I Made 217 Divine From Scratch On a Level 1 Account In Under a Week (Only Crafting/Trading). Guide Below:
YouTube Link for those who prefer that format
Essentially the challenge I was trying to do was to see how much money I could make in a week starting from a fresh character that could only trade and not actually play the game. I farmed up a few transmutes just from the tutorial and pretty much bought a ton of junk to flip for my first ex. What ended up working for me was buying a unique Cbow for 1 Transmute and 1 Augmentation and selling it shortly after for an Exalt.
I really summarized this part because you'll probably never need to do this, but to give you an idea of how tedious this was, this whole process took me roughly 8 hours.
The first thing I did after getting this ex was open up like 3/4 trade tabs and set up filters for armor. The only thing I knew about armor is that we want life and res and on boots you need MS so I setup some filters like this:
My thought process on the weightings was that you can only get like 120 life on rings and 40 ish res for a single type so 1 res=3 life. I know this is off especially for stuff like chest pieces, but it was just back of the envelope calculations that got me started. I made one tab for rings, amulets, boots, body armor, and belts.
My first sale probably took me a couple hours of waiting but I went from 1 to 4 Ex so it’s pretty much exponential growth from here. I kept doing these small ball trades and reinvesting my my profits into more items until I had made about 30 ex. At this point I found this amazing pair of boots I bought for 2 Ex. I could tell immediately it was good but when I went to price check it I realized it could be worth a div - and within 30 minutes it sold. This was huge. It now meant I could stop buying items for 1-2 ex and selling for 5-10 and I could start buying for 10-30 ex and hopefully sell for divines
I shopped around of a lot of stuff with mild success. I found rings and ammy’s had the highest potential to be worth div so I started there. I bought rares that were either severely underpriced or with multiple open slots and slammed. I made something to the tune of 5 div doing this, but it was too inconsistent. Some didn’t sell for more than a day and many just didn’t sell at all. In just 2 days I had only made 5 div from the 1 div I started at. I felt like this deep into the game the economy was fucked and rings and ammy’s were way too obvious which means everyone and their mom was doing it.
I did some research on the top builds in Poe and I thought why don’t I just craft weapons for those builds. Sparkmage was 1, but lightning arrow dead eye was a pretty much tied for second. I looked up like 5 different guides for this build to find the primary attributes bows care about and I took a stab at it.
I spent probably 2-3 div on bows and waited.. and waited. But none sold so I moved onto a bunch of other shit. High ES chest pieces, 35 MS boots, and attribute breach rings. The ES chest pieces were total duds but the breach rings were mildly profitable but really slow. As I was beginning to feel like I just didn't know enough about the game to progress, I actually started getting some messages to buy some of my bows. This made me give bows another chance and try and learn what I was doing wrong.
Essentially my mistakes boiled down to this: I didn't realize how important these stats were
1. High DPS
2. Dual String Bow Base
2. +4/5 to Projectile Skills
3. +Additional Arrow Fired
If you had a DSB base with +5 proj with 250 DPS, then you could get 60ex to a Div For it. With 300+ DPS you can get 2-4 Div depending on the other stats.
For +4 proj the DPS you need for 1 Div would be closer to 300 and for 2-4 it would be closer to 350
Non-DSB bases would pretty much need 4/5 proj with 350+ DPS to be worth a Div or more.
With that being said, there was essentially 3 different methods for how I profited off bows.
1. Rune Flipping.
This was by far the least profitable, but theoretically had the least amount of variance and was the cheapest. I was literally just finding bows without runes in them and putting runes into them. You're probably thinking this is the stupidest shit you've ever seen, but hear me out. On the trade site it will list the DPS of items in the top right. It factors in how high it would be with 20% quality, but doesn't factor in how runes affect the item. So when you list a bow without runes they'll be missed by a lot of filters.
Take this guy's bow for example:
It was definitely underpriced, but it's worth like 10-20 ex as is. If you put in two iron runes, it pushes the bow past 275 DPS which means it can be worth 50 ex to a Div. If you play it right you'll almost always make a profit, especially if you go bargain hunting for underpriced bows.
2. Open Bows
I setup my filter like this:
The weighted sum essentially makes it so the bows we search for all have at least +4 proj skills and 1 mid-high roll phys mod. then we just gamba slam. We're literally just looking for more damage on the suffixes with a preference for phys and then +arrows and attack speed on the suffixes but these are very rare. Crit chance and Dmg are also nice, but I didn't notice it affecting the price of bows as much as these other stats. Take a look at this bow I found. for 5 ex it has these stats and one open prefix. If I slam decent phys here, which I do, this bow can easily be worth a div.
I've gotten lucky and slammed both phys and +1 arrows and taken bows from multiple ex to 15 Divine. The problem is that if you miss your slams, the bow can be worthless but if you hit you can turn huge profits.
3. Pure Flipping.
By far the easiest and the best money, but it needs a lot of knowledge about the items you're flipping and a lot of currency to play with. For this reason It almost never makes sense to just jump straight into flips. You need to spend some time crafting or flipping lower cost items to get a feel for the market and build up the currency to flip with. The process itself is pretty straight forwards - just buy low and sell high. The one tech that I have for this is using active search. It makes it so you can setup your filter and if any new postings come up you get notified immediately, which explains how sometimes when you underprice something you get spammed by like 30 people in a second. But for the most part what I did was every time I price checked a solid craft or rune flip, I'd just look through the higher end bows and see if there was something really undervalued. Like a 350 dps bow priced the same as 300 dps bows.
In the 3 days I traded bows I took my 5 div to 200 div in raw currency and easily another 50 div in bows waiting to sell. All together, it took me less than a week to get from a fresh account, with just a transmute to my name, to a couple hundred Divine ONLY TRADING.
I don't use the currency I make, and honestly it'll just waste away in my stash so I want to give it away to people who will make good use of it. Last video I gave out some currency to the top comment and comments I found funny or wholesome and I want to do that again. I'm committing all the currency I made this video to commenters.
Proof:
Anyways thanks for watching/reading I'd be happy to answer any of your questions in the comments below!