Path of Exile - Why Exalted Orbs Are Cheap In Metamorph
183This video is podcast format - you can minimize the graphics and listen and catch 90-95% of it if you prefer.
If you played POE years ago then are coming backafter a 5 year break, you might think "why are exalts over 70c?". If your first league was Blight, you might think "why are they under 170c?"
Four key points compared to Blight.
- Reduced demand due to multimod nerf
- GGG's constant war with cheating players
- Reduced demand due to alternate slams (Crusader Exalt etc)
- Premium Zana mods
I won't discuss the fear of missing out phenomenon that causes price swings to be more volatile, as it isn't different to previous leagues.
Multimod
In previous leagues, essentially the special craft "Can have multiple crafted modifiers" displaced a lot of other crafting methods.
In 3.9 this mod was nerfed to "Can have up to 3 crafted modifiers", which means "Can have up to 2 crafted modifiers not including this one".
This sharply dropped exalt demand.
Also some other powerful (although less prevalent) bench crafts have eaten nerfs and are no longer 'must have' mods. These were denominated in exalts.
GGG's war with cheaters
If you've played POE much you'll have been exposed to characters spamming chat channels with "Buy chaos/exalts from us for real world money". These are often hard to read, as GGG tries to set chat filters up that stop their ads from being displayed.
First - don't support these people.
The spam is irritating, but much worse, they are behind the overwhelming majority of account hacking that takes place in the game.
Additionally, it's cheating.
Path of Exile doesn't have any of this paid cheating garbage and we want to keep it that way.
In some games throughout history, pay to cheat sites have used sweatshops in low-wage countries to manually farm tradeable commodities.
However now this is mostly done by bots.
For various reasons bots tend to focus on farming the Blood Aqueduct and doing chaos recipes, having minimal impact on exalt supply but generating a lot of chaos orbs and divine orbs.
HOWEVER this league, another Youtuber who is more into the POE economy than me (Path of Matth - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC10CwKWuw7CPpjCvYbIyzAw) regularly monitors the forums of the bot cheaters, and reports that there's been two big banwaves. These bans happen in waves to maximize impact - once GGG develop a diagnostic tool that catches a specific cheat bot, they don't instantly ban people, they run the tool for a while to make a list of people to ban, then hit them all at once.
I researched the pay-to-cheat sites a bit when making this video, and they mostly advertise exalted orbs. Their bots trade their chaos up into exalts and sometimes mirrors, then the cheat sites sell those.
When a banwave happens, the cheaters lose a lot of accounts, but still want to be able to fill orders. In the short term they do this from pre-stocked exalts, but they can't generate new chaos orbs for a while. This means they stop buying exalts for a period, and the market adjusts toward where it might be if the cheat sites didn't exist.
Then the bot is 'fixed' and the cycle repeats.
Two big banwaves is more than usual for this early in a league. This has suppressed the amount of chaos orbs in the economy.
It's too early to say if GGG is winning the war here, or has just won a few battles.
Alternate Slams
When you create a rare item with a chaos orb, ID scroll, alchemy orb or fossil, it is believed (not proven) that there is a 1 in 12 chance to hit a 6 mod item, 1 in 4 to hit a 5 mod, and 2 in 3 to hit a 4 mod item.
This 1:3:8 ratio certainly matches my anecdotal experience, although it is not statistically significant.
A 6 mod rare with desireable mods is usually 'finished'.
A 5 mod rare usually gets a benchcraft.
But for a 4 mod rare, you used to usually benchcraft it, then if the item merited it, 'slam' it with an exalt as the final step.
Now, however, it is almost always better to 'complete' the item with a strategically chosen Conqueror's Exalted Orb, whenever this is an option.
Premium Zana mods
So far we've discussed three factors that affect chaos supply or exalt demand - cheaters influencing chaos supply less than usual, and multimod and Crusader exalts suppressing demand for traditional exalts.
There's one more major factor, the Zana mods.
This league Legion as a Zana mod is the best loot hunting option, and Beyond is the best XP hunting option. Both are excellent Zana mods and increase signficantly the value you get from maps.
These mods cost 6 and 5 chaos orbs respectively, and the players using them do not recover quite that many chaos orbs.
This pushes up chaos orb demand considerably.
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