Our Methodology

What a strategy is made of

Every strategy is two tables.

Setup is everything the farming session consumes to run. Depending on the content, that might be:

• scarabs
• invitations
• specific maps or waystones
• maps or waystones that need specific modifiers on them, such as a corrupted map or a waystone with a particular mod

Drops are everything the entire farming session produced, from currency and cards to fragments and uniques.

Each line on both tables carries a count (how many of that item the session used or dropped) and the price that item had when the strategy was established. That price is the anchor everything later is measured against.

Content creator strategies

A creator strategy is a farming session exactly as the creator reported it.

• Setup is what the session consumed: the scarabs, maps and other items for every map or run the creator did, added up across the whole session. If the creator does not say how many maps they ran, we estimate it (see run speed).
• Drops are what the creator reported the session dropped, in total.

From those two tables come three numbers, priced at the market on the day the session was reported:

The initial net profit is what the farming session was worth when it was reported.

Synthetic boss strategies

A boss can take hundreds of kills before its average drop means anything, so for bosses the session is modelled instead of recorded.

The model is 100 synthetic runs at the boss's known drop chances.

• Setup is what one run takes (the invitation, fragments or other entry items) multiplied by 100.
• Drops are each item's drop chance read as a count over those 100 runs:

The same three numbers follow, priced at the market on the day the strategy was created:

The initial net profit is what 100 kills were expected to be worth when the strategy was created. It is an expected value, not an observed result: an actual evening of kills will land some distance either side of it.

Market shift

With the baseline set, the next step is to ask what the same basket of items costs and pays at current prices.

The counts stay exactly as they were. Each line is re-priced at the current market, and the total is compared with the total at baseline. This is done separately for the two tables:

setup shift = ( count × current price ) / ( count × baseline price ) − 1   over the setup table
drop shift  = ( count × current price ) / ( count × baseline price ) − 1   over the drops table

A shift of 0 means that table costs or pays exactly what it did at baseline. +0.20 means it is worth 20% more now, and −0.35 that it has lost 35%.

Because every line is weighted by its value, the expensive items drive the shift. A cheap item doubling barely registers. An item that was most of the session's income slipping 10% shows up immediately.

The two tables are kept apart because they move independently, and often in opposite directions. A strategy whose scarabs got more expensive while its drops held steady has not stayed the same. It has lost margin, and a single combined shift would hide that.

Seeing what moved. Behind every strategy's shift we also track each item on its own, which is what answers “the number dropped, so what moved?”. For every setup item and every drop we keep:

This breakdown is what we use when writing articles about which strategies rose or fell and why.

Current estimated net profit

The two shifts are applied to the baseline.

current cost        = initial cost   × (1 + setup shift)
current profit      = initial profit × (1 + drop shift)
current net profit  = current profit − current cost

That is the estimated net profit of the same farming session, run at current prices. Here is an example, for a session with an initial cost of 1,000 chaos and an initial profit of 3,000 chaos:

Neither table moved dramatically, but because they moved in opposite directions the session's net profit fell by a quarter.

Divines per hour

A whole session's net profit is hard to compare across strategies. One session might be fifty maps, another a hundred boss kills. So the site shows divines per hour instead.

Profit per hour at baseline. Alongside its initial net profit, every strategy stores how much that comes to per hour of play:

• Content creator strategies: the session's net profit divided by how long the creator says the session took. Creators tend to quote a gross rate (“30 divines an hour”). We subtract the setup cost before dividing, so the figure is net.
• Synthetic boss strategies: no drop table says how long a kill takes, so the run duration is our estimate of the whole loop, end to end. The 100 runs' net profit is divided by 100 of those. The estimate is stated on the strategy page so you can substitute your own.

Profit per hour at current prices. The current estimated net profit is compared with the initial net profit, and profit per hour moves by the same proportion:

prediction               = current net profit / initial net profit
current profit per hour  = initial profit per hour × prediction

In the example above, net profit went from 2,000 to 1,500 chaos, so the prediction is 0.75. A strategy that made 400 chaos an hour at baseline is estimated at 300 chaos an hour now.

Because the prediction is built from net profit, a strategy with a thin margin reacts strongly to its costs. If a session cost 1,000 chaos and dropped 1,200, a 20% rise in setup cost with flat drops wipes out its entire profit. That leverage is real, and it is exactly why cost and drops are shifted separately.

If a strategy's initial cost and initial profit are equal, there is no net profit to scale, and the prediction is held at 1.

Converting to divines. Everything above is priced in chaos. The last step converts it to divines at the current Divine Orb price:

divines per hour = current profit per hour / current Divine Orb price

That figure is recorded with a timestamp every time prices are updated, and the chart on a strategy page is that series. Where a day holds several recordings, the chart shows the last one of the day.

