You’ll find plenty of loot during your adventures in Path of Exile 2, and harkening back to loot-grind ARPGs of yore, the rarer, more mystical gear you find can’t be blindly equipped. First it must be identified before its properties are known to the player and, more importantly, it can be equipped. This page will cover how to identify magical items in Path of Exile 2, including where to buy Scrolls of Wisdom and how to get free identification from The Hooded One.
Page Breakdown¶
Quick Search |
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Identifying Items with Scrolls of Wisdom |
Buying Scrolls of Wisdom |
The Hooded One Free Identification |
Identifying Items with Scrolls of Wisdom¶
When you find your first magical items (quite possibly after defeating [The Bloated Miller] - the game’s first boss) you’ll quickly run into an issue - these items can’t be used until they’re identified! You’re going to want to use magical and rare gear, too, because these items have random modifiers on them that boost various gameplay parameters - more damage, health, armor, skill bonuses, etc., the rarer the item, the more modifiers. Fortunately you’ll also find Scrolls of Wisdom, single-used items that can be consumed to reveal the properties of magical gear, which can then be equipped. These will drop fairly regularly from all sorts of enemies, so you should have a constant supply of them.
Buying Scrolls of Wisdom¶
Path of Exile 2 isn’t the most generous game when it comes to loot drops, but the game will still drop more magical items than Scrolls of Wisdom. At some point you’re going to end up with a surplus of magical gear that needs to be identified, and relying on RNG to solve your problems will likely just exacerbate them. Fortunately you can visit Una in Clearfell Encampment and purchase new Scrolls of Wisdom from her for 25 gold each. This will eat into your profits a bit, but not as much as not identifying magical items and selling them would, to say nothing of keeping your power level up by being able to equip these new items.
The Hooded One Free Identification¶
We’re all friends here, so we can hopefully speak candidly - individually identifying gear sucks. The less time you spend in your inventory screens in a loot-grind APRG, the better it probably is. This is something we should have all learned back in 2000 when Diablo 2 sidestepped the issue by allowing Deckard Cain to identify all the magical gear in your inventory free of charge, once you rescued him. Fortunately for us all, Path of Exile 2 is clearly inspired quite heavily by the aforementioned heavyweight of the ARPG genre, and has provided an awfully similar workaround to the tedium of manual identification.
Advance the main questline until the quest Sorrow Among Stones begins, where you’ll need to head to the Cemetery of the Eternals and do some busywork there (read: defeat several bosses). After vanquishing [Lachlann of Eternal Sorrow], reclaim Count Lachlann’s Ring and return to Una in the Clearfall Encampment. After some chatter you’ll be able to talk to The Hooded One, who might not have the same iconic voice as ol’ Deckard Cain, but he will identify your gear for you for free going forward. Just talk to him in town and select the option for him to identify your gear (or press Square if you’re on PlayStation) and he’ll identify every unidentified item in your inventory, no fuss, no muss, no pay.
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