A comprehensive item evaluation guide (WIP)

Study these, they are important!

Encyclopedic references:
• Path of Exile wiki: information on white items, area levels, quest reward gems, and other general stuff.
• Mod Compendium: A full list of Path of Exile mods, along with separate sheets for maximum rolls possible on given types of items.
• Your Crafting Resource Guide: a general guide that explains what currency items are used for.

Community statistics and metagame references:
• ExilePro: go there to get an idea what builds are popular and what kind of items/gems they use. Warning: always look at publication dates because many builds posted there predate important balance and metagame changes that renders them unviable at present. Use old builds only to refer to their basic gameplay preferences (i.e. what kind of weapons they use, what mechanics are employed to make the build effective, etc.).
• ExileStats's Currency Exchange Rates: an approximate reference for currency trading. Warning: slow to adapt and may contradict itself. Never consider it to be a matter-of-fact reference, especially for higher-end currencies.
• Nugiyen Price List: an approximate price list for high itemlevel craft bases. Warning: rather outdated and lacks a lot of info.
• PoE Spreadsheet: a very approximate price guide for some of PoE items. Warning: very slow to adapt to metagame changes and doesn't list HC/Onslaught/Anarchy prices. Use with caution.
• 6-socket Orb of Fusing Community Log. Warning: the results may not be valid anymore.
• Orb of Chance Community Log. Warning: the results are not valid anymore do to the stratification of unique items. Now some items are more likely to chance than the other ones.

Trade forum indexing services:
• http://poe.xyz.is/: the faster, more precise one.
• http://poexplorer.com/: the sleeker and more convenient one. Beware of the buggy item verification and long-sold items that remain in the database for months.
Also keep in mind that many items aren't sold via forums and can only be sniped in the game's trade chat.
• The Mirror Shop: an index of mirror-worthy rares and their owners.

Other useful info:
• How The PoE Economy Has Changed, an insight by Kripparrian.
• How the Economy Actually Works, an insight by ScrotieMcB.

This is the single most tricky question to answer. You must study the metagame (the state of affairs with regards to players' builds and their power/viability in late game), which is a neverending process. That'll also give you a better idea as to what a "wander ring", or "sporker wand", or a "CI belt" is.

Obviously, items that interest the most popular builds are going to be in huge demand, like what is happening at the moment with The Searing Touch, after Kripparrian has made it popular with his Burning Discharge™. Similarly, at the start of Onslaught league, a certain RG_PankO made popular a RF Dual Spork farmer build based around cheap common uniques, so its typical items (Springleaf, Redbeak, Sadima's Touch, Perandus Blazon, and Wondertrap) all went up in price. People are still asking up to 10 chaos for Springleaf, which I personally find absurd to the point of being insulting, but... yes, some people use all the chances they get to take advantage of the economy.

Items that are really useful for very niche builds, on the other hand, could also be in high demand by the virtue of their relative rarity. But they'll always take longer to sell, and estimating their prices is always tricky as there can be no precedent cases to reference.

Items that don't belong to either group are usually the cheapest, except for very high-end, essentially maxed-out items that are universally useful for most builds out there. These are usually the items that end up mirrored.

You must have an idea of the rolls an item can get at a certain level, as well as the uniques available at that level.

I'll give a few examples.

These items are absolutely absurd for the level they require. You're very unlikely to find anything better on sale (let alone in a drop) even several levels higher. This makes them more expensive relative to the other items typical for their level, although it may not make them expensive per se—see further sections for elaboration.

A special case of maximizing stats relative to item level is level 28 PvP. PvP is still rudimentary in PoE, and at present, the only popular competition tier is limited to level 28. This means that an item usable in PvP at that level or below, like Geofri's Baptism above, may have an additional value in leagues populated with PvP players.

You can get the idea of this by seeing how often it's mentioned in the trade chat and how often it can be found in shops. Limbsplit, for instance, is a very common unique, so even though it's one of the best items you can get at level 13, it's rarely worth more than a chaos. Another reason why it's so cheap is below.

This, right here, is the strongest factor that helps keeping the prices of crazy leveling gear down: a leveling gear is bound to be replaced sooner than later. The aforementioned Limbsplit is good, but how long are you planning to use it? At some point even a white item sold by a vendor for one transmutation orb will provide higher DPS, and that's what is the most important. This point usually doesn't take long because you can easily get to around level 30 in three hours. An item that is useful for less than three hours can never be expensive.

