PoE Heist Farming Guide (3.29): Rogues, Blueprints & How the Rogue Harbour Prints Currency

Quick answer: In Path of Exile 3.29 "Curse of the Allflame," Heist is a self-contained stealth-farming lane run from the Rogue Harbour: you spend Rogue's Markers to open Contracts (single-target jobs with one Rogue) and Blueprints (multi-wing Grand Heists with several Rogues), sneak to a reward room, grab the loot, and escape before the area goes into lockdown. It prints Heist-exclusive gear you can't get anywhere else — replica uniques, experimented base types, and alternate-quality gems. Heist was not reworked or removed in 3.29; it only got reward-table tweaks. That "left alone" status is exactly why it's a stable, low-competition currency lane this league.

Heist is the closest thing PoE has to a heist movie: hire the crew, case the vault, grab the prize, run for the exit before the alarm locks you out. Everything below is built around opening the right jobs and getting out with the loot. This guide is current for 3.29 Curse of the Allflame (launched 2026-07-24), verified against the official 3.29.0 patch notes, poedb, and Maxroll.

What is Heist in Path of Exile?

Heist is a permanent core mechanic (added in the 3.12 Heist league, 2020) built around a crew of thieves you hire to steal artifacts. As the official site frames it:

"In Path of Exile: Heist, you will hire skilled thieves to help you pull off risky Heists. Steal valuable artifacts to fund and train your crew as you plan towards the execution of a Grand Heist."

The whole thing runs out of the Rogue Harbour, a hub instance you reach from town or your hideout by spending a Rogue's Marker. Inside, you talk to Adiyah, the Wayfinder to embark on jobs, sell targets to Faustus, the Fence for more markers, and (for Grand Heists) reveal extra vault wings via Whakano. Contracts to run are found out in Wraeclast — as the official description puts it, "Contracts containing these clues can be found throughout Wraeclast."

If you like self-contained farms where you control the risk and the loot is unique to the mechanic, Heist sits next to lanes like the Forbidden Sanctum and Delve's Azurite Mine — but Heist is the one that prints gear you literally cannot obtain any other way.

Contract vs Blueprint: what's the difference?

This is the single most important distinction, and where new players lose value. There are two job types, and Maxroll defines them cleanly:

"Contract — Items required to open a basic version of Heist. Blueprint — Items required to open an advanced version of heist called Grand Heist."

• Contract = one basic Heist. You pick one Rogue for the job, sneak in, grab the target artifact, and escape. Fast, low-setup, repeatable.
• Blueprint = a Grand Heist. These are the big scores: a facility with 3–4 wings, requiring multiple Rogues and up-front planning. Each Blueprint "contains between 3 and 4 Wings," and at the end of each wing "you get to choose 1 out of the 5 presented items to steal."

The catch: a Blueprint drops mostly unrevealed. As the community wiki notes, a typical Blueprint starts with only one wing and a few rooms visible, and you spend Rogue's Markers through Whakano to reveal the rest before you run it. Revealing the good wings is a cost you pay before you ever see a reward — that's the Grand Heist gamble.

How do the Rogues and their jobs work?

You recruit nine job-specialist Rogues (the marketing page's "thirteen Rogues" figure counts non-recruitable Harbour NPCs — the nine below are the ones you actually hire and level). Each job door in a Heist demands a specific skill at a specific level, so your crew's job levels gate which reward rooms you can open. poedb lists the nine job types verbatim:

"Agility, Brute Force, Counter-Thaumaturge, Deception, Demolition, Engineering, Lockpicking, Perception, and Trap Disarmament."

The Rogues and their headline specialties:

• Karst, the Lockpick — Lockpicking, Perception, Agility
• Tibbs, the Giant — Brute Force, Demolition
• Isla — Engineering, Trap Disarmament
• Tullina, the Catburglar — Agility, Lockpicking, Trap Disarmament
• Nenet, the Scout — Perception, Counter-Thaumaturgy
• Huck, the Soldier — the all-rounder (Lockpicking, Brute Force, Demolition, Engineering)
• Niles, the Interrogator — Counter-Thaumaturgy, Deception
• Vinderi, the Dismantler — Demolition, Trap Disarmament, Engineering
• Gianna, the Master of Disguise — Deception, Counter-Thaumaturgy, Perception

Rogues gain experience by completing jobs, and each has four gear slots for Rogue-specific equipment. The potency of that gear scales with the Rogue's highest job level, so leveling a specialist and equipping their slots is what turns a cheap Contract into a consistent, high-value run. Some gear directly cuts risk — for example, Lockpicking gear on Karst can grant "less alert from opening reward chests."

