Last Epoch: Corruption Guide (2024)

Last Epoch's endgame has a great deal of customization to suit any playstyle. The Monolith of Fate allows any build to earn some powerful rewards by clearing entire maps of monsters, completing a wide range of objectives, or killing tough pinnacle bosses.

To make this system even more flexible, the Monolith of Fate features a flexible difficulty mechanic called Corruption. Players can opt into harder Echo encounters to gain bonus XP, item rarity bonuses, and better Echo rewards. This guide will explain how Corruption works in Last Epoch, how to scale it, and give some tips on how to farm Corruption efficiently.

What Is Corruption?

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Corruption scales the difficulty of all encounters within a particular Monolith of Fate timeline. By default, standard Monolith runs have zero Corruption and a hard cap of x50 Corruption stacks. Empowered Monoliths start at x100 Corruption and have no ceiling. The higher your Corruption is, the tougher the monsters will be, but the better loot you'll receive.

Your timeline's Corruption stat impacts two things:

1. Monster Stats: Enemies gain increased HP and damage per stack of Corruption.
2. Player Stats: Players gain increased XP and item rarity per stack of Corruption.
   • Echo rewards also increase in rarity.

Endgame builds ideally want to push their Monolith Corruption as high as possible, as this will greatly increase the rarity of items that monsters drop. It also makes reaching Level 100 far easier.

How To Increase Corruption

You can increase your Corruption stacks by defeating the Shade of Orobyss boss in your timeline. The Shade of Orobyss spawns at the edge of your Echo web, found on the "Echo of a World" tile. Successfully defeating the boss will increase your timeline's Corruption stat slightly. For normal difficulty, this has a hard cap of x50 Corruption stacks. For Empowered Monoliths, there is no Corruption cap.

Increasing your Corruption this way is fairly slow, but there is a way to drastically speed up this process. Killing a timeline's final boss will grant a stack of Gaze of Orobyss. There is no limit to how many stacks of this buff you can receive. Killing Orobyss will consume all Gaze of Orobyss stacks and award bonus Corruption, roughly ten Corruption per stack.

Finally, you can opt to beeline it to the edges of your Echo web to further increase Orobyss' base Corruption. The further Orobyss is from the center of your timeline, the more base Corruption they'll award when slain. A node that's close to your timeline's center will award +2 Corruption, while a distant node can award up to +10 Corruption. Pair this with Gaze of Orobyss stacks, and you can earn over 20 Corruption from a single kill.

Reducing Corruption Stacks

While the Corruption system only adjusts difficulty in small increments, it's possible to add too much Corruption from an Orobyss kill, effectively soft-locking your character from clearing Echo objectives. If this happens to you, there are two solutions:

1. Fight the Shade of Orobyss if they're close to your Echo origin.
2. Complete the Sanctuary of Eterra Echo.

Shade Of Orobyss

The Shade of Orobyss will typically increase your Corruption stacks, but they can actually do the inverse if they're close enough to your timeline's epicenter. If you find Orobyss near the middle of your timeline, killing them will reduce your Corruption by a small amount.

You can repeat this process multiple times until you strike a good balance between difficulty and rewards. Just beware that your Echo resets every time you kill Orobyss, so you'll need to go searching for their Echo tile each time you kill them.

Sanctuary Of Eterra

After you kill the Shade of Orobyss for the first time, you will unlock the Sanctuary of Eterra Echo tile. This node will always spawn at the center of your Echo web. Completing the Sanctuary of Eterra node allows you to reduce your timeline's Corruption. Unlike the Orobyss fight, you can actually choose how much Corruption to remove. The Echo gives you three options:

• Small Reduction: Removes up to -10 Corruption.
• Moderate Reduction: Removes roughly 20-30% Corruption.
• Monolith Reset: Resets your Corruption to base value.
  • 0 for Normal, 100 for Empowered.

The Echo itself requires you to complete a short boss fight that's far easier than the Shade of Orobyss. If you're struggling to clear your Monolith Echoes and need to lower the difficulty, the Sanctuary of Eterra is your best option.

The Most Efficient Corruption Farm

By far the fastest way to build Corruption in Last Epoch is to clear your Echo web diagonally and disregard Stability. When you enter an Echo, you'll want to complete the objective as fast as possible and ditch bonus Stability. The second you complete the objective, portal out of the Echo to claim your rewards, and then start another Echo. Avoid arena Echoes while doing this, as they take far more time to complete.

You'll want to continue pushing diagonally across the web until you either hit max Stability or find an Orobyss fight with +10 Corruption at base. Once you reach max Stability, kill the timeline boss before you do anything else. This will grant a Gaze of Orobyss stack and increase the Corruption awarded from your next Orobyss kill. Slay Orobyss when their Corruption payout reaches +25 or higher. The web will then reset. Repeat the process until you hit your desired Corruption value.