Path of Idle gear quality: keep, sell, or save for the forge

Keep every Set piece for a build you are working toward, every Legendary, Mythic and Unique, and a handful of Common items at item level 20 or above. Sell the rest. The Common items are the part people get wrong: they are the only quality besides Fine that can carry sockets, and sockets are the only way to run a runeword.

The eight qualities

Sell and buy rates multiply against the item’s level based trade rate, so a Mythic item sells for twenty times what a Common item of the same level does. That is worth knowing before you vendor a Mythic you cannot use: it is the largest single gold source in the game outside the Market itself.

Corruption price factor multiplies what corrupting the item costs. Corrupting a Mythic costs five times what corrupting a Common does at the same level.

Sockets exist on two qualities only

Only Common and Fine items can have sockets. Nothing above them can, at drop or at the forge.

When an item drops, the socket count is weighted:

Fine items never drop with three sockets. If you want a three socket item, it has to be Common, or it has to come from the forge.

Forging a Common or Fine item that has no sockets can open some, and the forged distribution is much better:

The chance of the forge opening sockets at all runs from 0% to 10% depending on Workshop upgrades, and only items at level 20 and above can carry sockets in the first place. Once a socket opens, that item can no longer be refined.

So the practical rule is: a level 20 or higher Common item is a runeword candidate and should not be sold. All 18 runeword loadouts in the official builds sit on Common items for exactly this reason.

Refining changes quality, and one path destroys

Refining spends bone to reroll an item’s quality. There are three paths.

The ranges depend on Workshop upgrades. The first two paths are safe: a failed attempt leaves you with a Rare item rather than nothing. The third is not. At the base 15% success rate, five out of six attempts destroy the Legendary.

That makes the decision concrete. A Legendary you do not need is a reasonable Mythic gamble. A Legendary your build lists is not.

Item level beats quality until level 90

An item’s level sets the maximum level of the affixes it can roll, and it climbs in steps of ten:

A Rare item at level 90 can roll affixes that a Legendary at level 40 simply cannot. This is why farming forward matters more than hoarding rarities early, and why the chapter you farm decides what your gear can be.

The item level also sets which rune quality the item accepts, which matters for runewords because rune quality sets the granted talent’s level: quality 1 from item level 1, 2 from level 30, 3 from level 50, 4 from level 70, and 5 from level 90.

The wear requirement stops at 60

The hero level needed to wear an item rises with item level up to item level 60, and then stops. Every item from level 60 to level 170 requires a level 60 hero and no more.

That has a real consequence: a level 60 hero can wear the best gear in the game. Levelling past 60 buys you attribute pool and threshold problems, not access to equipment. The full table is on the equipment levels page.

What to sell

Sell Rare and Magic items that do not roll the attributes your build’s preferred list names. They cannot be socketed, they cannot be refined into anything except by luck, and their sell rate is low enough that they are worth more as forge fuel money than as storage.

Sell Common and Fine items below item level 20, because they can never carry sockets.

Keep Set pieces even for classes you have not recruited, since the official builds are set driven and a set takes a long time to complete.

Keep Uniques. There are few of them, they drop from a Unique Chest at a base 0.02% to 0.04% per roll in every chapter, and several official builds list them.

The market and Sanctum guide covers what your surplus is actually worth and how to turn low value chests into higher ones.