Guide to Pricing Items on Domination

Warning: this is a fairly long textbook-style guide. Understanding the value of items and knowing how to price things in this game is not easy, and takes a lot of time and experience to learn. There will never be easy shortcuts like “if item has x, then it is worth y.” In fact, this guide is not as much a price guide as it is a guide about understanding where the value of an item comes from, and how to price check items for yourself. It’s kind of like how your high school science teachers always told you that the key to success is in understanding the material, not memorizing facts and formulas. Also, and this goes almost without saying, but the majority of this guide is purely subjective. I do not claim to be the ultimate authority when it comes to pricing items, but I do think I’ve traded enough in this game to have a pretty good idea of how things work. Please leave me your comments and suggestions and help me to improve this guide.

This guide is not for the complete beginner. It assumes that you have basic knowledge of game mechanics, and have played through the game at least once or twice. If you are playing this game for the first time, my recommendation is to not worry too much about the value of items yet. If you happen across an item that you think is good, stash it for now and come back to it once you have a better idea of what’s out there. You should know the difference item level and level requirement, the difference between global mods and local mods, what an implicit mod is, the fact that rare items can spawn with up to 3 different prefixes and 3 different suffixes and that each of those item affixes fall into various tiers, etc. If these are unfamiliar to you, please consult wiki and/or the game mechanics thread.

One critical thing to keep in mind about pricing items in this game is that nothing has a defined price. Items may have an approximate value, but in the end an item’s “price” is simply the amount a particular buyer is willing to pay and a particular seller is willing to sell for. The value of an item changes over time, is different across different leagues, and is influenced by both supply and demand - how many people want the item, and how rare the item is. The demand factor is something people often forget about - even the rarest of items are not worth much if nobody or not many people want it.

Since I’ve spent the majority of my time on PoE in Anarchy and Domination leagues, this guide is written to apply purely for Domination only. Of course the general concepts I talk about will work with any league, but as far as numbers go, do not trust them for other leagues.

As a final note, I realize there are no examples in this guide. I've been price checking some items in the Domination Price Check forums though, so check my post history for some examples there.

Unique items are the easiest to price in this game since they come with a predetermined set of mods. Simply search poe.xyz.is with your unique, mark buyout only, and the lowest buyout prices you see are typically going to be a good estimate of how much your unique is worth. If you see a few prices that are lower than most of the others, verify them to see if they are still available. Also click the item to visit the seller’s thread and see if the shop was recently updated. If the item is sold, or the seller’s shop has not been updated recently, then that b/o price might truly be a bit too low/inaccurate.

If not a lot of results come up, you may have to dig a bit deeper to find prices. Turn off buyout only, and see if you can find prices by manually visiting each seller’s thread. Sometimes there are c/o and b/o prices in the forum thread that aren’t properly tagged to show up on poe.xyz.is. If you have an extremely rare unique and you still can’t find many listings, you could try a forum search for that unique to find forum threads selling that item that have already sold it, but may still have useful pricing information on the thread.

2.1 Uniques with Rolls

Although the same unique always has the same set of mods, many uniques have varying ranges of rolls for certain mods that can affect its value. Make sure to look up your unique item on the wiki to see the range of values it can have, and consider specifying a range of values for mods that vary on the unique when searching, especially if there are a lot of results. In general, rolls on cheap uniques that are worth a chaos or so do not matter too much, whereas rolls on uniques that are worth multiple chaos or exalts do matter quite a bit. Keep in mind though that divine orbs do exist and can be used to reroll these mods. For high end uniques that are worth multiple exalts, a mid roll isn’t worth too much (i.e. more than a divine’s worth or so) more than even the lowest roll, but a high roll can be worth an exalt or more over a mid roll.

There are exceptions to the effect of rolls on the cheaper uniques, most notably facebreakers and uniques with increased quantity and rarity. For example, currently on Domination, for a facebreaker which has an increased unarmed damage mod that rolls between 600-800, anything under 700 is worth a chaos or less, while a roll of 790+ can be worth 10-20 chaos. For goldwyrms, which has a quantity roll between 20-30, anything under about 26-27 is worth a chaos, a high roll of 28-29 is worth 2-4 chaos, and a perfect 30 roll can be worth 10-20 chaos.

Unlike unique items which already have predetermined mods, rare items can have a large variety of different mods which make them much more difficult to price. To price a rare, your best strategy is to identify which are the important mods on the item, and then search for items of the same base type with those mods. For weapons, it’s important to specify the type of weapon like “1H sword” or “2H axe.” For armor slots, I usually just use the generic armor slot like “ring” or “body armor,” and only if I need to narrow down my results do I specify the actual base type like “diamond ring” or “body armor with evasion and ES.” An item can have up to 6 mods but you would rarely want to search for similar items with those exact same 6 mods, because then your results would be too narrow. The rest of this section is designed to help you understand what are the important mods that you should specify in a search, what are the helpful mods that you should consider when valuing an item but not necessarily explicitly search for, and what are the mods that add no value at all to an item.

