Path of Exile: Shaping Your Atlas

Before you start shaping your Path of Exile Atlas, we suggest you read our introduction to the Atlas. Once you've done that, you'll be left with the question: what is "shaping"? Shaping is a mechanic used to increase a map five tiers of difficulty. In other words, shaping lets you move a tier 1 map up to tier 6 in difficulty. You can only shape up to tier 10, since the normal maps only go up in difficulty to tier 15. There are several reasons to shape your maps—perhaps you simply prefer playing certain maps, or you're trying to develop a customized farming pattern. Whatever the case may be, if you're confused about Path of Exile shaping, this guide will point you in the right direction. When you're playing maps, you'll find ones you like and ones you don't like.

 Shaping a map you like is an easy way to get one more high tier map with a layout that you're fond of. Since you'll be wanting to fill out your Atlas for the map rate bonus, having more good layouts to run can be a big advantage. The good layouts can be more than personal preference though. This patch, Grinding Gear Games evened out the experience that is gained on each map, so there aren't maps that are much faster to run. That being said, different builds are better at tackling different map layouts. For example, a Cyclone build tends to like smaller alleys, since they can just run down the alley killing everything without needing to backtrack.

 Maps like Waste Pool and Sewer are extremely good for these builds. Ranged builds, like Ice Shot or Kinetic Blast, on the other hand, prefer open maps like Dunes where you can take full advantage of your range. Finding the maps where your build excels can be a huge boost to your experience gain. There's one other huge reason to shape specific maps: divination cards. Most items in the game can drop from any map equally, but there are a few map specific items. Divination cards are one of those. Certain maps are worth shaping specifically so that you can farm the cards from high tier maps.

 You get both the cards you want and experience, rather than having to give up one for the other. The divination cards worth farming for are up to you, but popular choices include The Doctor (for Headhunter) and Abandoned Wealth (for Exalted Orbs). Shaping was changed a bit in 3.1. Prior to this league, there were specific maps on the Atlas which you would complete to get a "Shaper's Orb" of a specific tier. The tier of the orb typically corresponded to the tier of map it was found in. This changed in 3.1, and now there aren't any specific maps to run for a Shaper's Orb. In fact, Shaper's Orbs never actually drop in https://www.mmoah.com/path-of-exile