Hateful's Alchemy Orb Straight Flush Farming Guide

I meant to write this gude sooner but Zana spawned in my map.

First, a little history on how I got here.
I don't know about everyone else, but I've been running low on Alchemy Orbs lately, so I searched for some help. This pointed me to the Straight Flush Vendor Recipe. Basically, if you vendor 1 Rare, 1 Magic and 1 Normal piece of gear of the same base type (this is very specific, e.g. Dragon Mace) at 20% quality, you'll receive an Orb of Alchemy. If they're all unidentified (yes, except the normal one) you get 2 x Orb of Alchemy.

The first information I found was in a comment on this post: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/314699. User TehHammer posted that he collects any Rare helm or chest with at least 15% Quality and then uses Armourer's Scraps on the Normal and Magic items. He dumps it on a mule, then uses a program or PoE Helper to match them later. I tried this but didn't fully understand what you needed to match when you've only and saved up Rare items. So I started filling a Quad Stash Tab with Rare and Magic chests of Quality and any Normal item. I did this for a while and didn't seem to get any sets - though I didn't have the patience to use any matching programs.

So I came up with a way that works better for me. Here's what I do:
First, I collect any Rare of 15% or more. If I'm running really low on my Quality Rare's I may lower my standards to under 15%. You may want to do this when starting out (when I started out I had over 1000 Armourer's Scraps, so I chose to do this in the beginning).

I added two additional rules to my item filter. I am currently using the One Filter to Rule them all oftrta, but the filter you use is unimportant. I added two more rules to the top of the filter as follows:

Show # Need Magic
Rarity = Magic
BaseType "Royal Staff" "Dragon Mace" "Nightmare Bascinet" "Spiked Round Shield" "Lordly Plate"
SetFontSize 28
SetTextColor 0 255 255
SetBorderColor 255 0 0

Show # Need Normal
Rarity = Normal
BaseType "Spiked Round Shield" "Lordly Plate"
SetFontSize 28
SetTextColor 0 255 255
SetBorderColor 255 0 0

Keep in mind that you may want to select different colors. The one I currently use drops both the Magic and Normal ones in cyan because I found that having a border-only difference wasn't enough for me to easily notice.

I opened up my rule filter in Visual Studio Code because I already had it (because of my day job). I'm glad I did because I was immediately prompted to download the Syntax support for filter files [glencfl.item-filter-code]. Now I have intellisense when creating my rules. It even tells you when there's an issue (like if you list a BaseType that doesn't match up with an ItemClass).


So once a new Rare drops with 15%+ Quality, I go to my loot filter and add its base type to the Magic and Normal lists.

When I pick up the matching gear marked in cyan, I can re-edit my filter to remove that item from it's appropriate list (Magic or Normal) so it stops highlighting. I've been doing this for a couple of days and have probably gotten over 20 complete sets.

When I have a full set of 3, I use Armourer Scraps or Blacksmith's Whetstone's (yes, I do weapon's also!) to bring all 3 up to 20%.

There are some downsides/annoyances:
- You have to constantly edit the file. This isn't such a big deal for me because I bring it up on another monitor
- you have to constantly click esc+options+reload every time you edit the file.

But I do not feel that these down sides out weigh getting much needed Alchemy Orbs.