I knew before the league started, I wanted to run some heist early on. At some point, I'll be switching out to do other things. I was hoping to get lucky on some decent drops to make a lot of early-game currency to buy some needed upgrades.

First, I did run quite a few maps. One thing I did not do this time around was hit up the heist vendor daily for contracts. That was something I'd have done in the past. With the atlas nodes I went for quite quickly I was going to have more than enough contracts to keep me busy for a while.

It was then time to start the first one. All the different characters in a heist that are needed for different types of jobs need to be unlocked first. This would require running a couple of missions with each one until they invited another member of the crew to join in on one of our heists. I then would unlock that next person assuming the heist was a success.

I mainly focused on going for jewelry and currency chests. Along with just picking up the random chests along the way to try and fill up the alert meter till it was almost full.

The jewelry chests were quite important as I was spamming the chaos recipe. Which requires turning in a full rare set of unidentified gear. The biggest bottleneck in doing so was getting amulets followed by rings. the jewelry chests dropped mountains of amulets. Helping me acquire enough chaos to get a couple of divine orbs that I then could trade for gear upgrades.

Along the way, I also looted quite a few chaos and other lower-tier currencies while running a heist. This came in handy any time I needed to four-link a piece of gear as an upgrade and recolor the sockets to what I needed from all the orbs of fusing and jeweler's orbs I was looting while running heists.

It also came in handy the number of orbs of alchemy I was getting to turn any maps I'd acquire into rare maps. I ended up saving any chisels till I got into red maps. That would end up taking a couple of days so I had a nice stockpile of chisels by then.

I wanted to at least get each heist crew member to level three in their main skill. Some of them like Karst I'd end up taking to level 5 as lockpicking contracts have a lot of the reward types I was after. I wanted him to have level 5 for when it was time to start pulling off the far more rewarding and higher-risk jobs.

Like in any heist you enter in. The place is not on alert yet. Everything that is walking around is easy to take out. I’d then slowly make my way stealing most things in sight till I made it to the main objective of stealing.

While I usually wanted to be near the max of the alert meter. That was not always the result. I was more interested in getting quick experience. Some of the contracts I had were also just not that great. With some rather bad loot as to be expected.

Once you steal the main objective or are not paying attention and over steal setting off the alert. The place goes on lockdown. Many doors and areas need to be opened by your crew member to escape.

Meanwhile, you have waves of harder enemies spawning in trying to take you out. On most types of heists if you get killed it’s over and you drop everything you had looted in that heist. Thankfully I only had a couple of deaths along the way losing out on some loot.

I was kind of shocked I did not get killed more often. For a while, the build I was using had massive issues and still is kind of lacking being able to take damage. I don’t know how many times I'd have a down-blown open and find myself almost getting killed. Having to dance around while waiting for natural heal regen to get me a single heartbeat away from getting killed.

I would usually wait till I had about half a dozen or so of the storyline contracts from heist before I'd take a break from running maps. These can’t be put in the stash and end up taking up inventory space over the long run.

Once those were done, I'd work on getting my next heist crew member to at least level three. Sometimes I'd have a storyline contact that required a higher-level member than I had. In those cases, I'd focus on running a bunch of contracts to raise that crew member level so I could get the storyline job done.

I’d then switch back to running a bunch of maps again. Over time the storyline contracts started to dry up a lot. My heist locker was also starting to get quite a few contacts in it. I always find these things to be quite a fun break when going on quite the map-grinding session.

You could also get some gold while running heist as well. So, it’s not like it was helping out to grow my town as well. I’d say I had much better ways of farming for gold. It was at least something.

Like I was hoping I did luck out even before I made it to grand heists. I ended up looting this piece of armor a couple of times. The higher-stated one I acquired ended up going for two divine orbs. With the others, I looted for going for about ¾ of a divine orb.

I also looted quite a few 10-50 chaos orbs. About 150-160 of them could be exchanged on the currency market for a divine orb. Heists were becoming quite a nice place for me to make some currency.

Final Thoughts

After a while as expected a lot of the items were starting to lose value quickly. There also came a point where I no longer needed to level up my heist characters with standard contracts. I was also not using the chaos recipe any longer as I had much better and quicker methods of farming.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Path Of Exile.