PoE 3.29 Mercenaries of Trarthus Guide: Recruiting, Infamy and the Mercenary Rush Farm

🎯 The core idea

Mercenaries of Trarthus came back in 3.29 as core content, and the fastest league-start money in Path of Exile right now is not clearing maps — it is running into a cheap map, beating one mercenary, taking their Rucksack and leaving. A Trarthan Scarab of Infamy costs a couple of chaos and turns that single encounter into an Infamous one, which is where the divines actually come from.

• free costs nothing
• cheap small cost
• setup needs preparation
• grind pays off slowly
• skip the thing to stop doing

Everything below was checked against the Path of Exile Wiki before publishing. The wiki's Mercenary page currently carries an official "needs to be updated — Rework in version 3.29.0" banner, so where it is silent on a 3.29-only detail this guide says so instead of pretending otherwise.

Path of Exile mercenaries explained: what you are actually fighting

Mercenaries are unique enemies from the lawless cities of Trarthus. They are not monsters you kill on sight — you wager Gold to challenge one to a duel. Win and the wagered Gold is refunded, you take a reward, and the mercenary fights alongside you as an ally for the rest of the area. Lose and the mercenary teleports out and your Gold is gone.

Each one carries a Rucksack that holds up to four rewards, typically currency or scarabs, plus a full set of equipment that is usually moderately-to-well crafted and can include unique items. That Rucksack is the entire point of the mercenary rushing strategy.

The video calls the reward pouch a "rock sack" — the auto-captions mangle it. The wiki and the in-game tooltip both call it a Rucksack, and it holds a maximum of four items.

1. Stop skipping mercenaries you meet while mapping freeEvery mercenary encounter is a free-to-attempt Rucksack. The only cost is the Gold you wager, and winning refunds it. 1:25
2. Stockpile every white, yellow and low red map you own cheapThe farm burns map items fast because you never clear them. Cheap low-tier maps are the fuel. 1:25

How to recruit mercenaries in PoE: campaign, maps and permanent hires

This is the part the video skips entirely, so it comes straight from the wiki.

Mercenaries start appearing from Act 3 onwards. You are guaranteed to find one in The Sceptre of God, The Grand Arena, The Ridge and The Hidden Underbelly, and since patch 3.29.1 a mercenary always spawns in The Control Blocks in Act 10 regardless of how over-levelled you are. Only one mercenary can spawn in a given area, and in the campaign you must be no more than 10 levels above the area level for them to appear at all.

Important caveat for anyone hoping to fund their league start during the campaign: mercenaries found in those guaranteed campaign areas carry no Rucksack items. They are there to give you a temporary ally and a Trarthan gem, not currency.

Opening the mercenary interface gives you two choices:

A mercenary will only grant their Warrant once, so you cannot farm the same one forever. Hired mercenaries scale their passive stats and skills to the level of the area you are in, up to a maximum of level 68, and during the campaign a temporary hire lasts up to three areas.

If you want to hire a mercenary permanently in Path of Exile, that requires the new Luminary ascendancy for the Scion, added in 3.29.0. A Luminary can keep up to three permanently hired mercenaries — two in reserve in town or hideout, one active in combat — and unlike temporary hires you can change their equipment freely.

1. Duel the guaranteed campaign mercenaries for the ally, not the loot freeSceptre of God, Grand Arena, The Ridge, The Hidden Underbelly and Act 10 Control Blocks. Their Rucksacks are empty by design. 0:02
2. Take Rematch when the items are bad setupA Warrant re-summons that exact mercenary in a future map with a fresh item roll, and it can be traded to other players. 1:25

PoE infamous mercenary: what Infamy actually changes

An Infamous Mercenary is marked by a decorated border around their name and an "Infamous" prefix on their class. Compared to a normal mercenary they have a greater chance of extra supports on their skills, better-rolled gear, a chance at an exclusive Infamous modifier, a guaranteed unique item equipped, and — the reason you care — better items in their Rucksack.

There are three separate levers on mercenary infamy, and the video only uses one of them:

• The scarab. A Trarthan Scarab of Infamy makes every mercenary in the area Infamous outright.
• Map tier. Patch 3.29.1 made Infamous Mercenaries 50% more common in tier 1 maps, scaling to roughly twice as common in tier 16 maps. The video says tier 16 "should get you better loot on average" — the wiki gives the actual reason and the actual number.
• Map modifiers. The wiki states plainly that the chance of encountering an Infamous Mercenary increases based on the number of map modifiers. The video never mentions this, and it matters, because the strategy as demonstrated runs unrolled white maps. If you are not using the scarab, rolling your maps is a free infamy multiplier.

