How to maximize Eldritch altar spawns?

Im trying to farm as many altars as possible per map to farm ichors
What are the things that affect how many of them spawn?

1. Does adding strongboxes to maps help to spawn more altars from the monsters inside?

2. What about sextants? Such as "Your maps contain # additional packs" - Does this help to spawn more altars?

3. Fortune favors the brave - does this help to spawn more altars?

4. Vaaling maps - does it help?

What about maximizing loot after u click altars? does quantity help there?


Is the best strategy to alch+4 chisel+vaal map, fortune favor brave, strongbox scarab, sextants with pack size. all of this is helpful?

someone told me the only thing that mattters is pack size

so i respec my whole atlas tree and got Grand Design, which gives pack size per notable

then I got as many notables as possible, having 41% increased pack size

I 4x chisel+alch+vaal all my t14 park maps, and use cartography scarab and scarifice fragments for more quantity
i do fortune favors brave each map 10% packsize

all my maps have like 70-80% pack size

im only getting 2-4 altars per map...

I think when I was wasnt using grand design and just using stongboxes and shrines for more monsters i was getting more shrines... whats going on? is there something more than jsut pack size? plz help me to min/max altar spawns!!

i just did a 80% pack size map and got one (1) altar spawn. wtf? how does this work. PLZ

just did another map. 92% pack size. ZERO altars
ZERO!!!

what am i doing wrong? im about to quit the league if i cant figure this out. i just want to farm altars, why is it even worse now that i swap to grand design and maximize packsize? now its terrible, wtf!!

When I did this last league (to knock out 1000 of each altar challenge), I found that the map you use makes a huge difference. Courtyard (which isn't on the atlas this league) was great. Mesa was decent. Some maps like Strand/Park/etc. were horrible.

ah yes, is this the so called 'Natural density" ?
where can I find a list of these maps from best to worst for altars?

Does the density or 'goodness' of a map change per league, or is it always the same?

Like I say, Ive been using t14 Park cause its easy to get to boss and easy to sustain with 3x voidstones . What map should I try instead? I know about mesa, but ive also read that apparently mesa has a low Natural Density so maybe theres something better..

The more complex (and thus annoying) the map is, the better the natural density is. The wide open or linear path maps are mostly pretty close to bottom barrel when it comes to that. Plaza, Cells, and similar maps are pretty good, but they can also be very annoying to run. It's a tradeoff.

yeah that makes sense it would need to be a map with high 'natural density' and also easy to kill the boss first

park apparently has higher nautral density than mesa so it should be better, but im getting miserable spawns.

I stopped using sextants, so I want to know if "#additional packs" sextants benefit altars? that could be one reason why my spawns suck? does anyone know ?

just did another 10 maps

mostly getting 2 altars per map
have never seen more than 3 altars ever since i respec to grand design and stacked pack size

dont get it. so demotivated.

This answer is based mostly on anecdotal evidence, both from other players and from personal experience.

The more monsters you kill, the more chance you have of spawning an altar. This is why it's better in worse-layout (and thus higher mob count) maps, and why pack size increases your chances.

However, altars take up Extra Content slots, and the corollary of this is that the more league mechanics you have in your map, the more chance you have of filling up the Slots and having no more altars spawning. From the sounds of it this probably isn't your issue.