[3.20] League starter Raider for Heist | Hit Explosive Arrow + some others | Come heist with us

Im a bad player. I think my mechanical skill is something like 5/10, my game knowledge is 4/10 and my build creation is about 1/10. But i do love this game and i know that community will help me with this thread so we can create a bunch of useful resources for heist.

My goal is to create a heist compendium for all players so that you dont need to search all over the internet for some useful info about it. To start i combined garf TR (all links will be posted below) and asmodeus TR heist raiders into one build and modified it slightly.
I'll try to keep this thread updated whenever it's possible

heist is a separate game mode added a couple years back in 3.12.
It consists of 2 main types of content: contracts and blueprints. Gameplay of them is actually almost exactly the same with blueprints just basically being a couple of contracts stitched together with a different reward at the end. And it all boils down to enter a instance, run through collecting intermediate rewards from chests around the place, get to the end of a maze, click shiny and then run out.

Theres a lot of different strategies on how to heist, but to answer briefly - yes, you should heist at the start of the league, because amount of chaos recipe and raw currency drops are way bigger than possible currency you can make in the early maps. Heist at the start is one of the best ways to kick-start a build for faster mapping afterwards.

Honestly, i find heist to be quite relaxing and enjoyable. I got my first level 100 in PoE by doing heists in 3.12, i played some heist basically every league after that and i do like it.
There's a common belief that heist is annoying, clunky and require an insanely tanky build, but that's just not true, especially if you build a character for a heist specifically (well, i guess for running fast).
Another thing i like about heist is that you dont need to focus all that much on a game (apart from running and steering lol) so you i can listen to podcasts and/or watch some streams on another monitor

In act 6 you'll start to encounter a weird "rogue cache" somewhere during your journey through the campaign. Inside of it you will find a contract and strange coins called rogue markers
If you use markers while being in town or in your h/o a portal will open leading you to Rogue Harbor, shady part of town occupied by a bunch of.. well.. rogues, actually.
Anyways, lore aside that first contract will teach you basics: how to interact with Adiyah, Whakano and Faustus (those 3 are your main buddies for first couple of days), how to pick a companion goon and how to perform a heist contract.
To start a heist you will need to talk to Adiyah, pick a corresponding rogue and pay some amount of Rogue Markers. She will then open a portal leading to a "map" of sorts.
Inside of a heist there's 2 stages - going in to snatch and escape.
GOING IN
After you go through a contract portal you'll end up in a safe "buffer zone" that lead you to the contract area. When inside of that are a progress bar will appear that indicates Alert level.
Alert level raises only when you open chests inside of a heist and if you get caught up in a pulse of an observer totems found in Perception contracts. That's it, killing mobs or opening doors does nothing to it.
If Alert level reaches 100% lockdown will begin, area will spawn some extra mobs and a timer will appear. You can still open chests while this is happening, but every time you open one you'll get a small penalty that shortens the timer. Once the timer runs out, casing of the heist target will be completely shut down and you will not be able to open it to complete a contract and also you will not be able to re-enter a contract.
So, it this part boils down to: go in, grab as many chests as you can (or as many as you need for that strategy you are going for) while not triggering the alarm and then grab heist target. Pretty easy, huh?
If you die during this part, you will drop everything that you looted from that contract, but since you can still enter a portal it's no big deal.
ESCAPE
But after lockdown.. if you die you'll lose everything that you earned forever. Soo.. just dont die 4head.
So, after lockdown all you need and most of the time can do is just run to the exit. Some doors will reappear to slow you down, but nothing that you and your buddy-rogue could not handle, right?
This part is pretty straight forward. Just, as i said, dont die.

After you finish a contract (hopefully successfully) you will be granted a blueprint reveal (more on that later), some exp for your rogue companion and you can then sell your heist target to Faustus for a chunk of rogue markers and start again.

This is the base on which all heist is built. All in all blueprints follow the same pattern, with a slight variations in the end, but if you finish a contract you'll pretty much know what to expect from all other contracts and/or bp's.

In heist there is 9 possible types of jobs and contracts related to those jobs. For ease of understanding every job got a corresponding Rogue-specialist (main rogue) and some supplementary rogues. Differences between being main and supplementary is the ability to reach highest possible level for that job, that level being 5. Supplementary goons capped somewhere bellow 5, each rogue also got a unique perk (passive or active) and 4 item slots with of them being unique for each heist rogue.
When you first enter rogue harbor, there will be only 3 rogue's available and to unlock others you just need to do contracts in order:
Tibbs-> Tullina-> Nenet.
Karst-> Huck-> Niles-> Vinderi-> Gianna
Isla is just a sad loner :(



Here's a quick info on goons and my ranking of them


Alright, now we know some info about our buddies, we need to get them dressed (eventually, no pressure). As i said all rogues got 4 pieces of gear, 3 can be shared between them and 1 is a special for each one.


