The Forbidden Sanctum League Mechanic (PoE Trial of the Ancestors)

The Winning Strategy

Unlike most League mechanics, the Sanctum is incredibly punishing. Some players are struggling to clear a few rooms, while others are comfortably clearing every run without breaking a sweat. This section will cover the key strategy you can follow in your runs to ensure that you’re in the latter category.

The Sanctum League has gone Core with 3.22, and this guide has been updated to reflect all known changes to the mechanic. However, parts of this guide may be inaccurate until 3.22 is actually out.

Priority #1 – Don’t Get Hit!

On each run, you can only take a limited number of total hits before you’re kicked out – even with strong Relics. Unlike regular PoE – where you can just build a tanky character and not worry about taking hits – in the Sanctum you must play with the intent to never get hit. In practice, this isn’t going to happen – you’re going to get clipped by attacks sometimes. But you should never stand still and intentionally allow yourself to get hit by an attack. You should always be trying – to the best of your ability – to dodge every attack that enemies use.

Overwhelming Single-Target Damage

Enemies can’t hit you if they’re dead. The single best way to not get hit is to kill enemies before they even get an attack off – overwhelming damage is king, and if you’re struggling in the Sanctum, you may find investing in strong, single-target DPS makes this significantly easier.

Inspiration is King!

The key understanding to succeeding at Sanctum runs is to understand that Inspiration is far more powerful than Resolve, and should be prioritized, at all costs.

There’s a few reasons for this: Firstly, focusing on Inspiration allows you take all of the Pacts that have a cost of sacrificing Maximum Resolve, while effectively dodging the downside. If you never run out of Inspiration, after all, it doesn’t matter how much Resolve you have – your Resolve meter will simply never be touched!

The second, is that any Inspiration you gain will be gained regardless of how much Inspiration you have (up to the cap of 1k), whereas Resolve recovery requires you to have already lost Resolve. This prevents you from preventatively stacking up Resolve, as well as meaning that Resolve does NOT play nice with Inspiration – If you have Inspiration and take a hit, you still won’t be able to recover Resolve. But you’ll be able to gain Inspiration either way!

Third is that there are several powerful, repeatable Inspiration gain effects on artifacts. The “Relics & Relic Loadouts” section of this guide covers these affixes in detail:

Relics & Relic Loadouts

The general idea is that because you’re going to be generating Inspiration from your Relics, you’ll be unable to focus on Resolve, because any initial damage you take will be going to your Inspiration instead of Resolve – leaving you with no missing Resolve to recover.

As a result of this, effects that “recover” or “gain” Resolve are mostly worthless. This includes regular Fountains, Relic modifiers, and Resolve recovery from the Merchant.

Note that this only applies to standard Sanctum runs – some challenge runs from unique Relics require different strategies to be used. These alternate strategies are covered in the “Challenge Runs” section of this guide:

Challenge Runs

Avoid Run-Ending Afflictions

You cannot prevent yourself from getting Afflictions as you progress through the Sanctum – they are inevitable. What you can control, however, is which Afflictions you receive. Afflictions are not created equal – some of them are trivial and will do almost nothing, whereas others are back-breaking, and might as well end your run on the spot.

If you want to be consistently clearing runs, you need to avoid run-ending Afflictions at all costs *.

This doesn’t just mean picking other afflictions when presented with a choice – it also means looking ahead on the Floor Map, and making sure you’re choosing a route that will give you as many options as possible for future rooms. If you put yourself in a position where you will be forced to go into a room, without knowing if that room has an Affliction yet, you could end up tanking your run.

A full list of the Afflictions, and how dangerous I rate each of them at, is in the “Afflictions” section of this guide.

Afflictions

*If a run-ending affliction is on a room that has an Offer with a Divine Orb with it, you usually want to go for it anyways. That’s what you’re here for, after all.

Prioritize Merchants, Pacts, Radiant and Benevolent Fountains

Collecting Boons will make your runs significantly easier. Even in cases where you leave these rooms with nothing of value, you cannot have duplicates of the same Boon – meaning that each Boon you collect makes the odds of your NEXT boon being a strong one even higher.

