How to Get/Farm a 6-Link (Best Early Methods)

There are good and bad ways to get a six linked item in Path of Exile. This guide is going to look at both and cover why some are better options than others.

In Path of Exile 1, each support gem represents a damage multiplier, and even if you occasionally choose damage projection over damage, your fifth and sixth links almost always boost damage.

Some supports are better, some are worse, but typically, you will get a 40% DPS boost for each of your 5^th and 6^th links.

Upgrading from a 4 link to a 6 link will almost double the damage your character deals.

However, if you do not manipulate the odds in your favor, having a direct drop of a 6 linked chestpiece is extraordinarily rare.

All drop rarity information is based upon patch 3.26 and is subject to change.

A chestpiece with six links is far, far, far more important than a weapon.

Even if your character ultimately wants to use a two-handed weapon, you will likely gain more character power from upgrading your weapon than your chestpiece.

A six linked weapon with bad item type, bad explicit modifiers and low item level is likely worse than a four or five linked weapon with good modifiers. This is not true of a chestpiece.

Get a six linked chestpiece first, almost always, if you get a lucky six linked weapon first, that's a bonus.

There’s two exceptions – if you have the resources to craft a bow and make it ‘good enough for now’, there are deterministic and reasonable ways to farm a low level six linked Thicket Bow, or a high level six linked Imperial Bow. Both are good enough to use on some builds.

The relevant divination cards are The Porcupine (uncommon) and Imperial Legacy (common).

The listing here is from ‘most recommended in trade’ to ‘least recommended in trade’.

In SSF, it’s good to be aware of some options in case RNG falls in your favour, but I strongly recommend that SSF players farm ‘The Chains That Bind’ or ‘Tainted Orbs of Fusing’ unless you get lucky.

Orbs of Fusing are rigged.

They are VERY heavily biased against generating high numbers of links.

They are known to give better results when applied to items with high quality, but even at the default limit of 20 quality or the absolute limit of 30 (for currently available items), large tests indicate that it’s about one in a thousand to hit a six link with one Orb of Fusing.

Many players believe it to be one in 1200 at 20%.

It is not rare to sink 2000 Fusings into a chest with no six link to show for it.

Five links are estimated at 13 times as likely as a six link (about 1 in 80 fusings).

Unless you have enough league wealth to recover from throwing 2000 fusings at a chest and NOT getting a six link, direct application of an Orb of Fusing should be seen as a reliable method to get a five link, but nothing more than that.

If you hit a six link first – bonus.

Use Orbs of Fusing if one of the following is true:

• You will stop upon hitting a five link
• You’ve made your peace with maybe throwing 2000+ at an item and STILL being as far away from a six link as you were before feeding 2000 orbs to it.

Otherwise, don’t roll over five links.

Keep the gem colors you must use in mind – and also decide upon any combinations you might settle for.

For example – in 3.26 my character required 4 red and 1 blue, and the sixth gem could be either red, Cruelty Support, or green, Awakened Deadly Ailments Support.

So I wanted 5R1B, but was willing to settle for 4R1B1G.

In much more detail - Chromatic Orb odds and Tainted Chromatic Orb odds

These considerations might impact your options later.

Not applicable to SSF players.

In trade leagues, often your first six link should come from trading with other players who are further ahead than you in progression.

Their ninth best item might be better than your best.

This is listed first as it is often the very best option available. But where are those spare six links coming from? Read on... there are good alternatives to trading here.

The easiest way to acquire a reasonably good six linked chest without trading is by turning in a set of 11 of the quite common divination card The Chains That Bind to Lilly Roth in your hideout, or Tasuni in the acts.

You can farm The Chains That Bind yourself in maps in most leagues, it will typically take about fifteen rare maps if you aren’t using good scarabs to ‘juice’ your maps, and far less than fifteen maps if you are.

However, sometimes (as was the case in patch 3.26) this card will not be on the maps available on the Atlas.

The item level of the resulting chest will be whichever is lower – 80, or your character’s level when you turn the cards in.

The minimum level of the chestpiece will not exceed the item level, so you cannot get a Twilight Regalia from this card.

Most times, you won’t get a great base item – but you can still apply a high tier Essence, an Eater of Worlds Ichor, a Searing Exarch Ember (rolling over useless modifiers, and keeping ‘this sort of helps a bit’ results like +6% to elemental resists), and you now have a starting point item.

A rarer divination card gives better rewards, The Dapper Prodigy. It’s about 4 times as rare as The Chains That Bind, and cannot drop until high tier maps.

The maps these cards come from changes each league. In 3.26, Dapper Prodigy was in high tier Villa maps, and The Chains that Bind was the least farmable it has ever been. We won’t know until 3.27 lands which maps these cards will belong to.

