Essence Farming Guide
Last Updated:April 6, 2024|Change Log
In this guide you learn the basics of farming Essence as well as how to maximize your rewards and profitability.
Essences are a core crafting currency in Path of Exile, therefore there's almost always a demand for them. Luckily it's easy to add Essence into your usual farming routine. If you want to know the Essentials of how they work, check out our Essence Crafting guide.
Important Note: Unlike other League Mechanics, Essences don't consistently scale with Map Tier. You MUST Farm Essences in T6+ Maps to maximize profitability, however there is no currently no benefit beyond that. Their rewards are the same when killed in a Yellow Tier 6 or a Red Tier 16 Map. This makes Essences an incredible farming opportunity early in the league, as you're progressing through the atlas.
Mechanics
When Farming Essence there are a number of key mechanics to watch out for to ensure you're achieving maximum rewards.
Corruption
Remnant of Corruption - Knowing when to Corrupt your Essences is a key part of maximizing your profits. Essence Corruption outcomes include, breaking the monster out immediately, adding an essence, randomizing the Essences, or upgrading the Essences into a higher tier. First up, when you encounter an Essence Monster with any of the Purple Essences be sure to Corrupt them using a Remnant of Corruption.
Essence Monsters With:
- Screaming Essence of Dread
- Screaming Essence of Envy
- Screaming Essence of Misery
- Screaming Essence of Scorn
May Turn Into:
- Essence of Delirium
- Essence of Horror
- Essence of Hysteria
- Essence of Insanity
Atlas Memories
Einhar's Memory of Crystal Prisons - This Atlas Memory involves a series of maps with Rogue Exiles imprisoned in Essences! These Exiles are extremely dangerous because they inherit all of the Essence skills and modifiers. Luckily, you can remove your Voidstones and run the Yellow Tier 6 Maps without adding any modifiers (don't use an Orb of Alchemy on these maps!). As the sequence increases so do the number of Essences per Exile. Exiles frequently drop Shrieking and Deafening Essences making them very profitable. To run this strategy you need to find the Atlas Memory or purchase it from other players. Atlas Memories ignore your Atlas Passives and instead provide their own unique bonuses.
Within these Memories, some Essence Exiles without Dread, Envy, Misery or Scorn are worth corrupting. If an Essence Exile has 1 Screaming Essence and 3 Shrieking Essences and you Corrupt it, there's a chance for these Essences to upgrade. When they do, the Exile now has 1 Shrieking Essence and 3 Deafening Essences. These are then doubled (you do need to fight 2 very angry Exiles), so you get 2 Shrieking Essences and 6 Deafening Essences. When you encounter an Exile with at least 1 Screaming Essence, and multiple Shrieking Essences toss a Remnant of Corruption at it!
Combine Essence with Other Strategies
Combination Strategies - Because Essence provides very high baseline loot but doesn't scale it's best to combine it with other mechanics. This makes Essence a staple part of starter strategies like Alch and Go Harvest, Expedition, or Heist. If you have a strong build, consider Essence with Beasts for even more profit, just be warned Essence Beasts are a thing, and they are thicc!
Pro Tip: You can run Essence with Beasts in Tier 6 Maps skipping the difficulty and retaining a majority of the rewards!
How To Run It
Essence Only Strategy
The most efficient way to farm Essences depends on whether you're adding other mechanics or not. With a pure Essence strategy use Prolific Essence and Kirac's Map Device to add as many Essence Monsters to your Tier 1 or 2 maps as possible. Then run to the Essence Monsters and kill them (corrupting when appropriate). Once you've exhausted all the Essence Monsters in your map leave and launch the next one. For maximum efficiency use a build with high movement speed and ignore other monsters along the way. While not difficult the profit from this strategy scales with character speed so it pays to be fast.
First - Run through the map until you encounter an Essence Monster.
Second - Check to see if it needs Corruption.
Third - Activate the monster kill it, then collect the Essences.
Finally - Repeat until no Essence Monsters remain.
Essence & Other Strategy
Frequently players combine Essence with other mechanics that don't care about map tier like Bestiary or Heist. Essence is also commonly added into a more advanced Endgame strategies involving Eldritch Altars. In these cases you proceed through the map as normal until you encounter Essences. In high tier Maps clear out nearby monsters as Tier 16 Essence Monsters pose a significant threat. Then Corrupt or kill the Essence Monster and continue Mapping.