The four Trarthan scarabs, and which one is the farm

All four have Limit: 1, so you can run one of each in the same map. The auto-captions render the family name as "Trove Scarab" and "Churf and Scarb" — the in-game tooltip above confirms it is Trarthan.

The Scarab of Infamy is the whole strategy. It cost 1–2 chaos for the first two days of the league, briefly spiked to about 4 chaos, and settled back around 2. The video's own hedge — "it turns the main merc, and maybe the other two, I'm not sure" — is answered by the tooltip and the wiki: the modifier reads Mercenaries found in Area are Infamous, plural, so it applies to the Wild Mercenaries too.

Mercenary rushing: the actual loop

The loop is deliberately stupid. Enter, find the mercenary, beat them, take the Rucksack, leave. You never clear the map, you never care about the rest of the layout, and the map item is consumed either way.

The video runs this on Mesa. The wiki confirms Mesa Map is a tier 3 map in the southwest quadrant of the current Curse of the Allflame map series, with Oak the Mighty as its boss — a small, fast layout with a single easy boss, which is exactly what you want.

1. Socket a Trarthan Scarab of Infamy and run the map cheapOne scarab per map at roughly 2 chaos. Nothing else is required for the base farm. 2:06
2. Beat the mercenary, take the Rucksack, portal out freeDo not clear. The whole point is that a run takes well under a minute. 1:35
3. Sell the rares the mercenaries drop while you are still poor grindMercenary equipment is well crafted; 5–15 chaos rares funded the first gear upgrades. Stop bothering once you are past that. 1:46
4. Move to tier 16 as soon as your gear allows setupInfamous mercenaries are about twice as common at tier 16 as at tier 1, and the item level of everything they carry is higher. 1:46

Wild mercenaries: the trap that eats most of your loot

The Scarab of Infamy spawns two Wild Mercenaries next to the main one. You cannot choose their loot, but killing them drops items anyway — sometimes a full Rucksack, sometimes a random unique ring, most often very little.

The catch: if you kill the main mercenary first, the Wild Mercenaries become untargetable NPCs and you get nothing from them. They have no map icon, and the main mercenary is the one actively attacking you, so in practice you kill the wrong one most of the time. The video's author reports failing to kill them roughly 80% of the time.

The one workaround demonstrated is damage over time: apply a DoT to the Wild Mercenaries before the main one dies and they can still die and drop loot after becoming untargetable, as long as the DoT would have killed them.

The wiki does not document Wild Mercenary targeting behaviour or the damage-over-time workaround at all — its Mercenary page is flagged as not yet updated for the 3.29.0 rework. Both points are reported from the video only and should be treated as unverified.

The Atlas passive tree for mercenary rushing

Mercenaries need almost no atlas investment, which is why this works so early. These are the nodes the wiki lists, with their exact wording:

Loot and Pillage is the node the video points at when it says the Rucksack "will always be full". The wiki shows it does a second thing the video never mentions: a flat 10% chance for the mercenary to drop everything.

The "two atlas passives that make mercs drop two pieces of gear each" is Mercenary Additional Item Dropped, which grants one untaken item per point and has two points available — so two points, two items. The wiki's wording is "1 of their untaken Items", i.e. equipment you did not select, not a guaranteed second Rucksack.

1. Take Loot and Pillage first setupA guaranteed-full Rucksack is the single biggest multiplier on a rush strategy that only ever collects Rucksacks. 1:35
2. Take both points of Mercenary Additional Item Dropped setupEach point drops one more of their untaken items on defeat. 10:38
3. Do not take the whole mercenary cluster skipNodes like Mercenary Additional Supports Chance, Aura Effect and Cooldown Recovery only make the mercenary harder to kill. On a rush strategy that is a pure downside. 10:18
4. Avoid Civil War in Trarthus and think twice about High Stakes skipCivil War removes mercenaries from your maps entirely. High Stakes doubles the Gold you must wager for a 30% better refund. 10:18

Beyond the mercenary nodes the rest of the tree is spent on Eater of Worlds altars (the blue ones) for the scarab-duplication upside, on Synthesised Stability, and on nodes that add extra scarabs from bosses. The auto-captions render Eater of Worlds as "eternal world" and Synthesised Stability as "emphasize stability".

Layering the Templar Astrolabe and Domination Scarab of Terrors

This is the high-investment layer, and it is where the video is easiest to misread.

