Path of Exile – Expedition Guide

Terminology

Remnants

Remnants provide positive and negative modifiers for the explosive that explodes them and all future explosions in that expedition encounter. This can affect monsters/excavated chests.

Warning: These remnants have mods that disable entire damage sources such as Cold, Lightning, Fire etc. There are also modifiers dangerous for certain build types, like “Monsters Kill things with 20% or lower Life on Hit”, which is deadly for low-life builds.

Excavated Chests

Excavated chests have 3 tiers; White, Yellow, and Red. These follow the map tier system, typically white chests are the worst and red are the best chests. These chests contain all sorts of rewards from various league mechanics such as expedition currency, delirium rewards, blight rewards, etc.

Runic Monster Markers

Runic Monster Markers (big skulls) will spawn Runic Monsters for you to kill. Monsters are affected by remnant modifiers, and they drop key expedition items such as Logbooks, Reroll Currency and artifacts.

Logbooks

A logbook is an itemised Expedition encounter, which lets you open an expedition area portal if given to Dannig, Warrior Skald. One logbook enables you to choose between two to three Expeditions. They can be normal, magic or rare. You can roll them like any other maps with Orbs of Alchemy and Scours or Chaos orbs, and you can divine their implicits with Blessed Orbs.

Expedition areas can contain respective bosses (Medved, Vorana, Uhtred or Olroth). They can also have a modifier which forces the boss to appear on the map.

Expedition NPCs

There are 4 main Expedition NPCs:

• Dannig, Warrior Skald – Dannig allows you to give him a logbook and open an expedition map. He also lets you spend your Artifacts for additional artifacts of other types, reroll currency and logbooks.

You spend Burial Medalions to reroll his stock.

• Gwennen, The Gambler – Gwennen lets you spend your Artifacts to gamble for gear. She generates rare items, and whenever you buy a piece it has a chance to change its rarity into an unique item (A leather belt to Headhunter, a Heavy Belt to Mageblood).

You spend Astragali to reroll her stock.

• Tujen, The Haggler – Tujen lets you haggle for various types of items like currency, scarabs, maps or stacked decks.

You use Exotic Coins to reroll his stock.

• Rog, The Dealer – Rog lets you craft items using your Artifacts – spending them allows you to buy a certain piece of gear, then reroll and modify its attributes.

You spend Scrap Metal to reroll his stock.

Expedition Bosses

There are 4 Expedition bosses, which can randomly appear in a Logbook. It’s indicated by a big skull on your mini-map. They can also be forced to spawn in a logbook, if it contains a specific implicit (Area contains ). Such logbooks can be split (this will be covered later in the guide).

Expedition bosses are affected by every single modifier from each detonated remnant, thus they can be incredibly deadly. Every encounter has specific mechanics and different drops, which are also affected by remnant modifiers.

Expedition bosses yield huge amounts of Reroll Currency.

• Medved (Druids of the Broken Circle) – Drops Astragali and Elixir of the Unbroken Circle Iron Flask
• Vorana (Black Scythe Mercenaries) – Drops Exotic Coinage and Vorana’s Preparation Iron Flask
• Uhtred (Order of the Chalice) – Drops Scrap Metal and Starlight Chalice Iron Flask
• Olroth (Knights of the Sun) – Drops Burial Medalions and three additional items: Olroth’s Resolve Iron Flask, Cadigan’s Crown Runic Crown and Vorana’s March Runic Sabatons.

Interacting with NPCs and Spending Reroll Currency

Expedition mechanics involve spending four types of Reroll Currency – Astragali, Exotic Coinage, Scrap Metal and Burial Medallions. The common opinion says that spending Astragali is a pure gamble, and it’s better to sell the currency itself to profit, but you can easily make currency using the rest of the types. If you don’t want to interact with any NPCs you can sell all of your Reroll Currency, however using them yourself tends to be a bit more profitable.

Making Currency with Dannig:

Dannig lets you buy other types of artifacts and also sells Astragali, Scrap Metal, Exotic Coinage and Logbooks. It is usually a good idea to reroll with your Burial Medalions and simply take all the Logbooks that show up, along with Astragali and Exotic Coinage. Scrap Metal tends to be very cheap and spending artifacts on it could be a loss, thus people like to avoid buying it.