First - Run the map normally until you encounter an Essence Monster.
Second - Clear all monsters surrounding the area.
Third - Check to see if it needs Corruption.
Fourth - Activate the monster, kill it and collect the Essences.
Finally - Repeat until no Essence Monsters remain.
Atlas Passives
Atlas passives are a massive boost to Essence. Understanding how they work and which ones to take is critical to correctly executing the strategy.
- Amplified Energies
- It results in more Shrieking Essences per monster.
- Crystal Resonance
- This replaces the Remnant of Corruption effect.
- It's great when you want quantity over quality, making it good for low investment strategies.
- The boss can only have one of each essence type.
- This makes bosses extremely dangerous!
- Prolific Essence
- Prolific Essence is great bang-for-the-buck Notable when farming Essences.
- Adding 1 guaranteed Essence Monster per Map provides a steady trickle of additional profit.
- The Essence Rare Chance passives before aren't useful, but the Notable is strong enough to make up for this.
- Crystal Lattice
- The 15% chance for +3 Essences results in more loot at the cost of making the encounters more difficult.
- The more Essence monsters you have in your Maps, the more impactful this node becomes.
- Imprisoned Monster Additional Essence Chance
- Many of the small nodes you take on your way to Notables give a chance for the monster to possess additional Essences increasing the loot and difficulty of the encounter.
- Crystalline Carapaces
- Use this to obtain more Essence Scarabs to perpetuate your farming.
Scaling Loot
Multipliers
Essence farming doesn't scale with the Item Quantity, Item Rarity, or Pack Size of your maps. There are also no Scarabs which add Essence Monsters or increase their loot. Unfortunately this means investing further into your maps only increases the difficulty of Essence monsters and not their rewards. When combining Essence with other mechanics it's still important to invest!
Scarabs
- Essence Scarab
- Use this to add additional Essence monsters to your map.
- Essence Scarab of Ascent
- A key part of Essence farming strategies, it's a 300% multiplier on your Essences.
- Essence Scarab of Stability
- Significantly modifies the way in which Remnants of Corruption function.
- Needs more testing.
- Essence Scarab of Calcification
- Provides a strategy redefining way to encounter Essence monsters.
Basic Scarabs for Essence Farming
Your Scarabs depend on whether or not you intend to farm pure Essence and the level of investment per map, but a simple Essence Scarab strategy would be 3x Essence Scarab
+ 1x Essence Scarab of Ascent. This gives more high Tier essences while allowing you to blast through maps.
Other Options
Essence Scarab of Calcification is powerful for enabling endgame farming strategies. Because you get so many Essence monsters you don't want to combine this with Crystal Resonance. Due to its power, this tends to be expensive so it may be better to farm Essence Memories.
Kirac Modifier
Area Contains 2-3 Additional Essences (costs 2-3 Chaos Orbs) - This is one of the only ways to scale your Essence farming strategy so always use the Kirac modifier!
Map Choice
Essences don't really care about Map layout, but your goal is to complete maps as quickly as possible. Therefore the best Map is highly league specific, look for tier 1 or 2 Maps with easy layouts. Below are some examples;
| Strand Map | It's fast and linear which makes the Essences easy to spot. This is your best choice when it's available. |
| Atoll Map | Essences prefer to spawn near the center making them easy to track down, to complete the map run in a figure 8. |
| Jungle Valley Map | A straightforward layout that's great for Essence. |
When combining Essence with other League Mechanic Farming strategies, the optimal map from the other mechanics takes precedence.
Selling Your Loot
Here are the drops you can expect to acquire with this strategy, as well as some advice on how to sell them effectively and quickly. It's easiest to sell your Essences in bulk after upgrading most to Shrieking (early league) or Deafening (late league). By doing this you're able to sell hours worth of farmed Essences in a single transaction. Follow our Bulk Selling guide to learn more.
Essences
How To Min-Max Profit
Filtering
When setting up a filter for Essence Farming, make sure Remnant of Corruption and all Screaming Essences, Shrieking Essences, and Deafening Essences are visible on your filter.
Credits
Written by Tenkiei.
Reviewed by Facefoot, Grimro