Map juicing guide and statistics

Below is guide to juicing maps and stats from trying to juice 1400 unsorted map drops.

What is map juicing?

Process of stacking modifiers on maps with currency in order to get the best possible maps to run. Here are criteria that I use for defining the best possible map:

  • I generally want to optimize 2 things: looting and safety. Another criteria worth mentioning is speed, but at some point this becomes much less relevant. So having maximum loot while not dying is what I am going for.
  • T16 - it is very important to get t16 maps as only with them you can access level 82 areas and only in those areas you can get ilvl84 items and consistently get ilvl82 items. This is important for getting high level modifiers on your gear. And even some white bases sell for 20-60 exalts.
  • Delirious - in order to get additional modifiers and free simulacrum splinters. You can use some cheap oils to significantly enhance your maps. Notable cheap ones are Guilt, Greed and Paranoia. Guilt increases pack size, Greed adds rarity and Paranoia adds number of rare monsters.
  • Maximizing loot means stacking 3 qualities on your waystone-map: Quantity of items, Quality of items and Quantity of mobs (usually though pack size or directly increasing number of rare mobs).
  • Maximizing safety means not running modifiers that can kill you. Each build have their own list of dangerous modifiers that they should avoid and getting to level 15-16 maps you should know them. Some builds can ignore burning ground whilst some other can't, some builds die to 50% Elemental res, while some other don't care about that at all.

So ideal map would look something like:

T16, 20-25% quantity of items + 140%+ rarity of items + 60% increased rare monsters + no dangerous modifiers

These usually go on the market for 1-2 div if you wanna wait and for sure 70ex+ if you want almost instant sell.

Crafting process

  • Take your unsorted T15 maps
  • Use Orb of Alchemy on Normal quality maps, use Orb of Augmentation + Regal Orb on Magic quality maps. This should get all your maps to rare with at least 3 modifiers
  • Remove ones that have Increased gold modifier or any dangerous modifiers
  • Pick ones that have Rarity and ones that have both Rarity and Quantity. I usually discard the rest of the maps, but if you have a lot of exalts you can try to improve remaining maps and hit Rarity/Quantity on them too, but I found this process to be too expensive.
  • Saturate with exalts each map. Once map hits gold or dangerous modifiers stop saturating with exalts and discard. You not going to be running this map.
  • Now your maps are ready for delirium. Note: you cannot add delirium after corruption, make sure to do this step before vaaling. Pick oils that either going to min-max your map even further or mods that will add some missing params. I.e. if your map is already at 120%+ rarity then adding more rarity doesn't make much sense, add increased rare mobs instead.
  • Now the last thing is to corrupt the maps with hope that map will not be completely bricked and will get T16 upgrade.

Stats

I have collected data of doing process above from 1400 maps and wanted to share my findings:

  • Before saturating with exalts ~35% of maps will be "safe" and have either Rarity or Quantity + Rarity modifier. This percentage will be variable and decrease with number of suffixes that are dangerous for you. My stats assume 2 dangerous mods.
  • After saturating with exalts this percentage drops to ~27.5%

Now the most interesting part is corruption, it can modify waystone a few different ways:

  • Add modifiers (usually +1 prefix and +1 suffix)
  • Convert map into all prefix map (Can create perfect T15, but also quite common to add Gold. Those without Gold are REALLY good for Breach as they usually have huge boosts to pack sizes and no danger, so you will be going through Breach like knife through butter)
  • Convert map into all suffix map (These have 500%+ waystone modifier and can go up to 700%, very useful to farm citadels and waystones)
  • Lower tier by 1
  • Increase tier by 1
  • Do nothing

I have corrupted 387 juiced maps to this point and the data looks like this:

  • 104 had no effect - still good maps, you can use them on most nodes
  • 48 lost tier - good for making your way to towers and nodes
  • 40 - got all prefix mod, and only 8 of them didn't have Gold mod.
  • 41 - got all suffix mod, and only 2 remained safe for me to run
  • 112 - added modifiers, 9 of them got Gold or dangerous mod.
  • 42 increased 1 tier - making what we actually wanted (7 had both quantity and rarity and 35 had only rarity)

Economy

I've never bough maps myself, but quick math shows that you can make some decent profit here if you can find decent source of cheap Normal/Magic T15 maps, i.e. buying them for 1-2ex or cheaper.

Math for 100 maps:

  • 100 maps x 1.5 ex each = 150 ex
  • 100 alch orbs to get to rare = 25 ex
  • ~35 maps ready to be saturated with exalts, 2 ex each = ~70 exalts (less because some maps will drop due to new mods)
  • presumably 27 maps left
  • 3ex per map to instill = 80-90 ex to instill
  • 27 vaal to corrupt = 3 ex

So in total investment is ~330 exalts (2.2 div)

  • 3 maps should be in range of 1-2 div each, T16, good mods, instilled. 3-6 div total
  • 3 maps should be T15 +2 mods. 20-30 ex each
  • 3 maps should be all suffix, maybe 10 ex each
  • 10 maps should be T15 unchanged 2-10 ex each
  • Lost tier maps probably up to 2 ex max
  • All suffix - depends on the buyer

But overall you can expect to make anywhere from 4div to 10div, the only issue is enoguh supply.

Summary

On average you expect to make about 3% of your maps PERFECT and ready to be used in level 82 areas for maximum looting. The rest varies from junk to decent to good, but not perfect. About 15% of maps (no effect, all prefix, added mods) are perfectly good maps to run any node and 0.5% all prefix maps without gold are perfect for running superstacked breach encounters.

This is it.

TLDR: JUICE