Blood Crucible is the core mechanism of PoE 3.16 Scourge. This PoE 3.16 Scourge Completed Guide aims to help you understand the mechanism of Blood Crucible and use it to create your crazy endgame items!

 

Get Blood Crucible

When you play Path of Exile: Scourge, you will find Blood Crucible. Place this device into your inventory as the following example.

Transform Your Items

Slain more monsters and you will see a progress bar in the top-right. When the progress bar is full, you will be able to activate the Blood Crucible.

Click the Blood Crucible in your inventory, then place an item into the Crucible slot.

While you are killing the Scourge, it absorbs corruption from the alternate Wraeclast and focuses it onto the item. After enough kills, your item is ready to transform.

When it does, it becomes corrupted and gains a pair of Scourged Modifiers. One of these is a beneficial mod and one is a detrimental mod. These scourged mods are in addition to the regular explicit and implicit mods or enchantments on the item.

There are many powerful beneficial mods available that can really improve your item. The detrimental mods can significantly raise the requirements of the item, penalise your character's stats (such as resistances) or outright turn off various mechanics like the ability to deal fire damage or gain charges.

The goal of the transformation process is to get a beneficial mod that makes your item a lot more powerful while also rolling a detrimental mod that doesn't hurt your build much or at all. But if you get a combination you're unhappy with, your item is not ruined. By putting it back in the Blood Crucible, and killing even more monsters in the alternate Wraeclast, you can transform it a second time, potentially getting a better pair of mods that overwrite the first set. Equipment can be transformed up to three times, and each time it guarantees a minimum tier of beneficial and detrimental mods equal to the number of times it has been transformed. By the third tier, you can start to get some very powerful effects.

Work with Corrupted Items

The Blood Crucible works on already-corrupted items, so it's possible to add Scourged Mods to items that you thought couldn't be improved any further.

Talking about corrupted items, you're going to need a way to modify their sockets. While in the alternate Wraeclast, you can find Tainted Chromatic Orbs, Tainted Jeweller's Orbs and Tainted Orbs of Fusing, which work exactly the same as their regular counterparts, but can only be used on corrupted items. Tainted Orbs provide a significantly easier and cheaper way of modifying the sockets on your corrupted items than the crafting bench does.

Blood Crucible Passives

As you slay the Scourge and other monsters while shifted, the Blood Crucible gains experience and can level up. You can allocate its skill points in its own passive skill screen, which allows it to specialise in many aspects such as unlocking additional item slots, faster item transformation, better transformation outcomes, the ability to transform unique items, and so on. It's possible to eventually allocate every single one of the Blood Crucible's skills, but it requires a lot of demon slaying.

Row Needs Name Points Stats
Row1 0 Chaotic Adornment 5 Jewellery absorbs 5% more Corruption
Row1 0 Twisted Metal 5 Armour Items absorb 5% more Corruption
Row1 0 Murderous Desecration 5 Weapons absorb 5% more Corruption
Quivers absorb 5% more Corruption
Row2 10 Alternate History 1 The Blood Crucible can transform Unique Equipment
Row2 10 Trypophobia 5 3% chance for transforming to add a Socket
Row2 10 Stitched Wounds 5 3% chance for transforming to add a Link to the largest group of Linked Sockets
Row3 20 Golden Blood 5 4% chance for transforming to add an Explicit Modifier to Magic or Rare Equipment
Row3 20 Anomalous Aura 5 2% chance for transforming to grant Beneficial Modifiers one tier higher on Equipment
Row3 20 Stabilising Energy 5 2% chance for transforming to grant Detrimental Modifiers one tier lower on Equipment
Row4 30 Fervent Dreams 5 Maps absorb 5% more Corruption
Row4 30 Crushed Organs 1 +1 Crucible slot
Row4 30 Warped Sluice 5 While in a Scourged Map, Items absorb 1% more Corruption for each time the Map has been transformed
Row5 40 Restless Nightmares 1 +1 Dream Furnace slot
Row5 40 Intensifying Emulsion 5 2% chance for transforming to raise the tier of an Explicit Modifier on Equipment
Row5 40 Strange Forces 5 1% chance for transforming to grant an additional Beneficial Modifier

Blood Crucible in Endgame

Scourge's endgame is one where you control the level of risk and reward, or as we like to say in the business, "it has a lot of player agency".

Once you're exploring the Atlas of Worlds, you may gain the ability to place maps in the Blood Crucible, alongside your equipment. When a Map absorbs enough corruption and transforms, it gains a beneficial and detrimental effect in the same way that a piece of equipment does, but can also gain a modifier that changes the behaviour of Scourge league in that map entirely. After all, when you combine two types of alternate realities together, the results are bound to be unpredictable.

Maps can be transformed up to ten times, increasing their risk and reward substantially each time. When a map is transformed a second or subsequent time, there's a chance that the new beneficial or detrimental modifiers stack alongside the existing ones, enhancing their power, or a chance that new modifiers are added.

Be careful not to transform your maps too many times as they may become too dangerous to complete.