Good Morning Friends! It has been almost a month since the start of the Crucible league, and I thought I would talk a bit this morning about my experiences with the league as a whole and why this is probably the best league I have participated in… even though the actual league mechanic is a bit of a dud. I discussed this the other day but effectively I have been “really” playing Path of Exile for the last four leagues: Sentinel, Lake of Kalandra, Forbidden Sanctum, and now Crucible. While I technically dabbled with the game before that, I didn’t “really” play the game with any purpose or direction which is sadly a key part of the Path of Exile experience. During that time each league has improved my personal experiences and I think the core behind this improvement is my willingness to embrace the trade mechanics within the game.
Prior to Kalandra I technically played in the trade league but never interacted with it. In Lake of Kalandra, I barely touched trade other than to solve a few very specific problems, namely finding some key uniques for my build. Starting with Sanctum I began legitimately trying to acquire currency and used said currency to solve problems with my build and ultimately started to dabble in actually selling goods on the market. With Crucible I was a functioning part of the economy from the very first days of this league and immediately set up trade tabs as I was playing through the content, making a few bits of currency off things I happened across but were of no use to me at the time. So it is by no coincidence that we are less than a month into the league and I am sitting here with three endgame viable characters and a mountain of currency to do pretty much anything I want to do in the future. Embracing the trade economy meant that I could fix problems with my builds pretty easily and get to a functional state within a very short time with each of them.
I will admit… the version of me that started seriously playing Path of Exile during the Sentinel league would have found this deeply distasteful. I’ve hated the idea of having to rely on auction house economies in games before, and this is even worse considering all trade takes place in person. The truth is however that trade practices are so automatic at this point in the community that most trades take less than 5 minutes and often go through without a single word. I’ve also found ways to make currency with the methods of play that I enjoy the most, and without specifically doing things for the purpose of currency generation. The above is a snapshot of my inventory on 4/12 when I was starting to gain a little bit of chaos and again this morning showing my war chest of funds that I can use to either improve my current builds or create something new.
Exilence is a third-party tool that will scan your stash tabs and evaluate items that are stored in them. I do this periodically to find anything that I might be sitting on that is worth a good deal of currency. The curve is somewhat choppy because I have not taken snapshots of my inventory very often this league, but you can see a steady increase from only having a few Chaos Orbs to having an estimated value of 15,949 Chaos Orbs or a little over 72 Divine Orbs in roughly a month into the league. Most of what I just said is probably absolute gibberish to the uninitiated. Essentially Path of Exile is a game without a gold equivalent and when you sell items to a vendor you get crafting resources. Some of these crafting resources have become cash equivalents due to the mechanical value of the game. Essentially the common scale goes a little something like this.
Common Trade Currencies
- Chaos Orb – Randomizes the Modifiers of a Rare Item – The Dollar Bill of Path of Exile
- Awakened Sextant – Used in Generating Map Sextants – 5.8 Chaos Orbs
- Honestly relatively new pricing tool but gaining popularity in this league.
- Exalted Orb – Adds a new modifier to a Rare Item – 14.7 Chaos Orbs
- Divine Orb – Randomizes the Numerical Values of a Rare Item – 220 Chaos Orbs
- Mirror of Kalandra – Creates a Copy of an Item – 57200 Chaos Orbs
Generally speaking, small trades are priced in Chaos, larger trades in Divines, and absolutely massive trades are when you get into the realm of the Mirror. Mirrors are this weird investment vehicle as it tends to go up in value as the league goes on because there are folks who only play individual leagues for the purpose of getting cheap mirrors. A Mirror of Kalandra goes for 118,400 Chaos Orbs in the Standard League and since all currency dumps into Standard at the end of a league… the value slowly trends upwards towards that Standard League price.
I’ve rattled off a bunch of prices, and you who are not indoctrinated at this nonsense are probably thinking… “Bel how the hell do you know this?”. Every trade economy needs a price guide. For sports cards there was Beckett, for Magic the Gathering there was Scrye, for Comic Books there was Overstreet, and for Path of Exile there is POE.Ninja. POE Ninja serves as the neutral arbiter of price based on trade volume data pulled from the official GGG Trade Website and offers up various APIs that other applications can use to facilitate price checking. So when you price an item at 2.2 Divine Orbs… the community as a whole just knows that what you mean is 2 Divine Orbs and 44 Chaos Orbs, 484 Chaos Orbs, or some other equivalent of readily used trade currencies. There is some natural fluctuation throughout the league but generally speaking, they stay in fairly narrow bands other than the Mirror which always trends upwards.
Through the use of loot filters and a general increased understanding of what makes something sought after in Path of Exile, I’ve gotten better at “eyeballing” something to determine if it was worth anything. When in doubt however I run an overlay called Awakened POE Trade that allows me to price check an item by mousing over it and pressing Ctl+D. This pops up a dialog window that shows that POE.Ninja thinks the item is worth it and has a number of active listings for the item. So while the estimate is 119 if you convert up the sextants you end up with a current trade value of 116 chaos to 121 chaos roughly. This current trend of pricing things in Sextants is a bit weird and so far folks tend to still prefer dealing with Chaos instead. So I could probably price this card out at 120 and it would move quickly.
