POE Ruthless with Gold Atlas Strategy & Map Sustain Invest Tips | Path of Exile 3.20 End-of-League Guide

In this POE 3.20 Ruthless with Gold Event Guide, we dive into the best Ruthless Altas Tree strategy and invest in Map Sustain early for the End-of-League event of Path of Exile The Forbidden Sanctum!

POE 3.20 Ruthless with Gold Event Guide - Map Sustain Early Invest Tips & Altlas Tree Strategy

For those of you that are thinking of playing in the Path of Exile 3.20 End-of-League - Ruthless with Gold, we want to point out one of the easiest mistakes that you can make when you're playing Ruthless for the first time because it can be quite a shock for those that have never played in an era where map sustain is scarce. To suddenly be in a situation where you do need to min-max your map drop chances quite a bit, in order to not flounder in low-tier Maps unable to progress. You want to spend all your early points (at least your first 30, maybe even 50) on map sustain through masters. For that reason, we are going to recommend the following 26 points or something quite similar to it be the first 26 points you allocate on your Atlas. Now the key things you're trying to achieve here.

Ruthless Altlas Node - The Perpetual Search

Firstly you are picking up The Perpetual search, this is probably your first three points and the reason for this is that Alva Missions are a fantastic resource for getting more maps to drop. Maps don't drop very much if at all from the incursion monsters themselves. 

But when you go into the Incursion Temple, every monster that's there can drop maps and the actual Incursion Temple itself has perhaps eight times the number of monsters you'll find in a typical map in ruthless. This is one of the very best nodes on the atlas that you can take and it's probably something you want to take as your third point and then never unspec it while you're playing in ruthless.

Ruthless Altlas Node - Mad Devotion

On the other side, you'll see that we're passing through mad devotion as well, Delve is pretty good for maps sustain, it's actually a little bit worse than Alvarez and so for that reason you could definitely path up this way instead of the way that we've pathed here.

However, Delve will still help you find more access to content and more monsters that you can kill in order to gain Maps. After this, you're probably going to want to go and pick up the three small points that lead to Solidarity and also work your way towards the very important Commissioned Officer node. 

Ruthless Altlas Node - Planar Tactician

You can also go down this way to Planar Tactician which is an excellent choice as well, it also has the same three small nodes leading up to it, that you'll find on the other side of the atlas. Now Kirac Missions are a fantastic resource, both because they will give you maps that you haven't yet completed and also because they will very rarely grant you a unique map. 

Getting access to Unique maps in Ruthless is very rare and very powerful because it will give you a plus one Atlas bonus and that's the reason that we chose Solidarity as being the better choice over playing a Tactician. That said Planar Tactician is a fine node too, it's well worth the extra point but the three nodes leading up to it are probably even better. A quick note during editing that Kirac shop works on the same principles that it does in the base game which means that every time you attempt a Kirac mission, Kirac inventory will refresh curex maps are also sold at a lower price point in Ruthless than they are in the base game, although this price point is still going to hurt because you have a lot less currency and ruthless than you do in the base game.

Ruthless Altlas Node - Shaping the Mountains

You can also take Shaping the Mountains as well just note how much worse, this node is than it is in the base game, even then it is still something that you are very happy to take, and we would even go as far as to say that it is one of the best nodes on the entire Atlas.

Ruthless Altlas Node - Shaping the Seas, Shaping the Valleys, Sulphite Infusion

After you've filled out these 26 points, some other nodes you might want to consider are Shaping the Seas and Shaping the Valleys, both excellent nodes. And also there is the Delve node Sulphite Infusion, a little more travel to get to this one but it will give you a steady income of Sulphite while you're doing everything else. 

Again Sulphite is really good in Ruthless because Delve will give you access to more monsters to kill, it's some of the densest content in the game and also the Delve cities will drop a lot of loot for you as well when you get those, dub cities aren't super common but they're also not super rare. Of course one of the drawbacks here is that because your character is likely to be weaker in Ruthless than it is in the base game, you may find that you struggle a bit with Delve in terms of the monsters just being too tough for you early on. If that's the case then just save up yourself light maybe do a few low-level Delves so that you can increase your self-right capacity and it'll be there for you when you need it later.

More Tips for POE 3.20 End-Of-League Events

To help you know more about the Ruthless Altas and enjoy the end-of-league events in Path of Exile 3.20, here are more tips we want to share with you:

POE 3.20 Ruthless Atlas Extra Contents

There are two main categories of extra content that you can add to your maps in Ruthless that were sorted out by Reddit user TwoHandsRuthless:

Category A - Masters and the 10 League mechanics that are blockable, these are Legion, Harvest, Delirium, Abyss, Breach, Heist, Metamorph, Expedition, Blight, and Ritual

Category A includes the 10 blockable mechanics, as well as the four Masters that can pop up in a map at random and it seems you have approximately a 40% chance to get a piece of content from category A. However this is not an independent chance for each one instead it's just something like 40% to get one of these and 60% to get none of them, if you do get one of them then content blocks can be really important in order to make sure that it's the one that you want the most. What you can do if you want to optimize your chance of getting one particular type of content and let's say that that is Heist, then what you would do is you would block absolutely everything else except Heist, and then there will be two possibilities that can come up when the game decides to roll for you that you get a category A event in your map. Either you'll get a high Smuggler's Cache or Alternately you'll get a Master Mission, you can further bias this towards being a high Smuggler's cache if you elect to take nodes like Secret Stash that increase the chance to get a Smuggler's Cache. Note that we're in the base game, this node would be a 12 flat chance increase, here it is a 125% increased chance so what this means is that when you do roll a Category A thing, there is a stronger bias towards it being a Smuggler's Cache but that comes at the expense of everything else that could roll, so that's going to come at the expense of chances to get a Master Mission and similar things.

Category B - League Mechanics that are NOT blockable, these include essence, harbinger, Shrines, exiles, Beyond, Strongboxes, and Torment.

Lastly, there's also Category B which is pretty much everything else that can be added to Maps things like Strong Boxes, Essences, Harbingers, and the like and these things do not seem to conflict with each other in the same way.  But again we would suggest if you want to read up more on those that you check out twohandsruthless' post because it goes into it in much more detail.

Betrayal Atlas Passives Tree Strategy Suggestions

We would just add that there are good reasons you might want to run Betrayal especially if you are playing an ailment-based build and if that's the case focus investigation becomes one of the best nodes on the atlas in that case. We would deviate from this plan and take these three as some of your earliest points as well so you might find your first nine points are taking the Perpetual Search plus Mad Devotion and plus the focus investigation cluster and then from there follow the rest of the plan as we discussed, mayavalogs have interesting results because in Ruthless you won't get very many any of them.

Anyways these are the 26 points we would recommend that you take first if you're going into Ruthless with Gold, this will change however if it turns out that we're able to trade gold for maps directly. If there are in-game mechanics that allow us to do that, then at that point, you can probably trim down some of these points, you may not need to take all of the Kirac focus, and then at that point, you can spend your points on other things. But as you'll see if you read all of twohandsruthless's posts, it's probably best to pick only one of the 10 blockable mechanics, block the other nine and invest it very heavily into that one mechanic that you choose, because that seems to give the best results in Ruthless.