and pillage as much as you can without maxing out your Alert Level.
• You get to the final room, and you break the artifact out of its glass case. It falls to the floor.
• At this point, lockdown is automatically triggered. No timer, no nothing.
• Pick up the artifact (make sure you have room in your inventory to carry it!) and it's time to escape.
• You have to backtrack all the way to the entrance, but now it's truly dangerous.
  • You are constantly being swarmed by monsters that come out of the falls, from the floors, and anywhere else a SWAT team might be hiding.
  • Several doors previously opened are now closed and you need your Rogue to 'hack' through them.
  • As your Rogue is busy with the door, you'll notice a horde of monsters amassing on the other side. Beware, they'll try to shotgun you into nonexistence as soon as you try to pass through once the door is open.
  • Rinse and repeat until you make it out and through the portal.
• Once you're out, you sell your artifact to Faustus the Fence, an NPC in the Rogue Harbor that's to the left of the portal area, and you get Rogue Markers in return!

By the golden arse of Innocence, that's quite the complicated mechanic. As promised, here's a video that shows all of this in action:

video

Now that we understand how a Contract functions, let's add another layer to it: Rogues & Job Types.

Depth 3 - Rogues & Job Types

Every Contract has a Job Type and a level, such as Trap Disarmament (Level 2) or Lockpicking (Level 5). This requirement determines which Rogue you can hire for it. There are 9 Job Types in total, 9 "hireable" Rogues and 4 "support" Rogues that we'll focus on in the next section. Each Rogue has at least two skills to match the Job Types, but different maximum levels they can attain. For example, both Karst and Tullina know Lockpicking, but Tullina's Lockpicking level only goes up to 3, meaning you can't take her on Contract with Lockpicking levels 4-5 as a requirement. But why ever bother taking her at all? Because each Rogue comes with their own perks, which increase in level depending on their highest-level skill. Let's take a look:

giant table / cheat sheet that has: portrait, name, heist perk, jobs and their max levels of each of the nine rogues. https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Heist 

The Heist perk values in brackets are those that increase based on the Rogue's maximum skill level.

Rogues' skills gain experience every time you complete a Contract with them, with higher-level Contracts granting more experience. In addition:

• You don't start out with all the Rogues unlocked. Each Rogue will eventually bring a 'friend' on a Contract, after which you unlock them.
  • Karst eventually unlocks Huck, who unlocks Niles, who unlocks Vinderi, who unlocks Gianna.
  • Tibbs unlocks Tullina, who unlocks Nenet.
  • Isla doesn't unlock anyone.
• Rogues can be equipped with up to four items. These items drop exclusively in Contracts and Grand Heists. They can be crafted like most other items in the game and grant bonuses to both the Rogue and yourself. Note they have a "minimum job level" requirement.
  
  • Cloaks and Brooches can be equipped by anyone.
  • Gear can be equipped by anyone, but is divided into three item types with Melee, Ranged and Caster modifiers.
  • Tools can only be equipped by Rogues with a specific skill and level of said skill.

Here's a few examples of what you can expect from Rogue items:

table with a bunch of rogue item examples

Depth 4 - Extra Rogues

There's four Rogues in the Rogue Harbor that you don't take have the option of hiring for regular Contracts. They do, however, serve different, important functions:

This is a placeholder.

Now, there's a few notions in the above table that relate to Grand Heists. Let's finally talk about those.