In a search for an item, anytime you get too many results, try adding more mods to narrow your search. If not a lot of results come up, remove some mods or increase the range of values for the mods in your search and try again. You may end up having to even remove important mods as parameters in your search, and be able to mentally substitute 1 important mod for another. For example, if don't find any results for amulets with spell damage, cast speed, crit multiplier, and life (all important mods), you can try taking off the life mod. Then in your next search, you see an amulet with those 3 mods and then all resist instead of life. Life and resists are not the same thing but they're both important mods and now you have at least something to go off of. Also, especially for harder to price items like jewelry, don't be satisfied if you find only 1 or 2 similar items with buyouts - most items are overpriced and you should be looking for at least 5 similar items to get a more accurate picture of the item's value.

The biggest question that gets asked but is impossible to answer is “what makes a rare item valuable enough to keep and sell to other players instead of vendor?” For weapons, it’s simply a DPS number that will be explained in greater detail later on. However, for caster weapons, armors, and jewelry, it’s much more difficult to say. The baseline I usually use is that a rare armor or jewelry piece should have at least 2 high-roll important mods, or 3 mid-roll important mods. Important mods are things like life, ES, and resists, and will be discussed in detail for every single gear slot in the following sections. For chest pieces, quivers, and life based shields, this number becomes 3 high-roll important mods, or 4 mid-roll important mods. If your item meets this baseline criteria, you should search up similar items on poe.xyz.is to see how much your item is really worth.

The next question is then “what is considered a mid-roll and what is considered a high-roll?” To get a feel for this issue, you need to check poemods.com and look at the different values and tiers a mod can have. Let’s take resistances, for example. Fire resist can spawn anywhere from 6-45. Getting a bottom tier roll like 8% fire resist won’t really add to the value of an item. A mid tier roll like 25% is decent and will add to the item’s worth. A slightly higher roll such as 33%, is also nice but won’t really add considerably more value to an item than 25% since it’s only 1 tier higher. A roll of 44%, however, is a max tier roll and can add a lot to an item’s value. For the most part, each tier of any mod has approximately the same chance to spawn as any other tier for that mod. There are a few notable exceptions though, namely % increased physical and spell damage mods, and life/mana leech. For those the mods the top tiers are much more rarer than the lower tiers. Also, keep in mind that the same mod can have different max tiers for different equipment slots. For example, life can can spawn up to +109 on chest pieces, +99 on helms, shields, and belts, +89 on gloves and boots, +79 on rings and amulets, and cannot spawn at all on weapons.

3.1 Weapons

Most weapons are not too hard to price, since in general there’s really only 1 defining factor on it, which is the weapon’s physical DPS. You should begin pricing a weapon by searching for weapons of the same type with similar pDPS. Currently in Domination you’ll need about 200 pDPS on 1H weapons and bows (a bit less for daggers and a lot less for wands) and 350 pDPS on 2H weapons before they start to become worth anything, but keep in mind that those numbers are just approximates and vary greatly based on league and age of league. If you’re not sure, search for a particular pDPS and if you see lots of items with 1 alch b/o’s, then that pDPS is probably too low to be worth anything.

A weapon’s pDPS is a number that’s the result of up to 4 different mods, as well as the base type of the weapon:
1. Flat added physical damage prefix
2. % increased physical damage prefix
3. Hybrid % increased physical damage and accuracy prefix
4. Attack speed suffix
None of those mods alone defines the value of a weapon much, and you should never search explicitly for those mods. To calculate a weapon’s DPS, simply add the minimum damage and the maximum damage on the weapon, divide by 2, and multiply by the attack speed.

What about elemental damage? While added elemental damage is certainly useful and increases the value of an item, 1 DPS of physical damage is generally worth a lot more than 1 DPS of elemental damage, for 2 main reasons. First, most builds are built to scale their physical damage a lot more than elemental from their gear and passives, and second, most monsters have a lot of inherent elemental resistances (especially bosses) and no physical resistances. The only physical resistances monsters have are from armor, but there are no higher armor monsters in this game. Due to the way armor works, a monster’s physical resistance from armor is a very small amount.

Of course, there are exceptions to this - some bow and wand builds are built to scale off both physical and elemental, or even only elemental. Other more defensively-oriented builds don’t scale off physical too much anyway so added elemental damage still helps a lot. So in order to account for elemental damage, calculate the total DPS (add min and max damage of both physical and elemental, divide by 2, multiply by attack speed), and include both a range of pDPS and total DPS values when searching for similar items.

The next important mod on weapons to consider is crit. On daggers and wands, crit is just as important as DPS, and when pricing wands and daggers with additional crit chance on them you need to be searching for weapons with not only comparable DPS, but comparable crit chance as well. Crit on bows (if it’s a harbinger bow in particular, then crit on that falls into the same category as daggers and wands) and swords can also add a lot of value to a weapon, but it’s not as important on those bases. Crit on maces and axes generally do not increase the value of the weapon at all. Note that the mod I’m talking about in particular is the local “% increased critical strike chance” mod - this mod affects the base chance to crit on the weapon, and is really important for crit builds since all other increased crit from gear and passives scale off of this weapon base crit chance. Crit multiplier is a very nice mod as well for crit weapons, but is no where near the importance of the local crit chance mod for these items.