Making Currency with Gwennen:

In general, Gwennen money comes from expensive unique items which we have a chance to acquire while spending our Artifacts on gear. Each bought piece has a chance to turn itself into a jackpot like Mageblood, Headhunter or several smaller items, like Unnatural Instinct.

For example, this is a regex string that will show us possible, Magebloods, Headhunters, Squire Shields and Unnatural Instinct Jewels: “nt ro|r be|vy b|ian”

We choose what items we are aiming to get, and it generates a regex string (like the one above). Once we have it ready, we can paste it into Gwennen Search Bar, and it will highlight all the items we want to buy. After that, it’s pure luck.

Making Currency with Tujen:

Tujen is incredibly simple – we straightforwardly haggle for specific items and buy them using our Artifacts. Here, currency comes from getting a lot of small currencies that we can easily sell in bulk. After farming Scythe Logbooks, one Tujen session can usually yield thousands of Alternation Orbs, Stacked Decks, Chaos Orbs, and other types of currency.

The only tip here is that you can adjust the price you’re offering with a mouse scroll, and you should always do that – you can usually get each item for around 55-65% of the initial price. You shouldn’t worry about it too much, because the longer you haggle the more time you spend on it, and we want to be as quick and efficient as possible.

Another thing worth mentioning is that it’s necessary to pay attention what certain items cost. It’s almost always worth to spend Lesser and Greater Artifacts as we usually have thousands of them, but buying 3 stacked decks for Exceptional Artifacts might not be a good idea.

It’s smart to have in mind the little jackpots Tujen will offer – 5 Exalted Orb Stacks, Divine Orbs, Conqueror Maps etc. Expensive currency stacks usually cost Exceptional Artifacts, and the price can vary from few hundred to thousands of these artifacts. It is a good idea to farm in advance and have some Exceptional Scythes to spare, as we wouldn’t want to miss out on a Mirror Shard or other important items.

The strategy here is to grab all the things that we can sell fast in huge quantities, and exchange them later, once we gather significant amounts of them.

Making Currency with Rog:

Rog is for people who like to craft. There isn’t any simple strategy on how to make currency with him – it all comes to your crafting knowledge, and the options you randomly get during the process. Scrap Metal is usually pretty cheap so you can still try it out, even to learn some new things.

It is commonly heard that usually jewels are the most profitable items to craft with him, as it’s a bit easier to get good rolls (for example multi crit jewels) and sell them to players for profit.

Buying, preparing and splitting Logbooks

Preparing (rolling) Logbooks

Rolling Logbooks is fairly straightforward and works like rolling any map. It requires Orbs of Alchemy and Orbs of Scouring (or Chaos Orbs) and Blessed Orbs.

First, we roll them like everything else. We can help ourselves with https://poe.re/#/maps to set up a regex string, so it’s easy to see if we have the quantity/pack size we want, or whether there are mods we want to avoid. Later, we use Blessed Orbs to change values of implicit modifiers (modifiers that are applied to specific expedition on a Logbook). Usually, Increased Runic Monster Markers is a superior implicit we always want to go for, if we can’t decide between expeditions and one of them has it.

There are other incredibly useful modifiers like Increased Number of Explosives, or Increased Explosive Radius – these are helpful for us to cover much more area and yield more profit out of the encounter.

Keep In Mind that Blessed Orbs might not be that cheap. It can be a loss to use them extensively on perfect rolls, but using 1 or 2 to increased good modifiers’ values is usually a good call.

Splitting Logbooks

Logbook on the screenshot has a modifier which says: Area Contains Vorana, Last to Fall

This means that this specific expedition will have a forced expedition boss inside, which means the logbook will be much more profitable than a regular one if we can complete the encounter. We usually want to split such logbooks.

Splitting it simply means making it rare, using Split Beast (Fenumal Plagued Arachnid) on it, and completing a short encounter in Menagerie. Once it’s done, we should have two logbooks with separated modifiers, but both of them will keep their implicits, which esentially means we now have 2 logbooks with a forced boss encounter. After that, we can roll them, and run them.

Using Blessed Orbs before splitting is a good move, as both Logbooks keep same implicits, thus we save a little bit of money. After splitting we still need to roll them with Alchs/Chaos Orbs, as each Logbook keeps half of the modifiers.

