Path of Exile: Abyss League Mechanic Guide

Welcome to the Abyss league mechanic guide! Ever wonder what else lives underground, next to all these Undead corpses you keep bumping into? The answer is lots and lots of Abyss monsters. In this guide we'll go through all things Abyss: The map mechanic, exclusive items, the two Abyss bosses and various ways to augment your Abyss experience through the Atlas Passive Tree. Let's dig in!

Abyss is considered Extra Content, meaning it has a baseline non-zero chance of being randomly encountered in maps.

Our league mechanic guides are structured according to "Depth" - the deeper you go into the article, the more complex the mechanics get. If it all becomes too much, take a break from this guide, play with the league mechanic enough to master the fundamentals then come back and delve deeper!

Difficulty: Generally easy, tough if you really go for it.
Complexity: Very Low, for Path of Exile standards.

The icon that denotes Abyss content or rewards of the Abyss type.

Depth 1 - The Abyss

In your maps, you may come across a green circle surrounded by a black stroke on your minimap. On approaching it, you'll notice what looks like a stinky pit (NO) in the ground, oozing a thick green fog. When you step over it, the Abyss encounter begins:

• Step over the Abyss. Suddently, a crack will form, that begins travelling in a random direction, spawning a few monsters in its path!
• Follow the crack until it stops and bursts into a hole / pit in the ground. Plenty of monsters will begin to spew out. Kill them!
• At this point, the encounter could end, or the crack could continue traveling. This could happen until up to four holes / pits are opened. Rinse and repeat as many times as necessary.
• When the encounter finally ends, there's three outcomes:
  • An Abyssal Trove chest bursts out of the ground.
  • A Stygian Spire erupts, spewing forth even more monsters until destroyed.
  • The pit opens up to a sub-area called the Abyssal Depths, where you'll face an Abyssal Lich, one of this league's boss encounters!

That's really all there is to it in terms of the in-map part of Abyss. Check out the video below to see how an Abyss ending in an Abyssal Trove looks like. Before we talk about the Spires or the Abyssal Depths, let's take a look at what sort of loot you can expect from the Abyssal Trove.

Depth 2 - Abyssal Trove Loot; Abyss Jewels

In addition to some generic loot, Abyssal Troves are where we find out first Abyss-specific (but not Abyss-exclusive!) loot: An Abyss Jewel. Each Abyssal Trove is guaranteed to drop at least one.

Abyss Jewels function the same as regular jewels, with a few key differences:

• They have different pools of possible modifiers.
• Most of their mods have tiers that are dependent on item level. The higher the item level of the jewel, the better chance to get a certain mod's higher tiers.
• They can be socketed on the Passive Tree but also in abyssal sockets.

We'll talk about abyssal sockets in the next section, but first, let's just preview what the four types of Abyss jewels are for:

• Murderous Eye Jewel - rolls melee attack modifiers
• Ghastly Eye Jewel - rolls summoner / minion modifiers.
• Searching Eye Jewel - rolls ranged attack modifiers
• Hypnotic Eye Jewel - rolls caster modifiers

Here's a few examples:

one of each from somewhere in my stash

Depth 3 - Stygian Spire, Stygian Vise, Abyssal Sockets

The second possible outcome at the Abyss' end is the spawning of a Stygian Spire. These spires will spawn monsters until killed, with certain breakpoints in its health pool spawning additional Rare monsters. The Stygian Spires only have a chance to spawn from a 4-pit Abyss. It's worth noting that you can encounter Stygian Spires in two other situations:

• As part of boss encounters in the Abyssal Depths, which we'll cover in our next section.
• In the Azurite Mine (Delve), where they will drop a Hollow Fossil.

Now, the Stygian Spires in your regular in-map Abysses don't drop a Hollow Fossil; they have their own special drop: The Stygian Vise, a belt that has 1 abyssal socket! This allows you to socket Abyss Jewels on a piece of gear that doesn't generally benefit from any sort of socket, at the cost of not having a different implicit modifier on your belt slot. In addition to Stygian Spires, Stygian Vises also drop from:

• Abyssal Lich bosses in the Abyssal Depths.
• Abyssal Incubators, found primarily in Legion content, which may occasionally yield a Stygian Vise, but more commonly an Abyss Jewel.