Attack speed on weapons is a bit of a trickier consideration, since it’s already factored into the DPS calculation. In general, if 2 weapons have the same DPS, the one with a higher attack speed will be worth more. This is because higher attack speed will scale your damage better if you have a lot of added flat physical/elemental damage from gear, and from the wrath and anger auras. For example, player 1 has a weapon that does 10 damage once a second (10 DPS), and has a ring that adds 2 to physical damage. His total DPS is 12. Player 2 has a weapon that does 5 damage twice a second (also 10 DPS), and the same ring that adds 2 damage. His total DPS is 14. Other benefits of higher attack speed include more chances to crit and apply on hit effects such as charge generation and reave stacks, and more “fluid” gameplay (i.e. can run away faster or move on to next pack of monsters faster). Overall, just keep in mind that attack speed can be a big deal for things like one handed swords/axes, wands, daggers, and bows (so include it as a parameter in your search), and not as important for maces and most two handers. In fact for some builds, a slower and harder hitting weapon may actually be preferred since it has the benefits of increased stuns and status effect durations, less mana cost, and better armor penetration.

Other mods such as leech, mana, mana regen, weapon elemental and % elemental damage, attributes, resists, and accuracy are useful mods that can increase the value of a weapon, but never by too much and thus you generally shouldn’t specify these mods in your search. A lot of the prefixes mentioned above such as leech and % elemental damage are actually great and worth a lot on other pieces of gear, but on weapons they have to compete with and end up being overshadowed by weapon damage prefixes.

Some daggers and wands are caster weapons, and thus the DPS doesn’t matter at all. For these items you want to look for mainly spell damage, cast speed, projectile speed, and spell crit chance. Crit multiplier is also a nice mod to have but is not as important on weapons since it maxes out at 38 on weapons compared to 70 on amulets and quivers. Increased % elemental damage is essentially the same thing as spell damage, but since it have a much narrower value being limited to only 1 element, you shouldn’t explicitly search for it.

Another thing that’s fairly rare but still something to be aware of are +gem level mods. In general, they are worthless, but there are a few notable exceptions, namely if you get both +1 to all gem levels and +2 to melee/+2 to bow (on one handed weapons and bows, respectively) on the same item. The DPS on these weapons do no matter but they are still useful for viper strike and poison arrow and can be worth quite a bit. Also, +gem level mods can really improve the value of caster staffs, since they can be 6 linked.

Lastly, one more class of weapons to be aware of is the cast on crit dagger, which is a spellcaster that can only cast those spells on melee crits. Like regular physical daggers, local crit chance and attack speed is very important. However, unlike regular physical daggers, the actual physical damage on the dagger is useless, and instead needs spell damage. Spell crit, crit multiplier, and faster projectiles are also helpful, but cast speed is useless.

3.2 Armors

Armor pieces are a bit more difficult to price than weapons because while weapons have 1 all-important DPS number to go by, armors have multiple mods that can be equally important. Life and energy shield are probably the 2 most important mods, since most characters are either life based or CI. There are hybrid life/ES builds, as well as builds that utilize ES for eldritch battery and/or mind over matter, but those builds are still essentially life builds that use energy shield as more of a minor mod. So in other words while life and ES are individually essential mods, having both together on one piece will not dramatically increase the value of an armor piece. On the other hand, an armor piece without any life or additional ES will generally not be worth much, and will need the other stats to be spectacular in order to have any value at all. Another thing to keep in mind about life and ES is that while life comes from 1 mod, ES on an armor comes from 3 different prefixes in addition to the base amount on the armor. This means that the ES amount on an ES piece carries a lot more weight than the life amount on a life piece, especially when you get to high end gear, and especially for helms and chest pieces, which can reach higher ES tiers than gloves and boots. When searching an ES piece you should specify a range of ES values rather than searching for increased ES as an explicit mod.

Additional armor/evasion and resistances are also key mods to have on armor pieces. When searching for resists, usually you should search for “# elemental resists” or “+#% total elemental resists” rather than a specific fire/cold/lightning resist. Chaos resist is rarer than the 3 elemental resists, and is generally worth more than a regular resist for a life armor, but worth nothing for a ES armor (low-life Shavronne’s builds do exist, but are too uncommon for chaos resist to consistently add value to a ES armor). When searching for armor/evasion, know that 1 armor is worth about the same as 1 evasion, and in general they are interchangeable (as far as value is concerned) and additive for armor/evasion hybrid pieces due to the prevalence of iron reflexes. Just like ES and physical damage on weapons, total armor/evasion on an armor piece is also composed of a combination of multiple prefixes, so you should search for a range of those values instead of additional armor/evasion as an explicit mod.

Additional attributes, increased rarity, mana, and the combination of life and ES are all helpful and valuable mods, but are not super important and in general shouldn’t be explicitly searched for when pricing an item. The exception here is that increased rarity is both a prefix and a suffix, so if you happen to find a piece with more than 30 or so rarity, then that is actually quite significant and is worth specifying as a mod in your search. This is especially true for helms, since it is difficult to beat the cheap unique alternatives for rarity on gloves and boots (sadima’s/aurseize for gloves, and goldwyrm for boots), but a high rarity unique helm option does not exist.

