Frequently Asked Questions

Twenty-five questions, including the awkward ones about this site itself. Search or filter by topic, or read straight through.

Showing 25 questions

Nothing matches that Try a shorter phrase, or clear the filters. If your question genuinely is not here, it is worth asking. Ask us directly

The basics

5 questions
What is PoE Ninja?
A free, independently built website that tracks prices and character builds in Path of Exile and Path of Exile 2. It reads public data the games publish and organises it into economy overviews showing what items sell for, and build overviews showing what top ladder players are running. Full explanation here.Basics
Is it official, or made by Grinding Gear Games?
Neither. Path of Exile and Path of Exile 2 are made by Grinding Gear Games, who publish the data it reads but do not run it. PoE Ninja is an independent community project with no affiliation to them.Basics
Does it cost anything?
No. It is free, there is no paid tier, and there is nothing to download. Everything is read directly in a browser.Basics
Do I need an account?
No, and this is worth being firm about: nothing that only reads public data needs your credentials to do it. If any site in this space asks you to log in with your game account to show you prices, that request is the thing to examine, not the feature attached to it.Basics
Can I buy or sell items on it?
No. It is a reference, not a marketplace. Nothing changes hands on the platform. You read a value there, then trade through the official trade site or directly in game.Basics

Reading prices

5 questions
Why will nobody sell at the listed price?
Because it is not an offer. The figure is a filtered summary of asking prices with outliers and manipulation stripped out, and nobody is obliged to match it. The cheapest sellers are frequently people who stopped playing last week. Expect to pay slightly over it for anything you want today. How prices are computed.Prices
What does the listing count actually mean?
It is the confidence attached to the price, and the most useful number on the page. Thousands of listings means a real market rate. Under about twenty means a handful of opinions with a decimal point. Read the count before the value and most pricing mistakes disappear.Prices
Why is the same item listed several times at different prices?
Those are different versions of it. Corruption outcomes, roll brackets and league-specific variants all change what an item is worth, sometimes by a factor of a hundred. Blending them would produce an average describing none of them. Read the small text identifying which version a row is pricing.Prices
Why do prices change so quickly?
Both games run fully player-driven economies with no fixed prices. Values are recalculated continuously from live listings, so a supply shift, a balance change or a new crafting method can move a price within hours. That is the economy working, not the tracker failing.Prices
Why does Standard show completely different prices?
Every challenge league starts its economy from zero. Standard holds over a decade of accumulated wealth while a fresh league holds days, so the two are never comparable. If a figure looks bizarre in either direction, checking the league selector resolves it more often than any other single check.Prices

Reading builds

5 questions
Why is my character not in the build overview?
Almost always the rank cap. Ladders return only the top 15,000 entries in Path of Exile and 1,000 in Path of Exile 2, and characters below that are never published, so no tracker anywhere can show them. Private account settings and recent renames are the other two common causes. The eligibility checker narrows down which applies.Builds
What does the popularity percentage measure?
The share of sampled characters, never the share of everyone playing. In Path of Exile 2 the sample is a thousand characters, so five percent is fifty people. Convert every percentage into a headcount before reacting to it.Builds
Why is my character listed under the wrong main skill?
Nothing in the ladder data says which skill you consider primary. It has to be inferred from what is equipped, which is why weapon swap sets, trigger setups and aura-heavy builds get attributed to the wrong skill so often. Search unfiltered before concluding a character is missing.Builds
Should I copy the top-ranked build?
Probably not. The highest-ranked player is usually the best funded, not the best designed, and most of their gear is unobtainable on your budget. Open three characters running the same skill and take only what all three share — that is the build; what appears in one is that player's bank balance.Builds
How many characters does a build overview actually cover?
15,000 at most in Path of Exile, 1,000 in Path of Exile 2, per ladder. Those caps come from Grinding Gear Games' own API rather than any tracker's choice. Filter by class, ascendancy and skill and the remainder shrinks fast — the Path of Exile page shows what survives each filter.Builds

Path of Building

3 questions
Why does the DPS not match what I get?
Damage figures are calculated under a specific configuration against a standard target: buffs assumed active, flasks up, charges full. Your own file almost certainly uses different assumptions. The gap is expected, not an error in either place. Match the config on both sides before treating any difference as meaningful.Path of Building
How do I import a build into Path of Building?
Any listed character can be exported as a single code carrying the tree, gems, links and gear, which you paste into Path of Building's import tab. Path of Building itself is a separate community project and free from its own repository — it is not part of the analytics platform.Path of Building
Why are some buffs turned off by default?
Because the tool cannot know what you keep up during a real fight. Conditional buffs stay off until you switch them on, which is the honest default — a figure assuming perfect uptime describes a fight you will rarely have.Path of Building

About this site

4 questions

The awkward ones. Most sites leave these out, which is exactly why they are worth answering.

Are you poe.ninja?
No. This site is Poeninjaa.com, an independent guide that explains how to read the data poe.ninja publishes. We are not affiliated with them, do not host any live data, and have no access to their site, their data or their accounts. If you need current prices or ladder builds, go to poe.ninja directly.This site
Why is your domain so similar to theirs?
Because the site is about their platform, and the name reflects that. We accept it causes confusion, which is why the independence notice appears on every page, why the main explainer includes a table distinguishing the three similarly named things in this space, and why mail intended for them gets redirected rather than answered. If you arrived here expecting the tracker itself, that is our name doing it, not yours.This site
Do you make money from this?
Whatever the current answer, it is stated plainly on the about page rather than buried. What does not change either way: no sponsored guide is ever presented as editorial, no payment or relationship changes a recommendation or a criticism, and nothing critical comes down because someone asked. That is set out in the editorial policy.This site
Who writes these guides?
Everything is written or reviewed by Rowland Cox, who has played Path of Exile since 2019 and founded the site. There is no anonymous content pool. A one-person site cannot claim a newsroom's checking process, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty — what it can offer is that the person who wrote something answers for it, at a real name and a reachable address.This site

Troubleshooting

3 questions
The data looks wrong. Who do I tell?
Depends whose data. Anything about the tracker itself — a price that looks wrong, a missing character, a feature request — goes to poe.ninja, since we have no access to any of it. Anything wrong in our guides comes to us, and we would genuinely like to hear it. Report it here.Troubleshooting
A guide here is out of date. What happens now?
Tell us and it gets checked against the source, fixed if it holds up, and a dated note is added to the page recording what changed. Corrections are never edited in silently. The full process, including how errors are graded by severity, is in the corrections policy.Troubleshooting
Can you look up my character for me?
No, and we would not want the access required to do it. A page offering to log into your account to solve a mild inconvenience is a page you should close, whoever is running it. The eligibility checker works entirely from answers you already know, and reasons through the likely causes without touching anything of yours.Troubleshooting
Question not here? Send it over. Questions that come up more than once end up on this page, and several of the entries above started as someone's email. Ask us directly.
Start here Beginner Guide A ten minute first session in timed steps, plus the five things that confuse everyone. Mechanics How PoE Ninja Works Both data pipelines end to end, what updates when, and what each one throws away. Avoid these Common Mistakes Eleven misreadings ranked by how often they happen and how much they cost. Four chapters Economy Guides Currency, item prices, price history and trading, following one price end to end.
Lost your password?