Note that Stygian Spires in Abyssal Depths boss encounters are not guaranteed to drop a Stygian Vise. In addition, a Stygian Spire has a small chance to drop one of four Unique Abyss Jewels, alongside regular Abyss Jewels:

Depth 4 - The Abyssal Depths, Abyssal Liches

If you're lucky and stumble upon a pit that leads to the Abyssal Depths, you'll encounter a fairly short zone teeming with Abyss monsters. Exploring it will eventually lead you to the boss arena, where you will fight either Amanamu, Liege of the Lightless, or Ulaman, Sovereign of the Well. While they have distinct abilities, they do share the same encounter structure:

• When they hit certain HP thresholds, they will become invulnerable and you'll enter Phase 2 of the encounter. Phase 2 requires you to enter a freshly-opened room along the arena's walls and defeat a Stygian Spire.
  • At 75% HP, the first sub-room opens and you have 90 seconds to destroy the Stygian Spire.
  • At 50% HP, the second sub-room opens, with the remaining time from your first sub-room resuming. Defeat the secon Stygian Spire quickly!
  • At 25% HP, the third sub-room opens, and the timer resumes yet again! Essentially, you'll have 90 seconds to defeat all three Stygian Spires or you fail the fight.

Amananu, Liege of the Lightless boasts an arsenal of bullet-hell type abilities and occasionally summons four totems that make him invulnerable until destroyed. Here's a video of the boss fight:

Ulaman, Sovereign of the Well also has quite a few projectile-spamming abilities, but you should be more worried about his wide melee attacks that sometimes send out long-range shockwaves. What's more, he can teleport to the player and deliver three slashes in quick succession. Here's a video of the boss fight:

Need to find a way to check if abyssal depths close if you die during the boss encounter. I can't find anything about it online, but I remember it being the case.

Abyssal Liches share the same loot pool, and always drop a Stygian Vise. In addition, they have a chance at dropping the Unique Abyss Jewels listed in the previous section, as well as any of the following Unique items, and The Samurai's Eye Divination Card:

Behold, even more weird items that have abyssal sockets! Take a moment to read through their effects and see how many cool build options you can think of that use Abyss Jewels and some of these Uniques. While not generally too useful, there are also other ways of getting abyssal sockets on regular gear - we'll talk about those in Depth 6.

Depth 5 - More Abyssses & Abyss Scarabs

Can't get enough of following a crack around the whole map to fight some extra monsters? There's a few ways to guarantee an Abyss in your map:

• Using the Abyss map crafting option, which costs 6 Chaos Orbs and guarantees two Abysses in your map.
• Using the Abyss Scarab, which guarantees one! You can use up to 2 of these per map!
• Allocating certain passive nodes on the Atlas Passive Tree which will increase the chance of Abysses spawning in your maps, or eventually outright guarantee it. Here's a link to a Passive Tree that highlights all the chance increase nodes: LINK

In addition, Abyss content benefits from three additional Scarabs. Note that they don't guarantee an Abyss, so make sure you don't waste them on maps an Abyss isn't guaranteed:

• Abyss Scarab of Multitudes - More monsters equals more XP and more loot! You can use up to 2 of these per map!
• Abyss Scarab of Emptiness - Remember when I talked about getting abyssal sockets on regular items? This is one of the sources!
• Abyss Scarab of Edifice - Not only do you get bonus Hoards (better chests), you're guaranteed at least a Stygian Spire, sweet!
• Abyss Scarab of Profound Depth - Loot increases the more pits you have to deal with, which can be further boosted through the Atlas Passive Tree.

Abyss content may not be your cup of tea, or perhaps you just don't want to deal with it in your maps. That's alright! Open the box below to see what other parts of the game can net you Abyss loot:

Depth 6 - Abyssal Atlas Effects

not now

Other Considerations

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