Questions for those who trade

I try to avoid trade as much as possible. This league is the first time that I set up a few items for sale through premium tabs. Made about 50c from all sales combined (1 card sold for 40c in there). But enough about me.

Questions to those who trade:
How much of your currency is from selling items you find?
How much of your currency is from flipping items (low end or high end items)?

Reason I ask is because I am constantly amazed at the items people have when looking at build guides. I go through a ton of them, even ones that I have no intention of running soon, just because I like to see if people thought of clever interactions or what the potential is.
And so many times, I'll see these comments come up: "great guide, used it to start in xxx league, currently level 72 and smashing T5 maps" and then they proceed to link a 6 link shavs, 20/20 gems and other items worth 50ex easy. How do you accumulate that much wealth that quickly? If everyone is flipping, who is being flipped? (is that a word?) Do people spend days trading and then move on to levelling a character with the wealth accumulated?

As I said, I don't trade much. So maybe this is very obvious and those who trade make dozens of Ex per day. I don't think I could sell for 15c per day from everything I find (and I do ID good rare bases). I'm not going to start trying to trade regardless, I'm just really curious how much people are getting and how.

I make currency (over the course of Prophecy ~150 ex if I had to estimate, only ~25 so far this league) MOSTLY by running maps efficiently, and knowing what the meta wants. Knowing what rares are worth, what rares have potential to be improved (ie. this rare is good and has an open prefix for either life or ES), and of course having a little luck here and there are all important. I make a LOT of small sales (1-5 chaos), and the occasional big big sale (the 10+ exalt sales). I play this game not to make as much currency as possible, but having enough currency to be able to play whatever build I want, or access whatever content I want is important for me, so I will take the time and put in the effort to make the money. I try to spend as little time in my hideout as possible, since you're never going to get that GG item drop sitting in your hideout organizing your stash. Zizaran has a way of looking at this subject that I like, something along the lines of RNG is a constantly spinning roulette wheel. The more often you play, the better your odds. "Playing" the RNG wheel is done by killing mobs. The more mobs you kill, the more often you are spinning the roulette wheel, and with enough mobs killed, you are bound to win eventually.

My basic consists of rolling 4 or 5 maps (I try to stay in red maps, but anything tier 9 or above is fair game). I roll for high quantity and pack size. I chisel maps above tier 11, Vaal 13/14/15/16, and add Sac Frags to 15/16s. I keep these maps in the bottom corner of my map stash tab, so I can just grab one and go. Zana mods are a tricky subject. The quant bonus:cost ratio is generally pretty good. Getting 20% quant for 2c or 3c is nice. Beyond gives great extra XP and loot, but cannot drop maps. Invasion gives quant, and one extra unique mob. Anarchy is great because it gives a few extra loot pinatas and a quant bonus. Whether you use these mods is entirely up to you.


While mapping, I only pick up certain items. For example, right now the meta is centered around Blade Vortex, CI, and to a lesser extent AW Totems. As such, it is worth picking up and ID'ing daggers, ES gear, etc. I also almost always pick up belts, rings, and amulets, as these take up very little space, and can potentially be super valuable. I pick up most currency items (don't bother with Transmutes, Armourers/Whetstones unless I am running low on wisdom scrolls, then I pick up scraps/transmutes to vendor for wisdoms). I always pick up maps. With the Atlas system, and needing to "unlock" maps and get the Bonus etc, even low tier maps will sell. I pick up MOST uniques, but not all. I will pick up "vendor" uniques if they are small (1x3, 2x2). If they are below item level 80, I don't bother. The reason for this is that I keep a handful of them around in case I get the "Mysterious Gift" prophecy, and need some junk to vendor for a chance at something decent. I'm not sure that item level has anything to do with what you get in return, but whatever. Vendoring garbage uniques is also a good source of Alchs, which you need for map rolling. I pick up all 6S items to vendor for jewelers, and 5Ls if they are either a good base or a rare. There are also bases worth picking up in tier 14/15/16 maps, even if they are white items (84 Hubrises, Regalias, etc.).

As I finish each map, have tabs set aside as DUMP tabs. Typically I have 4 or 5 of these. I put all currency in my $$ tab, maps in my map tab, and all of the gear just gets thrown in DUMP tabs. Once I dump my inventory, I start the next map. I only ID and sort through gear once these tabs are full. This allows me to maximize my time spent in maps killing mobs. For this method to be really efficient it is important to have a good grasp on affixes, and affix tiers. Being able to look at an item to know that it has a T1 flat ES roll, a T2 % roll, and an open prefix without having to look it up online is VERY helpful. Also having an idea of how to price items is important. All of this requires experience and time invested. At this point I will ID everything in my dump tabs, and sort accordingly. Anything not worth selling gets vendored for alts/alch shards. Alternatively you could do the regal recipe with this stuff, but for my money that takes too much time, and isn't worth it in the end. My sale tabs are organized into b/o 1c, b/o 1 fuse, b/o 5c, and then individually priced item tabs. I also have a tab that I throw white maps into for 1 chisel. Generally this keeps me supplied with chisels to be able to use on maps that I want to use them on.

I also always have a GG chest piece on my currency tab to try to 6L. As I find fuses, I save them up. When I have a few hundred, I spam them, and hope for the best. This is NOT a reliable method of making a profit AT ALL. In fact, it is a very stupid idea, but it satiates my gambling urge. Every once in a while you will get lucky, and 6L something that you can either use, or that you can sell for a decent margin vs. investment.

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Namcap wrote:

Questions to those who trade:
How much of your currency is from selling items you find?
How much of your currency is from flipping items (low end or high end items)?

This is the first league where I have used Premium tab for trading.
I have found 1 exalt myself and currently have about 17 exalts worth of stuff. I'd guess around 70% of that came from trading (for example, collected all pale council keys myself and got a RotC as a drop - sold it for 2 ex, uber lab drops, atziri drops etc).

Haven't flipped any items

To answer this question properly you have to understand that it's a process unless you are a full time flipping.

1. You level a character to dried lake and start farming for basic currency
2. You gain your basic starter gear with like 3-10 chaos from dried lake and use this to massively boost your character in gear which saves you time since you will be able to level faster/ascend to harder content.
3. Doing harder content earlier and faster gives you currency faster and higher chance of finding better items to sell.
4. By getting more currency faster and finding item to sell, you earn yourself a starting bank.


3 and 4 is a feedback loop if you keep trading once in awhile, so it massively decrease the time you have to spend increasing your exp/currency per hour and while getting faster pulls on the slot machine for better loot.

Step 5 would be being able to bypass inefficient reward for time content (for your potential earning), for example if you power your way up to like t7/t8 maps and then just buy for cheap all of the t2-t6 maps that you haven't found yet. You have a ton of time and headache running lower tier maps to fill out your atlas.

Same thing with buying carries through lab or something.

Once you get a feedback loop going you can start try to wiggle in small time flipping or market gaming. Ranges from basic leveling gems like empower to level 3 to sell them, small time crafting, essence crafting (this league) and so on.

People who get that rich early in the league are in a special place since when you no-life it at the start of the league and massively ahead of everyone else, you get the benefit of having extremely high market share. So you can make way more currency then what stuff is worth out there, or sell items for much higher.

So for example they can buy exalts for 30c for the entire first week and they'll grow to 2x just with time, or sell items for multiple times their price since people need them.

This is on top of already using the efficiency of trading + playing extremely efficiently and being ahead of the content curb.

This league 10 mirrors just by flipping jewels, jelly?