Venarius Farm

Overview

The Cortex is a Synthesis unique map, and High Templar Venarius waits at the end of it. He never fights you himself. Instead he summons four Synthesised bosses one after another while filling the arena with ground hazards. This page covers the normal fight at area level 83, not the Unleashed Cortex uber version. It is worth farming because every kill drops one guaranteed Synthesised unique, and two of the four in that pool are expensive.

Setup

• Cortex — one unique map per run. Nothing else is consumed. The normal fight needs no fragments, unlike the uber version.
• Run time — about three minutes for the whole loop, from opening the map to picking up the loot, not just the boss fight. That assumes a good build clearing it cleanly, so treat it as a target rather than a floor everyone hits.

The Encounter

Four boss phases in a fixed order, with hazards that reset between them.

• Fractal Gargantuan — a giant golem. Cleaves in front, a long laser beam, a leap slam, and a slam that drops two lines of body-blocking turrets. It also fires slow projectiles that it detonates with a laser sweep, so do not stand between them.
• Synthete Masterpiece — a humanoid. Its wormhole slam summons black orbs that chase you and accelerate; touching one teleports you in front of the boss for a heavy cone slam. Dash away the moment before it lands.
• Fractal Titan — the same skills as the Gargantuan, plus an Unstable Energy phase where it absorbs orbs to power up. Walk through the orbs to detonate them or it releases rings of heavy damage.
• Synthete Nightmare — the same skills as the Masterpiece, plus rapid teleports and a laser cage that shrinks toward the centre of the arena and explodes. You need a movement skill to get out.
• Void Pits — small black pools in every phase. Each stack cuts action speed by 5% and deals physical damage over time, up to ten stacks. Keep moving.
• Energy Pylons — appear in the last two phases and shock anything that touches them. Touch one again after a short cooldown to switch it off.
• Do not leave the zone after the Synthete Nightmare dies. The loot animation is delayed, and leaving early can lose the drop entirely.

How These Numbers Were Calculated

• The method. These figures are a synthetic sample of 100 kills built from the drop rates published on the PoE Wiki, not from recorded runs. A drop listed at 5% is counted five times across those 100 kills, and a guaranteed drop 100 times. Expenses are one run's map cost multiplied by the same 100 runs. The hourly figure is the net total spread over five hours, which is what 100 runs comes to at three minutes each.
• The rates are estimates. The wiki's own table is crowdsourced and it says so. The sample spans versions 3.25.0 to 3.28.0, the additional drops are given as approximations rather than measured rates, and Imperfect Memories is flagged as needing confirmation. Real results over a short run of kills will differ from the model, sometimes by a lot.
• Concentration. Almost all the modelled profit sits in two of the four guaranteed uniques: Bottled Faith at a 5% share of the pool carries about seventy percent of it, and Garb of the Ephemeral at 9% carries most of the rest. The other 86% of kills hand you a unique worth a few chaos. Long stretches with nothing valuable are normal here and are not a sign the strategy is broken.