Path of Exile Influence Farming: Complete Guide
Understanding Influenced Items
Influenced items are a unique class of items that carry special modifiers associated with one of the game's major endgame entities. Each type of influence corresponds to a different entity, offering specific affixes:
Shaper Influence: Items influenced by the Shaper tend to enhance elemental damage, spellcasting, and energy shield mechanics. These affixes are highly desirable for many caster and hybrid builds.
Elder Influence: Elder-influenced items often grant modifiers that are more aggressive offensively, sometimes at the cost of additional mechanics or curse effects. They are popular for high-damage melee or elemental builds.
Crusader Influence: Crusader-influenced items focus on defensive stats, life, armor, and block chance. These items are frequently used in tanky builds.
Hunter Influence: Hunter-influenced items provide critical strike bonuses, attack speed, and projectile enhancements, making them ideal for bow or ranged weapon builds.
Redeemer Influence: Items influenced by the Redeemer often enhance minion mechanics, defensive capabilities, or utility features.
Warlord Influence: Warlord-influenced items emphasize melee damage, life leech, area-of-effect damage, and other close-combat enhancements.
Influenced items are visually identifiable by a unique border around the item frame and often carry higher item levels than standard loot. While influenced items can occasionally drop randomly, farming them systematically yields the best results.
Why Farming Influenced Items is Important
Influenced items are highly valuable in Path of Exile for several reasons. First, they allow for high-end crafting that is otherwise impossible with normal items. Certain affixes, like Shaper's elemental damage modifiers or Crusader's block bonuses, cannot appear on standard rare items, making influenced bases critical for top-tier gear.
Second, influenced items hold substantial trade value. Players who are crafting competitive endgame gear often seek these bases to save time or ensure access to powerful affixes. A single Shaper-influenced item with the right combination of stats can command high prices on trade markets.
Third, they are essential for endgame optimization. Many high-tier maps, bosses, and league challenges require gear that maximizes damage or survivability. Influenced items often provide the specific modifiers needed to reach the thresholds for these encounters. Finally, some players pursue influenced items for collection or challenge purposes, aiming to obtain all types of influence for completionist goals.
Methods for Farming Influenced Items
Farming influenced items effectively requires an understanding of which methods generate the highest quantity and quality of drops. There are multiple approaches to maximize influence acquisition.
1. Influenced Maps
One of the most reliable methods is running influenced maps. These maps are touched by Shaper or Elder influence, meaning enemies and bosses within them have a higher chance of dropping influenced items. For efficient farming:
Focus on high monster density maps, as more enemies increase the likelihood of drops.
Run high-tier maps, as the item level of drops correlates with the map's tier. Higher item levels allow stronger and more desirable affixes.
Enhance maps with league mechanics such as Sextants, Scarabs, or Breachstones, which improve quantity, quality, and drop chances.
Elder-influenced maps are particularly beneficial because the Elder can corrupt regions, creating continuous zones where Elder-influenced drops occur consistently. Similarly, Shaper-influenced maps maximize Shaper-specific affix drops.
2. Guardian Encounters
Defeating guardians is another efficient method for farming influenced items. Guardians are powerful bosses associated with Shaper or Elder influence, and their loot tables favor influenced item drops:
Prepare a build capable of efficiently defeating guardians, as their fights are significantly harder than standard map bosses.
Run guardian encounters within influenced maps, combining map-based influence and guardian mechanics for higher drop rates.
Use maps with additional loot-boosting modifiers to maximize efficiency during runs.
Guardians often drop influenced bases with higher item levels, making them prime candidates for crafting premium gear.
3. Strongboxes and Special Encounters
Several in-game mechanics provide influenced items reliably, including strongboxes, breaches, Abyss encounters, and Legion fights. These encounters often drop multiple items at once, including influenced bases:
Breaches and Abyssal encounters spawn high-density monsters, increasing loot drops and influenced item chances.
Certain divination cards guarantee influenced items when completed. Collecting and targeting these cards can ensure a steady supply of specific influenced item types. You can also buy POE currency to get them.
Incursion or timed event rooms can drop influenced items as rewards for completion, making these mechanics efficient for farming outside of standard mapping.
By combining these mechanics with high-tier maps, players can maximize both quantity and quality of influenced items.
4. Delve and Syndicate Encounters
Deep delves and syndicate safehouses provide another layer of influence farming. Delve nodes sometimes spawn enemies with influenced items, especially in high-tier or corrupted zones. Similarly, high-level syndicate members, when defeated, drop influenced items in addition to their normal loot. Targeting syndicate operations with specific rewards can enhance the efficiency of farming certain influence types.
Crafting with Influenced Items
Once you have obtained influenced items, crafting them effectively is key. Influenced items carry exclusive affixes, so preserving these modifiers is crucial during crafting.
Crafting Bench: Use the bench to add additional prefixes or suffixes without overwriting the entity-specific affixes. This is essential for high-end crafting.
Fossil Crafting: Fossils can restrict or expand affix pools. For instance, Prismatic Fossils are excellent for elemental builds on Shaper-influenced items.
Currency Use: Chaos Orbs, Exalted Orbs, and other high-end Path of exile currency can be applied to influenced bases with high item levels for optimal results.
Master Crafting: Using masters to add guaranteed modifiers without altering influence affixes helps maintain the item's value while improving stats.
Sextants and Scarabs: Enhancing maps to increase item quantity and quality indirectly increases the number of influenced items available for crafting.
Efficiency Tips for Influence Farming
Run high-density maps to increase monster kill count and potential drops.
Chain influences in maps when possible, combining Shaper, Elder, and other influences to maximize drop variety.
Focus on high item-level drops to ensure that influenced affixes roll at their full potential.
Utilize league mechanics like Breach, Abyss, and Incursion to amplify loot.
Track market trends to farm items that are currently in demand, improving trade efficiency.
Prioritize divination cards that yield influenced bases for guaranteed results.
Conclusion
Influence farming is a critical component of high-level Path of Exile play. By obtaining items influenced by Shaper, Elder, Crusader, Hunter, Redeemer, or Warlord, players gain access to affixes that dramatically increase the power and versatility of their gear. Whether the goal is endgame crafting, trade profit, or build optimization, understanding influence mechanics is essential.
By utilizing influenced maps, guardian encounters, strongboxes, special league mechanics, delves, and syndicate operations, players can farm these items efficiently. Coupled with thoughtful crafting strategies, such as bench crafting, fossil manipulation, and master crafting, influenced items can become the foundation for the most powerful gear in Wraeclast.
