When you are new to the game, evaluation of items might seem very hard and the enormous amounts of stuff dropping can be overwhelming. Most items will be useless for selling and I will explain, which ones you should pick up and keep for selling.
[wp_ad_camp_2]At first – It is a no-brainer, that all currency items should be picked up.
Skill gems
Skill gems in this game is something that will always have use, some more popular or rare than others. If you have extra stash tab, it is generally a good idea to collect gems. Oftentimes people in global or trade chat look for specific gems and are ready to overpay for getting them, that’s where you come in with your collection.
Here is the list of skill gems you should definitely keep:
Drop-only skill gems – Empower, Portal, Enlighten, Enhance. They cannot be obtained from quest rewards and will sell for quite good amount of currency.
Rare and not so rare support gems – There are few skill gems that are very widely used and obtained only from Fixture of Fate quest (excluding drops). These gems are – Cast when Damage Taken, Multistrike, Spell Echo, Greater Multiple Projectiles, Chain, Cast on Critical strike, Concentrated Effect. If you happen to find one of these, they are more than worth keeping. Generally speaking, you should also collect popular support gems that are also rewards from few quests, like Increased Area of Effect, Faster Attacks, Faster Casting, Melee Splash and others. There are only few support gems that would not sell good.
Vaal gems – Vaal gems can be obtained from corrupted map bosses and corrupted zones. Always pick them up, some of them are used by a lot of players, for example Vaal Haste. The reason to keep all the Vaal gems is to use them in Vaal Orb recipe. 7 Vaal gems + any Sacrifice fragment sold to vendor will give you 1 Vaal Orb. Read more about Vaal orb here.
Aura gems – Aura gems are used by almost every build and people will buy them often, especially at the beginning of new leagues. Hatred, Grace, Herald of Ash/Thunder/Ice and Purity auras are all good gems to collect and sell.
Skill gems with quality – Always pick up skill gems with quality, it does not matter, what kind of gem it is. If the quality if low, you can use it for Gemcutter’s Prism recipe, if the quality is higher or the base gem is popular, sell it to other players.
Unique items
This one is self-explanatory. Unique items are the least common rarity for base items. Not all unique items are going to be selling material, those you can store and use for Orb of Chance recipe, also known as Straight Flush recipe. It works as follows – sell four same base items with different rarities – normal, magic, rare, unique to vendor. For example – Normal Jade amulet + Magic Jade amulet + Rare Jade amulet + Unique Jade amulet sold to vendor together will give you 5 Orbs of Chance.
Items for vendor recipes
There are few kinds of items you should always pick up.
Chromatic Orb recipe
Always pick up any item with 3 different color sockets linked together and sell it to vendor. This is the best and the only reliable way of obtaining Chromatic Orbs besides trading, because they do not drop as often as other low tier currency.
Jeweler’s Orb recipe
Always pick up 6-socketed items, you can exchange them for 7 Jeweler’s Orbs using vendors. Be wary of links, if the item is 5-Linked or 6-Linked, it is not worth to sell it to vendor. 5Linked items can be sold for several Chaos Orbs to another players and 6-Linked items usually go for one to few Exalted Orbs, depending on 6-Linked base item and itemLevel (Chest armors are usually worth more than weapons).
Rare items of itemLevel 60+/75+ for Chaos/Regal recipe
Rare items should always be picked up, regardless of level, but you should start stacking them up in your stash tabs if they have itemLevel 60 or greater. These items are great way to earn currency using Chaos recipe and that’s how a lot of people get their currency pool going. If itemLevel is equal or higher than 75, you can get Regal Orbs from same recipe. Read more about currency related recipes here.
Stone hammers/Rock Breakers/Gavels
These are 3 base items that are used in chisel recipe. You can convert them to chisels by yourself or sell to other people as is.

Flasks
It is always a good idea to collect flasks. While you are in earlier levels, good idea is to collect Quicksilver flasks and flasks in general. If Quicksilver flask has desirable mods, for example – Surgeon’s prefix and of Adrenaline suffix, you can sell it for fair amount of currency – somewhere around 10 chaos orbs or more.
Good idea is to vendor flasks with quality for 40% quality recipe and look for desirable mods on other flasks after identifying them. Flasks with Surgeon’s prefix will give you Alchemy shards – 20 of them combines into an Orb of Alchemy, which is good currency to have with you.
When you are in the later stages in the game and hp/mana flasks with best bases drop, good idea is to use Orbs of Transmutation on white flasks. Orbs of Transmutation are very common currency and usually stack up while you play and transmuting high level flasks can give you potential to roll good flasks and make some more currency.
If you found the guide helpful, please share, it would help a lot! 🙂
P.S. – if I missed some valuable stuff, let me know in the comments.
I need to know the best item bases to pick up. I keep reading about picking up the best item bases, but I have no idea what they all are, and what makes them the best. I want to stop picking up every rare I find and just pick up the ones that will net me the most profit, since I have 246% MF and a high clear speed on maps. It takes me nearly 30 minutes to sort through every single rare that drops, and sometimes I don’t even have enough portals left to the map to bring them all back to sell.
Start using item filters (I’m using Neversink one and it’s amazing) but all the most popular filters have best base items highlighted differently from other rares. The best bases are usually with the highest damage stats for weapons / highest armor/eva/es values. Some bases are good for their implicit property like Astral plate that gives you +8 to +12 all resists. You can always take a look at Path of Exile item data to check out bases with highest damage/defense values yourself.
With rarity that high it’s expected no not be able to get every rare out of map every time. 🙂 But yeah, in conclusion – use good item filter, id good bases, use bad bases for unidentified chaos recipe.