Path of Exile: Heist Mechanic Details and Analysis
A deep dive into the mechanical additions of Path of Exile Heist.
Last week Grinding Gear Games announced the details of their next expansion to the critically acclaimed ARPG, Path of Exile. The theme is inspired by heist movies, where a crew is assembled, each with a very specific set of skills, to execute a nearly impossible and elaborate heist.
On the surface, this seems like something that would not mesh well with the fast-paced action style of Path of Exile, but from what we have seen, the implementation stays true to the spirit of Path of Exile. Heist allows you to push hard and brute-force your way through the mechanic with very little downside. On top of the new Heist league mechanic, GGG is adding many new features which makes it very apparent they are testing for Path of Exile 2. In this article, I am going to take a deeper look into Heist itself. I will dig into the additional mechanics in future articles, there are enough that they warrant their own deep dive. For more articles make sure to subscribe below, and if you want to discuss anything here, please stop by my Twitch or follow me on Twitter.
Contracts
Contracts are the baseline content in Heist, they are intended to drop through the campaign and maps at an average rate of one contract person zone. According to GGG you can have more contracts drop in a single zone, especially when running well-rolled maps.
Contracts are craftable and seem to have some affixes that overlap with maps while having other unique affixes that are exclusive to Heist. With the examples we have seen, there is no apparent benefit to crafting contracts. There is a chance that the teasers do not include beneficial mods.
There are a few explanations for this. The first is that there is no inherent benefit to crafting your contracts other than adding difficulty. While I like the ability to optionally add difficulty to Path of Exile content, often that difficulty comes with additional rewards. I will be very surprised if this is the case, but I am not ruling it out. It would be a large oversight to simply allow you to make contracts craftable without a benefit to those added modifiers. If this is the case, there is no real reason to ever add modifiers to your contracts.
The second is that the added benefits are not apparent. This means that there is no visible way to see what additional rewards you have added for the risk. In addition to that, it will require players to do research outside of the game to understand the upside to crafting contracts. Path of Exile is a complex that requires players to learn many of the mechanics outside of the game, and not by trial and error, adding another such mechanic is problematic.
All of the contracts that we have seen have been below level 68, which means that they are from the campaign and not maps. This could mean that you do not get benefits from additional modifiers until mapping. I am not completely convinced that this is the case, Vaal side areas from the campaigns have modifiers and increase quantity, there is a precedent for added quantity to zones prior to maps.
Finally, it is possible that the quantity is simply omitted from the teasers, and when the game goes live we will get quantity modifications for each mod we add to the contract, allowing us to roll juicy contracts for juicy rewards, as we would with maps.
The rewards of each contract mostly enable you to play additional Heist content. While you earn any items that monsters drop, the real rewards come in the form of markers and intel.
Markers are the currency of the league they are required to start a contract and a larger number of them are earned upon the success of the contract. Markers drop from monsters across the entire game, including The Labyrinth and other past league mechanics. In contracts, pay markers to run a contract, upon completion of a contract you will get back more markers than you paid.
Intel allows you to do research for grand heists, the more you research you do, the more reward rooms, and escape routes you will make available when running your Grand Heist. Using intel seems optional, but will likely be something you want to use. To me, Intel looks like a soft version of Sulphite. Sulphite was a gatekeeper for running Delve content, without it you were unable to run any.
The biggest benefit to contracts is that there is no requirement you run them when you encounter them. Incusions, Blight, Abysses, and many more league mechanics require you to run the content when you encounter it. In Heist, you can defer the content to when you want to play it, similar to Delve, but you are not gated by Sulphite, meaning you can simply run contracts and blueprints all day, as long as you have a way to acquire them. According to GGG, you can at least get more contracts when running Blueprints. While it may be impossible without trading, it seems like it is plausible you can run only Heist content without setting foot into maps, once established.
Blueprints
If Contracts are your incursions, blueprints are your Temple of Atzoatl. These are the one per act encounters where the league specific rewards will drop. Much like contracts, they can be crafted, and like contracts, there are the same concerns related to how much reward crafting them provides.
Blueprints seem to be built with the greater investment reaps greater rewards mentality. The more time you spend researching the blueprint, and the more intel you use to do so, the more you will unlock for your run. I believe that it will be optimal to run Blueprints with as much unlocked content as possible, ideally, you will work towards unlocking a full blueprint, then run it, as it will maximize the rewards gained.