Regarding chest pieces in particular, typically unlinked chest armors need more and better mods to be worth anything when compared to gloves/helms/boots, for two main reasons. First, the pool of mods for chest pieces is much smaller than that of gloves/helms/boots, so it’s much easier to get the good mods of life/ES/armor/evasion/resists. Second, which is the more important reason, is that most people need a 5L for their chest piece, and it’s much more cost effective to buy a 5L chest piece than to try to link one for yourself. Even for builds that use 2H weapons, before you reach end game you’d still prefer to have a 5L armor over a 5L weapon since the weapon is more important than the armor and then it becomes much easier to upgrade your weapon (since you don’t have to worry about the links on it).

Gloves are unique in that they can roll several damage mods that other armor pieces cannot, such as attack speed, added physical damage, and added elemental damage. Out of those, attack speed can worth quite a lot and you should specify an increased attack speed mod when searching for similar gloves. Another mod that cannot spawn on other armor pieces and that you should also specify when pricing gloves is life leech and mana leech. As for added damage, added physical damage is worth slightly more than added elemental (for reasons mentioned earlier in the weapons section), but neither are too critical and are probably not worth specifying for to keep your results from coming up too narrow.

The only thing special about helms is that they can spawn with a +1/+2 to minion gems mod. A helm with +2 (and only +2, since +2 isn’t any more rarer than +1, +1 is essentially useless) and not on a pure evasion base is great for summoners and should be specified in a search for similar helms. A +2 minion mod on a pure evasion base is not really useful because very few people use green skills for minions and colors would be too difficult to roll on such a helm.

For boots, the movement speed mod is practically just as important as life/ES if not even more so. Movement speed is difficult to obtain in significant amounts anywhere else, and is vital for any build (except maybe cyclone). Just like life/ES, it is difficult for boots to be worth much without a move speed mod.

3.3 Shields and Quivers

If you thought it was tough to get a chest piece to be worth anything, it’s even harder for a life-based shield to be valuable. First of all, not all builds even use shields. Second of all, for any build that does use a shield, there are powerful and readily available unique options - crest of perandus, lioneye’s remorse, aegis aurora, etc. In particular, crest of perandus is the reason why most rare shields are bad. If your build uses a shield, you probably want high block, and crest of perandus, a unique low level shield that costs barely 1 chaos, has the most block of any shield in the game (40%) in addition to up to 80 life, 30 lightning res, and a bonus 3% life leech on top of that. It doesn’t matter that it has low evasion, the extra block chance more than makes up for that. If you do come across some spectacular shield though, you should price it the same way as any other armor piece, while also placing extra value on base block chance and additional block chance. One sort of exception though are the armor/ES hybrid shields with implicit 24 all resist (ceremonial, angelic, and archon kite shields). Since the implict mod on these shields is way better than any of the other implicit mods on other shields, these types of shields that spawn with a life roll and another decent mod or two can easily be worth at least something for players who need the resist more than the block.

ES shields are a bit different though, as users of ES shields use them more for their ES rather than the block chance. Price these as you would any other ES armor, while noting that ES shields can have a max somewhere between helms and chest pieces. Also, pure ES shields can spawn with spell damage and spell crit, both are which are very valuable and should be specified for in a search.

Quivers are notoriously hard to price, and are generally need quite a lot of good mods to be worth anything since they can only be used by bow users, which represent a relative minority of all the builds out there. While they can spawn with life and resists and those are certainly useful mods, a quiver can still be worth a lot even without those defensive mods due to the many offensive mods that can spawn. As far as the offensive mods go, attack speed and weapon elemental damage are probably the two most important, and should definitely be specified for in a search. Crit chance and crit multiplier are also highly desired stats, with crit multiplier being better than crit chance, since not only does crit multiplier go up to 70 as opposed to crit chance’s 38, but for the majority of crit builds, 1 point of global crit multiplier adds more DPS than 1 point of global crit chance. Life and mana leech are 2 more mods that can be useful, but the majority of bow builds deal a large portion of elemental damage and get life/mana from other sources such as blood magic, life leech gem (which leeches from elemental and not just physical), and life gain on hit. Out of the rest of the mod pool, added physical and elemental damage prefixes are somewhat useful, and accuracy, projectile speed, and dexterity suffixes are not useless either. This means that there are no completely useless prefixes on quivers, and very few useless suffixes, which further contributes to the high requirements a quiver typically needs to have in order to be of any value. In terms of base type and implicit mods on quivers, light quivers with the up to 40 max dexterity implicit mod is arguably much better than all the others, since the added damage mods on the other quiver base types are too low to be meaningful by end game.

3.4 Jewelry

Let’s start with belts, since they have a rather limited pool of mods to draw from and aren’t too different from other armor pieces. The main difference between belts and other armor pieces is that they don’t have any base armor/evasion, and that they can get a weapon elemental damage mod. Also, instead of additional % armor/evasion, they can get a up to 400 flat physical armor mod. These mods - weapon elemental damage, armor, life, ES, and resists - are the mods to search for on belts. As far as the base type goes, rustic sashes and leather belts are obviously the most desirable, as well as chain belts that have additional ES. The other base types are not as useful, but can still be valuable if they spawn with desirable mods.

