Reveal How to Master Essence Farming in PoE 3.28: High-Yield Strategies with Vaal Orbs & Scarabs

In Path of Exile 3.28, essences are a type of currency used to craft equipment. y can upgrade or reset the rarity of equipment.

Essences are inexpensive, easy to obtain, and offer very stable returns, while also providing other valuable drops during farming.

Let's take a look at how to farm essences efficiently! We provide several flexible farming options that you can adjust according to your budget and personal preferences.

Functions

Essences are a crafting currency used to craft items. You can combine broken items with essences to create very powerful items. They are essentially Path of Exile Chaos Orbs with specific attributes. Take an essence and use it repeatedly until you get the suffix or prefix you want.

Essence of Desolation is a Mirage-specific essence modifier and is extremely valuable. It has a wide range of uses and is quite rare. While uncommon, essences are incredibly valuable when found, and they're not particularly difficult to kill. Furthermore, Mirage replicates all Essences within Mirage area.

How to Obtain Them?

Essences are sealed within rare monsters scattered throughout the map. These monsters are frozen in place until you repeatedly click on them, awakening them from Essence Monolith. Once awakened, they become extremely dangerous, and killing them yields essences.

The method for obtaining essences is somewhat similar to Delve, but without Delve's confusing aspects, dark environments, and other things that average players dislike. Instead, there are only monsters with incredibly high attack power.

If you want to farm essences, you need to stack as many rare monsters as possible on the map. Kill the monsters that drop essences and clear out all other monsters. On average, each map will have 15 to 25 essence-dropping monsters.

If the map mod is special, or if it's a Mirage map, the number of essence monsters can reach 30 to 40. We will also corrupt all monsters that drop essences and clear out all other monsters.How can we achieve this?

Corrupting All Essence Monsters

You can use Vaal Orbs to corrupt essence monsters. Previously, corrupting essence monsters used a special currency called Remnant of Corruption, but now it can only be done with Vaal Orbs.

If you corrupt any of the four purple essences - Scorn, Envy, Misery, or Dread - you have a chance to convert it into an essence that can only be obtained through corruption, making it very valuable.

When farming essences, you need to use Stability and Adaptation Scarabs and use Vaal Orbs on every essence monster you encounter, not just those that have purple essences.

Stability Scarabs ensure that your Vaal Orbs can only upgrade or change essences. Essence upgrades mean you'll gain more currency and may even turn into purple essences. Adaptation Scarabs guarantee that a randomly selected essence from a monster you release will be transferred to other essence monsters on the map.

If Adaptation Scarab selects a purple essence, you can try corrupting it onto another monster using a Vaal Orb, and you have a chance to transform it into one of four special corruption essences.

Therefore, by corrupting all the essence monsters you encounter while farming, you can increase your chances of obtaining special essences, and Vaal Orbs are cheap, making them a very cost-effective way to corrupt essences.

Choose Map You Need

Essences are essentially currency, and their value doesn't increase with quantity. Monsters with essences already have a high number of mods. Therefore, farming maps with an excessive number of mods and high difficulty isn't necessary.

Therefore, you can try farming Eight Mod maps for some rewards. You can also try White Map Strats, but maps filled with low-value monsters might get boring and detract from the game's enjoyment.

Keep some Vaal Orbs in your inventory. Corrupt the essence monsters you encounter while farming; this essence farming strategy works on any map. You just need to collect as many rare monsters as possible, make good use of the map layout, and the bosses are relatively easy to kill quickly.

Basic Maps

You can choose some common, ordinary maps. The classic map Mesa doesn't have as many essences as other maps, and the same goes for Strand; the essence count is simply too low. Haunted Mansion probably has the fewest essences of all maps.

Jungle Valley has a simple layout, leading straight to the end, and usually has a good number of essence monsters. Its only drawback is that the map bosses are too slow and boring.

Tropical Island is probably the best; the map layout is good, the bosses are easy to deal with, the route is straight, and the essence count is quite considerable. However, its base damage cards are poor, so you'll need to add some better damage cards.

Nightmare Map

Another option is Nightmare Map. Nightmare Maps are well-suited for this strategy because they generally have more rare monsters than regular level 16 maps and offer high-value Uber boss tokens.

Of all Nightmare Maps, Sanctuary is arguably the best choice due to its highest drop rate of fragments for Uber Dread. Citadel drops valuable Support Gems, while the other three maps also drop other valuable items.

In PoE 3.28, the number of monsters in Nightmare Maps decreased, but they still have a significantly higher average number of rare monsters than regular level 16 maps, and the final boss drops valuable fragments.

The only downside to Nightmare Maps is their longer completion time; unlike Jungle Valley which can be completed in four or five minutes, they now take seven to nine minutes. Therefore, you might not get as much essence per hour as before, but the overall reward per map will definitely be higher. Also, the rare monster mod needs to be considered.

Ultimately, I recommend trying out Eight Mod Maps, Mirage Tier 16s, and Nightmare Maps to find your favorite and then focus on farming that one for a while.

Astrolabe Setup

You can choose Templar Astrolab, which only requires killing the boss. Alternatively, you can choose Enshrouded Astrolabe. Farm some Delirious Maps and complete them normally to earn rewards. This Astrolabe setup also works for farming other materials in Path of Exile 3.28.

So, if you don't want to repeatedly kill bosses, such as in Jungle Valley, you can instead farm some Delirious Maps at 20% difficulty using Enshrouded Astrolabe. While slightly more expensive, it's more valuable than Templar Astrolab in terms of map content, especially if you don't want to kill bosses.

Now that you've mastered the core techniques for farming essences, all that's left is to explore the maps and try it out for yourself. Find a map that suits your pace, prepare plenty of Vaal Orbs, and reap the rewards!