Alva – Master Explorer
Alva Valai, the Master Explorer, can be first encountered in Act 7.
When you meet Alva in the world (outside of town), she grants you access to temporal incursions which take you back in time to the glory days of the Vaal. Upon entering her portal, you are transported to the Temple of Atzoatl at a point in time during its construction.
These incursions are small sub-zones full of mobs to kill in different styles of rooms. During these encounters, an item called a Stone of Passage can drop. These stones are required to unlock closed doors and create connections between two adjacent rooms.
Each incursion also contains two Architects – one to the right and one to the left, as shown in the image here. Killing one of the Architects allows you to change the room type, or upgrade the existing room to a higher tier, depending on which Architect is killed.
For a full list of rooms, check out the well laid out page at https://wraeclast.com/#incursion
Alva can open up to three portals per zone. Once twelve incursions have been completed, you gain access to the Temple of Atzoatl in the present day.
The area level of the temple is determined by the average level of the incursion zones that you opened, plus 10 levels, to a maximum of the highest level of the twelve incursions that you opened.
Tailoring your Temple
For the purpose of target farming a specific room, it becomes important to understand the nuances of temple creation. As such, this section details how rooms are chosen and how to give yourself the best chance at having a tier three (T3) room of the desired type. For the rest of this section, we will use the T3 Corruption room (the Locus of Corruption) as our example target room, since this is usually the most desirable room.
When a zone (map or otherwise) is created with Alva present, three rooms are chosen. These rooms cannot double up (as soon as you meet the first Alva the three rooms are set in stone), and cannot be changed once the zone is loaded.
Additionally, the next room that you will encounter at any given point is always guaranteed. This means that, for example, if you were to encounter a T1 Flame Workshop as your first incursion in a map, and you chose not to enter it hoping that it would change in the next map… well, it won’t. No matter where you go, once it has been determined the next incursion will always be the same until it is opened (whether it is completed or not).
Knowing that all three rooms are generated at the start of the map allows us to approach it in a way that will maximise the chances of finding the specific room that we want.
- If the first incursion we encounter in a zone contains the Corruption room that we are seeking as one of the options, then we will run that incursion and change it to the Corruption room (or upgrade it if it is already the Corruption room). We will then not open either of the other incursions in the zone. The next 2 rooms have already been decided, and we know that it cannot be the corruption room (as it cannot have doubled up). By not running these two rooms in this zone, we put one extra incursion back into the pile of “chances to get our desired room”.
- If the second incursion we encounter contains the Corruption room instead, we will of course change to it or upgrade it. Once again, at this point we stop running incursions and leave the third one alone. This is because the third room choice will be an “undesirable room”, and if we run it now then the next time we encounter Alva we have a chance to get that same undesirable room choice another time, diluting our chances of getting the Corruption room. By instead leaving the third incursion untouched we will still be forced to run that room at the start of next map – but we have ruled out the chances of having to run it twice instead of once.
- If neither of the first two incursions we encounter contains the Corruption room:
- If the third incursion contains the Corruption room then we change to it or upgrade it and that’s that (as there are no incursions left in the zone).
- If the third incursion doesn’t contain the Corruption room but does contain a T2 room that we can upgrade to a T3 room, then we can do that upgrade to remove that room from the pool of available rooms to choose from.
- If the third incursion contains neither the Corruption room or a T2 room to upgrade, then we do not open it (for the same reason as above – this will guarantee that we don’t get this undesirable room choice twice in the next zone).
If we reach the sixth last incursion in a temple without having the Corruption room anywhere in our temple (including the room choices in the sixth last incursion) then the temple is ruined as far as finding the Corruption room is concerned. At this point, we should open every incursion we see in order to finish the temple as quickly as possible and try again.
As an additional note, while running incursions we should be sure to never change a room to anything that isn’t the target room (the Corruption room in this example). Once a room reaches T3 it caps and cannot be chosen again in future incursions for that temple. As such, if we are forced to run an undesirable room (if it is the first incursion in a zone, for instance) then we should upgrade the room to get it to T3 as quickly as possible, in order to rule it out of the pool of available room choices.