A Templar Astrolabe creates a Shaped Region covering 6–9 adjacent maps in one Atlas quadrant. Every map in a Shaped Region gets Slay the Map Boss to successfully complete Maps within this Shaped Region and Map Bosses have increased Difficulty and Reward for each completed Map, plus a rolling pool of extra modifiers. The one you are hunting is Final Boss drops (2–3) additional Scarab Items — the video's "map boss drops two to three additional scarabs", confirmed word for word.

Wiki correction: the video summarises the strategy as "run Mesa in the bottom left quadrant with a Templar Astrolabe applied". The wiki is explicit that maps within Shaped Regions require at least a Tier 16 map to enter — inserting anything lower returns "Map item is too low level to experience the Shaped Region's effects". Mesa is a tier 3 map. The cheap Mesa rush and the Astrolabe layer are therefore two separate stages, not one setup: rush cheap maps until you can sustain tier 16, and only then run the Shaped Region on top.

The multiplier comes from Domination Scarab of Terrors, whose tooltip reads Shrines in Area are guarded by an Atlas Boss and, critically, Modifiers to the Final Map Boss also apply to these Atlas Bosses. That second line is why stacking all four Domination scarabs with Domination nodes on the tree turns "the final boss drops 2–3 extra scarabs" into every shrine guardian in the map dropping them.

Those boss-dropped scarabs are not affected by atlas-tree scarab quantity nodes, but they are affected by the Eater of Worlds altar upside Scarabs dropped by slain Enemies have (15–30)% chance to be Duplicated — which is why you take the blue altar when it offers it.

Second wiki correction: the video says Synthesised Stability makes sure the Astrolabe map "doesn't disappear". The wiki is more careful — with Synthesised Stability allocated, a map other than the selected map collapses instead, but the selected map can still collapse if a later collapse leaves it on the smaller disconnected side. It reduces the risk; it does not remove it.

Atlas anomalies: free side income from the same quadrant

Anomalies are new in 3.29.0. They manifest on the Atlas after you complete a map affected by a Voidstone, need no map item or fragment to enter, are unaffected by your Atlas Passive Tree, and always sit at area level 83. Their spawn chance scales with the item quantity of the map you completed — a detail the video does not mention and a genuine reason to roll your maps once you are past the pure-rush phase.

Anomalies are quadrant-specific, so farming Mesa in the southwest only ever manifests southwest anomalies. The wiki lists three there:

Two corrections here. The video is unsure where the Heist anomaly sits and suggests the southwest has nothing good — the wiki puts Planned Heist in the southwest, the same quadrant as Mesa. And Gambling District did not exist when the video was recorded; it was added in 3.29.1, so a Mesa farmer today has three southwest anomalies, not two.

The Manor Foyer behaves exactly as the video describes: you can skip Cadiro's offers to see the next one, and if you cannot afford a unique you can leave and come back. The wiki confirms the area stays open until you either accept an offer or skip all of them, and the offers are unchanged when you return. The video found three uniques worth about two divines each priced around 400,000 Gold and declined all of them.

What 100 mercenaries actually paid

The author logged every drop from 100 mercenary rushes with no map clearing. The on-screen sheet is the authoritative version, and it disagrees slightly with the narration:

The narration says "around like 17 divines profit" and then corrects itself to 16; the spreadsheet header says 16. Notable single drops in that sample were a max-rolled Death Rush at 370 chaos, a 135 chaos and a 130 chaos line, a 129 chaos line, and three Divine Orbs, one of which arrived as a stack of two.

Death Rush is confirmed on the wiki as a unique Amethyst Ring: +(17–23)% to Chaos Resistance, Recover (3–5)% of Life on Kill, Gain Adrenaline for (1–3) seconds on Kill. Three of the spreadsheet's item labels — rendered by the captions as "pandemonium", "risk" and "catalysing" — are the author's own shorthand and do not map cleanly onto any scarab name on the wiki, so they are left unidentified here rather than guessed at.

This is one player's sample of 100 maps on a specific build in the first days of the league. Scarab prices moved between 1 and 4 chaos over that window, so the 400 chaos cost line is not a stable number.

Farming uniques instead: the Renown variant

The other mercenary strategy people are running stacks Trarthan Scarab of Infamy with Trarthan Scarab of Renown, so every equipment item on every mercenary in the area is unique. The video confirms by testing that Wild Mercenaries do inherit the Renown effect, which makes Trarthan Scarab of Surprising Alliances — Wild Rogue Exiles have a 50% chance to be accompanied by a Wild Mercenary — the obvious third scarab for a unique-focused build.

There is a concrete reason this variant exists in 3.29. The patch notes moved six uniques out of the core drop pool and back to mercenary encounters only: Azadi Crest, Binds of Bloody Vengeance, The Ghastly Theatre, Hand of Heresy, Howlcrack and Scornflux. If you want any of those, mercenaries are now the only source. Trarthan gems went the same way — they are no longer possible rewards from Heist Gem Chests and are once again obtained from mercenary encounters.

