Path of Exile – Farming Primer [Guide]

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• Where to Farm
• What to Pick Up

Farming is a big part of action role-playing games, especially those with loot systems that are a big part of the reward in gameplay. It’s not that different in Path of Exile, but you do have to consider how different its economic system is compared to other games so that you can understand what you should be focusing your efforts on. If you wish to be serious with this game, then there are a few things to remember when it comes to farming.

This guide goes with the Path of Exile Getting Rich guide. Please read these two guides in order to get a good idea on how to make the most of your time and get to a high level in Path of Exile.

Where to Farm

You’ll want to find a farming run location that you can run from start to finish relatively quickly while having the most amount of enemies as possible so you can get tons of XP and loot from them. Once you finish a run, you can then reset the instance and do it all over again. The more runs you can go through within an hour, the better it is for farming.

Another thing to look for is a location where enemies all have one type of elemental damage so you don’t have to stack on different resistances and concentrate on just one to not get hurt so much. The enemies themselves shouldn’t have high elemental resistances either so you can kill them reasonably easily. Finally, they should come in droves so that you can take them out with crowd control and AoE skills.

Do know where to farm early on, and be sure that you don’t spend too much time in Acts 1 and 2. For these first two acts, there are one or two maps each wherein you can farm and level up as quickly as you can when you’re starting out. For Act 1, you have The Ledge; for Act 2, you have The Forst and Fellshrine Ruins.

In Act 3, you have a lot more options, depending on what your character is best at. There are the City of Sarn, The Docks, and Lunaris Temple & Piety as the best farming locations here. These maps have lots of mobs that yield good XP and loot. Of course, if you’re just in lower difficulties, you should move on when its reasonable or you’ll be set back by penalties when it gets too easy anyway.

What to Pick Up

While you may pick up just about everything you come across when you’re starting out, you’ll soon start ignoring most loot later on to pick up the ones that really matter. Doing so saves you time and let’s you do more farming and less picking up useless crap.

Of course, the first thing you should be picking up is anything that’s a currency item. There are plenty of different currency items in the game, and you’ll soon learn about most of them as you go along. Also, unique items are obviously worth picking up as well, and you’d want to stash them if you can’t use them so you can trade them later.

The next items in priority are rare items, anything that has yellow text names on them. They would usually be equipment and weapons, and you should stash away as many as possible so that you can use them for Orb vendor recipes, which are mentioned in the aforementioned Getting Rich companion guide.

You should also pick up most items with a +Quality property to them. Flasks with +Quality work much better than their ordinary counterparts, and +Quality gems are worth quite a lot as well. In fact, you can also farm Gem Cutter’s Prisms while leveling up gems to make your own 20% quality gems, which is also indicated in the Getting Rich guide.

Aside from white and blue items, you don’t really need to pick up scrolls that much since you’ll already have plenty in your inventory after some time, so you might as well save time by passing them by.