Run speed

Profit per hour is a session's profit divided by how long it took, and that is the least portable number on any strategy page.

Every build runs at a different speed. The session behind a strategy was run by one character at one speed. Yours will be different:

• Clear speed. A fast mapping build can finish a map in half the time of a slower one. Over an hour that is twice the maps, and roughly twice the setup cost and twice the drops.
• Kill speed. On a boss, the difference between a build that deletes it and one that has to dodge through every phase can be several times the kill time.
• Everything around the fight. Loading screens, buying setup items, sorting loot and selling it all count toward a real hour, and some players are much quicker at them than others.

The items in a session do not depend on how fast it was run. A hundred maps drop what a hundred maps drop. What changes is how many of those sessions fit into your hour. So a strategy's net profit per session carries over to you fairly well, while its profit per hour scales with your own speed.

The gap is usually widest on harder content, where a weaker build is not only slower but may have to skip mods or encounters that the original session took on.

When the creator does not count the maps. Creators almost always say how long their session took. What they sometimes leave out is how many maps or runs they did in that time: “I ran this for two hours” with no map count.

The drops do not need it, because the creator reports what the session dropped in total. The setup does. Setup is counted per map (so many scarabs, one map, one invitation), and the session's total cost is that per-map setup multiplied by the number of maps. Without a map count, we estimate it from the session's length and how long a map of that content typically takes, and build the setup table from that.

Comparing with your own speed. Because profit per hour moves in proportion to speed, it is easy to adjust. If you run a session in twice the time the strategy assumes, expect roughly half its profit per hour. Comparing two strategies against each other is safer than reading either number literally, as long as your build is about as well suited to both.

Where the prices come from

Every price comes from one of two sources, depending on whether the item needs specific modifiers to be the right item. Both are refreshed several times a day, and every strategy is recalculated each time.

Exchange items. Items that are worth the same whichever copy you hold (scarabs, currency, fragments and the like) are priced from the poe.watch API, which reports prices from the in-game currency exchange. The whole catalogue arrives in a single request, and every item it covers gets a fresh price.

Custom items. Some items are only the right item with the right modifiers: a tablet with certain exact mods, a unique, a gem. These are custom items, and each carries its own search query on the official Path of Exile trade site. The query is run, and the cheapest listing that matches it becomes the item's price.

A listing's price means nothing without its currency, so only listings in chaos, divine or exalted are accepted. Those are the currencies there is a reliable rate for. The first ten listings are checked, and the cheapest one in an accepted currency wins. If none of the ten qualifies, the item is not priced in that update and keeps its previous price.

Why uniques are priced unidentified. A top-tier unique can be worth hundreds of divines with the right mods and next to nothing with bad ones. Neither end describes what the drop in the session is actually worth:

• The cheapest identified copy is the one with the worst mods, so it undervalues the drop.
• The best identified copy assumes the drop rolls perfectly, which it usually will not.

An unidentified copy has not rolled yet, so its price is what the market pays for the drop before anyone knows its mods. That makes it a good average of what the item is worth coming out of the drop pool.

Chaos is the base currency. Every price is converted to chaos before it is stored, whichever currency it was listed in, and Chaos Orb itself is fixed at 1. Costs, profits and market shifts are all calculated in chaos. Items worth more than a divine are converted back to divines for display, simply because they are easier to read that way.

That has a side effect worth knowing about: the Divine Orb is an item like any other, with a chaos price that moves. Take a farming session whose drops include one Divine Orb, recorded when a divine cost 100 chaos and worth 110 chaos now:

The drop has not changed. It is still exactly one Divine Orb. But the divine now costs 110 chaos instead of 100, so in chaos terms that row is worth 10% more, and the drop table's market shift counts it as a 10% rise.

The display can look odd. Every value on the page, the baseline included, is converted with the current Divine Orb price, so the current Divine Orb always reads as exactly 1 divine. The baseline column is the one that appears to move: 100 chaos is less than a divine at current prices, so it is shown in chaos. If the divine had fallen to 90 chaos instead, the same baseline would read 1.1 divine next to the current 1 divine, with a −10% change.

The same holds for every item priced above a divine. Its value is tracked in chaos, so part of any move you see in it can be the divine itself moving against chaos.

New leagues

A new league changes the game underneath every strategy on the site, and a lot of strategies do not survive it.

Strategies that stop being valid. A strategy is a record of one farming session. If the game changes so that the same session can no longer be run, or would no longer drop the same things, its numbers stop meaning anything:

• A setup item no longer exists. If a strategy needs item X to run and item X has been removed from the game, the session cannot be repeated at all.
• Drop chances change. New leagues often rebalance what drops and how often. Any strategy with those items in its drop table would not yield the same profit now, however carefully it was re-priced.

