Gameplay Help and Discussion - A guide to the Labyrinth - Forum - Path of Exile (2024)

Welcome Exiles to my Labyrinth guide, I'll be explaining the fundamentals of the Labyrinth

_________________________________________________________________________

So what is Lab?

Labyrinth is the only place within the game which allows you to obtain your Ascendancy, there are 4 variations of difficulty; Normal, Cruel, Merciless, Eternal

Not only does the Labyrinth provide you with access to your Ascendancy, it's also allows you to enchant; gloves, boots and helmets. (With the introduction of Delve and Betrayal, this is no longer the only way to obtain enchants but it is the only way to enchant Unique bases.

What's needed to enter the Labyrinth

- Completing Trials of Ascendancy, which are found throughout the story;
- Normal Labyrinth requires 6 trials
- Cruel Labyrinth requires 3 trials
- Merciless Labyrinth requires 3 trials
- Eternal Labyrinth requires 6 trials (All of which are found in maps randomly
- Offering to the Goddess (Eternal Labyrinth only)
- Sanity
- Time

What are the benefits of running the Labyrinth

- It is one of the endgame activities in which players will run Eternal Labyrinth in hopes of items and enchants
- Enchanting gear to sell for currency
- Allows you to generate income while spending a minor amount to enter the Eternal Labyrinth
- Izaro has some amazing quotes
_________________________________________________________________________

What's inside the Labyrinth

Each difficulty of Labyrinth hosts a different amount of traps, rooms and bonuses. When completing the Eternal Labyrinth though, you'll encounter a vast variety of extra traps and fonts which aim to slow you down or even kill you.

Normal Labyrinth

Starting with the Normal Labyrinth you'll find a short generally linear layout as seen below, the Normal Labyrinth also contains the least amount of traps and rooms, this allows low level players and new players to get a basic understanding as to how the Labyrinth works (Please note it will not always look exactly like this

Cruel Labyrinth

Cruel Labyrinth isn't too different from Normal labyrinth but it does have a few small changes, for a start there are is an increase to side rooms and possible paths to take. It also introduces traps which are found in the final trial room, these range from darts to spikes, these are aimed at adding an additional layer of challenge. A typical Cruel Labyrinth layout can be found below

Merciless Labyrinth

Merciless Labyrinth introduces a whole host of new features when compared to Normal and Cruel Labyrinths. One of these is the gold door, there's nothing special about this door overall though it's aim is to send the player to find the golden key to access one of two doors (Sometimes it's just one golden door, depends on the layout). It also introduces the player to a special feature to Labyrinth, Argus. Argus is another boss found within Merciless and Eternal Labyrinth he provides the player with an additional Treasure key when killed it's advised to always kill Argus due to it being a 100% drop rate for the key. Layout wise nothing much changes from Cruel just additional rooms and the addition of secret passages, these aren't always useful but in most cases it will allow you to skip an entire room and knock off a few minutes for your run, which for some is needed. A picture of a gold door, Argus and a secret passge can be found below;

Eternal Labyrinth

Eternal Labyrinth (Often referred to as Uber Lab) is the final and most challenging form of Labyrinth, this is due to the level of the area coupled with the changes to traps and in some cases the length of the Labyrinth but with the extra difficulty comes extra rewards. Eternal Labyrinth has the special addition of allowing a number of additional Helmet enchants which can't be obtained in any other Labyrinths. An example of a font can be found below

_________________________________________________________________________

This section will provide additional information and help for the Eternal Labyrinth.

Eternal Labyrinth builds

The builds found within this section are what I think to be the best currently for running lab, there may be others you can use so feel free but for lab runners there are only a few builds.

_________________________________________________________________________

Flasks

There are only a handful of useful flasks used within Lab, for example as a QoTF lab runner I use these flasks;

These allow me to avoid basically everything the lab can throw at me, and you'll be looking to obtain some flasks with the same prefixes/suffixes you won't always want the same flasks as me due to it not suiting your build. So in place of a jade flask/stibnite you could use a Basalt/Granite flask. The main affixes you are looking for though will be Warding/Staunching/Adrenaline these alone will provide you tons of utility whilst running lab.

Warding removes all curses given by fonts during a lab run and the fonts found on days it spawns with Izaro, this basically removes any extra difficulty and in turn rewards you with a free key!

Staunching is one of the most desirable to obtain unless your build is already Bleed immune! The spike traps and the sentinel fonts (Only found in uber and map trials) due to these two traps bleeding it's highly recommended no matter what to keep a Staunching flask on you it will save your life.

Your Quicksilver flask is the 3rd most important flask as this is one of your main ways to speed your lab times up. As a QoTF Pathfinder the rolls I currently have are better for me than others due to the amount of extra Flask duration/charges I have so again roll it to suit you but I would highly suggest the Adrenaline suffix as it provides even more movement speed!

Last but not least your Health/Mana flask if you require one than again pick one that suits you,always aim to get one with the correct affixes as this is your only other form of defence aside from those used in your build or other flasks used.

_________________________________________________________________________

Izaro and his weapons

Izaro has a few different setups he uses which differ lab to lab and day to day, dealing with this can be a pain for some people due to each weapon having a different mechanic and changing the damage he can possibly do. Let's not forget about his green friend, The Goddess of Justice.

