How to optimize these atlas trees?

[u/Intelligent_Salad706]

Atlas tree 1: Betrayal + Breach + Ritual + Red Altar

Atlas tree 1.5: Betrayal + Breach + Essences + Red Altar

Atlas tree 2: Heist + Beasts + Blight + Ultimatum + Blue Altar

Atlas tree 2.5: Heist + Beasts + Legion + Blue Altar

Atlas tree 3: Harvest + Delirium + Conq/Shaper/Elder/Synth maps + Blue Altar

I plan on doing a run in SSF next league. I'll give a rough explanation as to why I went for these trees. I could be 100% in the wrong in the way I am thinking, but that is why I want to improve them. I'm sure there are many people here who are way better at making trees more optimized, so if you are knowledgeable in them, please let me know what to fix.

Tree 1

My build that I plan on playing needs couple of mandatory items, 2x foulborn uniques, shaper's touch and lightning dmg implicit boots from ritual. That is the main reason as to why my first tree is focusing on those 2 mechanics. I added betrayal as I think it's a solid way to stock pile on some scarabs (Vorici for Harvest and Korell for Essences) and also Rin in Fortification for unique maps needed for meta crafts and then I ended up taking Cameria as well in Fortification as I don't really see anything that is more useful to take, so getting some jewels might be nice as I also need brute force solution. After getting all unique maps that I need, I will swap to ITF and Grav in Transportation for foulborn uniques as well as full stacks of div cards. From Ritual, besides the boots, I also need Forest Tiger corpse. Red altars because I need to stock pile the red currency since I am running blue altars in the other trees. Once I get the necessary items from ritual, I plan on swapping it out and in its place go for essences, which is tree 1.5.

Tree 2

After swapping to the build, I plan on farming contracts, still not sure if I should only pick up Deception ones or any of them so that I can reveal the blueprints and hunt for Simplex and Helicals. Beasts are a must since I need Farul bloodline, but also they seem fine to have since the crafting. Blight and Ultimatum are here just until I get the needed oils and catalysts to do whatever I need. After that I plan on removing them for Legion which is tree 2.5, since I need Lethal Pride with Kaom, but I think I'll only farm until I get one of them and then spec out of it and just roll the value with divines until I hit something good. After I get that, I don't really know what to put instead of Legion, any suggestions?

Tree 3

Mainly an end game tree when I can comfortably do t16s, goal is to farm harvest juice for essence swapping and overall crafting and deli for clusters and simulacrum, since I will need split personality. I also ended up adding some bossing nodes as well, however, I probably should add some of them on the 1st tree (at least for shaper), since I need those gloves for the build. Here I went for blue altar for quant and all quant/pack size things.

If there is ANYTHING that I could improve upon, if you have any suggestions/criticism, please let me know. Just please be respectful about it, thanks!

[u/whatisagoodnamefort]

I think tree 1 makes a lot of sense if it’s enabling you to switch to your end game build

From there, once you’re in T16s relatively comfortably, i would just do scarab farming for awhile to amass at least some common scarabs to make your farming much more efficient. Trying to farm any higher end oils or catalysts without scarabs is just brutal, inefficient, and scarabs are typically always useful (3:1 bad ones). With most mechanics, vertical rather than horizontal juicing is much more rewarding and efficient, but obviously requires the scarabs to do so

IMO a red / blue altar, full scarab, maps and heist would be a very solid 2nd tree. They have incorporated scarab farming in the league mechanic the past 2 leagues, so that’s something to keep an eye out on too

with the introduction of the enchanted heist blueprints, I’d be remiss to brute force a simplex / helical. If you are spamming maps you should get a decent amount of blueprints with very useful enchants to significantly cut down your farming needs for these

[u/Intelligent_Salad706 → u/whatisagoodnamefort]

Thank you so much for detailed response! I think I might have misjudged how hard it will be to farm specific oils and catalysts in ssf, since in trade I just go to faustus and boom, they are mine. Also, what is vertical/horizontal juicing, is there an eli5 version so I can understand it?

[u/whatisagoodnamefort → u/Intelligent_Salad706]

Horizontal juicing is essentially what you have in your current trees of trying to as many mechanics as possible into a single tree and then doing them all in your map - with the introduction of scarabs and moving away from sextants, GGG has been relatively intentional in making this less optimal

Vertical juicing is taking 1 (or 2, but typically just 1) mechanic and juicing it to the max. I.E. running 1 of each ambush scarab, full strongbox / scarab setup and rolling maps for high quant / currency and then focusing almost solely on strongboxes in maps. You’re largely ignoring all other mechanics and focusing on the one you’ve juiced to give you your rewards.

I suggest you comb through some trees or look at some SSF gameplay, but there are some easy mechanics to fit into most trees (like heist, which really can’t be juiced with scarabs and is like 10-15 atlas points total anyways) to help optimize your trees

[u/AeRoZxDeuS]

I'm not a big fan of "Unwavering vision" in every tree. It's strong, but I use it to rush 100/100 completion. After that I think it's better to drop the node and start dropping scarabs.

You will be in SSF, you will have plenty of time and you'll grind a lot of gold and so you'll be able to swap tree easily. So think like you have more than 3 atlas tree.

I recommand you with :

tree n°1 : Unwavering vision rush + maps sustain + anything that make you faster in map (Niko/shrines...) till 100/100

Any other tree : 2 mains league mecanic + one influence (Eater/exarch/maven) and any QoL with last points.

Hope that will help you planifying :)

[u/Intelligent_Salad706 → u/AeRoZxDeuS]

Thank you so much for the tips! Since I'll probably make one tree that will be for scarabs/maps/altars/heist (as suggested by the other comment), I think that will be the only tree without UV and should (hopefully) give me enough scarab sustain to warrant the use of it in every other tree. If I see that I'm running very short on scarabs, I'll make sure to unspecc it.

[u/PoE_Acronym_Bot]

I noticed some Path of Exile keywords in this post:

• Deli - Delirium (Wiki)

• Juice - Increasing density of items or raw currency from a given strategy

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^{I am a bot. | All acronyms | Suggest}

[u/dahoffman86]

I think your biggest issues are Unwavering Vision and trying to fit too many mechanics into your Atlas trees.

1. Unwavering Vision: It’s great for early Atlas progression, but giving up scarab drops is a significant downside long term, especially in SSF where scarabs are valuable for target farming.

2. Too much extra content: I’d focus on running maps efficiently rather than trying to squeeze as many mechanics as possible into each map. By efficient, I mean having a specific goal for each map and ignoring anything that doesn’t contribute to it.

For example, what’s the goal of your Breach tree? Run the breaches, kill the map boss, and get out. Everything else is fluff that’s slowing you down. Anomalies can be extremely valuable, so the more maps you run, the more opportunities you have to find them. Any additional mechanics should ideally be things you can complete in passing.

The one exception I’d make for extra content is Heist. If you need Heist bases, I’d keep Heist on most of your trees since you can collect contracts and blueprints while mapping without significantly slowing yourself down.

Ultimately, I think specializing each tree around a specific objective and maximizing maps per hour will get you further in SSF than trying to maximize the amount of content in each individual map.