The Circle of Fortune and Merchant’s Guild are Last Epoch’s way of making itemizing easier, as the former provides more deterministic loot drops and the latter provides a player market to buy and sell items. Both factions have a passive tree that provides additional benefits. Here’s our comparison between both factions and which of them you should choose.
Circle of Fortune Mechanics
As mentioned earlier, the Circle of Fortune is all about making certain loot drops more deterministic with the help of constellations and associated Prophecies that come with them.
To start, the faction headquarters has four Telescopes. Each Telescope governs a type of item: Idols, Armor, Weapons, and Jewelry. This will let you narrow your search for a specific item, whether it's an Exalted, Unique, or Set item you need.
After interacting with a chosen Telescope, you will see a Constellation with multiple nodes on it. Each node is a Prophecy, which shows you the enemy that you need to kill, the timeline where you need to kill it, and the item reward. If you want a specific item and the Constellation doesn’t have it, you can spend Favor to reroll Prophecies.
To give you more control over where your Prophecies can occur or what it rewards, you can slot in 3 Lenses in the Telescope, which are any of the following:
- Regional Lens: Makes a specific item type appear more often
- Obscuring Lens: Blocks a specific event type for the Prophecy
- Refracting Lens: Increases a Prophecy’s reward amount for higher Favor costs
- Enhancing Lens: Increases the item rarity of a Prophecy’s reward.
Merchant’s Guild Mechanics
This faction is essentially the in-game player market where you can buy and sell items whenever you want. When joining the Merchant’s Guild, you can only purchase Normal, Magic, and Rare at the start since you'll need Reputation to unlock higher gear rarities. Here are the Merchant’s Guild ranks and their privileges once you reach them:
- Rank 1: Unlocks gear selling
- Rank 2: Unlocks Set items
- Rank 3: Unlocks Unique weapons with no Legendary Potential
- Rank 4: Unlocks Idols
- Rank 5: Unlocks Exalted weapons
- Rank 6: Unlocks Unique weapons with Legendary Potential
- Rank 7: Unlocks all Exalted items
- Rank 8: Unlocks all Unique items.
- Rank 9: Unlocks Legendary weapons
- Rank 10: Unlocks all Legendary items
Like any other marketplace, you can add filters to narrow down an item that you’re looking for, with players setting the price of items.
Should You Pick Circle of Fortune or Merchant’s Guild?
If you want the easiest and quickest way to get gear, the Merchant’s Guild is by far your best choice as you can pick an item type, rarity and specific modifiers. Even powerful Uniques like the Red Ring of Atlaria and Omnis can be bought on the Merchant’s Guild for easy access.
However, if you prefer to save your gold or are playing a Solo Self-Found run, the Circle of Stars is a great option as this faction lets you manipulate loot drops without interacting with the market. This will take more time though since you will need to complete Prophecies for your gear.