Farming Strategies

Important Note: Runic monster drops scale with pack size! more pack size = more logbooks!

Farming maps for Logbooks (zero investment)

This strategy revolves around running your maps very fast, as you don’t have a guaranteed expedition encounter. The optimal placement for explosives would be to look for the “50% increased Quantity of Expedition Logbooks dropped by Runic Monsters” and “Runic Monsters are Duplicated” remnants. After that you should look and setup explosives in positions where you will blow up the most runic monster markers as possible. Take as many “50% increased Quantity of Artifacts” remnants as you can while doing so.

The best way to run this strategy would be to take the atlas keystone Stream of Consciousness and block specific league mechanics from spawning. An example tree for expedition only is shown below. However do note it is more resource efficient not to block all the league mechanics as shown, this is just an example of what the tree would look like and does not include any other league mechanics you may want to run.

This strategy will yield us random Reroll Currency and Artifacts, as well as occasional Logbook drops which we can later run.

Farming maps for Logbooks (scalable investment)

Strategy number 1 can be scaled really far with additional fragments and compasses. You can add them depending on how much you are willing to spend on your farming sessions.

First thing we might want to consider is either getting all Expedition Nodes on our atlas tree and adding additional content we want to run, or dropping Stream of Conciousness and allocating Grand Design, once we can afford putting Expedition Scarabs into our map device.

Shaping the Valleys is another incredibly good atlas node, which lets us run Fortune Favours the Brave – this pushes our pack size even further.

This strategy can be run with scarabs only, but it’s a good idea to juice the maps even further. Keep in mind that expedition encounters in high tier maps and a lot of pack size are incredibly deadly, and you need a strong character to utilise it to its best possibilities.

What do we want to add into our Map Device?

• Any Expedition Scarab – Polished or Gilded ones would be the most cost efficient choice here. Winged Expedition Scarabs are very often an overkill, unless you have a lot of currency to invest into preparing your farming sessions.
• Other Scarabs of our choice or 3 sacrifice fragments (they are cheap and push our pack size even further).
• Charged Compass – Your Maps contain 100% increased number of Runic Monster Markers. These are usually quite expensive but certainly worth it, as it results in way more drops.
• Charged Compass – 25% Increased Magic Pack Size. They are usually cheap during league and provide us with a lot of additional value. If you can’t afford Runic Monster ones, certainly grab some of these.

In a situation where we have a strong build capable of completing endgame expedition encounters, and where we maximise our pack size and get all the fragments mentioned above, with good remnant RNG you can see multiple Logbooks dropping in one map. It’s not going to happen every map and you will for sure experience dry streaks with less drops, but in the end scaling expedition this way can yield insane profits, whether you want to run the Logbooks yourself and use the currency as mentioned in Interacting with NPCs and spending Reroll Currency section, or sell them in bulk on TFT.

Farming Logbooks (high investment)

This strategy is considered high investment because you either need to spend a lot of currency using the previous ones to collect a lot of Logbooks, or buy them in bulk on TFT or Trade Site.

It’s pretty straightforward and revolves around splitting boss logbooks, rolling everything with high quantity and pack size, and running them!

First choice in this scenario is usually running Sun, Scythe and Broken Circle Logbooks. Sun Logbooks will yield us Burial Medallions we later spend with Dannig. Scythe Logbooks will provide us with Exotic Coinage we later haggle for currency with Tujen, and Broken Circle Logbooks will give us Astragali we later sell to other players or gamble ourselves with Gwennen. Chalice Logbooks are usually not that profitable, unless someone likes them and extensively crafts with Rog for profit.

Our step by step guide would look like this:

1. Split good logbooks, roll them and run them.
2. Spend Burial Medallions for Exotic Coinage, Astragalis and more Logbooks (buy additional Tujen/Gwennen Artifacts if needed)
3. Haggle with Tujen for bulk amounts of various currencies
4. Gamble with Gwennen or sell Astragali
5. Sell remaining Logbooks and either come back to farming more, or buy them in bulk and repeat.

Running Logbooks can be challenging and it is necessary to pay attention to remnant mods. One overlook can easily brick whole encounter, as it is very common for players to miss a modifier that later stops their build from functioning properly, which results in being unable to finish the map.