If you turn in a set of cards and get an unusable base item because you cannot Chromatic Orb it (e.g. Necromancer Silks with its 160 Int requirement when your gem colors are R-R-R-B-G-G), in trade league I’d advise selling the unusable item.

In SSF, you can craft it with an Essence and Ichor and Ember, then Vaal it, hoping the Vaal Orb doesn’t randomize the links. If it does not, you can then apply Tainted Chromatic Orbs, which you will need to farm.

The odds for Tainted Chromes will help you decide if this is a plan, or if you’d rather farm a new set of cards.

These cards will bias toward item bases with a level requirement in the high 50s, just as monster drops do.

The very best item bases such as Royal Plate will be quite rare here.

Vaal Orbs and other methods of corrupting items have an interesting bias. Items corrupted by a Vaal Orb can randomize into rare items with random modifiers. These don’t six link often, but they will do so much more often than Orbs of Fusing do.

Players believe a chestpiece of item level 50 or higher that is corrupted by a Vaal Orb has a 1 in 144 chance to turn into a rare item with six random modifiers, six linked sockets, and completely random colors as if a Tainted Chromatic Orb had just been applied to the item.

Corrupting a Strongbox (either by Vaal Orb or by the Tamper Proof Atlas notable) will corrupt all items inside it.

This means mapping with Tamper Proof allocated and a Strongbox strategy, possibly using Ambush Scarabs, generates a large number of corrupted items – and of every thousand corrupt chestpieces, about 7 will be six linked.

These will be corrupted and quite a bit worse than ‘clean’ six links – they cannot be crafted with Essences or Eldritch Embers or Ichors. But early in progression, they can still be a welcome step up from worse gear.

These corrupt six links are stepping stone items – you use them knowing they are bad, but because they are still better than you had. If you use one, aspire to replacing it quickly.

This is actually the easiest way to get a six link, but the resulting items are so much worse than Chains that Bind divination cards that I usually recommend Chains that Bind instead.

There is a less common mechanic named Corrupting Tempest - experienced players can use these to generate a couple of six linked items in a map, but you have very little agency over whether or not you will encounter Corrupting Tempests and so this is a low priority to learn about.

These orbs are amazing if your build only really ‘sings’ with a six-linked version of a not very rare chestpiece, such as Dendrobate or Cloak of Flame. Rarer chests like Hyrri's Ire are less suited to this method, as you will occasionally destroy a chest with this approach and Hyrri's is harder to replace.

Tainted Orbs of Fusing drop uncommonly from Beyond bosses and very rarely from Beyond regular monsters. You can’t otherwise get them.

Step 1: Source your chest. You’ll need an average of two and two-thirds copies of the item.

Step 2: By applying Armorer’s Scraps, raise the item’s quality to 20%

Step 3: By manually applying Jeweller’s Orbs or an Omen of the Jeweller, six socket the item. (You might think of applying Tainted Jeweller’s Orbs as an alternative, I do not recommend this)

Step 4: By applying Orbs of Fusing, manually 5 link the item. One time in 14 you’ll get lucky and hit a six link before ever hitting a five link. If you do – fantastic. If not, continue.

Step 5: Corrupt (Vaal Orb) and hope. There’s a 25% chance that it is reforged as a (usually bad) rare item with random sockets. If your item survives, it’s time for the second RNG barrier.

Step 6: Apply a Tainted Fusing Orb. These are 50-50: either they add one link to the largest chain of links, or they remove one. If you lose the coinflip, it’s usually best to return to step 1, unless Tainted Fusing Orbs are cheap. If the 6S5L version of your chest costs more than two Tainted Fusing Orbs, it’s worth applying another Tainted Fusing Orb to your 6S4L chest for the 50-50 to recover to 6S5L and then repeat this step.

Adapting for SSF: This approach works in SSF, but RNG hurts more as you can’t just trade for a new chest nor can you trade for a new tainted fusing.

Legion encounters will uncommonly award Geomancer’s Incubators.

These take a long time to ‘crack open’, but when they do, they will award you a six-linked chestpiece with item level equal to that of the incubator.

Like other RNG sources, these will bias toward item bases with a level requirement in the high 50s. The very best item bases will be quite rare here.

The advantage to Legion is that if you spec heavily into it (which only certain builds can do well), the Geomancer's Incubators, while uncommon, are not really rare. You might get several in a play session.

Heist Blueprints are the capstone encounters of Heist, and they are more approachable than most capstone content.

Blueprints frequently offer six socket, five linked ‘well rolled’ rare items and uncommonly offer six linked ‘well rolled' rare items.

These are often quite good.

