Summary
Grinding Gear Games' ARPG sequel,Path of Exile 2, has been in early access for a couple of months now, and players are already working out the best routes, maps, and bosses to farm. The game does a reasonable job of telling new players where they’ll get unique boss rewards, but it doesn’t make clear exactly how to repeatedly farmbosses, or even whether that’s a good idea.
Players can farm bosses at any stage in the game by creating a new instance of an area. Console players hold the button to move to a new map instead of clicking it. PC players have the option when selecting a map icon or map transition to shift-click. Players who are still going through the campaign should only resort to this if they’re in serious need of a gear upgrade or more skill gems though, as scaling drop rates meanfarming at lengthisn’t worthwhile until the endgame.
If players are feeling under-equipped or under-leveled, though, re-running the last map that was easily clearable is usually the most efficient way to farm early game. Once the player has access to the waypoint device in the endgame, this is where the opportunities for boss farming and target farming of uniques occur. This topic will discuss the best bosses to farm inPath of Exile 2, focusing mostly on the endgame.
1Accessible Minor Bosses
Farm At Your Level Efficiently
If players need to farm in the early acts of the game, the most efficient strategy is to find the last map that is easily clearable, ideally one with an easily accessible minor boss, and re-run that map for levels and loot. Good minor bosses and maps for this include The Executioner in Ogham Village, Kabala Constrictor Queen in Keth, and Mighty Silverfist in the Jungle Ruins.
2The Act Bosses
The Climax Of Each Act
While the act bosses have the potential for a large number of loot rolls, the efficiency of farming them at all is questionable. The act bosses don’t have unique loot tables, so it comes down to a question of whether the player can clear the last map and boss faster than previous maps in the act to determine whether it’s an efficient farming method.
Once they get to the end game, though, players will need to farm the pinnacle versions of these bosses in the Citadels to get the fragments needed to take on the Arbiter of Ash.
Location:
Potential Rewards:
The King in the Mists is originally encountered as a side quest boss in Freythorn in Act 1. It’s the endgame version of this boss that players will want to farm, though. The ritual altars that players encounter in Freythorn can appear at random in endgame maps. Completing their encounters to acquire currency will eventually let players purchase an item called An Audience With The King from the altar.
This can be used in the Realmgate on the Atlas to initiate the fight with The King in the Mists pinnacle version. Like several endgame bosses, this fight can have its difficulty raised via Atlas skill tree passive points. As the difficulty increases, so does the chance of obtaining the boss’s unique item drops.
Olroth is the pinnacle boss associated with the Expeditions endgame activity. He’s a little bit difficult to target-farm though, as his appearance in an Expedition map is down to RNG. To even have a chance of spawning him, players need to do excavations in endgame maps until they meet the NPC Dannig.
Dannig is in charge of the expedition log book and players can visit him in theirhideoutto see their progress. Opening an expedition with a level 79+ logbook has a chance to spawn the Olroth encounter, signified by a skull marker on the map that players must excavate.
Potential Rewards:
The Trials can be an effective endgame activity if players are looking for more loot opportunities. Opening the endgame version of the Trials of Chaos using a level 75+ Inscribed Ultimatum allows players to fight The Trialmaster at the end of the run.
This gives players an opportunity to drop any of the boss’s associated uniques, on top of theVaal lootthey’ll get from the Trial. To unlock the final boss door, players also need to pick up the three “fate” fragments from the mini-bosses in phase 10 of the trial.
Farming the endgame version of the Trial of the Sekhemas is a multi-step process, but it allows for some very targeted unique farming with guaranteed drops. Using a level 75+ Djinn Barya to open a trial gives players four trial floors to run through and the opportunity to fight Zarokh, The Temporal at the end.
Killing Zarokh gives players a chance at aunique relic, and each one has a very specific effect. All the relics, apart from the peacemaker’s draught, guarantee that the boss will drop a specific unique if he is defeated with the relic active for the trial. Though it’s an involved process, that makes it possible to get specific unique items from Zarokh with relative certainty, as long as players obtain the right relics. The other relic makes the boss drop more Djinn Barya, so that he can be re-fought.
The Arbiter of Ash is the final boss of theendgame inPath of Exile 2, and as such, has some sought-after loot and relatively high drop chances. Yet, they don’t come in at the top of this list because the process of just getting one opportunity to fight them can be very time-consuming, let alone grinding the resources to fight them multiple times. Plus, there’s the fact the boss is a tough one to defeat, so players won’t be jumping into the fight and rolling over the Arbiter in seconds.
To fight the Arbiter of Ash, players first need to find three Citadels on their Atlas map. Each Citadel contains the pinnacle version of one of the act bosses, and each one of these drops a fragment needed to access the final boss fight. Combining these fragments in the Burning Monolith opens the way to the boss. The process is faster once players have located the Citadels, but it still takes considerable time and effort to farm this boss.
The most popular endgame activities to farm inPath of Exile 2currently are Breaches and Delirium rifts. If players can find convenient map layouts andjuice some waystonesfor the activities in question, they can be among the most rewarding and fastest to complete of the endgame farming methods. When farming Breaches, players will accumulate Breach Splinters. Getting 300 splinters will make a Breachstone. This is the key to fighting the Breach boss Xesht, We That Are One.
Players need to use the Breachstone in the Realmgate to activate the boss fight. Once players have defeated the Breach boss, they can invest passive Atlas skill points into the Breach portion of the tree to accumulate splinters more quickly and get more opportunities to farm the boss’s unique drops. As with other bosses, this can also be used to raise the difficulty of the fight for a more unique drop chance.
The process of farming Simulacrum Splinters from Delirium rifts is very similar to the process of farming Breaches and Breach Splinters. Players should ideally find a convenient map layout and juice some waystones with Delirium-related modifiers. This will allow for relatively quick farming of the Delirium rifts to acquire the 300 splinters needed for a Simulacrum. Be aware that the rifts can also spawn their own mini-boss versions of Kosis and Omniphobia, but they’ll always spawn as a duo fight on the Simulacrum map.
Players need to use the Simulacrum in the Realmgate to access the boss map. Farming the Simulacrum wave fight is roughly the same level of effort-to-reward that the Xesht fight is, so both are equally viable boss farms, with the Simulacrum’s items being slightly easier to target farm - purely due to the slightly smaller item pool.
