Every number below comes from the real Path of Building 2 engine or a plainly-labeled estimate — never from a language model asked to "seem right." Here's exactly what each score means and how the overall grade is built from them.
Your survivability (effective HP, resistances) and damage checked against real reference numbers for a chosen content tier — or, if you pick a specific pinnacle boss, against that boss's actual real life pool and a kill-time estimate. Not a vibe check: these are concrete thresholds, documented in the code that computes them.
By default that tier is a normal endgame map: a Tier 15 rare waystone with 6 modifiers, not corrupted and without tablets. Full damage marks mean killing its rare monsters (about 258,000 life) in 5 seconds; defence is the biggest hit you survive in your weakest damage type. Every part is a sliding scale, not a step: a resistance at 74% counts nearly as much as one at the 75% cap, and a build just under a mark gets nearly all of that mark's credit. Farming Fit below holds builds to a much harder standard — juiced maps.
How well a build suits a specific farming strategy (Breach, Delirium, Expedition, and others) — weighted 35% clear damage, 25% defense, 20% single-target damage and 20% mobility, the same for every strategy. This comes from one of two sources, and we always disclose which:
Farming is always judged against very juiced maps: a Tier 16 waystone with a full set of corrupted modifiers, under a tower of tablets (whose irradiation adds a level, so area level 81). Damage is measured by how fast the build kills a juiced rare monster (about 333,000 life): a quarter of a second — deleting packs — is excellent, 1 second good, 3 seconds slow. Defence is measured by the biggest hit the build survives in its weakest damage type — physical, fire, cold, lightning or chaos — because juiced waystones add extra chaos and elemental damage and penetrate resistances. Evasion, block and deflection count at half credit on top (up to double the hit): they stop most hits, but not the unlucky one that lands. Mobility is the build's real movement speed, plus credit for a movement skill such as Flicker Strike, Leap Slam or Shield Charge: worth another 25% movement speed when it's the main skill, 15% when it's there for getting around.
Defence also caps the whole farming score: a build that can be one-shot can't farm, however fast it kills, so a weak defence multiplies the score down (to as little as 55%). Strategies built around heavily-modded rare monsters — Expedition, Grand Expedition, rare-hunting Breach and Abyss exiles — are held to harder hits still, because those monsters can roll stacks of extra modifiers. Totem and minion builds are held to a lighter hit (60%), because monsters go for the totems and minions while the player stands back.
If neither exists, this component is dropped entirely and Endgame Readiness makes up the whole grade — never silently scored as 0.
How hard a build actually is to play well: whether it requires a weapon swap mid-combat, and how many distinct active skills you genuinely have to press (not just how many gems are socketed — a totem or minion's payload skill doesn't count as a second button, since you never press it yourself). Higher score = easier to pilot. This doesn't affect your letter grade; it's shown so you know what you're signing up for before you invest in a build with a steep learning curve.
Endgame Readiness and Farming-Strategy Fit are combined as a straight weighted sum — 50% / 50% by default — into one 0-100 composite, then mapped to a school-style letter: A ≥90, B ≥80, C ≥70, D ≥60, F below 60. Every build's detail page shows the exact breakdown table, not just the final number.
The grade says how good a build is. What it costs is a separate question, so it's answered separately — an excellent build is never marked down just for being expensive.
Every item the build actually wears is priced: uniques from live poe.ninja data (the right version of each — plain, Runeforged and Runemastered versions are priced very differently), socketed runes and soul cores the same way, and rares from real trade listings. For a rare we search for items at least about as good as yours and read the cheapest ones online; when nothing matches exactly, the required rolls are lowered before any mod is left out, and the build page says which. Magic items and low-tier rares count at a small floor instead of being searched.
Gems count too: Lineage supports at their poe.ninja price (some cost hundreds of divines), and every other gem at the price of the uncut gem it's cut from at its level. Gems granted by an item are covered by that item's price.
The price is shown as a range with a tier — Starter, Budget, Mid, Expensive or Mirror-tier. What counts as expensive grows as the league goes on (45 divine is a fortune in launch week and pocket change a month in), so the tier is always judged against the current league week. Prices are re-measured every week for the first four weeks after a build is priced.
Curious what any of this looks like on a real build? See the worked example on the homepage →
