In depths guide on how to plan your Atlas Progression with the new Trees

Welcome to maps Exile, now we have to start getting some watchstones. As you know the first 4 watchstones can only be obtained from the four corner regions of the atlas: Lex Ejoris, Lira Arthain, Heawark Hamlet and New Vastir.
The best way to do this is to go straight for the corner regions. You can get some head start on this, if you have farmed one or two sets of "cartographers delight" divination cards in act 8 (Harbour bridge) or act 9 (foothills) on the way. Since most T5 maps are in the corners while we have no watchstones, this will give us a corner map. You can also buy one if you have a slower start or started late and they are cheap. This will save so much time that I really would recommend buying one map of each corner area if they are cheap.
Also check Kirac and later Zana for maps to buy.

If you plan to progress your way into the corners you should not randomly run any map. Run your T1s and then only go straight for the corners. If you find a map that does not lead you into a corner, do not run it right away, since it will be unlocked to drop and this can slow you down by a lot.

After you have acquired the first watchstone I recommend putting it directly into the area you have gotten it from. This will have two good effects. For once we can not get zero watchstone maps from this area anymore and will get the maps from the corner areas that we are still seeking and second we will find 1watchstone maps while we are completing the other corner areas.

You can Skip Ahead to the choosing Atlas Trees part. You might also want to put the watchstones in the middle regions if you have unlocked watchtowers already there. If not you can run a t3 or t4 map from middle regions to get the watchstowers. This paragraph gets more clear after reading the parts about choosing which areas you want to farm for lategame.

When you have your first stone you go for the next corner. This is a good time to use Horizon Orbs to get into a new corner. I would not use them after you already unlocked a map per corner but to get into the corner it is well worth doing.

This is the right time to decide what regions you want to farm over and over in the end. With the new trees we have insane amounts of influence on how we farm, what we farm and what types of content we will meet. This is the right time to decide on 1-4 regions that you like most. There are two aspects to this. Choosing regions with maps that you like most and choosing regions with the atlas trees that you like most. For some thoughts about the different strategies with atlas trees I will write a paragraph later on you can skip ahead to this at this point if you want.
If you have 1-4 regions that you like, you should decide on maps in that region that you do NOT like at all and do not want to run later on. I recommend you to not complete these. It should not be too many per region but leaving 1-4 maps per region uncompleted can make a good amount of difference for a significant amount of hours.
Write down the maps that you do not want to complete at this point and make sure you remember them. If you accidentally run one you can either skip the boss if you remember while inside the map. It will not be the end of the world if you accidentally kill the boss either, so don't beat yourself up if it happens.

Why do we do this now?

Now you have your list with maps that you do not want to complete and your 4 favorite atlas regions chosen. The next step is to get the watchstones in the regions that we did NOT choose as our last 4. Why are we doing this first? Now you are running white and yellow maps for a while and we just want to do this fast without a lot of thought. The key here is to zoom these maps. Your hideout is lava. Just put them in run them kill conquerors and collect watchstones.

If the corner areas are among the areas that you chose for late game this is the time to run a map of t3 or t4 in the areas that we want to do first to find zana after the boss to unlock all watchtowers and switch our watchstones to these areas asap.

Ways to farm watchstones



After we have our 5th-8th watchstone we just repeat with 2watchstone regions. Depending on what option from the last paragraph you chose you either will farm one region after the other or all 4 simultaneously (influence 4 first and then get stones)

If you get to unlock any atlas tree passives for these regions now, you can jump to the atlas tree paragraph at that point. The choices for these regions however are not that important, since we are not planning to really farm them a lot anyways. I recommend taking nodes from the "Nodes that add content TO maps" type.

Well not much to say here. Put your stones in the regions that you preselected as your favorites and get the missing stones while focusing in actively unlocking atlas passives for these regions. Until now we did not actively play towards Maven content and unlock Atlas skillpoints yet. However at this point I would prioritize getting Skillpoints for the Atlas wheels over getting the watchstones asap.

The first type of nodes adds content to maps.

List of nodes that add content to maps


These maps, as the paragraph said "add content to maps" or at least a chance to have this content. This means that if you just put a map into the device and open it, these nodes will instantly give you something that you did not have before.

