Trait your blues BEFORE you get purple gear.

I see a lot of people asking about gearing up and how to get purples and I just want to do a little PSA.

You want to fully trait your blues before you go to purples. You want to be selling the purples you do get (on the Auction house), don’t worry, you will get more, even if its your bis. (at most I would toss a bis in storage for later)

Fully traiting a purple is hard and expensive right now. Use the money you get for selling purple traits or lithos to fully trait your blues first, later you can upgrade your purple with your traited blues. I made this same mistake and am working towards correcting it.

This system isn’t explained the best in game but TRAIT YOUR BLUES FULLY FIRST, you will be sooo much stronger than trading a blue for an untraited purple that you wont be able to trait for quite some time.

edit..

Astral_Alive explains the trait system very well in one of the comments on this post, so im going to tag it on to this post so it doesnt get missed..

You should get some sort of guide for your class and follow it, that guide will have examples of the blue gear you want to farm and the best traits to put on that gear.

For example: My helmet drops from worker ants in the ant caves. I want Melee+Magic endurance and Max HP on it. I need to go into the caves and farm for that specific helmet, eventually I will get (let's just say) melee endurance on it.

Now I need to continue farming those ants until I get another helmet with magic endurance. When I do, I go into the trait enhancing and can throw the new drop I got into my old helmet to have one with melee AND magic endurance together. Then I keep farming until I get a 3rd helmet with max hp and use that to unlock max hp as the 3rd trait on my helmet.

Then you can use ANY QUALITY helmet with the traits I need to max out my traits. If I was to get a 2nd copy of my blue helmet with max hp, throwing it in to boost the trait is a guaranteed upgrade. If I get a bunch of green helmets, the upgrade is not guaranteed but you slowly build blessings which is a pity system to eventually guarantee your trait upgrade.