While Sanctum didn’t end up going core at the conclusion of the Sanctum Challenge league, just one league later, it will go back to POE 3.22 Trail of the Ancestors League with some significant changes and reworks.
Here, I’m going to go over everything that’s changed, and what you can expect from the revamped Sanctum.
Overview of Changes
Now, when I say that Sanctum has undergone a major rework, that is not an exaggeration. Almost every aspect of Sanctum has been rebalanced or overhauled.
First of all, you no longer have to build your Sanctums one room at a time through mapping. Instead, a POE Item called a “Forbidden Tome” will drop very rarely.
These tomes represent an entire Sanctum run – one floor at a time! You simply bring this tome to the entrance of the Forbidden Sanctum in the Fellshrine ruins, and you’re off to the races.
Because these Tomes are tradable, this means that you can simply buy up a stockpile of them and farm Sanctum as much as you want! This is a huge boon for dedicated Sanctum farmers, who no longer have to waste time burning maps, massively increasing overall profitability.
Sanctum access isn’t the only thing that’s now tradable, however. Relics, including Unique Relics, are now tradable to other players. This means that you can buy your best-in-slot relic set off of other players, in the same way that you could buy a Heist trinket for heist. It also means that you’ll be able to make a bit of extra POE Orbs selling excess Relics you find along the way.
Relics have also had their affixes “rebalanced”. No examples of this were shown, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see the powerful Inspiration affixes nerfed, and the Resolve gain affixes buffed.
Unique Relics have also been reworked, mostly to account for the removal of Sanctified Relics and Invocations. For example, the reward from the Random Rooms Challenge Run is now two additional Forbidden Tomes, letting you farm Sanctums endlessly. Because Unique Relics are still a guaranteed drop off the final boss, this might end up being incredibly profitable!
Speaking of the final boss, the Herald of the Scourge is no longer optional. During the Sanctum Challenge league, you could simply leave the Sanctum after beating Lycia’s first form, and get all of your run-completion rewards. This is no longer the case, and you’ll have to beat both Lycia and the Herald of the Scourge for a successful run.
This isn’t the only way Sanctum is being made harder, either. The difficulty of later Sanctum Floors has been increased, with both new monsters, and increased monster life and Resolve damage.
In addition, there’s been a balance pass on all Afflictions and Boons.
New Pseudo-Defenses
To offset all this, there’s a major addition to Sanctum in the form of three Pseudo-defense buffs that allows you to reduce Resolve damage you take, based on your player defenses. These buffs are incredibly powerful.
Resolve Aegis gives you a recharging Resolve Energy Shield that can absorb up to half of hits against you. And you can also both mitigate Resolve loss, or straight-up avoid it.
With the overall difficulty increases of Sanctums, these buffs will be crucial for reducing the difficulty enough for consistent clears. Players looking to create a dedicated Sanctum runner should look to scale their Armor, Energy Shield, and Evasion as much as possible.
Something to note, however, is that these buffs scale exclusively via these primary defensive stats. Do not make the mistake of thinking that any old “tanky” character will now lose less Resolve in the Sanctum.
For example, an Energy Shield character scaling armor will find themselves incredibly tanky in the Sanctum, while one focusing on scaling their Life, while capping Block chance and Spell Suppression will find that they receive absolutely no benefit from those defenses in the Sanctum.
Keep this in mind while choosing what build to play if you intend on farming Sanctums.
Rare Monsters in Sanctums
The other major change is the addition of Rare monsters to Sanctum rooms, and the new rule that you must kill every Rare monster before you can leave the room.
This massively increases the difficulty of Sanctum in two different ways.
First, this adds a ton of variance to the Sanctum. No longer will you be facing exclusively unique monsters with predictable attack animations. Now, you have to be prepared for anything and you could easily take a few hits from a Rare with scary modifiers.
Second, you can no longer just zoom past all the enemies to the end of a room. You have to kill every Rare monster. This both increases the overall time it takes to clear a Sanctum, as well as forcing you to interact with many more monsters, giving you more chances to make mistakes and lose Resolve.
Some players have expressed concern over the addition of Rare monsters to the Sanctum, thinking that a Rare monster with a modifier, like Effigy, could end their run outright.
However, something to keep in mind is that monsters dealing damage to you doesn’t necessarily mean Resolve loss. Resolve loss is simply an effect that’s added onto attacks of monsters in the Sanctum. It’s unclear whether damage dealt by skills granted by Rare monster modifiers will cause Resolve loss at all. My guess is that it actually won’t, alleviating a lot of these concerns.
Reward Changes
The next major change I want to spotlight is the changes to Sanctum’s rewards.
During Sanctum league, the primary chase rewards were Sanctified Relics and Invocations, with raw currency providing a consistent reward for each run.
Now, however, Sanctified Relics and Invocations are gone, and the Sanctum rewards exclusively raw currency. This is a bit concerning, in that if POE Currency rewards were nerfed at all, I suspect that many players will simply write Sanctum off as “not rewarding enough”.
Something that may end up offsetting that, however, is the fact that Relics are now tradable, including Unique Relics. This will both allow you to get a best-in-slot Relic setup pretty easily by trading for it and allow you to sell excess Relics that drop for you.
It will also allow you to sell Unique Relics, such as the one for the No-Hit Challenge Run for the Original Sin unique ring.
With Original Sin costing more than 50 Divine Orbs during Sanctum League, it’s possible that this one Unique may end up propping up the profitability of Sanctum entirely. Casual farmers can sell their Unique Relics, and hardcore No-hit runners can buy them, making massive profits farming Original Sin.
Original Sin Challenge Run
Speaking of the No-Hit Challenge Run, I expect it to be changed to additionally disable the new pseudo-defensive buffs.
Otherwise, the Evasion buff that gives you a chance to avoid losing resolve will be a king among Original Sin farmers.
Even without that, however, it’s worth noting that this Challenge Run has been made significantly harder, and far less consistent.
The addition of Rare monsters means that Original Sin farmers will have to be prepared to deal with anything, as well as the possibility that rebalances have removed cheese strats that granted extra lives.
Additionally, the off-screen range reduction from 120 to 100 means that cheese builds won’t be able to off-screen everything quite to the extent they used to.
On the plus side, however, Original Sin farmers won’t have to farm the Sanctum forever for a chance to even attempt the run anymore. They can just buy as many Unique Relics as they want off other players!
I expect some players will specialize specifically in farming Original Sin, and get very rich doing so.
Outro
Overall, I’m very happy with both Sanctum returning to the core game so soon, and the changes being made here.
While I’m a bit bummed out about the removal of Sanctified Relics and Invocations, these reworks and additional content are exactly what Sanctum needed.
I can’t wait util POE 3.22 releases, and I can start running Sanctums again.