On the other hand, rings and amulets are the most difficult items to price in the game. They have a huge pool of mods to draw from, and there isn’t any one or even few all-important mod for rings and amulets. Also, various combinations of certain mods can greatly improve the value of a piece of jewelry, and you should be able to use your own logic to figure those out. For example, having crit chance and crit multiplier on an amulet is a great combination, while having physical damage and cast speed together on an amulet is not even though individually they are great mods for their respective builds.

As usual, life and resists on jewelry is always extremely valuable. ES though, while still useful, is not too great of a mod on a ring. Why? For life, you can get up to 79 life on a ring versus 89-109 on other armor pieces, but for ES, you can only get up to 43 flat ES on a ring versus hundreds (or even over a thousand on a chest piece) on other armor pieces. Note that amulets can get a global % increased ES mod though, which unlike flat ES is actually quite valuable since that mod cannot appear on any other gear slots (not counting uniques). Similar to flat ES, armor and evasion mods on jewelry can be nice but rarely add much to the value of jewelry since they can be found in much higher quantities on other armor pieces.

The most important offensive mods to search for on rings and amulets are physical and elemental damage, spell and % elemental damage, weapon elemental damage, attack speed, cast speed, crit multiplier, and maybe crit chance. Mana and life leech are two highly sought after mods as well, especially on amulets since they can roll up to 6 life leech and 4 mana leech compared to 2 life/mana on rings. Note that life leech on amulets is one of the rare cases where the higher tiers (3-4, 5-6) are much rarer than the lower tiers, making them extremely valuable.

Other mods such as attributes, accuracy, increased rarity, mana, and mana regen, are useful but generally shouldn’t be explicitly searched for when pricing a piece of jewelry. The exception is if you get a rarity roll on a gold base, and/or a double rarity roll. Jewelry with high increased rarity (let’s say 30+) is worth explicitly searching for, even if the item has no other useful mods.

3.5 Leveling Rares

Not all gear needs to be end game gear to be valuable. For weapons, if you get a high % increased physical mod and a high increased flat physical damage mod on any weapon under level 40-50, it can still be worth a chaos or two. Calculate the DPS on the weapon and search with a level restriction around the level of your weapon, and if not a lot of results come up, you might have found something worth keeping. For armors, since the base type matters less than weapons, there is less of a distinction between a “leveling” armor and an “end-game” armor. It’s very possible to find an armor piece with a level requirement under 40-50 that has multiple good mods and is worth multiple chaos or even exalts. One question you can ask yourself when deciding whether or not a sub-par armor is worth keeping or not just because the level requirement is low, is how it compares to common leveling uniques. Would you use that helm over goldrim? Those gloves over sadima’s? Those boots over wanderlust or lioneye’s paws?

If the item you’re trying to price is either 6S, 5L, or 6L, I would specify those requirements in your search. Anything else, even 4L, I wouldn’t bother with since it would narrow your results by too much. If your results are too few, then remove the socket/link restrictions, and use the following guidelines to make an educated estimate on the value of your socketed or linked item.

4.1 Sockets

The only time sockets have an effect on the value of an item is if it has 6 sockets. A 4S pair of boots will not be worth any notable amount more than a 1S pair of the same boots. Even a 5S chest piece will not be worth more than a 1S chest piece. This is because it is relatively cheap to 4S a piece of gear by yourself with jewellers. No one aims to 5S a piece of armor, since it is quite easy to achieve a 4L even with only 4S, and if you are attempting to to 5L an item you would be doing it on a 6S, not a 5S. A 6S, however, can be worth quite a bit more. For an end game item, a 6S adds about half an exalt to an exalt to the value of an item when compared to the same item with less than 6S. To give you an idea of where this comes from, a jeweller has about a 1 in 150-200 chance of 6S. What exactly qualifies as an end game item? Usually a build-enabling unique such as voll’s protector or quill rain, or any weapon/armor that’s already worth at least half an exalt to an exalt, something that a player would deem worthy of investing another exalt or two worth of fuses to try to 5L the item. For a 6S item that’s not worth anything without the sockets, then having the 6S doesn’t magically make it valuable, or at least not any more than the 7 jewellers you get from vendoring it.

4.2 Links

Anything under a 4L will not affect the value of an item. A 3L on a 1H weapon or shield may increased the value of it by an alch or so, but it’s debatable and I generally ignore it. A 4L will increased the value of a useful item by a chaos or two over its unlinked version. Note that the item needs to be useful to begin with - if an item is white or a useless rare/unique to begin with, having it be a 4L still doesn’t make it valuable. Sometime a player may be looking for a specific color combination in a 4L white item, but those cases are rare and such an item is still going to be worth an alch or less.

Any 5L weapon that does not have a top tier ilvl (more on that later in the craftables section) and does not have usable stats (i.e. white, magic, or rare with junk mods) is going to be worth a chaos at most. A 5L leveling weapon is generally worth about 5-10 chaos. Once you get to a true end game weapon, such as a build enabling unique (ex. searing touch, quill rain), or any weapon worth at least an exalt already without links or sockets, having 5L will increase its value by about 1.5 to 2 exalts. Again, to give you an idea where this number comes from, a fuse has about a 1 in 100-150 chance to 5L an item.