Blueprints can be sold, so there may be a huge market for fully researched Blueprints. If you are able to run Contracts quickly, unlock content on Blueprints, and sell them off, you may be able to make a large profit with minimal investment. I suspect there will be a portion of the player base looking to farm blueprints for the league specific content.
Specialists
Path of Exile: Heist introduces a number of new NPCs who will aid you in your quest to pull off the most elaborate Heists. They are known as specialists, they have a specific set of skills, from opening doors to picking locks, to jumping through a room full of lasers. These specialists will join you when you venture into Contracts and Blueprints, bringing one with you to Contracts and three to Blueprints. Each specialist has skills needed to complete the heist, and level up while heists are completed.
In his Q&A with ZiggyD, Chris Wilson alluded to Specialists as a testbed for Diablo 2 style mercenaries. Giving you an NPC to gear up and perform actions for you. Path of Exile has forgone Mercenaries for many years, and many players have been craving a mercenary style mechanic.
I do have some concerns about the Specialists though. It seems like this is the area will you will be spending most of your micromanagement time. Since Heist contract has level requirements for each skill, you need to make sure that you are leveling your Specialists up in a way that you have enough skill levels to complete any encounters you come up against. Chris mentioned that skill level requirements increase as the content gets higher in level. I am very concerned that you will push beyond your Specialists level, forcing you to do lower-level content to level up your specialists.
Management of gear is another area of concern of mine for Specialists. I am concerned that I will have to constantly swap gear across different specialists, or make sure that I get specific items to aid in my heists.
There is a chance that GGG added these mechanics, but they are very forgiving and many of my concerns will not come to bear. I hope that this is the case, constant need to micromanage a group of NPCs will really harm the overall Heist experience.
Alert Level
The alert level system is the risk vs reward aspect of Heist. As you push deeper into hidden rooms, and lock doors, you will increase your Alert Level. Once you reach a threshold, you will have a few moments to gather the last items you can and the whole zone goes into lockdown, sending infinite waves of monsters at you. A zone goes into lockdown when you loot the objective as well, meaning that lockdown is unavoidable.
Once in lockdown, you will be unable to loot any more items, including the objective of the Heist itself. GGG has made it very clear that they do not intend this to be an oppressive mechanic, allowing players to push as far as possible, but also not punishing players for killing too many monsters. Although, I would not be surprised if GGG reduces the amount of alert level each action generates after Reddit gets to complaining about it. I see this as the mechanic that will upset them the most. Personally, I don’t think it will be too oppressive, and adds a bit of planning to your run, making sure you grab the items that are important to you and pushing the zone into lockdown at the correct time.
I would imagine that the optimal play-style will be to push the alert level as far as you can, and just before, or just after the lockdown is triggered, grab the objected and get the fuck out.
Trinkets
Path of Exile will be gaining its first new item slot in many many years. Thief’s Trinkets are Heist specific items that further modify Heist content. This is an interesting implementation, as Yoji puts it in his “Actual Heist Trailer”, they are Breach Rings done right. He is 100% correct, Breach rings had excellent benefits to running breaches but were basically useless in 90% of the game’s content. Since the Trinkets are an additional item slot, you don’t have to sacrifice any other items to equip content specific items. This is similar to the ring enchants for Blight, they full a space that doesn’t exist currently in the game, not forcing you to choose between existing item slots and improving the new mechanic.
There is honestly, no real downside to this. These purely improve the quality of your Heist runs with no downside at all. Since they are corrupted, and can not be crafted, you will always want to keep an eye out for upgrades. This takes all of the good parts of things like Breach Rings and Talismans and removes all of the downsides.
Overall, I think that Heist is going to be a ton of fun. Heist is mostly just additional maps that you can run when you want, sell for currency, and gain league specific rewards. Heist won’t go off without warts, every league has a few execution misses, but Heist is a high concept league without a lot of moving pieces. I suspect most of the charm in the league is going to be the simplicity of the gameplay and the complex personalities of the NPCs you encounter along the way. For more articles make sure to subscribe below, and if you want to discuss anything here, please stop by my Twitch or follow me on Twitter.