PoE Juice is an Art — One That Pays Well!
In Path of Exile, properly juicing up your maps can be the difference between an efficient player and a rich one. If you learn how to properly earn returns on your maps, you will receive far more rewards, faster and get more experience to boot. All of this will be made far more effective if you have a Headhunter, but it is certainly not required. There are other ways to obtain PoE juice, and we will go over it.
Where Does My PoE Juice Go?
Starting from scratch, learning which maps to juice is very important. Starting with the bare basics, you will really only want to be juicing maps that are worth investing into. This means that you will never want to juice anything that is not at least a red map and likely will want to stick with tier 15 or 16 maps. This will allow you to roll the best map mods, get the highest level bases, return other high level maps and return the most experience for your time (if you care about experience). You can certainly run lower tier maps, but you will want to have far less investment to make up for the difference in return.
Once you have chosen the tier you are going to be running, next you will want to look for maps that have good density. This does change occasionally, so be sure to keep up to date with which maps are good in your current league. In the current Metamorph League, there are quite a few maps with decent density. Summit, Promenade and Canyon are three of my personal favorites. But make sure you have a map with good density, because everything we will be doing to it will be exponential, so having a high base number of monsters is very important.
Before we go much further, it is important to note that the most efficient way to roll maps is to do it in bulk. Rolling one map at a time is slow and tedious. Roll 10 plus maps at a time, then run them all before stopping to roll more. This will speed you up both in terms of actual actions and in mentality.
The Lesser Juice
Once you have chosen a map, it is time to start your PoE juice. From here we will be assuming that you chose a tier 15 or 16 map, in order to properly go through all the steps in juicing. We’ll start with the basics. Ensure all your maps are white and not corrupted or mirrored. Then, apply Cartographer’s Chisels to each until they are all 20% quality. This will increase the quantity of items dropped in the map by 20%, and using the Chisels while the map is white means you only need four Chisels to get to 20%, rather than 20.
Next you will want to use an Orb of Alchemy on each map. This will make them rare maps and add quite a few modifiers to the map. Each modifier will increase the quantity of items dropped and pack size of monsters within the map. Both of these stats are important to your overall juicing.
This is the point at which you need to figure out which map modifiers your build can run. You’ll be searching for those modifiers now and taking them out of the group of maps. These maps will be rerolled with either Chaos Orbs or by Scour + Alcing them once more. This will differ for every build, but obviously if you can run more modifiers then this process will be faster and less expensive. Builds which cannot run a handful of modifiers will have significant issues, particularly as we move on to the next step.
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The Greater Juice
At this point you have well rolled high-tier maps. Depending on where you are in the league, and how lazy you want to be, that might be enough for you. From this point onwards everything is significantly more expensive, so only progress if you plan to go for big juicy maps that have been invested in, but return quite a bit as well.
The next step is to Vaal your maps. This can be pricey not just because of the price of the Vaal Orbs themselves, but also because there are quite a few maps that will come out of this process that your build will be unable to run. For this step, it is an important note that this process is far less costly if you have a second character that can run those maps later.
Vaaling your maps has two great outcomes. These are going up to eight mod maps, which have insane pack size and quantity, as well as going unidentified, which maintains the modifiers but adds 20% quantity to the map. Hitting either of these adds quite a bit of value to your map.
Next, use Sextants on the area you’ll be running. What Sextants you use will depend on the price of them, but the higher the Sextant the better the mods. Currently I am running Prime Sextants because they are half the price of Awakened Sextants and give most of the same modifiers. Keep any pack size modifiers, but roll over useless mods like Slipstreams.
Now you have to decide what other things you want your map to have. This constitutes looking through the Zana mods and seeing which are good, as well as purchasing Scarabs if you so choose. Good modifiers to add to maps are Legion, Beyond, Breach, Harbinger and anything else that adds monsters to the map.
Look up good Prophecies for juicing, and see if you can buy some in bulk. You’ll always get far more out of them than you spend on them, it is just whether you are willing to put in the legwork (I will not blame you if you are not, I certainly do not buy them often).
Lastly, with the remaining slots in the map device, throw in Sacrifice Fragment. Each one adds 5% quantity to your maps.
Larger Juice Explained
The reason for so many different forms of PoE juice is that they work off of each other. Increased pack size increases the pack size of all the mobs added with your sextants and prophecies. Beyond will spawn off of the increased pack sizes and be larger as a result, Breaches will contain more mobs, etc. All of those different modifiers, after being buffed up to have huge numbers, will all be affected by the massive quantity bonus that we have amassed. Everything works with each other and leads to your maps being incredibly packed and very valuable. This is the endgame of Path of Exile, in its truest form.
