Understanding item pricing (rares)

I do not understand why some rares are worth a couple alteration shards vs. hundreds of exalts. I look at an item in my inventory and I have no real idea what I am looking at. What are the odds that I have been vendoring very valuable items? I have only been doing Tier 10 maps and below, so I assume everything that drops is trash and I should just use it for vendor recipes.

Is there a resource someone could point me to for getting a better understanding of how to evaluate items properly? Thanks.

Don't have a resource for you, sorry.

Some basic things though:

-Good rolls on good stats. Life on pieces at ~70+ tend to bump up the value because most people need as much life as they can get. A good spread of resists because people want to max their resists through as few gear items as possible. High increased armor/evasion/energy shield is pretty obvious. (90% and up is pretty good.) Chaos or double Chaos resist for rings. +1/+2 to level of socketed gems.

-The most expensive items manage to get all these rolled to sufficiently high levels that it's the "perfect" item: all good stats at high "rare" values, no kruft (kruft can be considered as good stats that rolled too low, as well.)

-Has a lot to do with the current meta too. When Energy Shield was the meta ES items with good rolls were going for tons. Now, not so much. If there's a particular stat that plays to the current skill meta, items with that stat will also be higher in price.

In T10 maps you should be seeing gear that is potentially sellable with a lucky roll, so it's probably good to slow down a little bit while selling. If you glance at an item and see some number is in the triple digits, it's probably worth a couple seconds to stop and read the whole item. When I see armor with 100% increased values or more mod, I usually stop and read the rest of the stats too.

You're dealing with irrational people. These people will pay 10 times as much for something that does the job 10% faster.

There is no easy answer for this. You just have to learn what mods people want and what's a bad roll vs a good roll. I would suggest going on poe.trade and looking for similar items to see what others are charging. Eventually you can spot them on site. That's garbage, that's garbage, oh that might be worth a few C, checks poe.trade.

Looking over what gear can roll based on its item level might help you get a quicker grasp on what's worth keeping. (Also very useful if you're planning on crafting stuff.)

https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/List_of_str_body_armour_modifiers

*Obligatory warning about wiki data being user contributed

That's just body armor but the principle is the same for all items. Once you know what the ceiling is for certain choice stats on gear, you can know whether what you've rolled is merely good, or exceptional.

I haven't seen any guide to item pricing and I'm fairly new, but I can explain a part of the effect.

The root of an item's value lies in supply vs demand. The chance of getting any particular combination of mods is low, and thus every rare is practically equally unlikely and scarce in supply. The demand for those particular combinations varies wildly though. You have to understand what the current meta is and which builds are popular to really understand the pricing, because that is the key to gauging demand.

Life is in. Rares need a good life roll where applicable. Unless a rare is absolutely amazing in every other way, a missing good life roll is a deal breaker. Does not apply to weapons.

Everyone needs capped resists. More resists is better obviously. If an item has three resist mods all at 30+ and a decent life roll, you can bet somebody needs it badly. People tend to focus on rings, amulet, boots, and shield for resists, using other slots for build specific uniques, but anywhere you can get good resist rolls, it's valuable.

Everyone needs damage. Lots of things contribute to that depending on the build. Attack skills need weapons with high damage. Spell builds ignore the weapon damage, but need lots of +xx% spell and elemental damage mods. +xx to xx damage to spells and attacks are very useful. Don't assume too much by the weapon base. There are attack builds that use wands, so a wand with 3 different +xx to xx damage to attacks mods is potentially quite valuable. Damage boosting rolls on armor/jewelry are great, although people don't look for them as much until you get to the high end. A ring giving you a lot of life, resists, AND elemental damage would be worth quite a fortune.

The biggest and most important thing to know is that every wasted mod brings down the value of an item. Some mods are just useless (like +x life regen... not to be confused with +x% life regen, which is very useful to many builds). Mods with low rolls are wasted. +8% fire resist or +7 int or +14 life are just taking up space. An empty space is much better than wasted space (assuming you still have 4 mods or so), since you can use currency or masters to add mods! In fact, thanks to masters, an item of with 5 good of 6 possible mods is usually more valuable than an item with 6 good mods, just because that extra space lets the buyer customize.

Sockets make a difference of course. A decent rare non-chest 4L saves someone ~5 fusing and you could probably sell it for 1-2C to someone that needed something to fill in. Without that 4L, they'd have to spend fusings to get the links, and that'd drive the value down. It gets really important with chests/2H and 5/6L. Even with bad stats, 5L can sell for a bit. A 6L with even terrible stats will sell well. A 6L chest, with bad stats and low ilvl, is something like 30c at a minimum and it just goes waaaay up from there. Assuming it's not corrupted of course.

There is crafting meta you can get into with prefix/suffix stuff and I don't understand that yet. You'd probably need to know it to determine the difference between a 30c ring and 10ex ring or something, but it should be obvious enough the item is valuable either way. In that case, look for similar items on the poe.trade site and beware of fake lowballs that might take up the first few results. If something is obviously good and you can't even find something to compare it to... you might have caught a shooting star. You better ask around a lot to get some opinions on that item.

You can certainly find some great stuff in T5+ maps. It's even possible to get amazing rares earlier than that, even in the later acts.

Look to the wiki for additional help, but what gives value to rare items...

Base Item: top level base items obviously are sought for end-game.

Sockets: 6L extremely valuable, 5L with 6 sockets desired, 5L useful for progression, and 6 sockets adds a little value. For items with 4 or 3 max sockets, having max sockets and linked doesn't add that much value to end-game gear since it's easy to use currency to get there, but it does make progression gear more valuable in temp leagues.

Implicits: This is a separate mod to an item that's listed at top, and can be part of the base item type, added with an enchantment (divine font at the end of the lab), or added when corrupted with a vaal orb. Some implicits from enchantments and corruption can greatly increase the value of an item.

Type of affixes: anything that increases DPS and adds Life/ES is going to be more universally desired than other types. Life usually the most valuable, then overall defense rating of armor/evasion/ES (ES not at popular post 3.0), then damage type % and + increases, crit chance for some builds, and finally other useful affixes like attack speed, cast speed, etc. For boots, put movement speed at top of that list.

Tier/roll of affixes: each affix has tiers, with T1 being the best range. These are not currently visible on the item, but you can determine the tier by the rolled value of the affix. Within each tier, the affix can roll a certain value range.

How many affixes: 6 max for rare gear (3 prefix, 3 suffix), 4 max for rare jewels (2 of each). 5 affixes is probably the most desired (but not necessarily most expensive), because getting all 6 affixes you want on an item is extremely difficult. 5 will let you master craft one more. 4 will let you master craft a condition to help exalting it. 3 will let you master craft with Elreon in order to add two more crafted affixes.

Corrupted: corrupted items sold are either failed rolls and fairly cheap, or end-game gear where vaaling it was a success, and thus greatly increases the item's value. Overall, mostly the 1% does vaal attempts on expensive gear, and the rest don't bother.

"

Shagsbeard wrote:

You're dealing with irrational people. These people will pay 10 times as much for something that does the job 10% faster.

if you got the cash for it, and want to go 10% faster, why wouldnt you?

to OP:

generally speaking look for high life (70-80+) and resists (60-70 combined res+) first of all
then you can look at additional stuff like movement speed on boots (very very valuable especially if its 30), attack speed on gloves, etc

Thanks to all who responded, you've been very helpful!