For the areas that we did NOT decide as our endgame areas we want to take these, if we even get far enough to add any atlas skill points while unlocking our watchstones there. These will give us a little bit of extra loot and that is always nice.

For areas that we chose as our endgame areas, we might either have chosen to take these anyways at this point. If we have chosen to take these for our end game plans, take these first. Easy decision.

If you chose to not take these for your endgame farm, you might anyways take these first. Why? I am reaching a bit to one of the following topics but the nodes that "add TO content" are not doing anything for us, if that content is not in the map. That means if we have a node before that that makes this content type more likely or even guarantees it they make a lot of sense. However in some regions there are no nodes that "add content TO maps" but have nodes that "add TO content" and these are only powerful when we manually add this content to our maps. That means we need to invest in Zana mods, or scarabs to really benefit from these nodes.
If you feel that it will take a while until you will be farming with investment (scarabs, Zana or missions) you might aswell take one of these nodes that give us immediate benefits first and respec them later on. I will get back to this in a later paragraph.

The next type of nodes are these that give us stuff immediately but not for the map we are running for rather to do later or actually to sell in some cases

Nodes that give us content for later

These are the fewest of all Node types. There only are two types of these. The ones that have a 10% chance to grant an additional Mission and the ones that give Maps that drop in that regions a chance to have a certain content type added to them.

The extra missions area really great, since this is an additional mission. This means you can get your normal mission at 35% (7% per master)+ awakened map bonus and ON TOP get another mission for this node, receiving two missions from one map completion.
Alva missions are the best to get early on since these are worthwhile even in white and yellow tier maps. Jun is not as interesting for white maps, since the more interesting veiled mods cannot drop here but if you plan to set up your Syndicate to farm it they might still be worthwhile doing later. Einhar and Niko missions probably only are worthwhile in red maps.
The nodes that give maps in these areas a chance to add a content type are sweet too. You can run these later in areas where we you take nodes for these types or sell them to other players.

These nodes are pretty good to take early, similar to the first kind. I recommend taking these for the areas that you did NOT choose as your endgame regions and again we take these first for the areas that we chose for our favorites.

I will not list the nodes that add to content because that are pretty much all that I did not list yet and also some of the already listed ones might fall under this with at least a part of their strength.

These are nodes that make certain content better and this is a majority of all nodes.

These nodes in general might look like the best, however they will do nothing, if the specific type of content is not in your map. That means for early atlas progression and early mapping these are pretty weak.

For later mapping these will be the best nodes IF you add the content type to your maps manually. That means that the nodes for content that you actually CAN add manually are the better ones for farming since you will have that content in every single map that you run later on.

How to add content to maps?



For some types of content that can be buffed with the atlas nodes there is no way to add these to every single map that you run. That means that you only have a certain chance to see that content and you should keep that in mind when evaluating these nodes against others. If you for example have a 5% additional chance to have Harvest inside your map, (maybe a bit more from the small nodes) you will see Harvest in every 6th or 7th map. That also means that the value of the nodes that make the harvests in these areas better are only worth a 6th or a 7th as much as those that buff content that you will have in every single map.
For example the choice between the betrayal and the harvest nodes in Heawark Hamlet looks like that. "Plants Harvested in Areas give the rares of 2 chosen Crafting Options" which sounds really great. However you will only have one harvest encounter per 6 maps and there you will only have 2-4 fields (probably).
On the other side the Bribery node for Syndicate will give you something in every single map, since you can run them all with syndicate (theoretically)

Maybe we will see new types of scarabs for these content types but I can't tell today.

You loose 1-2 Awakener level (big deal?)

You only drop maps from the Regions that you selected at the highest tier. This makes it a lot easier to sustain maps for these regions, especially early on when you are building a mappool.

You will only interact with the content types that you like most, this can be because of various reasons.

You can specialize on what you want to do. Do you want to farm currency? Do you want to get more XP? Do you just want to have fun with a certain content type that you prefer?

Less Atlas Bonus, Less Awakened Map Bonus

You will not drop these maps and you will run more of the maps that you like better.