To provide some more examples, some items, like this pair of boots right here, never outlive their usefulness for the builds they're used at:
Whereas these boots, while also useful for a similar purpose, can easily be obsoleted by a better pair at some point:

So, despite Wondertrap being more common, it will be more useful and thus more expensive.

This determines a large portion of the price, especially for endgame items. Here are some of the magic find gear I died with on Hardcore and Onslaught.

At the time I got them they were some of the top MF items on both of the permadeath leagues. Their total estimated value was around 3 exalts. I'm not really buying that kind of expensive items for my MF characters anymore: investments like this need too much time to pay for themselves, and oftentimes they don't. When I drop an exalt, or an eternal, or a 5-link, it always happens with my non-MF character. Go figure.

To answer this question, again, you must know what mods and rolls are possible to get on an item at all, as well as study the market using the shop indexers. Let's take life and ES on helmets as an example.

Additional life that can be found on a helmet is determined by a single affix that—assuming the item level allows it—can go from 10 to 99. High life roll is valuable, but isn't particularly hard to get because of it depending on a single mod.

ES is a base property of the (hybrid) Intelligence-aligned helmets such as masks, crusader crowns, and circlets. The maximum base ES that can be found on a white item with 20% quality is 120, on a Hubris Circlet. This gives you a value that determines the floor for your potential crafting results. The maximum value that can be had on a rare Hubris Circlet is 570, and it requires three different affixes: the additional maximum ES prefix, the percentage ES increase prefix, and a combined percentage ES/stun recovery prefix. Not only it's very unlikely for these three prefixes to occur on the same item at all (let alone at their maximum values), but there's also the fact that you can't roll even two of them at the same time with an alteration orb before subsequent regaling and exalting—which you could do with the life roll. This lack of control forces you to burn more of the expensive currency to get any decent results at all, which is why high ES items are so immensely valuable. Even a 285 (half of 570) ES helmet can cost upwards of 15 chaos with otherwise garbage rolls. A 50 life helmet that doesn't have anything else useful on it nobody would even look at.

(Note that I purposefully omitted life and ES bonuses from Strength and Intelligence, respectively, to avoid complicating things even further, but it's suffice to say that the ES bonus from Intelligence completely trumps everything a similarly high Strength roll can provide.)

Another thing that determines a large part of the item's value with regards to crafting is its links, and the topic is large and important enough to warrant a separate section. An item that has more links will always be more expensive all other things being equal. This is especially true for chestpieces which are the best item slot to get 5- and 6-links.

4-link items are the baseline around which most of the game is balanced, and it is the point (and oftentimes the base requirement) where most builds become effective. A white 4-link is usually worth one orb of fusing—because it takes at least one to make from an unlinked item. But since they are so common in drops their trade price can go significantly lower, to about half a fusing per item. Well-rolled 4-link rares may fetch a good price though, especially if they're helmets/boots/gloves, all which can't have more than 4 sockets. They often end up some of the longest lasting items in most builds, because the only point where you absolutely need to replace them is when its stats become insufficient. The two most common breaking points like this is act 1 in Merciless because of the huge resistance drop, and the start of doing maps, where you want to itemize for maximum survivability.

Let's have an example. This item here took me four armor scraps and one alch to create from a white 4-link base, and I made it on the second day of Onslaught. You could say I roughly invested a chaos's worth in it by choosing to craft it rather then selling it as is. I was lucky to get an item that had a higher value, particularly when the market wasn't yet flooded with better alternatives.

It has an implicit armor rating, a decent life roll, two smallish resistance rolls, and a not completely useless strength roll that also partly translates into life and physical damage. It's a pretty decent melee leveling helmet; I even wore it on my current Leap Slammer from act 3 Normal to act 3 Merciless, but it's hardly worth more than 1.5 chaos nowadays because the rolls are pretty average at best. A 4-link Goldrim could be worn similarly long (even longer, considering you can equip it at level 1), and can fetch up to 5 chaos depending on the resistance roll and the league you're selling it, because it's way more useful, especially to any non-melee build.

5-links and 6-links is where prices can vary wildly: from ~1 chaos for a low-level 5-link weapon with a bad base, to dozens of exalts for beastly rolled 6L chestpieces. The reason for this is that a weapon's usefulness and worth depends in the largest part on its DPS, since the vast majority of attack skills scale off of it. This is so important that even a 6-link weapon with a bad base will be of no use compared to a 3-link with a really good base.