There are a few ways to avoid his damage though, the main one being move around Izaro and try to keep behind him as much as possible due to this attacks having obvious animations and long wind up times this allows the player to move themselves way before Izaro attacks, this effectively removes any chance of dying unless the player ends up court between a fully charged Izaro and his big hammer or something equally as painful. There are some days when Izaro will receive some heavy buffs from the previous phases, if this is the case you have to decide for yourself which you will allow to buff Izaro.

_________________________________________________________________________

Traps

There are many different things found within lab which will aim to slow you down and/or kill you, there are different ways to deal with certain traps but the majority of them require you to pay attention to how they work.

_________________________________________________________________________

Darkshrines
There are a handful of Darkshrine buffs you can obtain some are useless while others are the most desired while farming Lab.

_________________________________________________________________________

Lab-aids (3rd party websites/programs)

The main form of help you can get is a picture for that days Lab layout which are found over at http://www.poelab.com this site has being running for a long time and has provided the community with lab information every reset for every lab, if you're new to lab running I recommend using this site to help run labs until you learn and understand how layouts work.

The other one is the new 3rd party program called Lab Compass, I've never used it myself and never will since it doesn't do anything for me but for newer players it will more than likely help,
it works just like poelab does but instead of using a web browser to keep a track on what to do next the compass does it for you with an overlay which looks like a compass (Surprise!).

_________________________________________________________________________

How to run lab efficiently

This is probably the single most asked question simply due to inexperience when running lab. Each day the lab resets the layout changes, this means silver keys, silver doors, darkshrines etc all move to a random location. Some days it's easy enough to hit majority of the shrines/gauntlets/silver doors but on other days it will be harder to do so.

Gauntlets are generally not worth the extra time due to the low amount of loot possible from the Lab troves, I would only recommend doing them if your build is fast enough to complete the gauntlet without delaying your total time by a drastic amount for example the BV Pathfinder build can complete them due to its insane movement speed, I can't say the same for other builds as I have never done them. But if the Gauntlet provides you with a Curious Lockbox then yes it's worth doing as the end of lab chests have much better loot tables

It is also worth noting that things will not always spawn within the same area each time you enter lab, there are 3 places within a room which the different items can spawn. I won't tell you how to identify each one as I would be here for a much longer time, that will come down to experience and time you will notice some rooms have certain layouts upon entering which will allow you to make a quick decision on which direction to head to obtain said object.

_________________________________________________________________________

Treasure chests & Enchants
Last but not least is the main reason we run lab, the loot! There is no special way to open chests as they are randomised every time.

Possible loot is as follows;

- An Offering to the Goddess
- Two additional Treasure Keys
- Multiple maps (Only in the Merciless Labyrinth and the Eternal Labyrinth)
- Multiple Sacrifice Vaal fragments (Only drops with the corrupted item box)
- Multiple divination cards
- Multiple currency items
- Multiple skill gems with quality (Silver door varients only drop level 1 gems with random quality while end of lab chests can drop with a variety of levels and quality)
- Multiple amulets, rings, belts and jewels
- Multiple body armours, gloves, boots and helmets.
- Multiple weapons of all types.
- 3 unique items
- ilvl 84 items
- Items with additional sockets
- Quality currency chest (scraps, whetstones, gcp, chisels)
- Chance for Lab only unique items; Chitus' Needle, Death's Door, Glitterdisc, Izaro's Dilemma, Izaro's Turmoil, Spine of the First Claimant, Viper's Scales, Winds of Change, Xirgil's Crank

This will also apply to the Silver chests found behind Silver doors but with increased quantity as of patch 3.1, but these chests no matter how small the amount of loot you obtain will overtime provide more than enough profit for constantly running lab. If a key on average costs 4c and you bought 20 of them, you would only need to make 90c in 20 runs to gain a 10c profit this is obviously on the low end in fact I'm pretty sure you'd rarely see that sort of return due to the large range of drops possible.

_________________________________________________________________________

Enchants

These generally will change every league depending on which skills are meta but generally you're looking for skills most commonly used on the most commonly used base;

Starkonjas
Rat's Nest
Any of the unique Nightmare Bascinets
Shaper/Elder bases
High iLvl rare bases commonly used

I won't tell you which ones are good but you can tell by simply searching for the enchant and base on www.poe.trade if there are few listings you've more than likely obtained a bad one so re-roll it! Enchants while they can provide a metric ton of income aren't reliable enough to make profit they are simply the icing on the cake and provide extra sources of income every so often, for example 4th day of Abyss league I hit a +1 barrage on a Starkonjas which means I lost a lot of money due to the wrong base but still managed to sell it for 130c this wasn't on top of the other loot I obtained which included a Tukohama's Fortress netting me a hefty 500c lab run while this is an amazing amount it's not common enough to get constantly in the past 140 lab runs I have done since I haven't had such good RNG.

It's also worth noting DO NOT WASTE UBER ENCHANTS ON YOUR GLOVES you can farm merciless lab for those, it's a minor difference stat wise at the cost of possible multiple exalts, you can if you so desire enchant your boots in uber but I prefer to either do it in Merciless or buy the enchant myself

_________________________________________________________________________

Final notes

All in all, lab isn't made for everyone and it does require a lot more patience than running maps due to the ever changing layout and rewards. It does pay off when doing enough of them though.

The main idea behind lab is to roll the RNG dice as much as possible while spending as little time running the lab, the more you can do per hour means more chances of good loot per hour.