Path of Exile 2 Currency Guide: Orbs, Crafting, and Trading Explained

Path of Exile 2 runs on a barter economy. There's no single coin everyone trades in, and there's no auction house with fixed prices. Instead the game hands you little orbs that do real work. They reroll your gear, add stats, change values. Each one pulls double duty as a crafting tool and as money.

The catch is that the same orbs you'd want to spend on your own gear are also the ones other players will trade you their stuff for. So every Exalted or Divine you find is a choice. Buff this item now, or stash it to buy something better later. The sections below cover the big orbs, how the crafting chains fit together, the vendor and salvage tricks worth knowing, how trading actually works, and where currency drops while you level.

Exalted Orbs and Chaos Orbs Explained

These two get all the attention because most trades get priced in them. But they do very different things, and the balance between them shifted hard from the first game.

Exalted Orb

An Exalted Orb adds one new random modifier to a rare item, and it leaves the mods already there alone. That makes it the safe crafting orb. You've got a rare with two good mods and a couple open slots, so you slap an Exalt on it and hope for something useful. No risk to what's already attached.

During the campaign these are pretty scarce, so hold onto them. In the endgame they get way more common and you can throw them around. The classic move is using them on your weapon to fish for more damage, since weapon damage lifts almost everything else on your character.

Here's the part that throws PoE 1 veterans. Exalts are cheap in PoE 2. Genuinely cheap as dirt. They dropped a ton in value because they're more common here, and because Divine Orbs took over as the big-money currency. You'll price small purchases in Exalts and see listings for fractions of an Exalt. That fractional number just means a slice of the going rate, not half of a physical orb in your stash.

Chaos Orb

The Chaos Orb changed in this game. In the first one it rerolled every modifier on a rare all at once. In PoE 2 it removes one random modifier and adds one new random modifier. More surgical, sure, but still a gamble.

Think of it like this. You've got a rare with two great mods and two dud mods. A Chaos might delete one of the duds and drop something good in its place. It also might delete one of your great mods. That's the risk, and it's why you save Chaos Orbs for items you're not actively wearing, the average pieces that could become huge upgrades if you get lucky. Burning one on your current chest piece in act 3 and watching it eat your life mod hurts.

Chaos Orbs are very uncommon, more so than Exalts. As trade currency they've crept up in value lately too, so they're starting to show up in mid-range deals instead of just sitting in your crafting pile.

Where Divines fit in

The real king of trade currency is the Divine Orb, not the Exalt. Divines reroll the numeric values on your modifiers, which is basically what endgame tuning is all about. Want that resistance mod to roll high instead of near the floor? That's a Divine's job. They're rare, and one Divine can be worth dozens of Exalts. That ratio swings wildly depending on how far into a league you are. Early on it might sit around five or six Exalts. Weeks in, it can climb past a hundred. Always check a live price site like poe.ninja before you trade, because the number moves every day.

Regal and Alchemy Orb Crafting Chains

These two are how you build gear from scratch instead of waiting for the right drop. Both turn lower-rarity items into rares, but they start from different places and serve different plans.

Orb of Alchemy

The Orb of Alchemy upgrades a normal (white) item straight to a rare (yellow), and it slaps the full four modifiers on in one go. It's the fast lane. You find a good base, Alch it, and see what you get. No middle steps.

Alchs are uncommon in PoE 2, rarer than they were in the first game, so don't waste them on junk bases. The smart targets are weapons (for damage), boots (fishing for movement speed), and jewelry plus body armour (for life and resistances). A lucky Alch on a weapon early in the campaign can carry you for a couple acts. An unlucky one on a terrible base is just gone.

Regal Orb

The Regal Orb upgrades a magic (blue) item to a rare, adds one new modifier, and bumps the mod cap up. A magic item tops out at two mods, one prefix and one suffix. Once you Regal it, the cap jumps to six, three prefixes and three suffixes, which is the rare-item ceiling.

Regals are scarce in the campaign too, so spend them like they matter. The endgame floods you with them and you can use them freely there. You can also build your own. Disenchant a rare item at a vendor and you get Regal Shards. Stack ten of those and they fuse into a full Regal Orb.

The classic crafting chain

Here's where everything connects. The most reliable way to build a piece of gear from a blank base goes like this.

1. Start with a normal base item that has the right item level for what you want.
2. Use an Orb of Transmutation to make it magic with one modifier.
3. If that first mod is bad, use an Orb of Alteration to reroll it. Keep rerolling until you land a mod you want.
4. Use an Orb of Augmentation to add the second magic mod.
5. When both magic mods are good, hit it with a Regal Orb to make it rare and add a third mod.
6. If that third mod is good too, spend Exalted Orbs to fill the remaining slots.

