Expensive Aldur's Saga Grand Expedition

Overview

The creator of the strategy runs Grand Expedition logbooks at the highest level of juice currently available in Path of Exile 2. The loop is: reveal a logbook, decide from its rumours whether it deserves an Alder Saga, then clear the Grand Expedition maps inside it with rarity-stacked tablets and waystones so that both the Verisium remnant rewards and the heavily buffed monsters pay out. The numbers behind this come from a single 13 hour 15 minute test run over two days.

This is, by the creator's own account, the hardest content in the game. A fully set-up map is effectively a 13-modifier tier 16 map whose monsters pick up another ten to fifteen runic modifiers as the remnant chain progresses. A strong, well-funded build is a hard requirement, and the creator specifically recommends one that can make use of Headhunter given how many rares you kill.

The creator links a rumour and rune cheat sheet in the video description, which is close to mandatory reading for this strategy: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14FFZPebLxeWIBGlbD-zKCxIy33lkOWpILO5JleVBnUw/edit

Reading the rumours and choosing a saga

Revealing a logbook opens an area whose maps are determined by island rumours, and each rumour maps deterministically to a map type. Only three rumours are displayed at once, but a logbook can hold up to six. Moving an item around in your inventory cycles which three are shown, so you can count how many Grand Expedition rumours a logbook actually holds before spending anything on it.

The decision rule:

• Four or more Grand Expedition rumours: activate an Aldur's Saga.
• Three or fewer: activate the other saga instead, which guarantees one Secluded Temple encounter. Duplicates stack, so it is never wasted.

Unique maps are largely skippable. Two boss maps are worth running when they appear, the one that drops the lineage jewel and the one that drops the quest item for the forks, and the creator suggests saving those for logbooks you are not spending an Aldur's Saga on.

The Aldur's Saga modifiers are the point of the whole exercise. The one you want is "all Verisium remnants have at least X rune slots", which rolls from five to eight. Be careful not to confuse it with "one Verisium remnant has at least X rune slots", which rolls from seven to nine and applies to a single remnant. Lucky remnants (rolled twice, better result taken) is also strong.

Two atlas details: toggle the increased chance of expedition encounters node on while revealing logbooks, and remember to switch back to the additional Verisium remnants node before running maps.

Aldur's Sagas broadly pay for themselves. The creator started the test with one and finished with three, finding roughly one every four or five maps, so on a large enough sample the saga cost approaches zero.

Map and tablet setup

Three different map types, all run with the same spycraft master setup (unexpected missions, eastern knowledge, partial translation, keen appraisal).

Travel maps are the filler between points of interest. Any six-modifier corrupted map with three cheap waystone-drop-chance tablets. Tablets are coded as waystones, so you rush the boss and only clear what is directly on your path, picking up tablets to sell. No time is spent on side content.

Non-Aldur's Grand Expeditions use tablets with two prefixes chosen from monster rarity, item rarity or increased effectiveness, and a tier 16 waystone with six modifiers and no pack size. Total map cost lands around half a divine.

Aldur's Saga Grand Expeditions are the expensive ones: three tablets each carrying one rarity or effectiveness prefix plus two additional random modifiers, and a tier 16 waystone with 50% or more item rarity and as little pack size as possible. A useful trick is to buy the cheaper single-random-modifier tablets and slam an Exalted Orb yourself, since it is a coin flip and averages two attempts, which usually beats the market price of the two-modifier version.

The one consistent rule across all three: avoid pack size. The difference between rarity, monster rarity and effectiveness is negligible, but pack size actively hurts the setup.

Running the remnant chain

Each remnant offers a choice of rune combinations, and you are looking for one of two things: a reward worth roughly a divine or more, or a good proliferating rune. The highlighted rune proliferates onto every remnant later in the chain, adding a modifier to those monsters, which is where most of the loot actually comes from.

Four runes matter: Opulent, Bond, Death and Time. Opulent raises monster rarity and Bond gives monsters more modifiers, so those two are the priority. Blue runes can be ignored. Hitting Opulent or Bond early in the chain is worth taking even when the attached reward is worthless. Late in the chain the rune type stops mattering and you simply want reward value and high slot counts. Note that a rune cannot be duplicated on a monster, so a second Opulent is not an upgrade.

Anything offering neither a good reward nor a good rune gets rerolled with Liquid Verisium, converted from the raw Verisium you drop constantly. Rerolls hand you a random option rather than a pick, so they can also lose you a good result.

Chain length is the primary driver of a map's outcome. More remnants means more proliferated modifiers means dramatically more monster loot, so route for remnant count first and chests second. Yellow currency chests are worth prioritising over the plain ones.

Farm of exile notes

I am using the conservative way of calculating the estimated profits. Might be higher as the creator sais.