Those strategies are archived. Each league that means removing a large number of them.

This is done by hand. Patch notes rarely spell out every change to every drop pool, so each strategy is a judgement call on whether it still holds. We try our best to get it right, but some calls will be wrong in both directions: a strategy archived that would still have worked, or one kept that no longer does.

League tags. Every strategy that survives receives a tag for the new league. The tag says which league a strategy is valid against. A strategy carrying the current league's tag has been checked against it, and one without has not.

Prices and history are reset. When a new league launches, item prices and every strategy's history are reset. Prices from the previous league describe a different economy, and a chart that ran straight across a league launch would show a market crash that is really just a new start.

The baseline carries over. A surviving strategy's baseline is not reset. Its counts and baseline prices stay exactly as they were, even though they come from the previous league.

That is deliberate. A strategy is a record of what one farming session used and dropped. If the drop chances are unchanged, the same session run in the new league uses and drops the same items. Only their prices are different, and measuring current prices against the baseline is exactly what the market shift already does.

The old prices do not drag the estimate back towards the old economy, either. Because the shift is the current value of the basket divided by its baseline value, the baseline prices cancel out: the estimated cost and profit come out as the same counts priced at the current market. What the baseline prices still do is weight the items against each other, which matters on the days when some items have no price yet.

The use of AI

The site is only useful with a good number of strategies on it, and only if they arrive while the league is still being played.

The problem. The whole point of the site is to let you compare strategies against each other and pick the one that suits you, and that needs something to compare.

Timing matters just as much. When a league launches, the strategies worth running are new, and players want them straight away. A site that finished adding the league's strategies after most players had stopped playing it would not be much use to anyone. So we use AI to cut the time it takes to get a new farming strategy from its source onto the site.

What AI does.

• Summarising the strategy. Each strategy's description is a short summary of what it is about, so you can understand the idea before deciding whether you want to run it.
• Parsing the data. A creator's session arrives as a video, a post or a screenshot of a loot table. AI pulls out what the session used and what it dropped, and builds the setup and drops tables from it.
• Calculating the baseline. AI speeds up putting counts and prices together into the strategy's initial cost, initial profit and initial net profit.
• Keeping articles current. Some articles on the site are built around live numbers. AI updates them with the latest data so they do not go stale.

The daily market shift and the current estimated net profit are not calculated by AI. Once the baseline exists, those are plain arithmetic, done by the site the same way every time.

What the site is, and is not. Farm of Exile is meant to help you decide what to run. It cannot give you the complete picture of how to run it. The atlas setup, the routine and the details that make a strategy work all live in the original source. That is why every strategy's description points you to its source, and we strongly recommend watching or reading it before you commit.

Difficulty and complexity

Neither is calculated. Both are 1–5 ratings set by our judgement, and they measure genuinely different things.

Read both as a way of comparing strategies against each other, not as a claim about you. A player with twenty thousand hours and a mirror-tier build finds nothing in this game hard, and has the whole scarab market memorised. A player who has never finished their atlas finds a red map hard, and a five-item setup routine a lot to keep track of. Neither of them is wrong, and no single number can describe both of their experiences.

What these ratings can do is put the strategies on this site in an order. A difficulty 4 should be meaningfully more likely to kill you than a 2, and a complexity 4 meaningfully more effort than a 2, whoever you are. That ordering is the useful part. The absolute number is not.

So take both as relative signals, and trust your own read over ours whenever the two disagree. You know your build and how much fiddling you tolerate. We do not.

Difficulty is an estimate of how likely the encounter is to kill you. Nothing else: not how long it takes, not how much there is to set up, not how much it costs. It assumes a reasonably built character played reasonably well, which is itself a fuzzy standard, and that fuzziness is why the scale stops at five rough steps rather than pretending to more precision. As an example, the scoring can look like this:

Complexity is an estimate of how much effort the strategy is to run. The atlas tree, the setup list, the routine you repeat every map, the number of things you have to remember, and how much of it you have to get right for the strategy to pay. Tedious is not the same as difficult. A mechanic can be fiddly and demand constant management, and still rate a 2 for difficulty because it does not kill anyone. That effort belongs here instead. As an example, the scoring can look like this:

This one is, if anything, more subjective than difficulty. Effort is partly how much a routine costs you to execute and partly how much it annoys you, and the second half is entirely personal. A player who enjoys managing a Betrayal board does not experience it as work at all. Someone else bounces off it in a day. The rating assumes a player who has not run the strategy before and is learning it as they go. Once it is habit, everything here feels a step or two lower.

What these numbers do not do

Worth being direct about the limits.