As for 5L armors, even the lowest level 5L armor is still worth a few chaos. A low-mid level armor with no stats is still going to be worth about 5-10 chaos. As the mods on the armor start to become better, the added value from a 5L will increase all the way up to 1.5 to 2 exalts for an end game armor, just like weapons.

The chance to 6L an item with a fuse is something that no one is really too sure of. The best guesses land it at somewhere between 1 in 1000 to 1 in 2000. This generally means that a 6L version of an end game item will be worth around 10-15 exalts more than an unlinked and unsocketed version of the same item. Sometimes for an especially valuable rare or a popular build enabling unique that there is a lot of demand for but few available 6L versions of them on the market, the 6L can increase the value of the item by up to 20 or more exalts. On the low end, we have tabula rasa as a stable unique alternative to compare with. Since tabula rasa is worth around 1.5 to 2 exalts, even low and mid level 6L armors without any stats are worth 5-10 exalts. Weapons, as always, are much less useful at low levels so leveling or white/magic 6L weapons are still never more than a few exalts.

4.3 Colors

It is actually quite rare for a rare combination of colors on an item to affect its value by too much. For rares, a player doesn’t have to pay more for a rare color combination when he can get a similar item on a different base type that will allow him to roll the needed colors more easily. Or, for 4L items, a player can just look for the colors he needs on a different gear slot. The exception to this is of course for certain uniques where no alternatives are available, such as 4 off colors on alpha’s howl, or 5 or 6 off colors on armors like voll’s protector or shavronne’s. Another thing to be aware of that isn’t widely known is the fact that items with lower stat requirements have greater chances of rolling off colors. This means that it’s much easier to roll 3 off colors on something like maligaro’s virtuosity than it is to roll 3 off colors on something like rainbowstride.

Occasionally a rate item may be described as having “crafting potential” or “open exalt slots left.” If the item is already worth exalts, then having only 4 or 5 mods with room for 1 or 2 more makes the item worth more than if had 1 or 2 junk mods instead. Exactly how much more is too difficult to say, and unless the current mods on the item are absolutely perfect or near perfect, an item’s crafting potential is not going to substantially increase its value. Don’t be fooled in particular by items that 1 mod away from becoming extremely powerful, but are currently worthless without that mod. For example, it’s possible for a weapon to have a high % increased physical damage mod and a high attack speed mod, but no increased flat physical damage mod. Its DPS is probably barely worth anything in its current state, but if you exalt a high flat physical mod on it, then it would be worth many many exalts. However, the chance of exalting that flat physical mod is so low that it really doesn’t increase that item’s value by much if at all. The only exception is if the tiers of the damage stats are top rolls or mostly top rolls, and the base type is an optimal one that someone will want to use eternal exalts to continue crafting it. These cases are extremely rare though and you won’t come across them until you’re doing end game content and are a bit more experienced in item values anyway.

5.1 Common Crafting Bases

High ilvl white items can be worth a 1-3 chaos since people use them to craft. If they come with 6 sockets, 5L, or 6L, then they are considered end-game items and their values will be increased as discussed earlier even if they are white. These items need to be the optimal base type for its slot, and “high” ilvl is whatever ilvl it needs to roll its respective top tier mods, which varies depending on the item. You can check poemods.com for more specifics, but I’ve included a quick table below for the most popular crafting bases and the ilvl required.

Weapons - minimum ilvl 77 for all
1H Sword - spiraled foil, jeweled foil
1H Axe - siege axe
Dagger - ambusher, imperial skean, platinum kris (these vary in attack speed and crit, and it depends on your particular build which one gives you the highest theoretical DPS)
Wand - imbued wand
Bow - thicket bow, harbinger bow (crit)
2H Axe - vaal axe
2H Sword - reaver sword

Life based armors - minimum ilvl 73 for all
Armor - glorious plate (highest armor), astral plate (implict all res)
Evasion - zodiac leather (highest evasion), assassin’s garb (implicit move speed)
Armor/evasion hybrid - triumphant lamellar

ES based armors - minimum ilvl 78 for all
Armor - vaal regalia (pure ES), saintly chainmail (armor/ES), carnal armour (evasion/ES)
Helm - hubris circlet
Shield - archon kite shield (armor/ES, implicit all res), titanium spirit shield (pure ES)

Jewelry
Gold rings/amulets - minimum ilvl 75
Other rings/amulets - depends, most damage mods need ilvl 76, % increased ES on amulets need ilvl 77

Gems are just like uniques since there’s nothing random about them, and as such, can be priced relatively easily by searching them with buyout only on poe.xyz.is. I’ve listed out the more valuable ones and their approximate values below as an easy to use reference, but know that this list is a bit subjective and written according to my own opinion, and that gem values can change. If you’re not sure it’s best to check for yourself on poe.xyz.is.