How strong each of these rooms are depends on where you are in a run. Merchants give you multiple boons per visit, or allow you to pick the best of several – but require (and eat up) Aureus Coins.

Pacts can often give out multiple Boons too, as well giving you an Offer if you take at least one. However, even with being able to liberally take Pacts that sacrifice your maximum Resolve, you will sometimes get Pact rooms with three Pacts you just can’t take.

Benevolent and Radiant Fountains aren’t nearly as strong as Merchants and Pacts – but you’ll be happy to hit up any room that gives you a Boon.

WARNING – Radiant Fountains also purge an Affliction. This is technically an upside, however, due to a quirk (possibly a bug), each time you purge a boon, it rerolls all the Afflictions on rooms in your Sanctum. This can be incredibly dangerous if you’re on a path leading through a room with an Affliction you thought was safe, only to have it reroll into something run-ending.

What to Do on Each Floor

Floor 1

Offer Rooms can’t contain anything of value on Floor 1, and you won’t have enough coins to hit up the Merchant yet. You’re going to want to focus on Treasure rooms and Pact rooms, to build up a supply of coins for the Merchant, while getting as many Boons from Pacts as you can. Keep an eye out for the miniboss room – named “Scriptorium” – to try and get some extra early coins.

There are many Afflictions that are far more devastating to take early in a run, so be very careful with your choice of paths on Floor 1. Try to take paths that always leave you with multiple options, to give you the best odds to be able to avoid run-ending afflictions.

Floor 2

Offer Rooms are still (mostly) worthless on Floor 2. This is where you’re looking to get as powerful as possible – get as many Merchants, Pacts, and Benevolent/Radiant Fountains as you can.

Floor 3

Starting on Floor 3, Offers can start to have Divine Orbs. Make sure you check every Offer room for Divine Orbs. Look to spend the rest of your Aureus coins here, while seeing as many rooms as you can, fishing for Divine Orbs.

Floor 4

All you care about on Floor 4 is Divine Orbs. You want to pick paths that let you see as many rooms as possible, and if you don’t see any Divine Orbs, take Pacts instead. Each Pact you take has a decent chance of offering you a Divine Orb. If it’s not too dangerous, you should even take a Pact that’s a net negative for you if there’s no good ones, just to ensure you get the Offer.

Build Considerations

High Mobility

With such a high priority on not getting hit in the Sanctum, mobility is king. The more mobile you are, the easier it is to dodge attacks – leading to more successful sanctum runs.

Short Animation Lock-In

Skills that lock you in place for any amount of time are incredibly dangerous in the Sanctum. They make it incredibly difficult to damage enemies while still dodging their attacks, and can cause you to take hits that other builds can easily dodge. This is what causes many melee builds to suffer in the Sanctum – melee attacks often keep you locked in place for long periods of time in close proximity to enemies – making hits almost unavoidable.

Teleport Skill

A teleport skill (such as Flame Dash) is effectively mandatory for the Sanctum. Whether it’s teleporting out of an attack, over the lightning in the Herald’s Intermission phase, over the beam attack of a Skull, or taking shortcuts in a trap gauntlet, you’re going to suffer if you don’t have one.

Overwhelming Damage

As mentioned before, damage is king. It’s a lot easier to not get hit when you’re killing enemies in the blink of an eye – playing a build with strong DPS will significantly decrease the difficulty of the Sanctum.

You might want to consider swapping your gem links or auras before starting a Sanctum run. Defensive Auras are not nearly as necessary in the Sanctum, and most builds have a gem or two they can swap in their main skill to increase their single-target DPS, at the cost of AoE (which is largely unnecessary in the Sanctum).

Chill and Temporal Chains

Another way to make it easier to dodge enemy attacks is by reducing enemy action speed with Chill and Temporal Chains. A Temporal Chains- Blasphemy Support setup can make enemies a LOT easier to deal with – swapping out some defensive auras for a setup like this can help immensely.

Conclusion

Be sure to check out the other pages of this guide, covering even more topics related to The Forbidden Sanctum! This guide will continue to be updated in the future – if you have any feedback, or find something cool you want to share, head on over to the PoE Vault Discord, and let me know!

Good luck, and have fun farming The Forbidden Sanctum!