For chestpieces, however, the above rule doesn't apply because the gems are separate from the weapon base, and that makes well-linked chests much more valuable: they allow weapons to be swapped and upgraded without losing the links on the main skill, and they allow usage of one-handed weapons and/or shields, either of which max out at 3 possible sockets.

Some of the estimates that were in use prior to 0.11 showed that the average probability to craft a 5-link was around 126 orbs of fusing, and 900 orbs for a 6-link. Obviously the prices on these items don't reflect that directly because more 5-links are found every day than they are crafted—and that helps keep prices down. But that still shows the relative magnitude of necessary investments and gives a good idea on how expensive it would be to craft such an item by yourself.

The last thing to cover here, is that before one even attempts 5/6-linking, 5/6-socketing an item is in order. A 6-socket item has a better chance of rolling a 5-link because all links are rolled in a strict order in a 2-shaped path. A 6-socket has double the chance of having a group of 5 links because both sockets 1-5 and 2-6 can be linked. But rolling 6S can require anywhere up to 200 jeweller's orbs, and in extremely unlucky cases even worse than that.

This makes items that are sought after as crafting bases, such as Vaal Regalias, be valuable even as 6S unlinked items. Whereas you could vend such items for 7 jeweller's orbs immediately, trading them away to other players can bring you 1-20 chaos orbs instead, depending on the base item and its item level.

For some items—white items and uniques in particular—this may mean a price difference in orders of magnitude. Here's why.

Item level determines two very important things with regards to crafting the item past its initial state:
1) how many sockets it can roll;
2) what affixes it can roll.

#1 is very important for uniques that can potentially run 6 sockets, but is also important for low-level gloves, boots, and helmets that can potentially drop off of Normal difficulty Hillock or someplace close. A Searing Touch that you can't 5-link is nearly useless in endgame because you need your main spell to be linked inside the staff for its maximum effect. Similarly, items like Goldrim, Sadima's Touch, Facebreaker, etc., are commonly used for very long periods of time (sometimes permanently), and at some point they need to be 4-linked.

#2 isn't important for uniques, but is immensely important for crafting rares. Usually people want an item with as high item level as possible before they start rolling the mods on it in order to take advantage of the best possible affixes that might occur. An ilvl 56 white Thicket Bow is pointless to even pick up. An ilvl 77 white Thicket Bow costs several chaos. This is also one of the ways how top players get rich: they sell white craftables which litter the floor of high level maps they play. It's almost as if literally everything that dropped at all were mid-tier currency items.

Most of the white craftables become valuable at around ilvl 72-73, which means they can drop on level 71 and 72 maps. This is important because maps of this tier are still manageable for solo/duo players who get thus far, in terms of both difficulty and currency investment. One could take out several inventories' worth of valuable items out of those maps. Consult Nugi Price List for approximate value of white craftables.

Do note that some craftables may start off high initially, but will gradually drop in price on new leagues, especially if uniques that are on par with some of the best rares exist in those leagues. For instance, I play on Onslaught and want to craft a 5-linked high physical damage two-hander from this ilvl 77 base:

I bought it for 4.5 chaos (it had only two sockets at the time) because there were no 5-links on the market that suited my DPS demands; the only exceptions were a Marohi Erqi for 6 exalts which I couldn't afford, and two rares with such an extreme factual/potential DPS that I knew I wouldn't get them any cheaper either. Because of this rift between my current item and the price of the top items out there it was actually cheaper for me to try crafting a decent item myself.

As good rares and uniques keep entering the market, it will be cheaper to buy them instead of investing into crafting, and that will make the price of white craftables like mine go down as well. But item types with large affix pool (like wands, staves, and daggers) and item types that have no suitable endgame uniques to fall back on (there are no high elemental DPS bow uniques, nor high physical/elemental DPS wand uniques), will always have valuable craftables because there's never enough of them.

The next sections will elaborate upon "partially" crafted items: non-white bases that can be crafted by adding mods rather than rerolling them.

This is one of the prime factors that dictate a price on endgame items. Basically it goes like this.