Ok, lets move on to contracts and what we gain from them.
As a baseline each successfully completed contract always award you with a Wakando BP reveal. You will use them to reveal reward rooms in BP's. Second reward from completing a contract is a Heist target that can be sold to Faustus for various amount of Rogue Markers based on a heist target value (moderate->high->precious->priceless).
But, apart from those 2 rewards contracts vary by item types that they offer in big chests.
Types of rewards


Ok! We can finally move onto discussing contracts. As i said theres 9 types of jobs, so 9 types of contracts basically. Not all of them are equal in terms of profitability and 90% of the time all you will run is deception, lockpicking, perception and CT. (i will rank them when we will discuss heist strategies, and i just list them for now with my comments)



Whew. Thats a handful of random info already!
Thankfully, some awesome dude/dudette made a great cheatsheet with all the info Here

Ok, and now for the second part of the Heist - Blueprints.
Blueprints are like a grand heist, where you plan your little journey beforehand and go in sneaky-sneaky Ocean’s 11 style. (in reality it’s pretty much the same as a normal contract but bigger).
Blueprints spawn with 3 or 4 wings (4 wings being more desirable), each wing containing a heist-traget room with a bunch of rewards to choose from based on bp type and (i can be wrong on that one) 7 siderooms per wing (for a total of 21 or 28). You use Rogue Markers alongside reveals generated by completing contracts to reveal said side-rooms and/or wings. As a rule of thumb: wings are always revealed using giana and side-rooms revealed via whakano. You can most of the time skip special “escape route” reveal, but make your decision based on escape route location (sometimes it will spawn right next to the heist-target room and it is actually useful).

There is 4 types blueprints, or i should say 4 types of rewards in blueprints and only 1 of them is actually profitable to run no matter what and others are somewhat lacking.


To run the blueprint you need to plan it first.
Each wing require 3 rogues with a matching job type and level. You dont need to use different rogues to fill each job per wing, but you’ll lose a bonus from using a different 3 then, so aim to fill all 3 slots with a usefull rogues as outlined in previous sections of this guide (vinderi, karst, nenet being top priority). Other wings can be filled with the same people as only 3 rogue actually goes in with you despite the fact that they all are in the “buffer zone” for that blueprint, so just aim for the best rogues you can use for it. (it’s kinda stupid i know)

Thats basically it for blueprint knowledge i think? See? Pretty much the same as contracts, but with extra steps.
Now we can move onto heist strategies!

League started, you made it to hillock and all good. You progress through the campaign and a decent or you pace and thinkin about them exalts divines then you suddenly notice that white maps gear set in your pob require you to get aegis aurora, you open /trade and see that that damned shield is 2 divines now. You think to yourself - there’s no way i’m gonna make 2 divines when i hit lvl 62.. huh?
If you ever found yourself in that situation i present to you the absolute best, pound for pound mechanic in the game to gather raw currency when your character cannot juice maps/kill bosses or do some other lucrative content (imma just ignore that currency flipping and crafting altogether, that’s a whole other game). That mechanic is heist btw. But how can we actually make money through it?

Strategy 1. “wrongfully accused”
tldr: buy lp/demo from 53, then after 59 add agi/bf. Bank rares for chaos recipe, disregard females acquire chaos orbs until level 69 or so, buy gear you need, smash maps. 2-2.5 hours TOPS.

Strategy 2: Heister junior
tldr: buy lp demo from 53, add CT and decept from 59. Always check for priceless artifacts, pour your soul into it and acquire a lot of $$$ to absolutely smash map (as well as succumb to the endless grind). 2-3 days.

Strategy 3. I take whats mine and take some more
TLDR: be lvl 59-60. Focus on Deception, CT, Perception with gianna. You want to get as many Gianna reveals as humanly possible and start running bp’s day 2 or 3 to make godzillion amounts of $.

Hit EA Raider for endless heist.
Small update for 3.20, as nothing really changed. Now goes only up to level 67 since i havent played it at lvl 93 (and honestly not sure if i will), so not to confuse people i just deleted it.
Just did kind of a "winter cleaning" on it, shuffled some gems around, got a better pathing + passives, etc.

Check notes for additional notes.



Alternative:

POB for CA+TR Raider based around doing endless heist at level 61-62. just to give you guys some baseline while i work and write this guide
This version imo is inferior to hit EA in endless heistand i wont be updating it.


Blueprint and level83 heist farmer by Asmodeus:


Feel free to try those one, but i didnt like them.