The whole point is control. You only commit the rare orbs (Regal, Exalt) once the cheap orbs have already set up something worth keeping. If the Transmute or Alteration steps go sideways, you've only burned common currency and you just start over.

There's a shortcut version for when you don't care about targeting the first two mods. Skip straight to an Orb of Alchemy on a normal base and get four random rare mods at once. Faster, but you give up the control, so it reads more like a lottery ticket than a plan.

A patch note worth knowing. Since the 0.3 update, lower-tier Essences work a lot like Regal Orbs but they guarantee a specific modifier. That took some of the pressure off Regals as a bottleneck, so you've got more options for that magic-to-rare step now. Patch 0.3.1 then reworked Alchs to play nice with the new tiered currency, so expect the exact feel of these chains to keep shifting between updates.

Vendor Recipes Worth Knowing

Path of Exile 2 handles vendor recipes differently than the first game did. A lot of the old "sell this exact combo for one specific orb" tricks are gone or moved. In their place you've got two systems that are honestly simpler once you find them: disenchanting at vendors for shards, and the Salvage Bench for quality and socket currency.

Disenchant for shards

Any town vendor can disenchant items for you, and it pays out in shards that stack up into full orbs. The breakdown is clean.

• Magic (blue) items disenchant into Transmutation Shards. Ten of them make an Orb of Transmutation.
• Rare (yellow) items disenchant into Regal Shards. Ten make a Regal Orb.
• Unique items disenchant into Chance Shards. Ten make an Orb of Chance.

This is the reason you keep picking up rares even when your inventory's full of gear you'll never wear. The Regal Shards add up. Dump a full inventory of junk rares at a vendor and you walk away with a real chunk of a Regal Orb, and a Regal Orb is a step in almost every good crafting chain.

The Salvage Bench

The Salvage Bench unlocks during an Act 1 side quest, and it's where the quality currency comes from now. You feed it items with the Superior tag, or socketed items, and it pays out in the orbs that boost quality. Salvaging destroys the item, so only feed it stuff you don't want to keep.

• Superior martial weapons (bows, maces, the things you actually swing or shoot) give Blacksmith's Whetstones. Each point of quality adds 1% more physical damage.
• Superior caster weapons give Arcanist's Etchers, and the effect varies by weapon. On a sceptre it boosts the Spirit the weapon grants, while on wands and staves it improves the granted skill.
• Superior armour pieces give Armourer's Scraps, and each point of quality adds 1% more defences.
• Items with sockets give Artificer's Shards. Ten fuse into an Artificer's Orb, which adds a rune socket to a martial weapon or a piece of armour.
• Superior flasks give Glassblower's Baubles, which boost flask recovery.

Most items cap at 20% quality, and it takes roughly 15 quality orbs to get there. Gemcutter's Prisms need fewer, since each one adds 5% to a skill gem up to that 20% cap. The takeaway is simple. Grab Superior items off the ground even when the base is trash, because the salvage value is the whole point.

Gold, the untradeable one

Gold is the odd one out. You spend it on vendor items, on listing orders at the Currency Exchange, and on respeccing your passive tree. You can't trade it to other players at all. So gold is useful, just not as currency between players. Farm it for your own respecs and shop rolls, and for paying those exchange listing fees.

Trading Through the Official Trade Site

Trading in PoE 2 is split across three systems, and knowing which one to use saves a lot of headaches. There's no gold-based market and no single coin everyone agrees on. It's barter all the way down.

The three ways to trade

1. Currency Exchange handles bulk, stackable stuff: Chaos Orbs, Exalted Orbs, Divine Orbs, runes, soul cores, essences, omens, catalysts, and boss fragments. It's asynchronous. You pick what you want and what you're offering, set a ratio, and pay a gold fee to list the order. The fee scales with how much you're trading and how rare the items are. When someone posts a matching order, it fills.
2. Asynchronous Trading through Merchant's Tabs is for the non-stackable stuff: gear, unique items, jewels, waystones, tablets. You unlock it in Act 4 by talking to Ange and getting her into your Hideout. Finish the Hostile Takeover quest first if you haven't got a hideout yet. You price each item in a single currency type. Sellers pay no listing fee, but buyers pay a gold tax on top of the price, and that gold just disappears into the system. The nice part is that a buyer can teleport to your hideout and grab the item even when you're offline.
3. Direct player-to-player trade is the old-school route for everything else. Invite someone to your party, meet in a hideout, open the trade window, double-check the goods, and accept.

