How To Use the Trade Site Like a Pro

Gearing in PoE 2 is more important than in PoE 1. You'll likely want to trade for chunks of gear when you're feeling too weak if you're unable to craft or find the gear yourself.

The Trade Site for PoE 2: https://www.pathofexile.com/trade2/

The Basics:

The current base currency appears to be Exalted Orbs. Most gear you purchase before maps shouldn't cost more than a few exalts, with a good chunk of it costing only 1.

You can filter by base type, level and attribute requirements in order to make sure you can equip whatever you're searching for. Typically I go a little over my current attributes in this filter, in case I see something good enough to respec a few points for. You can also filter buyout price to 'Exalted Orbs' and put the maximum amount you're willing to spend. Typically I'll put this a little higher than I'm willing to spend and send messages to people offering what I'm willing to spend if necessary. Selling an item for slightly less is better than letting it rot in your stash, but you may want to avoid haggling for items that have been on the market for less than a day.

Don't make your filter TOO specific. You can put all your requirements in, but narrowing down too many modifiers can be detrimental to your search. If you need 25% cold resistance, you don't necessarily want to search for only items that give all the stuff you want AND 25% cold resistance. Maybe an item giving 50% lightning resistance will free up worse piece of gear you can more easily get 25% cold resistance on, or maybe you can use runes to sure up problem areas.

The Sorting:

After starting a search, you can sort items by certain modifiers by clicking on them. For instance, clicking on 'Movement Speed' will sort by the highest movement speed item to lowest, with a secondary consideration for price (so the 1 exalt 20 movespeed boots will appear before the 20 exalt 20 movespeed boots).

For these filters, you'll usually want to select the 'aggregate' search (See: Stat Filters below). For damage, you'll usually want to sort by the 'DPS' total at the bottom of the item, not by the "+% physical damage" modifier, since the base damage of the item and other modifiers, like runes or +flat damage, won't be included.

The Stat Filters:

Finally, the most important part. This game doesn't have Pesudo filters, meaning, for instance, if you wanted to search items that give X life, you cannot just search "# to Maximum Life". Why? That will only give explicit modifiers that give life, and Strength gives 2 life per strength. A 50 life 50 strength item gives 50 more life than a 100 life item!

Enter Weighted Sum. Click "+Add Stat Group" at the bottom of the trade page and select "Weighted Sum". To get the item with the most maximum life, you'll want to search for # to Strength with a weight of 2, # to Maximum Life as both an explicit modifier, implicit modifier, and enchantment (runes) with a weight of 1. Then, when sorting you can sort on that 'sum'. You can also still use the min value at the top of the weighted sum category to only get items with a minimum sum of a certain amount of life.

Weighted sum also helps with resistances. You can search for 60% total resistances by entering them all in weighted sum with a weight of 1, and see items that offer any resistances totaling 60%.

Also, the "Count" stat group is helpful. Got several secondary stats you'd like to have on your item, but know you can't get them all? Place them all within "Count" and put the minimum count to 1-3. If you're just looking for enough life and resists on an item, you can add a count filter for other nice but not necessary things, like +rarity, +damage to your attack type, etc.

If you don't know what stats in general an item can roll, look up the item basetype here to see all of the modifiers it can roll, and the minimum item level required: https://poe2db.tw/us/Modifiers

Lastly, don't be afraid to use the live filter! Are there some items in the area you want, but none of them hit the right price or feel right for you? Start a live filter and get pinged whenever the correct item appears on the market. Keep in mind, though, that if a lot of people ping someone for an item in a short amount of time, sellers will often get spooked and raise the price of the item, so don't feel bad if the item gets listed again right away at a higher price and you never get a response.