trade you can find a lot of cheap path of exile items
Definitely. As someone who has avoided standard for quite some time and only played temp leagues: I was baffled by the prices when I played standard last week. If you use poe. trade you can find a lot of cheap items, but most of them are inactive users (not saying they quit, but often stopped playing for weeks).
If you're trying to buy stuff from online players like in challenge leagues you're going to pay exorbitant prices for average rares (the worst thing are gems. People want EXALTS for ~level 15-17 gems).
I assume the post I made sounds worse than I intended it to sound.
I wanted to try several CoC setups because I never played them, so I tried to buy level 15+ Arc/Ice Spear/Cold Snap/some other gems. While in general there are many people selling them for ~1 chaos, most of them were not online (and often offline for way more than one day). When I searched for them I was unable to find Ice Spear/Cold Snap for <1 exalt from someone that is currently online, searching for several hours while playing.
I just redid my search and the cheapest level 15+ Cold Snap that is currently online was listed for 5 chaos, with a total of 7 gems <1 exalt (to be fair, the rest are mostly 20Q gems, but that wasn't the case the last time I searched. Arctic Breath shows similar results).
When you actually take your time and search stuff over some time/PM a lot of offline traders you probably could get them cheaper, but when you're trying to trade instantly like in challenge leagues/the 1 month league it appears to me to be a lot more expensive

Oct
Best place to Farm Poe Orbs
Those are some of the most common questions both Ziz and me do get on a regular basis. So we teamed up to present to you a guide to playing Path of Exile efficiently.

Nov
Path of Exile is a much better game
If an Exalted Orb or Mirror of Kalandra drops, be very happy, put it into your stash, and forget it exists until you learn how to trade like a pro.

Nov
Make skin microtransactions easier to retrieve in Path of Exile
instead of the current look through all your tabs and characters until you find that one skin you are looking for method, my proposal is to have non-consumable skins permanently displayed on your microtransactions stash

Dec
Most players between an eternal and a stack of exalts
crafting will be far far more about finding an already good multi t1 base and throwing an exalt at it than it will be about crafting 6T1's that you want from a base white item

Oct
How do you get your sac fragments in Path of Exile?
If we're talking about day 1 atziri farming, you'll be mapping enough to reach a decent level ~75-80 and you shouldve collected a few sets with whatever vaal Path of Exile Orbs you have

Dec
Mods that affect Chaos Inoculation more than Life
If you're a caster using an elemental skill, find a way to convert the damage to chaos. Lightning > Voltaxic, Fire > Consuming Dark, Cold -> Pyre -> Chaos with consuming darks