What's the fastest way to level your Rogues?

Fresh Rogues can only open low-level job doors, so early Heisting is about building job levels fast without wasting Contracts. The efficient order in practice: run cheap, low-value Contracts with whichever Rogue covers the job the Contract wants, and prioritise the specialists you'll lean on for money rooms — Karst (Lockpicking, for Currency and Jewellery doors), Vinderi (Demolition, for the loudest high-value doors), and Huck the all-rounder for anything you're not yet specialised in. Each completed job levels that Rogue's skills, and once a specialist hits high job levels their four gear slots start mattering — that gear is what quietly turns a run from break-even into profit.

When we leveled a crew from scratch in 3.29, the pattern that worked was ignoring Grand Heists entirely for the first stretch: run a stack of cheap Contracts purely to push Karst and Vinderi's job levels up, then start spending Rogue's Markers on Blueprints once at least two specialists could reliably open the good reward rooms. Trying to run Grand Heists with an under-leveled crew just means paying markers to reveal wings you then can't open.

What is the alert meter and lockdown?

Heist's tension mechanic is the alarm. Every noisy action — opening a locked door, cracking a reward chest, and especially grabbing the target artifact — fills an alert meter. PoE Vault describes what happens when it fills:

"If you completely fill the alert meter, you will receive a countdown timer until the area goes into lockdown, which will prevent you from taking the target item in the reward room."

Once an area locks down, guards patrol and camp doorways, and per PoE Vault, "the only course of action is to leave as quickly as possible." The core skill of Heist farming is opening exactly the rooms you want, grabbing the target, and sprinting to the escape point before lockdown catches you. In our own 3.29 runs, the biggest early money-leak wasn't dying — it was cracking every side chest on the way in, filling the alert bar early, and then getting locked out of the actual target room. Open what you came for, take the target, leave the rest. Note also: everything you pick up mid-Heist is flagged as Contraband and is dropped if you die — it only becomes yours once you reach the escape point. Get greedy, die, and you lose the whole haul.

What does Heist actually print? (the money angle)

Heist's value is that a lot of its loot is Heist-exclusive — you cannot farm it anywhere else, which keeps demand steady. The highest-value targets:

• Replica uniques. These drop only from Heist and include chase items like Replica Headhunter, Replica Badge of the Brotherhood, Replica Farrul's Fur, Replica Shroud of the Lightless, Replica Dreamfeather, Replica Alberon's Warpath, Replica Hyrri's Ire, Replica Covenant, and Replica Emberwake.
• Experimented / Heist-only base types. Bases like the Simplex Amulet, Focused Amulet, Helical Ring, Cogwork Ring, Manifold Ring, Micro-Distillery Belt, Battery Staff, and Pneumatic Dagger drop only from Heist. These are prime crafting bases.
• Enchanted rares from reward rooms. Per Maxroll, "when offered reward is a rare item it is always enchanted with a random enchant normally crafted with a Tempering Orb or a Tailoring Orb" — and those Tempering/Tailoring Orbs themselves drop roughly "1 of them every 10 Wings."
• Reward-room specialization by job. The job you use to open a door decides the loot category. For example, Lockpicking rooms lean into Jewellery, Currency and Fragments; Brute Force into Weapons and Uniques; Perception into Divination cards; Engineering into Essences, Uniques and Maps. Building a crew that can open Currency and Unique rooms reliably is the profit core.

Grand Heists concentrate the best of this: multiple wings, each ending in a choose-1-of-5 reward room, plus the alternate-quality Unusual Gems and Replica uniques the format is known for.

Did 3.29 Curse of the Allflame change Heist?

Yes, but only the reward tables — Heist was not reworked, nerfed into the ground, or removed. This matters: Harbinger was fully removed in the 3.28 Mirage league, so it's fair to ask which older mechanics survived. Heist did. It's live and untouched at its core in 3.29. The official 3.29.0 patch notes list only targeted reward tweaks, including:

"Ultimatum Rewards from Demolition in Heist have been replaced by Map Rewards."

"Enchantments on Body Armour and Weapons related to White Sockets or those that set all Sockets to be Blue, Green or Red no longer appear on Heist Rewards or from Tailoring and Tempering Orbs."

