Path of Exile: Incursion League Mechanic Guide

Welcome to the Incursion league mechanic guide! If you're a fan of creating your own challenges, you'll find Incursion to your liking. In this guide we'll tackle everything you need to know about Incursion, from the in-map mechanic, to the plethora of things you can find in the Temple of Atzoatl. Let's dig in!

Incursion is considered Extra Content, meaning it has a baseline non-zero chance of randomly being 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: Average
Complexity: Average

The icon that denotes Incursion content.

Depth 1 - Temporal Incursions

You'll first meet Alva, this league's NPC, in Act 7, where she'll introduce you to the base level mechanic of this content. The mechanic works the same as it does in maps, which is:

• You come upon Alva, next to a pedestal. Talking to her will open up the Incusion UI.
• Here, you'll see the entire Temple of Atzoatl. The highlighted room is the one you'll be entering.
• In the top-right corner, you've got a rough map of the room you'll shortly be entering, with connecting doors (the circles) and Architects (the fancy squares) as icons you can hover over for more information.
• Red rooms are locked, green rooms are open.
• Your objective, once you're in, is to kill one Architect, which will determine what happens to the room. More on this choice in the next section!
• Once you've read all the details of the Incursion, you can press "Enter Incursion" and Alva will open a portal.
• Go in!

Once inside the portal, you'll have a short time (see the timer at the top of your screen) to wreak havoc. You'll want, in this order, to prioritize:

• Killing the desired Architect. When you kill an Architect, the other one despawns.
• Killing monsters, especialy Rare and Magic ones, for a chance to drop a Stone of Passage.
• Taking the Stone of Passage and using it to unlock doorways to other rooms.
• Killing everything else while you still have time, for more loot.
• Killing monsters adds extra seconds to the timer.

Once the Incursion is over, you'll be teleported out and all your loot will drop around Alva and her altar. You can then click on Alva to see what changed in the Temple. Essentially, at this point, there's two things you can change with each Incursion:

• The room type, which is determined based on which Architect you kill, or rather, the one you don't.
• The connections between rooms. You'll have noticed the Temple of Atzoatl is pyramid-shaped, with a boss fight at its apex. To reach it - or any other room for that matter - you need carve a path of connecting rooms!

This is the gist of the Incursion mechanic in maps. Each map, you'll be given 3 Incursions, meaning you have a shot at modifying up to three rooms. After a total of 12 Incursions, the Temple of Atzoatl will be ready and you can travel into the past and plunder it! More on the Temple itself in Depth 4. Before we move on to Architects, here's a video showcasing three Incursions:

video

Depth 2 - Incursion Architects

The whole thing about Architects is they're two titans of industry competing over the same space. When you're going into the past, you're killing one Architect. The surviving Architect gets to do whatever it wants with the room, which you'll then plunder in the future.

Each Architect corresponds to a room type. You don't need to remember their names, only hover over them in the Incursion planning UI so you know which room they will build. Speaking of rooms, there's three major types:

• The Apex of Atzoatl, which is the boss room. It is always there, and doesn't have an Architect. It can't be changed. Likewise, the Entrance room is always the same.
• Rooms initially devoid of Architects, such as Antechamber, Banquet Hall, Tunnels or Chasm.
  • These rooms just have packs of monsters and nothing else. You'll want to "assign" an Architect to them before entering the Temple, if possible.
• Rooms that already have an Architect in them, such as the Pools of Restoration, Hall of Offerings or Doryani's Institute.
  • These are rooms that have an effect, and they come in three tiers. Some rooms always reward you with something, others are only rewarding when they're Tier 3.

Ok, so we've got two room types that we can interact with: Empty rooms, and occupied ones. Each Incursion chooses a random room to let you modify. If it chooses an empty room:

• You'll get two random Architects that can potentially occupy it. You kill the one whose room you don't want to have in your Temple.

If the room is occupied, however, by the Architect of the Pools of Restoration (a Tier 1 room) for example, you've got the following choice:

• First, look at the room map. The occupying Architect will always be at the bottom, meaning if you kill him, the room changes to the other Architect's.
• The "intruder" Architect will be at the top. Killing him will upgrade the occupying Architect's room to the next tier.

To effectively make use of Incursion, you'll always want to try getting as many accessible Tier 3 rooms as you can. But what do they contain, and which ones are worth it? Let's take a look.

Depth 3 - Temple Rooms

We're still working our way to the league mechanic's 'pinnacle' content, the Temple of Atzoatl, and we need a better idea of what we should aim for. We've made a handy cheat sheet below:

• Each room is grouped with its different Tiers. Hover over each image to see each room's effect.
• We've grouped them up based on how valuable they are, but bear in mind there's a bunch of cool stuff to find even in the less valuable rooms!

giant awesome interactable cheat sheet.

Out of all these rooms, there's a few we want to highlight:

• The Explosive / Demolition / Unmaking rooms can be very useful, as they contain bombs which let you blow up walls to rooms you didn't manage to connect to while preparing your Temple.
• Rooms such as Doryani's Institute and Locus of Corruption are very valuable, and are worth trying to get even if you have no use for them, as they can be sold (more on that in the next section).

Ultimately, it's up to you which rooms you want to pick. Keep an eye out for the ones you're most interested in and work towards them!

Depth 4 - The Temple of Atzoatl

Once you've completed all 12 of your Incursions, the Temple of Atzoatl will be ready. You can open it by talking to Alva in your hideout, or:

• On the same UI that opens the Temple, click the "Take Chronicle" button. This does two things:
  • Allows you to run the Temple later, while enabling Alva to spawn in maps so you can work on your next Temple.
  • Allows you to sell the Temple, which can fetch some nice cash money if it contains a valuable room.