Also check for rarer curio rewards with the enchant “All sockets are linked”. Applying Jeweler's Orbs to an item with that enchantment will get a six link reasonably cheaply, typically requiring around two hundred Jeweler's Orbs.

The Ritual mechanic uncommonly will offer six linked rare chest pieces for purchase at a tribute cost from 3950 to 7900.

These will have the same base biases as Legion and divination cards.

Chests in Heist contracts with an armor icon will rarely award a six linked chestpiece, which unfortunately is often a very common and mostly undesirable unique item.

It is a numbers game, if you open enough you will get lucky.

These chests also drop many Orbs of Fusing and Chromatic Orbs.

Consider this option if you are specced into Heist and have run out of blueprints. Blueprints are better.

The ‘Saqawine Vulture’ red beast is quite rare, but allows you to sacrifice it to gain a six linked rare item.

These can appear in all map tiers, but the items will be better if the beast comes from a higher tier map.

If you specialise into Einhar's missions, and especially if you use beast scarabs, you are reasonably likely to find one or more of these. If you don't spec Bestiary, this is an RNG bonus you might find and little more.

Relying upon an RNG drop is not a good plan on its own, but rare monsters have several effects they can roll that rig the odds in your favor.

Unfortunately, most of the ways to do this rely upon endgame-only farming options that you might need a six link already to access.

The more monster modifiers a rare monster has and the nastier those modifiers are, the more likely it is that you’ll encounter a loot bonus known as a rare monster loot conversion.

Three of these matter here.

One of these RNG procs forces all items the monster drops to have the maximum allowed number of sockets. This is very noticeable when it procs, and isn’t very rare.

Another rarer RNG proc forces all items the monster drops to have all sockets linked.

And a third RNG proc upgrades all armor pieces that drop to be on higher level bases (e.g. Destroyer Regalia becomes Twilight Regalia, or Holy Chainmail becomes Sacred Chainmail).

Getting the first two together is termed a ‘six-link bomb’. It’s rare outside Tier 17 maps or Originator influenced maps, but it can happen.

Getting all three is much better, but this is rare even in Tier 17 maps.

To up the odds of seeing this fortuitous cascade of procs, you want to add more rare monsters to maps, run maps with more explicit map modifiers, and (most importantly) add more modifiers to each rare monster with Horned Scarab of Nemesis or Scarab of Divinity. Both of these scarabs are quite uncommon.

It’s even better if your Tier 17 or Originator influenced map has the very dangerous modifier “Rare monsters in area are Shaper-touched” and/or “Rare monsters each have 1 additional modifier”.

These will give more chances for these six link bombs to occur, but you will probably need a six link to defeat these monsters and claim it.

There are other divination cards that award six links.

CARDS NOT ALREADY NAMED IN THIS POST ARE TRAPS.

They are much rarer than you expect. Please do not spend time farming them.

The cost (in gold) to request a card on Faustus's currency exchange will give you insight into how rare that card is.

Up to 125 gold, Faustus costs are one-to-one with card rarity (twice the cost = twice as rare). Above 125 gold, the rarity increases much faster than the gold cost (twice the cost = eight times as rare).

So Draped in Dreams is 125 times as rare as The Porcupine!

The Emperor of Purity and The Dark Mage cards aren’t too hard to farm, but the outcomes from turning them in will be mediocre at best. Chains That Bind will surpass both.

In this table, 'Rarity' doubling means 'twice as rare'. It's normalized to have The Porcupine be rarity 1.

These rare cards will exist across a mature trade league, so feel free to trade for them, but do not attempt to self-compile a set.

sorry, this item isn't good any more

There was a time when this item was good.

It’s a long time ago now, so don’t use Tabula Rasa.

Zero base defenses (armor, energy shield, evasion), no resistances, no space for Eldritch modifiers – it’s almost always weaker than a five linked item with stats, and often worse than a four linked item with stats.

The divination card Humility is much rarer now than it was in the past, and while it’s not impossible to farm it, in the same time you could farm six copies of The Fortunate and trade for something much better than Tabula.

If you happen to drop a Tabula very early in progression, it’s reasonable to equip it and then replace it with a 5 link when you can acquire one of those. Or in trade leagues you can sell it.

There is an exception.

If you are playing a highly specialized boss killing character, such as an Explosive Trap build, and you have enough confidence with boss mechanics that you can defeat them without being hit, in this narrow use case, Tabula outperforms a 5 link.

But unless you are trading into boss invitations and doing little else, Tabula is very much not recommended. Not now that it's quite rare and base defenses are so important.

This article was written prior to the launch of Keepers of the Flame. Early pre-launch signs indicate that 'growing' a six link will be a very realistic goal.

This post will be updated once more is known.