Other 3.29 Heist notes: Trarthan Gems were removed from Heist Gem Chests; several Trinket modifiers were swapped (chances that used to grant extra Legion or Talisman items on opening a reward chest now grant extra Gold instead); and the Chromatic-Orb-to-Jeweller's/Fusing Trinket rolls were reworked. None of this touches the core loop — it's tuning, not a rework. The white-socket enchant change is downstream of 3.29's big socket-colour overhaul, which is worth reading if you craft with Heist rewards.

How do you make Heist appear in your maps?

You don't farm Heist purely from stockpiled Contracts — you generate more by mapping. The key is Smuggler's Caches: hidden chests that spawn in maps and are "guaranteed to contain Heist Contracts and Rogue's Markers," with a chance at Blueprints. To scale that up, spec the Heist cluster on the Atlas passive tree — nodes like The Finer Arts and Higher Education bias which job types your map Contracts require, and other Heist nodes increase Smuggler's Cache frequency (the 3.28 tree changes pushed toward a Smuggler's Cache in most maps).

One trap to avoid: there are no "Heist Scarabs." Heist frequency in maps comes from the Atlas passive tree (plus map devices / tablets), not scarabs. If someone tells you to slot a "Heist Scarab," they're confusing it with the Ambush Scarab family, which affects Strongboxes — a completely different mechanic.

Is Heist worth farming in 3.29?

For a currency-and-gear lane that you fully control the pace of, yes. Heist's pull is threefold: the loot is exclusive (steady demand for Replicas and experimented bases), the risk is self-imposed (you decide which doors to crack and when to bail), and it took no core nerf in 3.29, so every proven strategy from prior leagues still works. Where it slots into your Atlas is a judgment call — pair it against the best 3.29 currency-farming strategies and run it alongside density lanes like Legion or Breach rather than instead of them. The skill ceiling is real — crew leveling, alert management, and wing-reveal decisions separate a break-even run from a profitable one — which is exactly why a market exists for people who'd rather buy the currency or a leveling carry than grind the Harbour themselves.

Skip the grind — get Heist-ready fast:

- Buy Path of Exile currency — Divines and Chaos to fund your crew's gear and Blueprint reveals.

- PoE leveling & boss-carry services — hit red maps and job-ready Rogues without the campaign slog.

- Path of Exile store — everything else for the 3.29 league.

Heist FAQ

How do I unlock Heist and reach the Rogue Harbour? You unlock Heist during the campaign and, from Act 6 onward, spend a Rogue's Marker from town or your hideout to travel to the Rogue Harbour. Contracts and Blueprints also drop out in the world and from Smuggler's Caches in maps.

What's the difference between a Contract and a Blueprint? A Contract opens a single basic Heist run with one Rogue. A Blueprint opens a Grand Heist — a bigger facility with 3–4 wings and multiple Rogues, where you reveal wings with Rogue's Markers before running it and choose 1 of 5 rewards at the end of each wing.

What are Rogue's Markers used for? They're Heist's spend-currency: you use them to open Contracts and Blueprints and to reveal additional Grand Heist wings and rooms. They drop from monsters and Smuggler's Caches, and you earn more by selling completed Heist targets to Faustus, the Fence.

What is the most valuable loot in Heist? Heist-exclusive items: Replica uniques (Replica Headhunter, Replica Farrul's Fur, and others), experimented base types you can't drop elsewhere (Simplex Amulet, Cogwork Ring, etc.), alternate-quality Unusual Gems, and the enchanted rares and currency from Grand Heist reward rooms.

Did 3.29 nerf or remove Heist? No. Heist is fully live in 3.29 Curse of the Allflame and its core loop is unchanged. The only 3.29 changes are reward-table tweaks — for example, Demolition rooms now give Map rewards instead of Ultimatum, and certain Trinket bonuses were swapped to Gold. Verify current item values on poe.ninja before you sell.

Are there Heist Scarabs? No — this is a common misconception. You increase Heist in maps through the Atlas passive tree and Smuggler's Caches, not scarabs. (The Ambush Scarabs affect Strongboxes, not Heist.)

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Facts in this guide are current for Path of Exile 3.29 "Curse of the Allflame" and were verified against the official 3.29.0 patch notes, poedb, PoE Vault and Maxroll. Item values shift constantly — always confirm current rates on poe.ninja before buying or selling.