6.1 Common Gem Values

Gems worth more than 1 chaos
portal - 9c,
empower - 6c
enlighten - new gem, value not determined yet
multistrike - 5c
cast when damage taken - 5c
greater multiple projectiles - 3c
reduced mana - 2c

Gems worth about 1 chaos
Red supports - melee physical damage, blood magic, life leech
Green supports - faster attacks, cast on critical strike, chain, enhance
Blue supports - faster casting

Gems worth about half a chaos
Red supports - added fire, life gain on hit, melee splash, weapon elemental damage
Green supports - mana leech, lesser multiple projectiles,
Blue supports - concentrated effect, elemental proliferation, increased area of effect, item rarity, power charge on critical

Gems worth about an alch
Red supports - fire penetration, increased duration, increased burning damage, reduced duration, spell totem,
Green supports - added cold damage, cold penetration, faster projectiles, culling strike, fork, multiple traps, physical projectile attack damage
Blue supports - added chaos damage, added lightning damage, chance to ignite, increased critical damage, increased critical strikes, lightning penetration, minion life, minion damage, remote mine
Utility skills - enduring cry, molten shell, immortal call, leap slam, decoy totem, rejuvenation totem, devouring totem, blood rage, frenzy, lightning warp, summon skeletons
Popular leveling skills - infernal blow, discharge
All auras except haste - grace, determination, vitality, discipline, purity of elements and lightning, fire, and ice, clarity, hatred, wrath, anger
All curses except punishment and projectile weakness - elemental weakness, conductivity, frostbite, flammability, vulnerability, enfeeble, temporal chains, critical weakness, warlord’s mark

Everything else - while occasionally someone will pay an alch or a few alts for them, the demand for all other gems is so low I don’t recommend picking up, or keeping more than 1 in your stash.

6.2 Quality Gems

Quality gems should also be priced on poe.xyz.is, but here are a few general guidelines that may help:

Anything under 10% quality is not really going to improve its value too much. Gems that are worth a chaos or more might gain a chaos or so in value, gems worth less than a chaos may now be worth 1 chaos. Active/main damage skills that are not worth anything without quality may now also be worth 1 chaos. Support gems that are not worth anything though are still not worth anything with a little quality, and should be saved for the GCP recipe.

Gems with 10% or more quality start rapidly rising in value, but it varies greatly from gem to gem. On average a 20% quality gem is worth about half an exalt. Popular active skills and supports might be worth a bit more than half an exalt up to 3/4th of an exalt, while less popular skills and supports might be worth a bit under half an exalt, or even still worthless for worthless gems. For gems between 10% and 20% quality, sometimes it helps to figure out the value of the gem at 20% quality and simply subtract a GCP for each quality less than 20. Some skills and supports are completely useless (ex. punishment, point blank), so even having a lot of quality on those gems will not really improve its value. Also watch out for gems where the quality is not very useful. For example, even though reduced mana and blood magic are extremely useful gems, the quality on them is pretty much useless, so a high quality version of those gems is not worth much more than no quality at all. Aura gems also fall into this category,

6.3 Leveled Gems

For gems that are leveled, leveled gems up to 16-17 or so won’t significantly add any value to the gem if at all. However, since there’s a vendor recipe to turn a 0 quality level 20 gem and a GCP into a 20 quality level 1 gem, a level 20 gem is worth just as much as a 20% quality gem. Keep in mind that the experience needed to level gems is extremely skewed at the top - leveling a gem from 19 to 20 takes just as much experience as leveling a gem from 1 to 18 and a half.

I debated not putting this section in, but in the end I decided it would overall help rather than hurt. The main reason I hesitated to put out a table of currency rates is because I don’t want to propagate the idea of “equivalent currency.” Valuing currency against each other is like valuing any other item in this game - there is no exact price or exact ratio. When trading with others and a price in chaos or exalts is agreed upon, you should never automatically assume that the person you’re trading with will accept any currency “equivalents,” because everyone values different currency differently against each other, and that is perfectly reasonable. Always ask first and establish a deal in exact orbs, and not just “equivalent values.”

7.1 Vendor Ratios

The only actual currency equivalents are the ones dictated by vendor ratios. There are 3 main groups that everyone should be aware of:

4 augmentations > 1 alteration
2 alterations > 1 jeweller
4 jewellers > 1 fuse

4 chances > 1 scour
2 scours > 1 regret

1 transmutation > 4 wisdoms
1 blacksmith whetstone > 4 wisdoms
1 armourer’s scraps > 2 wisdoms
1 portal > 1 wisdom

Notice that I purposely put them as one way arrows, and not bidirectional equal signs. 8 alterations can be used as equivalent to 1 fuse, but 1 fuse cannot be used as equivalent to 8 alterations.

7.2 Approximate Domination Currency Ratios

Other than vendor ratios, all other ratios are simply averages or approximate values. I like to think of it this way - imagine the alteration to chaos ratio is 20:1. Player A has 1000 alterations and wants to trade them for 50 chaos. Player B has 50 chaos and wants to trade them for 1000 alterations. If it takes both players an equal amount of time to convert their currency, then the 20:1 alteration:chaos ratio is probably fairly accurate. If, however, Player A trades manages to get his 50 chaos in 5 minutes of trading but it takes Player B an hour of spamming to get his 1000 alterations, then the true alteration:chaos ratio is most likely less than 20:1, maybe 18:1 or 16:1, in favor of alterations being worth more. If it had taken player A an hour to get his 50 chaos and player B 5 minutes to get his 1000 alterations, then the true ratio is most likely higher than 20:1, maybe 22:1 or 24:1, in favor of chaos being worth more.