For this guide, let's assume you choose to run your Temple instead of selling it. After entering it and going on a short trek through the jungle, you'll finally reach the Temple of Atzoatl and enter the Entrance room. From here onwards:

• You are free to explore rooms in whichever order you please, as long as you managed to connect to them. For unconnected rooms, see the point about Explosive rooms in Depth 3.
• Each occupied room (a room with Tiers) will contain a bunch of monster packs, as well as its Architect, which can often drop some useful things.
• Depending on its tier, each room will contain exactly what it said it would: chests of specific loot, Corruption devices, a Legion Monolith etc.
• Once you reach the end, you'll have to fight The Vaal Omnitect, this league's boss fight.

The Temple is pretty large, but it functions the same as a regular map: You can open a Portal anywhere to return home or come back after dying without having to walk for five minutes.

Depth 5 - The Vaal Omnitect

The Vaal Omnitect is a pretty cool construct that looks like a particularly evil temple. It boasts four heads that fire attacks at the same time. Here's a general overview of the battle:

• At 75% and 25% health, it'll choose one of two special attacks and get some damage reduction for the duration.
  • Flamethrowers will spew four perpendicular rows of fire while the Omnitect moves around and rotates.
  • Lightning Wave will launch multiple slow-moving blue waves on the ground that extend outwards from the Omnitect. They deal quite a lot of damage and apply a stacking debuff that increases your Lightning damage taken and reduces movement speed.
• At 50% health, the Omnitect goes back to the center of the arena and becomes invulnerable for a short while. Energised Phantasms spawn from the corners of the arena and slowly make their way towards the Omnitect. If they touch, the Omnitect regains a portion of its Energy Shield.

This fight is nothing particularly troublesome, but can become a little harder if certain rooms are present in the Temple:

• Lightning Workshop / Omnitect Reactor Plant / Conduit of Lightning: This will activate the arena's wall defenses, periodically sending out lightning balls across the arena.
• Flame Workshop / Omnitect Forge / Crucible of Flame: This will activate Flame Turrets in the corners of the arena that periodically shoot fire.
• Hatchery / Automaton Lab / Hybridisation Chamber: During the 50% health phase, two Omnitect's Guards will join the fight.
• Workshop / Engineering Department / Factory: The Omnitect gains 15/25/35% increased life.

Now, let's see what loot the Omnitect actually drops. Aside from the Chasing Risk Divination Card, there's two "types" of Unique loot you can get from it. In addition, it may also drop Rare items with various Incursion modifiers, which we'll take a peek at in Depth 7.

Actual Uniques

The Omnitect can drop one of seven Uniques, out of which five can be upgraded. We'll talk about upgrades very soon, but first, here they are:

Ambition is one of four parts required to assemble The Adorned Unique Jewel. The other parts can be acquired from Atziri, the Vaal Temple Map and the Vaal boss in the Azurite Mine (Delve).

Now, the rest of these items can be upgraded using a Vial, which is the other type of Unique loot the Omnitect can drop. Let's take a look in the next section.

Depth 6 - Incursion Uniques, Upgrade System

Most Uniques you'll find exclusively in Incursion content can be upgraded to a stronger version. The upgrade process requires three components:

• The normal version of the Unique.
• A specific Vial, which can drop from the Omnitect.
• The Apex of Ascension, a Tier 3 room whose Sacrificial Altar allows you to combine the Unique and the Vial.

The following table shows which Vials are required for the Unique items that drop from the Omnitect, as well as their upgraded versions:

What about all the other cool Uniques that are exclusive to Incursion? Their normal versions can only be found in special chests in specific Tier 3 rooms in the Temple of Atzoatl. The table below will list the Unique, the room it can be found it, the Vial needed to upgrade it, and its upgraded version:

Depth 7 - Architect Item Modifiers

Some Architects / rooms house Rare items with fancy modifiers. Note that these modifiers can also show up on items in other content, occasionally. These mods are a "two-for-one" deal, where you get 2 effects but they only take up 1 modifier slot on an item.

For example, the Tier III room, Toxic Grove, has the tooltip "Contains a valuable Item." which will drop from a special chest found within it, the Grove Vessel. This will either drop:

• Apep's Slumber, as we discussed above.
• A Magic and/or Rare item with a "Tacati" Incursion modifier. Tacati is the name of the room's architect.

As usual, modifiers come in different tiers. For this example, we'll show you the possible list of max-tier Tacati modifiers that can roll on these special items:

That's a lot of power packed into a single modifier. The list grows when you add in the rest of the Architects. If you want to see all these mods, head on over to our Incursion Mod Cheat Sheet to check them all out, as well as find out which rooms each mod can be found in!

Depth 8 - More Incursions & Incursion Scarabs

Want to reliably farm Incursions? There's a few ways to go about it:

• The Incursion Scarab will guarantee Alva and her three Incursions in your map.
• Allocating certain passive nodes on the Atlas Passive Tree will increase and even guarantee Alva on every map. Here are all the nodes that directly increase your chance of finding Alva: LINK. With all of those allocated, your chance to find Alva will be XXX%!

In addition to the Incursion Scarab, there's three other higher-rarity Scarabs that increase or modify the rewards you get from Incursion encounters in maps. Note that they don't guarantee Alva will show up; you'll have to combine them with one of the above options to ensure they don't go to waste.

• Incursion Scarab of Invasion - This adds packs of Incursion monsters in the actual map, not in the Incursions themselves. You can use up to 2 of these per map!
• Incursion Scarab of Champions - More pack size and higher-rarity monsters translate to more loot and better odds at finding Stones of Passage! You can use up to 2 of these per map!
• Incursion Scarab of Timelines - The Architect of the last Incursion you complete will straight up drop an extra itemized Temple!

Depth 9 - Incursion Atlas Passive Tree

later!

Other Considerations