1. Run Infamy plus Renown if you want uniques rather than currency setupBoth are Limit: 1, so they stack in the same map, and the Wild Mercenaries inherit the Renown effect. 9:57
2. Add Surprising Alliances to multiply Wild Mercenary count grindWild Rogue Exiles get a 50% chance to bring a Wild Mercenary, but each extra Wild Mercenary raises their difficulty. 9:57

Mercenary tiers, classes and the "best mercenary" question

Two different things get called "tiers" here, so it is worth separating them.

Support gem tiers. Mercenaries have their own class of support gems whose strength is measured in tiers, including Gilded supports that players cannot use. A mercenary in a map rolls skills with support counts of None (0), Low (1–2), Medium (2–3) or High (3–5) depending on the skill. Infamous mercenaries have a greater chance of extra supports, and 3.29.1 gave mercenaries slightly more supports on average in maps. More supports means a harder fight, which on a rush strategy is a cost, not a benefit.

Map tiers. Covered above: roughly twice as many Infamous mercenaries at tier 16 as at tier 1 since 3.29.1.

As for the best mercenary in 3.29 — neither the video nor the wiki ranks them. What the wiki does document is that mercenaries come in attribute-aligned classes and in four noble houses descended from the death-trade families of Trarthus, and that the Atlas tree lets you bias which you meet: Azadi Supremacy, Cyaxan Supremacy and Keitan Supremacy each give 100% increased chance for mercenaries to be from that house, while Absent Warriors, Skills Shortage and Education Cuts give 75% less chance of Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence aligned mercenaries respectively. If a particular class is killing you, those exclusion nodes are the answer.

What this guide does not answer

Some things people search for around this topic simply are not covered by the source, and it is more useful to say so than to pad.

• Mercenary and Allflame interaction. 3.29 is The Curse of the Allflame league, but neither the video nor the wiki's Mercenary page documents any interaction between Allflame embers and mercenaries. Treat any "mercenary allflame" strategy you see elsewhere as unverified.
• Full mercenary class and Infamous modifier lists. The wiki has sections for both, but they are flagged as needing an update for the 3.29.0 rework, so the values there may be from the 3.26 Mercenaries league rather than current.
• Whether mercenary rushing stays profitable past week two. The video is explicit that its numbers come from a distorted early-league scarab market with very low scarab supply. The author's own read of the wider 3.29 endgame is that the floor of most mechanics is too low and there are no aspirational farms yet, with Mercenaries, red Searing Exarch altars and Legion as the three best early money-makers.
• Skittering Lockboxes. The video opens by rejecting an Abyss lockbox farm because greater lockboxes spawn too rarely, sometimes carrying around eight scarabs. There is no wiki page for Skittering Lockbox at all, so those numbers are unverified.

How this guide was fact-checked

Wiki-verified against poewiki.net: the Rucksack's four-item limit; the Gold wager, refund and forfeit rules; Take Item versus Rematch and Mercenary Warrants; the Act 3 onward spawn rules and the empty campaign Rucksacks; the Scion Luminary permanent-hire rules; what Infamous status changes; all four Trarthan scarab names and their exact modifier text; every Atlas passive quoted in the tree table; the 3.29.1 tier-scaling of Infamous mercenaries; Mesa's tier, quadrant and boss; the Shaped Region tier-16 entry requirement and the Final Boss drops (2–3) additional Scarab Items modifier; Domination Scarab of Terrors' wording; Eater of Worlds altar scarab duplication; Atlas anomaly mechanics and the southwest anomaly list; Death Rush's stat line; and the six uniques returned to mercenary-only drops in 3.29.0.

Screenshot-verified from the video itself, because the auto-captions garble them: "Trarthan Scarab of Infamy" (heard as "Trove Scarab"), "The Manor Foyer" (heard as "Manor Fire"), "Rucksack" (heard as "rock sack"), and the 100-map profit total of 1,731 chaos / 16 divines, which the narration states inconsistently.

Unverified and flagged inline: Wild Mercenary targeting behaviour and the damage-over-time workaround; the three unidentified spreadsheet loot labels; Skittering Lockbox drop rates; and any Allflame-mercenary interaction. The wiki's Mercenary article currently carries an official "needs to be updated — Rework in version 3.29.0" notice, so these should be re-checked once that page is revised.

Source: BawLoch, Poe 3.29 - Infamous Mercenary Rushing - How i farmed 100+ Divines on League Start, published 27 July 2026.