Path Of Exile 2: How To Unlock And Use The Currency Exchange

As time goes on with a single character in Path of Exile 2, you’ll begin to accumulate quite a bit of wealth. Your inventory will be full of gold as well as other forms of currency, such as orbs of various rarity. While you can use your orbs for their intended uses, you can also trade them to acquire different forms of currency that you don’t have or need more of.

This trading goes down at the Currency Exchange, which is an extremely useful tool to have at your disposal as you get into the endgame. However, the Currency Exchange isn’t something you unlock right at the start of Path of Exile 2.

Unlocking the Currency Exchange in Path of Exile 2

Fortunately, unlike other endgame content in Path of Exile 2, you don’t need to reach the endgame to start using the Currency Exchange. All you have to do is beat the main campaign a single time on Normal difficulty.

Once that’s done, you’ll enter Cruel difficulty and start back at Act One. Cruel mode turns up the heat in terms of enemy difficulty but you’ll also earn more XP and better drops. You need to beat all three acts again in Cruel mode to fully access the endgame in Path of Exile 2.

After making it past Normal difficulty and into Cruel mode, you can start using the Currency Exchange. The exchange is located at the Gambling Vendors in all three main towns, which are:

• Act 1 – Finn (Clearfell Encampment)
• Act 2 – Risu (Ardura Caravan)
• Act 3 – Alva (Ziggurat Encampment)

Talk to any of these vendors to access the Currency Exchange and start trading your various currencies.

How the Currency Exchange works

At the main Currency Exchange screen, you might be a little overwhelmed the first time you access it. There are several different screens to flip through that list all the available items you can trade for. We’ll break down the Currency Exchange to its basics below:

• On the main menu for the Currency Exchange, select the yellow “I Want” button on the left side.
• This lists all the currencies in Path of Exile 2. Select the one you’re looking for and go back to the main menu.
• From here, click the red “I Have” button on the right side.
• This lists all the available currencies you have to trade. Select the currency you want to exchange.
• You might need to select more of your currency if the item you want is worth more by itself than a single one of your currency.
• In the middle of the main menu screen, you’ll see the currency’s “Market Ratio” for what you want to buy. This tells you how much of your currency you need to be able to exchange it for the currency you’re buying.
• For example, if you want an Orb of Chance and you’re willing to exchange it for an Exalted Orb, the Market Ratio is 1:4. This means you need four Exalted Orbs to afford the single Orb of Chance.
• The exchange rates are determined by the player base and how in demand a certain item is. The rates will fluctuate as time goes on.
• Once you have input the correct number of currency on your side, you can click “Place Order” and then claim the currency you bought from the main menu.

The biggest learning curve with the Currency Exchange is figuring out the exchange rates for all the items you want. These exchange rates change every day based on what players are exchanging and how much of it they’re buying.

As such, if the item you want has a high market ratio, you could theoretically wait a day or two to see if the ratio goes down. However, this also risks the ratio going up, forcing you to shell out more currency than you would have if you just purchased it in the first place.

After a few trades at the Currency Exchange and exploring all the tabs in the menu, you should get the hang of it fairly quickly. You can use the exchange for personal use and simply trade for items you need or you can treat the exchange as a stock market. If you know the demand for some items, you can trade them at their peak value in exchange for a larger quantity of other items.