[Guide] Efficient currency farming

My 2 cents :

ITEM DROP PROXIMITY

That aspect of farming is actually something pretty important to consider.
Basically, there is a maximal range between your character and the item drop location, that will define if the sound effect you have in your filter will play or not.
According to my tests, that range has a length of about 1 screen diagonal (1920x1080 as a reference).
That means you won't miss much if you play with builds that provide kills close enough to your character.
But when you start using long distance projectiles, that becomes a real issue.
For example, skills such as Vaal Spark might be good on the paper, but the chance to actually miss a Mirror is higher than ever.
Fortunately, the current algorithm allows filter sound effects to be played "late", if you happen to cover that proximity later on, but then long range skills entirely miss their purpose if you need to actually move close to where the mobs were killed just to trigger the sounds.

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xhul wrote:

My 2 cents :

ITEM DROP PROXIMITY

That aspect of farming is actually something pretty important to consider.
Basically, there is a maximal range between your character and the item drop location, that will define if the sound effect you have in your filter will play or not.
According to my tests, that range has a length of about 1 screen diagonal (1920x1080 as a reference).
That means you won't miss much if you play with builds that provide kills close enough to your character.
But when you start using long distance projectiles, that becomes a real issue.
For example, skills such as Vaal Spark might be good on the paper, but the chance to actually miss a Mirror is higher than ever.
Fortunately, the current algorithm allows filter sound effects to be played "late", if you happen to cover that proximity later on, but then long range skills entirely miss their purpose if you need to actually move close to where the mobs were killed just to trigger the sounds.

That's a good point. I'll think about adding something about it to the guide when I make any necessary changes for 3.0.

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carkasjak wrote:

That's a good point. I'll think about adding something about it to the guide when I make any necessary changes for 3.0.

I really hope GGG will adjust that algorithm in the future at some point.
Oh, and i forgot to mention that the "late" sounds are sometimes not played at all, which makes it even worse.
After several tests, i was unable to properly isolate under which conditions a "late" sound is triggered or not.

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Ravenstaver wrote:

I understand that you want to update this guide, and i appreciate that indeed. But i have a question for the now, do you think that buying sextants is worthwhile. At what price would you stop buying sextants? Does it depend on the map/tier?

Also i would appreciate some justification as to why they are/are not worth buying. About a month or two ago on one of the podcasts i believe it was said that "Anyone who thinks sextants are not worth buying is an idiot" and they just moved on. I cannot understand how spending an additional 3+ chaos per map can help you make lots of profit.

I don't know which episode of which podcast that was, so I can't really comment on what they said without more context. I don't think it's good practice to categorically call people idiots without knowing their reasoning or motivation for doing something, though.

When I initially wrote this guide I was mostly drawing from my experiences from Breach League. Sextant stacking was good in Breach League too, but not nearly as insane as it turned out to be in Legacy. Due to the craziness of 3 good leaguestones you'd pretty much always get a good return on your investment when buying sextants. This was even more true after the sextant blocking technique came to light, so you could get the good sextant mods more easily.

Personally I still didn't buy sextants, for a number of different reasons:
1. Heavily sextanted maps were more likely to make my client crash.
2. I played Cospri's Discharge, which is very weak to volatiles and not great against reflect, and since I wanted to get to 100, the extra risk in sextanted maps was usually not worth it for me.
3. I hate trading. And buying sextants is usually a lot more tedious than other types of currency due to their high demand. If I could buy 500 of them in a single 1 minute trade, I would.

Whether or not buying sextants will be worthwhile in the 3.0 league remains to be seen. I'm actually hoping for less loot to drop than in Legacy and Breach.

In the end I encourage you to experiment with and without sextant buying to see if it's worth the effort and cost for you.

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Mid-Legacy League Update: If you're too lazy to purge the 5c tabs and have a lot of stash tabs, you can just keep adding more of them. After a while it can get difficult to find a specific item in 10+ 5c tabs. To make this easier, you can raise the price by 1c every 3 tabs, or list some of the tabs in an alternate currency like Regrets, Chisels, Regals or Vaal Orbs. That way the whisper you get will narrow it down to one of 3 tabs.

There's actually a better way to organize multiple 5c tabs: You can name the tabs like "Some random name ~b/o 5 chaos". You can put any text you want in front of the trade command. While the ingame UI doesn't recognize this (and will show the tab as individually priced), poe.trade certainly does.

The whisper will then look like:
Hi, I would like to buy your Scroll of Wisdom listed for 5 chaos in Legacy (stash tab "some random name ~b/o 5 chaos"; position: left 1, top 1)

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90ch wrote:

There's actually a better way to organize multiple 5c tabs: You can name the tabs like "Some random name ~b/o 5 chaos". You can put any text you want in front of the trade command. While the ingame UI doesn't recognize this (and will show the tab as individually priced), poe.trade certainly does.

The whisper will then look like:
Hi, I would like to buy your Scroll of Wisdom listed for 5 chaos in Legacy (stash tab "some random name ~b/o 5 chaos"; position: left 1, top 1)

That's very interesting, thanks. I'll test this to confirm, and then put it in the guide if it works for me.

EDIT: Yup, it works. This is actually a huge time saver. Will name my jewel/amulet/ring tabs "JAR<number> ~b/o 5 chaos" from now on.

This guide was last updated for Legacy League, so some of the information might be out of date. For instance, it's a lot harder to sustain a good map pool without all the extra loot from leaguestone effects. I'm mostly playing SSF at the moment because poe.trade has become unbearable for me, so I won't be making any updates based on my Harbinger League experience. Luckily, the majority of the guide is just general advice that you can apply to any league.

Guide has helped me a lot in the past so thanks for that! And I am glad an experienced currency farmer like yourself agrees with the increasing issues poe.trade and the whole trade system has. Hope the devs acknowledge that.

hmm.....I had a thorium shield i looted I sold for 120ex. had like 72 spell 550 ES and 80 res. I think it's a mistake not to ID rares for this reason. Thats not even best base. Many things like this albeit less sale price have come my way your idea of profit making would totally exclude. I dont fuck around with recipes tho. thats good advice.

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Aim_Deep wrote:

hmm.....I had a thorium shield i looted I sold for 120ex. had like 72 spell 550 ES and 80 res. I think it's a mistake not to ID rares for this reason. Thats not even best base. Many things like this albeit less sale price have come my way your idea of profit making would totally exclude. I dont fuck around with recipes tho. thats good advice.

Sure, you can win the lottery sometimes with rares, but in most cases you just spend your time and inventory space on crappy ones. Do what works for you, though.