Strategy
Grand Expedition remains one of the strongest early-league currency farms in 0.5.5, and this guide is the practical case for it. Aldru’s Legacy is gone from the patch, which removes the min-maxing that used to surround Aldru’s Saga — the method is now simply to explore freely and run every Grand Expedition you find. The appeal is that Grand Expedition drops large amounts of raw currency even on a mediocre remnant roll, so the floor stays high while the ceiling is enormous.
On travel maps the rule is narrow and deliberate: ignore everything else and look only for Expedition. Check each one, run it if it is worth running, and skip it entirely if it is not. The creator pairs this with Ghost March threaded boots, which let a dodge roll pass through enemies, plus Cast on Dodge, to reach expedition bosses without killing a single monster.
This is not a beginner strategy. With Ex-merion spirit stacking removed, Grand Expedition currently sits among the hardest content in the game — the monsters are both extremely tanky and hit extremely hard.
Atlas Tree & Setup
- Logbooks: Grand Expedition cannot drop logbooks, so you must run ordinary Expedition to sustain them. Destroy the expedition flag pole in regular maps, and allocate the Expedition Atlas passive that increases logbook drop chance per runic modifier on runic monsters.
- Tablets: three Irradiated tablets with increased monster rarity.
- Waystones: random Tier 15 maps, rerolled to avoid modifiers your build cannot survive (the creator specifically rolls off burning ground).
The one mechanic that actually matters in the encounter is rune proliferation. A rune surrounded by golden brackets will proliferate into the next remnant. The rule of thumb is straightforward: purple proliferation runes are good, black ones are not, and golden proliferated runes are excellent. Identical runes do not stack — a Bond rune proliferated into one remnant will not stack with another Bond rune elsewhere.
Top-tier runes to look for: Opulent (increased monster rarity), Bond, Power, Time, Death, and the blue Rebirth rune. These make the monsters far harder but hugely more rewarding, and they pay out even without much rarity on gear once several stack onto one monster.
Investment & Returns
- Investment: mid. Three rarity Irradiated tablets and a Tier 15 Waystone per run, plus the logbook sustain loop. No unique gear is required, though movement tech such as Ghost March boots meaningfully raises throughput.
- Returns: high. The creator farmed 163 Divine Orbs in a single day of Grand Expedition, enough to buy a Mageblood outright at 163 Divines. A raw Mirror of Kalandra also dropped from a random monster inside a Grand Expedition — that was luck, not the strategy, and should not be counted as expected value.
- Scaling: returns scale with how many stacked golden-proliferated runes you can survive. A build that can only clear the safe rolls earns a fraction of one that can take a fully stacked monster.
Step-by-step
- Run ordinary Expedition in regular maps and break the flag poles to sustain logbooks. Allocate the Expedition logbook-drop Atlas passive.
- Roll random Tier 15 Waystones, rerolling any modifier your build cannot handle.
- Slot three Irradiated tablets with increased monster rarity.
- On travel maps, ignore everything except Expedition. Check each one and skip the ones that are not worth the time.
- In Grand Expedition, read the golden brackets to see which runes proliferate into the next remnant. Prioritise Opulent, Bond, Power, Time, Death and Rebirth.
- Do not stack duplicate runes — the same rune will not double up.
- Push the highest rune stacking your build can actually survive, since that is where the payout lives.
Risks
- This is close to the hardest content in the game right now. The creator’s explicit gate: if you cannot comfortably clear a Tier 15, 200% Delirious, six-modifier map, do not come here.
- The mirror in the video’s title was a random drop, not a farmed outcome. Treat the Mageblood — 163 Divines in a day — as the realistic result.
- Stacking too many proliferated runes on one monster can wall a build that has the clear speed but not the single-target or survivability to match.
- Logbook sustain is a separate loop. If you neglect regular Expedition you simply run out of Grand Expeditions to run.
Credits & Source
Method credited to Phalanx. See the source video for the full run footage and rune explanations: How I Got A Mirror And Mageblood In 1 Day | Path Of Exile 2.