Another thing to remember is that even if the true ratio of alteration:chaos is 20:1, that doesn’t mean that you can’t get 16:1 trades or 24:1 trades. No currency rates have exact, right, or wrong values.

It’s impossible to get the ratios completely accurately, especially since they change almost daily, but I’ll try to keep this updated with feedback from the community. Again, this is Domination only. All ratios are with respect to chaos.

Last updated 1/20/14

Wisdoms 200:1
Portals 200:1
Transmutes 50:1
Armourer’s Scraps 80:1
Blacksmith’s Whetstones 40:1
Glassblower’s Baubles 20:1
Augmentations 72:1
Chromatics 18:1
Alterations 18:1
Jeweller’s 9:1
Fusings 2.25:1
Chances 7:1
Scours 1.75:1
Regrets 0.9:1
Alchemys 2.75:1
Chisels 2.75:1
Blessed 2.5:1
Regals 1:1.25
Gemcutter’s Prisms 1:2
Divines 1:10
Exalteds 1:28
Eternals 1:45

Yes, I'm aware that 1 alch + 1 scour has the same functional usage as a chaos orb, but their values are not equal. I do not want to start that discussion here, there are plenty of other threads you can read to try and understand where this discrepancy comes from. All I'm doing is reporting their approximate values here.

As a final note, obviously you can’t trade fractions of an orb. The decimals are there to represent the fact that it’s much easier to trade 2 scours for 1 chaos than it is to trade 1 chaos for 2 scours, but the ratio isn’t to the point where it’s 1.5:1 yet. In small amounts 2:1 trades are common, but in larger trades such as scours for exalts, those fractional ratios are better represented.

Useful Sites
- poe.xyz.is - indexes all items posted on the trading forums. Your main tool for buying, selling, and price checking in this game.
- poemods.com - lists all possible mods that can spawn on items and at what ilvls. Useful for knowing how good your rares are. It’s not 100% accurate though, so when in doubt check the main site - pathofexile.com/item-data.
- pathofexile.gamepedia.com - PoE wiki that contains a lot of useful information. In particular for price checking, you can look up uniques to see the range of rolls for certain mods.
- pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/11707 - game mechanics thread. You can’t know how good or useful something is if you don’t know what it does or how it works.

Uniques
- Search poe.xyz.is with buyout only. Price is generally the lowest buyouts.
- Be wary of uniques with rolls, especially damage and rarity rolls.

Rares
- For weapons, search poe.xyz.is for similar pDPS and base type. 1H weapons and bows need about at least 200 pDPS (less for daggers and wands), 2H weapons about 350 pDPS. Understand that elemental damage, crit, and attack speed can also matter.
- For everything else, including caster weapons, look for at least 2 high important mods, or 3 mid important mods. For body armors, life based shields, and quivers, look for 3 high important mods or 4 mid important mods. Search poe.xyz.is for items of that gear slot with those important mods.
- Important mods on caster weapons: spell damage, cast speed, spell crit, projectile speed, maybe % elemental damage and crit multiplier.
- Important mods on all armors and jewelry: life, ES, additional armor/evasion, resists.
- Additional important mods on gloves: attack speed, life/mana leech.
- Additional important mods on boots: move speed.
- Additional important mods on helm: maybe +2 minion gems.
- Additional important mods on pure ES shields: spell damage, spell crit.
- Additional important mods on quivers: attack speed, weapon elemental damage, crit multiplier, maybe crit chance.
- Additional important mods on belts: weapon elemental damage.
- Additional important mods on rings: added damage, weapon elemental damage, attack speed, cast speed, life/mana leech.
- Additional important mods on amulets: added damage, weapon elemental damage, cast speed, crit multiplier, % increased ES, spell damage, life/mana leech, maybe crit chance and % elemental damage.

Sockets, Links, and Colors
- 6S on end game item adds 0.5-1 exalt in value. 6S on worthless item is still worthless. Anything else does not affect item value.
- 5L on end game item adds 1.5-2 exalts in value. 5L white weapons are worth a chaos or less. 5L white armors are worth at least 5-10 chaos, more if it’s a better base type/higher ilvl.
- 6L on end game item adds 10-20 exalts in value. 6L on low or mid armor adds 5-10 exalts in value. 6L on leveling weapon adds 1-5 exalts in value.
- Colors, even rare combinations, generally does not affect item value.

Craftables
- Most of the time having crafting potential or an exalt spot left open does not substantially affect item value.
- High ilvl crafting bases can be worth 1-3 chaos. Refer to table in section 5.1.

Gems
- Easy to check on poe.xyz.is, or refer to table in section 6.1.
- Quality gems below 10% typically do not add more than a chaos in value. 20% quality gems are worth around half an exalt, up to 3/4th exalt for the more popular gems or only a few chaos for less popular gems or gems with useless quality. For quality between 10% and 20%, subtract about 2 chaos for each quality below 20.
- 0 quality level 20 gems are worth the same as 20 quality level 1 of the same gem.

Currency
- No such thing as currency equivalents, except for vendor ratios. Refer to table 7.2 for approximate conversions.

Now if you can tell me how to find Igna Phoenix I would be really grateful

For now had to go back to work sadly :/