A note on Merchant's Tabs. You either buy one from the shop or convert an existing Premium Stash Tab into one, and only Premium tabs bought before August 29, 2025 can be converted. Quad tabs can't convert at all. They're also unavailable in Solo Self-Found, which makes sense since SSF is all about not trading.

Finding what you want

The official trade site lives at pathofexile.com/trade2, and there's an in-game browser too. You filter by base type, affixes, implicit stats, all of it. Once you find an item, you copy the trade message to whisper the seller. For selling, you drop items in a public Premium Stash Tab, set a price, and after you change zones they show up on the site for everyone to see.

What things actually cost in

Since there's no universal currency, players default to Exalted Orbs for small trades and Divine Orbs for the pricey stuff. That split exists because Exalts are common and Divines are rare and powerful. A single Divine might run anywhere from a handful of Exalts early in a league to well over a hundred later on, and the number moves constantly. Before you commit to a trade, pull up a live tracker like poe.ninja so you're not getting fleeced.

Trade etiquette that actually matters

The community has settled on some habits that keep things smooth, and they're worth following even though nothing forces you to. When you whisper someone and they invite you, you go to their hideout, not the other way around. Don't invite sellers to your party when you're the one buying. If you want to offer below the listed price, send it as a separate message before you join their party, and never edit the original trade whisper to change the number, because that reads like a scam attempt. And when you're standing in someone else's hideout, don't spam your skills. It lags some players and it's just rude.

Currency Farming Routes by Act

Currency doesn't fall evenly across the game. Where you farm while leveling shapes what shows up, and a few spots are worth going out of your way for.

Act 1

Early on, your job is to set up the systems that pay off later. Grab the Salvage Bench from the Act 1 side quest and start hoarding Superior items and anything with sockets. That becomes your pipeline for Blacksmith's Whetstones, Armourer's Scraps, Artificer's Orbs, and the rest. Disenchant every magic item you're not using for Transmutation Shards.

The standout spot here is the Forgotten Riches, a secret room you reach through the Mausoleum of the Praetor out in the Draven's Tomb area. You can reset the instance and run it again and again. It's mostly a gold farm, and gold matters now because you need it for respecs and exchange fees. Players have reported something like 25,000 gold an hour out of it, and it works even better once you hit Cruel difficulty.

Act 2

Bosses start dropping the better orbs here, so don't skip the tougher fights. The equipment that drops in Act 2 zones is a step up, and the marketplace areas get flagged by a lot of players as good Exalted Orb territory while leveling. Keep vendoring genuine trash for gold and disenchanting rares for Regal Shards. Your shard stacks should be growing into real Regal Orbs around this point.

Act 3

There's a freebie worth grabbing. At the Azak Campfire in the Sandswept Marsh you get a guaranteed Lesser Jeweller's Orb drop, which adds a support gem socket to a skill gem. Those are common in the endgame but a nice boost this early, so don't leave it sitting there. Monster levels climb in Act 3, which means the loot ceiling rises with them. This is also where the Trials open up in a bigger way.

The Trials

The Trial of Chaos is one of the best currency faucets in the campaign and early endgame. The Trialmaster deals in Vaal-themed rewards, so you're pulling Vaal Orbs, Chaos Orbs, Exalts, soul cores, and relics out of it. Players report jackpots of multiple Divines and Perfect Exalts in good runs, though that's lucky rather than average. The appeal is that the rewards are liquid. The orbs you win are the orbs you spend, with no extra step to cash anything out.

The Trial of the Sekhemas is the other one. Its exclusive drops are Time-Lost Jewels and relics that socket into your passive tree, and with the right relic setup some players target it specifically for Divine Orbs. Less liquid than Chaos trial loot, but the upside is real if you enjoy the format. Which one's better depends on your build and your patience for each trial's rules.

Cruel and beyond

Once you finish the campaign and flip into Cruel difficulty, basically a harder second pass through the acts, the currency really starts flowing. Exalts and Chaos Orbs get more common, the Forgotten Riches farm pays out better, and boss drops improve across the board. The endgame then takes over with the tiered currency from the 0.3 update, things like Greater Exalted Orbs and Perfect Regal Orbs, plus atlas mechanics that can print currency if you spec your tree into them.

The habits that pay off everywhere

Across every act, a few moves compound on each other. Pick up Superior and socketed items for salvage. Disenchant rares for Regal Shards. Vendor the genuine trash for gold. And kill the bosses, because they have a meaningfully higher chance to drop the rare currency types than regular mobs do.

One thing worth holding onto for the whole game: a full inventory of trash rares at the vendor is worth more than it looks. Ten Regal Shards is a real Regal Orb, and a Regal Orb is a step in almost every good crafting chain you'll ever run.