So at this point, you are potentially asking yourself… “Bel how exactly do you make currency?”. Just like in life, there are a ton of get-rich-quick schemes that the YouTuber community will try and convince you of. Most of these strategies involve bulk selling relatively common and inexpensive resources through third-party sites like The Forbidden Trove or TFT for short. I don’t do this. I just play the game in the way I like to play it which means I tend to focus on Heist, Delve, and running maps to fuel those two league mechanics that I enjoy. A lot of strategies revolve around your Atlas Passive tree and for me, I focus on a few basic things like Shaping the Mountains and Skies to give you free bonuses from your map device and then went hard on Delve, Strongboxes, and Heist. Then I put a good deal of points into Metamorph to give me more boss rewards and Shrines to give me more pack size in my maps. Most of my mapping however is largely a fun means to an end to give me Sulphite which allows me to go do more Delve and to provide contracts to do Heist.
Delve is without a doubt my favorite part of Path of Exile. I just find it so chill to roam around in the procedurally generated labyrinth of madness. More specifically my favorite thing to do in Delve is to hunt for cities, which coincidentally pay out a lot in the way of interesting things. While hunting cities I go diving down tunnels looking for Resonator Caches which are a fairly plentiful but rarely farmed resource. For whatever reason… mapping is the primary focus for most of the Path of Exile players and Delve tends to be more of an acquired taste. This means specifically as folks start trying to craft ever more and more ridiculous items they will need more and more resonators and fossils in order to do this. Early crafting tends to be the realm of Essences and late crafting tends to be all about combining a certain number of Fossils to give you the heist chance of rolling that perfect stat combination.
So through this somewhat casual interaction with the game, I am accumulating trade value without really meaning to. Resonators come in four sizes and currently, their value looks something like this:
- 1 Slot Resonator – 1.4 Chaos Orbs
- 2 Slot Resonator – 1 Chaos Orb – No Clue why these are less popular
- 3 Slot Resonator – 3 Chaos Orbs
- 4 Slot Resonator – 30 Chaos Orbs
This is what I have gained from a night of chill gameplay doing delve, and if I were to liquidate it all right now it would be worth 545 Chaos Orbs. The disturbing thing about this is when I do list resonators, it is like turning on the hot light at a Krispy Kreme, and within 10 minutes I will be completely sold out. Similarly, I have started selling off my Awakened Sextants which I am not really using, because mapping is not my primary game mode and I sold 4 Divine Orbs worth of those in about 5 minutes. On top of this, I have made a bunch of 5, 10, and 20 Chaos Orb sales throughout the league of random items that I picked up off the ground and price checked because they looked interesting. This is all stuff that I am doing while I am enjoying the parts of the game that I actually enjoy… rather than going out of my way to try and build a “money-making strategy”.
I’ve been able to take that currency that I am accumulating over time and convert it into the items that I actually need to solve specific problems in my builds. Admittedly I am just as much of a tightwad in the game as I am in the real world… and I kinda hate spending money even when the money is fake and only really matters so long as the league is active. There seem to be specific brackets of spending that give you different effects. You can stabilize a build for a few Chaos here or there getting your resists in the right place. For around 100 Chaos you can set up a build to where it runs extremely comfortably and will let you complete your Atlas. For upwards of 10 Divines Orbs you can make a build generally feel really good and of note… all told for kitting out three different characters I have maybe spent 10 Divines in total. Then the order of magnitude jumps significantly and for example, I was looking for a replacement Sceptre to the one that I crafted for my Righteous Fire Juggernaut… and to get what I really want on it the price tag shoots up to 50 Divine Orbs.
Personally, I am pretty happy to be playing characters that “feel good” in that 100 Chaos Orbs to 2-3 Divine Orbs range. I would rather build several characters that are specialized in different sorts of activities than pour 100 Divine Orbs into a single character that can do everything that the game has to offer. Slowly I am working towards trying out the last few bosses needed for my Void Stones on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, and if that requires some additional gearing… I might actually do that. However for meme characters like my Explosive Raging Spirits Necromancer… I think I am good where it is and might actually completely respec that character to try out some ideas I have for a Wintertide Brand build. Embracing the existence of the trade economy is ultimately what gives me the freedom to play whatever I want to be playing.
I could be frustrated and grinding away looking for the perfect drop, or spending all of my currency in the hope of maybe just maybe being able to craft that perfect item. Instead, I would rather convert resources that I am passively gaining through playing the game in the manner I want to play it… and then buy the items I actually want. Admittedly this is not a play style for everyone and I get that but I have made peace with the existence of the trade economy and become a thriving part of it.