Heist League Basic Tips and Tricks

Heist League Regular Heist Tips

1. Looting chests raises your alert level. The alert bar shows you how much it will increase. Try not to max out the alert bar before retrieving the artifact.

2. Despite the “Heist” name, there is no stealth mechanic. Nothing you do, short of avoiding a section of the map, will stop you from getting aggro.

3. The lose everything on death mechanic has completely changed. Now if you die, as long as you haven't triggered the alert or taken the artifact, you can respawn at the last checkpoint, you'll restart in Rogue Harbor and can re-enter the heist as many times as you want.

4. This also means you can run out of the heist at any time, as many times as you want to convert your contraband loot into regular loot. As long as you haven't picked up an artifact or triggered the alert level, you can come and go as you want, saving all of your loot.

5. The exception to the above is for the quest heist missions. These are one shot, if you get killed you lose everything, if you exit you fail the mission.

6. Always, Always, Always have some sort of escape/phasing. Use phase run, use withering step, use flame dash, use flasks, etc. This league greatly benefits from movespeed and the ability to get through packs of mobs in narrow places.

6. The loot from chests is far better than the loot from NPCs. All chests disappear as soon as you pick up the artifact (unless you have a heist team member with a special ability), so open as many as you safely can before that happens.

7. Especially at higher levels, the mob attacks around doors can be especially punishing. Whenever you trigger a door, cross the threshold and dash back out to avoid all of the initial hits one-shotting you.

8. If you disconnect or the game crashes, before you exit the heist map, you lose everything and there is no way to get back in.

9. While leveling, most Heist map modifiers don’t make much of a difference. If you’re really having problems or want to make the most of each map, you can try rerolling augmentations and alterations, but otherwise save your currency.

10. If you do want to reroll mods, it’s similar to rolling strongboxes, you can try to focus on good mods, but for the most part any modifier is ok and will decrease your alert and increase your lockdown timer.

11. If your alert meter maxes out, you still have unlimited time to run through the map. All chests and the artifact are gone, but the mobs are still there and can drop loot. All contraband you have on you will be fine as long as you don’t die before exiting.

12. To equip gear on your support NPCs, you don't need to find the specific NPC, just click on any one of them and the names at the top let you switch between inventories.


Regular Heist Mission Tips

1. Determine your level of survivability. If you can run through packs of mobs without dying, focus on opening as many chests as possible. If you get splatted when you’re running through 10 mobs, slow down, kill on your way and only open a few chests.

2. Try to get all the way to the end of the map as fast as possible. Open the doors leading to the Artifact Room first and open any Safes in that room. Safes drop loot without increasing your alert level. DO NOT open the artifact container.

3. Kite any mobs that are aggroed in the room while your minion opens a door or chest. If you have so many mobs in the room that your minion can’t complete their action, kite them out of the room as far as possible then run back and kill the stragglers. Alternatively, try running a half-circle loop on the opposite side of the room from the door.

4. Once you’ve mapped out the path to the Artifact Room, run back through the map and open as many chests as possible. Try to save the chest closest to the artifact for last if you’re going to go over your alert level.

5. For non-mission heists, if you fill your inventory, run back to the entrance and sell or stash in the Harbor, you can then re-enter and loot any additional chests or drops without worrying about losing or having to choose your loot.

6. If you max out your alert level, either accidentally or by opening chests, as soon as that happens, run and pick up the artifact. If you let your timer run out, you’ll fail the heist and the artifact will disappear.

7. If you want to farm NPCs, do that after you have picked up the artifact. That gives you as much time as you want to get kills and additional loot. Time wise and safety wise, this really isn't worth it. If you have a clear shot to the exit, hit runspeed + phasing and get out.


Heist Type Ranking - From Best to Worst

Brute Force - Generally the quickest and safest as your support NPC bursts through the door into combat without you. Quick chest opening as well.

Lockpicking - Slower than the first two, but no big downsides.

Engineering - Quick and easy entries, chests are pretty slow.

Demolition - Relatively fast, but very buggy, your support NPC can get stuck with pathing very easily which screws everything up.

Trap Disarmament - Can be quicker, but misclicks can kill you, chests almost always do damage.

Agility - Not quite as slow as deception, but still unnecessarily long wait times. Chests are pretty quick.

Deception - Painfully slow wait times on doors, chests are ok.

Perception - Bottom of the barrel, generally has some sort of mob that raises your alert level and the mechanic is broken so in some cases you can't kill them in time.


Grand Heist Tips

1. If you hold the ALT key while on the tooltip for a Blueprint, it will tell you what node types are available to unlock.

2. There will likely be a patch coming in the next few weeks, until then the number of bugs and glitches with the league have caused many players to lose Grand Heists and Blueprints do to getting stuck or crashing. You may want to save big rewards for after the chance of this happening goes down.

You can put a Heist Locker in your hideout and get to your markers that way.

Thank you for all the useful info.

I was wondering after seeing you mention heist mods. Should a regular player alch every contract they do? I mean, if it's a 30ex build player then it doesn't really matter for them but for a regular player, is alching contracts worth the negative mods, reward-wise? I'm currently a lvl 70 poison BV assassin, with mediocre defenses and mediocre damage but it gets the job done so far for my heists.

I hope someone can answer my question.

I would say this really isn't worth it on regular heist maps. Most of the mods will just make it harder for very few decent mods increasing your rewards.

Updated this based on the many changes that have come out since the start of the league.