Path of Exile 2 – How to Improve Gear (without Player Trading)

Improve Gear During The Campaign (without Player Trading)

By Byron.

Gearing in the campaign comes down to two main components; Resource Management and Upgrading (my own made-up terms). If you manage your resources well and diligently use them to find/craft/buy upgrades you’ll be in good shape.

For Resource Management, you need resources to manage. This includes gold, orbs, and other currency (any stackable item is called a currency in poe2). Raw currency drops are great early on and you should always pick those up. I’d also recommend picking up basically every item that drops on the ground. Large normal (white) weapons that aren’t relevant to your build (like bows or 2h maces on a quarterstaff build) can be left on the ground unless they have quality (denoted by “Superior” in the item name) or sockets (denoted by a white box next to the item’s nameplate on the ground).

Once you’ve amassed a bunch of items, identify them all (this can be done for free once you unlock the hooded one in act 1. He has a dialogue option to identify all your items free of charge).

Now that you’ve got a pile of junk in your inventory, how do you decide what’s good and what’s bad?

The stats you want to look out for are:

• Damage on your weapon(s).
• For martial weapons this is added physical damage, %increased physical damage, added elemental damage, %increased elemental damage, and attack speed.
• For arcane weapons this is %increased damage (spell or elemental), added levels to spell gems, and extra damage as an element.

On your non-weapons you want to prioritize movement on boots above all else with as much life and elemental resistance (fire, cold, and light jng resistance) as possible. Ignore every other stat. The rest are a bonus.

If you find a weapon with more damage (you can equip it and check the dps of your skills in the skill panel to get a rough estimate), congrats, it’s an upgrade. If a piece of gear has more life/resists/movespeed, it’s also an upgrade.

At this point, if you have any particularly bad pieces of gear (no damage on your weapon, no movement speed on boots, no/low life/resistance on other gear), then what I’d recommend is this:

• If you have any normal (white) or magic (blue) items for those slots that are around your level (and that you have the attributes to equip), use an orb of transmutation and/or augmentation on them to get it to two modifiers. A two-mod magic item with life and a resistance beats a 6-mod rare (yellow) chest with neither of those.

So now you’ve accrued loot, upgraded the normal/magic items, and now you’re left with a pile of junk that contains zero upgrades. Next up is turning that pile into reusable resources through salvaging, Disenchanting (DE-ing), and selling to a vendor for gold (Vendoring). The salvage bench gets unlocked after you do a quest for Finn in act 1.

This area is kind of preference, but this is what I recommend doing during the campaign (in order):

1. Salvage all items with two sockets (each socket on a salvaged item gets you an artificer shard. 10 of these get you an artificer orb which lets you add a socket to gear).
2. Vendor all rare items for gold.
3. Salvage all remaining items that have quality and/or sockets.
4. Vendor all remaining items.

If you want, you can check to see if rare items have six modifiers (hold alt to see the number of mods more easily) and DE those for 2 regal shards, but it’s not crucial imo.

Now you have picked up a bunch of stuff, sorted it, used some orbs on it, and turned the junk into resources. Now what do you do with all that stuff?

1. Check vendors for upgrades, they restock every level. There is a martial weapon/equipment vendor and an arcane weapon/flask/jewelery vendor in every town.
2. The gamble vendor in town. This gets unlocked a little later, but they’ll be a good way to spend gold if you have a bunch lying around. Finn, Risu, and Alva are the gamble vendors in acts 1, 2, and 3, respectively.
3. If you have a good piece of gear or martial weapon, use artificer orbs to add sockets and then put runes in those sockets. I’d recommend runes that add damage (usually 20% increased physical damage) on weapons and runes that add elemental (fire/cold/lightning) resistances on gear.
4. If a piece of gear is outstanding and you feel like you aren’t going to replace it for a while, you can also add quality to it. Blacksmith whetstones add quality to martial weapons, raising their physical damage by 1% per quality. Armourer’s scraps add quality to helmets, gloves, boots, and chest pieces. Those raise the base defense (armor, evasion, and energy shield) by 1% per quality.

Good luck, exile!