Overwhelmed by loot

Hey, so I'm pretty new to Path of Exile and so far I'm really enjoying myself. One thing I've noticed, though, is that even at lower levels it can be really difficult to know what loot you should be grabbing and what you should be leaving behind.

I've only been playing for about two days now and already I've stopped picking up loot almost entirely, because I don't know what's worthwhile and what isn't. I spent about three hours last night grinding low level maps to get master influence and start working toward a hideout, and during that time the only loot I picked up were items that only take up one inventory slot.

I *was* picking up yellow items but soon realized that even those seemed to be useless considering they're about 15 levels below my character level so I stopped doing that.

Is there some kind of standard I should be adhering to so I'm not passing by good loot? Should I only be looking for items with certain stats or traits? Seems to be that even the ultra rare stuff only vendors for 2 scraps of currency, so it doesn't make sense to haul piles of loot back to a vendor only to get a few pennies worth of value...

I also read something about item filters... should I be using one of those or is that something geared toward high level maps?

Sorry for my totally noobish questions, but what am I missing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEZtq6FSebE&list=PL7GqFLebBU8inlrcqTZFXtIwP362XrdNe

I recommend the whole series. Part 3, 4, 5 and 7 all are kinda important for your question.

You sir need a loot filter :D

It is something that is build into the game that will filter out all the trash that drops and nobody has any interest in. The game becomes almost unplayable without one.

I would reccommend starting here:

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1246208

You should get the info you need to get started from the OP. There is a lot you can do with loot filters if you want to get into writing them or you can just download one and forget about it.

Good luck!

Just use neversink strict filter. 90% of that is currency which is all good. Then 10% is some decent chance at being good rares/uniques which you must learn.

Watched a few of those videos in that series you linked to, tweedledee, and they answered a lot of questions. Going to watch the rest of it later.

I've installed Neversink as recommended, going in game to activate it and test it out.

Thanks everyone.