Depth 5 - Grand Heists (Blueprints)

Grand Heists are what you spend countless hours running Contracts for. Here are some of the basics:

• Grand Heists drop almost exclusively from Smuggler's Stashes. In-game, they are referred to as Blueprints.
• They work very similarly to Contracts but:
  • They are much longer. Each Grand Heist has 2-4 wings, which is equivalent to 2-4 Contracts worth of content.
  • Each wing is entered separately from the rest, and triggering the lockdown in one wing will have no effect on the other wings.
  • The objective here isn't to return with some fancy artifact. The reward room at the end of each wing has five glass cases, each of them containing a Heist-exclusive reward.
  • You can only pick one. Once you pick it, lockdown triggers as normal and you need to make your way to the escape route.
• They require you hire several Rogues at once, as they require multiple Job Types for each wing.
• Not every room in the Grand Heist is revealed. You need to pay to reveal them. This, coupled with hiring multiple Rogues will drive up the amount of Rogue's Markers you need to get the most out of this Heist.
• When you successfully complete a wing, you'll escape either back to town or to the area where all wings are accessible. Note that you can leave and return to a Grand Heist, as long as you've still got one wing to finish, so you can unload all your loot in your stash.

We'll look at rewards in the next section, but for now, let's see how you prepare for a Grand Heist.

Initial Concerns

So, a Blueprint finally dropped and you're on your way to enacting your first Grand Heist, great! First, you'll want to check:

• What Job Types it requires, and whether your Rogues are high-level enough to fill in all the roles.
• If you've racked up a decent amount of Reveals.

Let's talk Reveals. They are a type of currency you automatically rack up by successfully completing Contracts. Reveals are used to, well, reveal additional wings and rooms in Grand Heist Blueprints. Each Blueprint drops with only a single wing revealed, so you'll definitely want to have enough of those to properly make use of your Blueprint. Once you're in the endgame, you can only earn Reveals from Contracts level 68 or higher. There are three Rogues that can earn you Reveals:

• Most Contracts you complete will grant you a Reveal from Whakano.
• Contracts you complete with Niles will grant you a Reveal with him instead, and his Reveals come with a 10% discount, so you get to save some Rogue's Markers!
• Contracts you complete with Gianna will grant you a Reveal with her instead, and her Reveals come with a lovely 10-35% discount depending on her level!

On average, revealing a wing costs 3000-4000 Rogue's Markers, and a room costs ~1000. You'll definitely want to keep costs low by using Gianna to Reveal wings.

Here's a video where we showcase how this whole Revealing process goes:

video

Escape Routes

You'll have noticed we revealed some extra Escape Routes in the video above. Depending on where there are randomly generated in the Blueprint, they're a great investment. An escape route:

• Is an alternative way to get out of a wing once you've triggered the lockdown and need to get your loot safely home.
• Is a little cheaper compared to other unrevealed rooms.
• Can either be extremely useful (close to the big reward room) or extremely useless (placed right next to the entrance). Take a good look at the Blueprint before you Reveal one!

Hiring Rogues

Once you've revealed all you want, it's time to go to the downstairs section of the Rogue Harbor, to the Planning Table. Here, you'll select which Rogues you want to take with you for every wing:

• Higher-level Rogues cost more, but it's generally a worth it as their Job Speed is higher.
• You'll want to have a good idea of what each Rogue's Heist perks do, and combine them to get the most out of each wing.
• You can hire a Rogue for more than one Job per wing, although you'll lose out on perks a different Rogue would bring to the table.

With your Rogues all set, rooms and wings Revealed, ask Adiyah to sign off on your Blueprint and you're ready to go! Good luck!

The costs really rack up by the end.

Depth 5 - Grand Heist Loot

First and foremost, Heist has a really fancy item you won't even know exists until you find it, or read about it here: The Thief's Trinket. Once you find one, a new item slot will appear in your inventory, where you can equip it. Thief's Trinkets come with many modifiers, related to either the business you conduct in Heist, or to getting more Rogue's Markers outside it. Here's a few examples:

table with 3-5 Thief's Trinkets.

Rare Gear With Enchantments

Grand Heist reward rooms may sometimes offer weapons or armor with certain enchantments, such as:

six items with funky Heist enchantments

If you'd like a shot at enchanting your own gear with one of these enchants, you may also rarely come upon the Tempering Orb or the Tailoring Orb!

