Welcome to our Domination league mechanic guide! This one's pretty simple - you click the Shrine, you get the buff. Still, there's a few extra cool things you can do with Shrines in Path of Exile, so after taking a loot at their varieties, we'll explore several ways you can modify Shrines to get even more out of them.

Shrines are considered Extra Content and have a chance of appearing in any map area and most story areas; multiple shrines may randomly appear in the same area, it is not limited to 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: Low
Complexity: None

The icon that denotes Domination / Shrine content.

Depth 1 - The Shrine

Across your many travels, you may come upon a Shrine, protected by a whole bunch of monsters. To grab its buff, click on it. The buff will last 45 seconds or until you leave the zone / area / map you found it in. There's a little more you should know:

• Players can have more than one Shrine effect on them at the same time.
• There's two types of Shrines: Buff and Spell. We'll talk about them in detail in the next sections.
  • Buff Shrines, until the player takes the buff for themselves, will buff the surrounding monsters instead. This can become rather dangerous with some Shrine effects like "All Hits are Critical Strikes" or "Cannot be Damaged", so if your build is a little on the squishier side, you'll want to know what each shrine does by only looking at its symbol, then decide how you want to approach it!
  • Remember you can lure monsters away from Shrines and have an easier time killing them once they lose the buff!

Really, that's kind of it with Shrines. With each Shrine you find, you get to kill some bonus monsters and grab a nice temporary buff. Let's take a look at all the cool types of Shrines found in the game.

Depth 2 - Buff Shrines

There's 9 "regular" Buff Shrines you may come across without having to do anything extra (you'll see what we mean in Depth 4!). Remember, these Shrines grant their buffs to surrounding monsters until you grab them for yourself, so depending on how strong they are, you'll have to make a choice: Rush to grab the Shrine or slowly, methodically kill its surrounding monsters first!

big'ol table.

Note that the Echoing Shrine and the Divine Shrine are notably rarer than the rest.

Depth 3 - Spell Shrines

There's only 4 Spell Shrines in the game, and they're all pretty common. These are:

small ol' table.

Here's a little more on how they work:

• Until you grab their buff, they keep casting their spell.
• When you grab their buff, they'll cast their spell around you until the buff expires.
• The spell does not damage you. In the case of the Skeletal Shrine, the skeletons will be friendly.
• The spell is not affected by any gear you're wearing which means that, sadly, you can't rely on them for damage, unlike their Buff counterparts.

Depth 4 - Unusual Shrines

There's two Buff Shrines you can't normally find. They can only be found in maps where you used a Domination Scarab of Abnormality in the map device. They're quite strong, and may be worth forcing to spawn on particularly dangerous maps. Remember, their buff applies to surrounding monsters until you grab it!

Note that you can use up to 2 Domination Scarabs of Abnormality per map!

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Depth 5 - More Shrines & Domination Scarabs

Want to bump into more Shrines? There's a few ways to go about it:

• Using the Domination map crafting option, which costs 3 Chaos Orbs and guarantees your map will contain 3 additional Shrines.
• Using the Domination Scarab, which will guarantee 2 Shrines. You can use up to 4 of these per map, for a total 8 guaranteed Shrines!
• You can guarantee two additional Shrines in your map through the Atlas Passive Tree:
  • One by picking up the Supplication Notable node, which is very close to the start of the Tree.
  • Another by picking five Domination Shrine Chance nodes that are divided across two Domination clusters further up in the Tree.
  • Here's a link to an Atlas Passive Tree that only has these two sets of nodes and any small nodes required to connect to them allocated: LINK.
• You can guarantee an Unusual Shrine with the Domination Scarab of Abnormality we mentioned in the previous section.

Domination has two other Scarabs you can make use of. Note these do not guarantee a Shrine to spawn, so you'll want to use them in conjunction with one of the methods above in order to ensure you don't waste them:

• Domination Scarab of Teachings - If you go hard enough and spawn 5 Shrines in your map, you can get a looot of XP with this!
• Domination Scarab of Terrors - More good loot, why not? Remember, you can lure monsters away from the Shrine's buff area.

Depth 6 - Dominating Atlas Passive Tree

Domination doesn't have much of a presence on the Atlas, but the few nodes it has are all pretty sweet. The Atlas Tree we linked in the previous section takes you to all ??????? the Domination clusters (here's the link again), so you can use it to read the effects for yourself. We'll talk about some of the passive effects that shouldn't be overlooked:

• The three Domination Shrine Duration nodes at the lower cluster are deceptively good, raising the duration of your Shrine buffs to 78-79 seconds!
• The Syncretism notable, found in the central cluster makes each Shrine count as two, basically. It's definitely worth taking, especially with the Duration nodes allocated as well.
• The All That Glitters notable, found in the upper cluster, gives you a chance at finding the "secret" Covetous Shrine we haven't talked about yet! This is a Buff Shrine with a downside. Check out its stats below:

tiny table with Covetous Shrine

some end paragraph talkin bout shrines.

Other Considerations

• Kirac's Memory of the Pantheon (Memory Guide) can contain yet another 4 exclusive Shrines! They grant some wacky effects, such as the Solaris Shrine making all your Hits Critical Strikes and negating enemies' Extra damage from their Critical Strikes. Have fun finding them! Note that Memories are not 'on' the Atlas, so your Atlas Passive Tree effects won't work in those maps.