When you find a rare or a magic item, you will see a certain combination of mods that may or may not be sought after. Sometimes these combinations will be extremely rare and valuable, such as a staff with +1 to all gems combined with a high increase to cast speed, which is the main crafting base for Ethereal Knives builds. But the most important thing to note here is that most/all mods should be high enough and there must be no junk mods. These two items are good enough examples:


Note how there are less than six affixes on either. It means they can be filled by exalting the item. This alone makes them more valuable than if they had something like "5.0 life regenerated per second" in addition to what they already have. You can't get rid of a bad mod, so for further crafting and/or reselling it actually lowers the value of the item, even though for actual use it's arguably better than nothing.

It's a little trickier with magic items because there's too much possible variations that might occur, but it's important to spot combinations that definitely work together. Such combinations, when sold, can fetch anywhere from 1 alch up to an exalted orb, depending on the particular base items and affixes. Examples:


Here we have an elemental resistance, high cast speed, and a very high life roll; all three mods are heavily sought after and work in synergy. This makes it is a good regal candidate for an HP-based caster ring. The aforementioned EK builds or Freeze Pulse builds could well use it as a crafting base. It can easily be sold for an alch as is, but with high enough item level it wouldn't be bad to ask a couple chaos orbs for it.


Here we have a physical damage roll, which is good, a high quantity roll, which is also good, and implicit mana, which is alright. But this is a bad regal candidate because very few builds that do physical damage need MF mods on their ring, and many of those either use Blood Magic (thus don't need mana), or they need a lot more of it than this ring provides. Similarly, a magic find sporker or summoner wouldn't need the physical roll at all, and would rather take resistances or energy shield over mana. This initial lack of synergy makes the item worthless for crafting, so it likely won't be sold at all.


Another similarly bad regal candidate because casters don't use weapons, and weapon users don't need high cast speed. (Aside from the fact that the WED roll is too low to bother with.)

The next section will elaborate upon sought-after mods and their combinations.

Mods can be separated into two distinct groups:
1) those that are universally useful;
2) those that benefit a particular group of builds.

The first group is actually pretty sparse, and for a good reason: as PoE is game of great many possibilities, it's only a good thing there aren't that many bonuses that favor every character out there. But these still do exist, and here's what they are:
— elemental resistances, especially the "+ to all resistances" suffixes on jewelry;
— attack speed mods on weapons;
— armour and evasion rating;
— movement speed prefixes on boots;
— "+ to all attributes" as a single suffix or an implicit mod (only found on jewelry and some uniques);
— block chance on shields.

All builds ideally want these as high as possible—every single one, at any point in the game, because all players get hit, and they all seek to minimize the chance or impact of the hit. Learn that by heart! All-attribute bonuses are great because builds commonly specialize in 1-2 attributes but still require the other 1-2 to equip certain pieces of gear or level up their gems (auras, curses, etc.), so it's usually more effective to get them in single-mod batches like this.

Of course, they also want other mods—some of them even more than these!—and this is where builds differ. Particular combinations of universally useful mods with build-specific ones are what makes the best items in the game so good and rare, and thus so valuable.

In this section I will attempt listing mods that benefit the largest, most general archetypes of builds to make the information future-proof and avoid bloating the guide unnecessarily. If you see several of them on the same piece of gear that may be of use to the listed archetype, this piece will most likely be expensive.

Mods are listed in the general order of decreased priority—but keep in mind that some very specific builds may have their own priorities.

Basic survivability archetypes
Basic survivability boils down to using and balancing two main pools that enemies' damage go to: life and Energy Shield. Any forms of avoiding or mitigating damage can be used, but these two—or usually one of them—has the final say in whether your character will die.





Playstyle archetypes
Playstyle archetypes describe the few major typical ways players interact with enemies. Various nuances and combinations arise within, but archetypes themselves usually stay the same.

2013/07/17: Initial release. Topics covered:
• Links to other resources that will be referred to throughout the guide
• How many of the existing builds could take advantage of this item, and what kind of builds are they?
• How good is the item for its required level? How likely it is to find a better one at that level?
• If the item is a unique, how common is it?
• How many levels does it take for an item to become obsolete?
• How likely it is to find a better item for a given task/build at all?
• How likely it is to craft a similar/better item? Are there any on the market?
• Sockets and links
• What is the item level of the item?
• Does the item warrant adding mods with Regal/Exalted orbs? Does it have empty affix slots for further exalting?

2013/07/19: Topics added:
• What mods and mod combinations are valuable, and why?
+ Various corrections and rewordings.