Path of Exile: The Best Beginner?s Guide to Loot

Posted by james bonds on December 2nd, 2017

One of the most confusing things in Path of Exile for new players is undoubtedly the Path of Exile currency system. This game is considered to be one of the best (if not the best) Diablo II clones out there and while it incorporates many elements from similar hack-and-slash games, the whole economy and currency system is completely unique.

Path of Exile’s Currency System
There is no base currency in Path of Exile. No gold, dollars, or money. You don’t kill a mob and see ‘361 gold’ drop. Instead, the currency is the drops thesmelves, which have other functions in addition to their purpose as economic bargaining chips. The lowest level of currency is the Scroll of Wisdom. You can find hundreds of these lying around very easily. The purpose it serves is to identify the rare gear you find on your journeys. Any item above the base rarity will drop as Unidentified, and you must use a Scroll of Wisdom to reveal the properties that it holds. The Scrolls of Wisdom are incredibly common, and in any late game map, you can expect to easily find at least twenty. They are worth so little that no one bothers trading them, and, after a point, most people don’t even bother picking them up.

Jumping up a few tiers in rarity, we get to the Orb of Transmutation. Once again, this is another drop that you can find anywhere in the game. When you find an item that has no stats on it, you can use an Orb of Transmutation on it. This bumps it from Normal up to Magic, and adds a property to it. This is extremely helpful if you find the item you need, but it doesn’t have any stats on it. You just throw an Orb of Transmutation on it, and now it has stats! As you get further through the game you can find Regal Orbs, which take that Magical item you made and bump it up even higher to become Rare. This adds yet another stat to the item.

Unique Items and Boss Loot
I mentioned different item rarities, including the fact that gear can come in Normal, Magic, or Rare forms. However, there’s one more rarity tier above ‘Rare’. Unique items are strewn throughout the game. While Magic and Rare are simply modifiers of a normal item, Unique are separate items entirely. They cannot be modified, and they have set stats. While their actual value fluctuates, they will always have the same abilities. For example, an Astramentis can have anywhere between a 90 and 116 boost to each of your stats, but it will will always have this effect–the only variable is the range of the boost.

These inherent properties make some Unique items incredibly powerful, and, of course, incredibly expensive. How do you get your hands on Unique items? This is where Path of Exile gives players a great opportunity. Most loot-based games feature specific bosses that drop specific items. Path of Exile does do that with some of the end game bosses, but for the most part, items can simply be found anywhere in the world–the more rare the item, the less likely you are to randomly encounter it. With a few exceptions, if I want a specific Unique item, my best bet is to simply buy it from another player. Most Unique items in Path of Exile don’t have a proper way to farm them, which means you’re left with no choice but to purchase them. With several hundred Uniques in the game, the odds of finding the exact one you want are relatively low.

The exception here is Divination Cards. Divination Cards are another drop that, after stacking up a pile (which varies in number depending on the card), you can turn them in for a specific reward. These divination cards are zone specific, and sometimes boss specific. In other words, you can farm them if you want to get a certain item. There’s quite a bit of randomness built into the cards though. They do give a specific reward, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re guaranteed to get a specific item. For example, I can turn in a set of Jack in the Box, and it gives me one random Unique item. That’s the most broad example, but many of the rewards ‘give a Unique Axe,’ or something similar. Divination Cards give you a mucih higher change chance of getting the item you want, but you’ll still have to get lucky. Gm2v is the best place to know path of exile guide, welcome your visit.