Experimented Base Types

Some rewards will also be the special Experimented Base Types, which are items with a fancy implicit modifier that might just be what your build needs. Note there's two versions for each of the following items; we're showcasing the ones that can be found in level 70+ Grand Heists:

another giant table

Some of these, such as the Simplex Amulet, are exceedingly rare.

Replica Uniques

Proving that Path of Exile's developers got no sleep developing this league, there's also a ridiculous amount of "Replica Unique" items that can be found in the reward rooms at wing's end, which are similar to their original variations, but with a twist. There are an absurd 91 of these to find. You can check the full list HERE, and we've hand-picked a few to showcase:

six-eight replica uniques, including replica cortex, replica headhunter, some jewel, some armor, etc.

Original Heist Uniques

Thought it was over? No! There's 9 more Uniques you can find in Curio Displays at the end of Grand Heist wings. These aren't a 'Replica' of anything, and deserve their own section:

table of Expedition's End, Fated End, Shattershard, Actum, The Hidden Blade, The Fulcrum, Crest of Desire, Font of Thunder, The Iron Mass

Depth 6 - Heist Bosses

Remember those folks we mentioned what seems like eons ago? Heist has five boss encounters that can only be accessed by completing a quest chain's worth of Contracts for certain Rogues. After you've defeated one in the 'quest version', the non-quest version of their Contract will be able to drop randomly from Smuggler's Stashes in maps.

One thing to note about all boss Contracts is that they start post-lockdown, meaning you'll have to brutally fight your way to the boss arena, but if you can handle the onslaught of constantly spawning monsters, feel free to loot every single chest on the way!

Boss #1 - The Unbreakable

This Synthesis-inspired robot has some particularly nasty lasers. Click here for a video of the boss fight. The Unbreakable drops:

Apex Mode / Nadir Mode table

Boss #2 - Nashta, The Usurper

forgot if this one's really that dangerous. Click here for a video of the boss fight. She drops:

The Fledgling

Boss #3 - Friedrich Tarollo, Slave Merchant

pretty easy fight if i recall? Click here for a video of the boss fight. He drops:

Chains of Emancipation

Boss #4 - Admiral Darnaw

really cool waves on this guy. Click here for a video of the boss fight. He drops:

The Admiral

Boss #4 - Vic & Vinny Vox

Arguably the true "end bosses" of Heist, you'll be fighting these two at the same time. They alternate between using melee and ranged attacks for each 25% of total health lost, while the arena continually fills with fire damage over time and frost wall hazards. If your build is not particularly well rounded out, you may want to chip away at both their health pools equally. When one dies, the other enrages, gaining increased damage, area of effect and damage reduction. Click here for a video of the boss fight. They drop:

Leadership's Price

Depth 7 - Advanced Contract Farming

As you've noticed through playing Heist or the videos in the guide, there's all sorts of chests with different reward types from other league content that you can find in Contracts and Grand Heists. Well, there is a method to the madness and a way to ensure you get more of a specific chest type!

Job Types, reward chests and tilesets are all linked with each other:

• A Job Type will determine which "pool" of reward types the Contract will use.
  • For example, Agility Contracts can generate Harbinger, Essence and Fossil (Delve) chests in the locked reward rooms.
  • Trap Disarmament Contracts can generate Abyss, Breach, Talisman and Legion chests in the locked reward rooms.
• A tileset (Bunker, Underbelly etc.) will determine the Job Type a Contract can require.
  • For example, Mansion Contracts will only drop with Lockpicking, Perception, Agility, Brute Force or Deception Job Types.
  • Meanwhile, Underbelly Contracts will only drop with Agility, Trap Disarmament, Brute Force, Demolition or Deception Job Types.
• This also applies to Grand Heists.

Here's a nice cheat sheet of each Job Type and its potential reward chest type:

cheat sheet 1

And here we have a cheat sheet for each tileset and the Job Types it can require:

cheat sheet 2

Depth 8 - Atlas Effects

talkin bout the atlas

Other Considerations

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