Complete the Hall of Grandmasters.
Hall of Grandmasters is a unique Promenade Map.
Hall of Grandmasters is not part of the Atlas of Worlds. There is no bonus objective for this map.
Instead of containing randomly spawned monsters as in most other maps, the Hall of Grandmasters includes other exiles based on characters of players who purchased a Grandmaster supporter pack.
The map consists of a foyer with several large doorways. Between each door is a hall of 50 grandmasters, separated by forcefields so you fight waves of 5 at a time. Currently there are 4 halls (Hall of the Heroes, Hall of the Eternal, Hall of the Fallen, and Hall of the Twisted), making 200 Grandmasters or 40 waves in the map. The waves are randomly organised by approximate difficulty and get progressively harder.
At the end of each hall there is a unique Strongbox called Grandmaster’s Cache that does not spawn monsters when opened.
According to the development plan, “Grandmasters using Vaal Skills will gain one Vaal Soul per skill every five seconds. It’s currently possible to encounter Tormented Spirits in the map. You will not encounter Strongboxes (other than those at the end of each hall) or Rogue Exiles.” However currently Grandmasters generate 2 Vaal souls every second.
Some of the Grandmasters have combinations of legacy gear and very heavy defences, making them hard to kill for a lot of builds. In general these can be categorized by high recovery (life regen, ES regen), high avoidance mechanics (Block, Dodge, Evasion), high damage reduction (reduced elemental damage taken, reduced physical damage taken) and Immunities (Chaos Inoculation, Gluttony of Elements, legacy Immortal Call).
Dealing with avoidance mechanics: Block Chance Reduction Support is a must for hit based builds. If you cannot replace one of your links then you can link a fast hitting attack/spell with it to quickly reduce Grandmasters defences. Note that the “Monsters cannot Block your Attacks” Attack Mastery will not work on Grandmasters. A suggestion is | Holy Flame Totem – Multiple Totems – Faster Casting – Block Chance Reduction | which will reduce Grandmasters block chance to zero in about a second.
Dealing with recovery: Frost Bomb solves most recovery problems and is currently the easiest way to deal with this.
Dealing with damage reduction: Some Grandmasters have very high physical reduction, if you struggle with this consider converting some of your damage to elemental. As with players, reducing (not recommended due to overcapped resistances) and penetrations is a massive increase to the damage taken.
Dealing with Immunities: Chaos skills are NOT RECOMMENDED as there are several characters with Chaos Inoculation which makes completion impossible. All other forms of immunities, including legacy Immortal Call are time based or can be solved by converting damage or dealing a mix of elemental and physical damage.
(!)Minions: Due to the way PvP damage scaling works, minions such as Spectres and Animate Guardian are extremely vulnerable in this map. They can be instantly killed by some grandmasters even with 50000+ Life and multiple defensive links such as Minion Life Support, Meat Shield Support, and Elemental Army support. It is heavily recommended you deactivate your Animate Guardian so you do not lose any expensive equipped items.