Upgrade Finder answers the question every other pricing tool dodges: not "is this item good", but "would this item make *my character* better, and by how much". It does that by running Path of Building headless against your build with the candidate item swapped in.
It is marked BETA and it earns the label — the scoring is real, the edges are rough.
Setup
Point it at your Path of Building builds folder. ePOE reads your local .build files — each one is a real imported character with real gear. Auto-detection usually finds the folder; if not, use the folder picker on the page. Build → Character Planner shows the stored path.
Check the headless status indicator. It tells you whether the bundled LuaJIT runtime and your PoB install can actually compute. If it is not ready, every score on the page is unavailable rather than wrong, which is the correct failure mode.
Pick your main skill. The page lists the build's socket groups with their DPS. Which one you evaluate against changes every number that follows, so choose the skill you actually play.
What it can do
Find upgrades per slot. It builds a trade search from what your build is short of, fetches real listings, and scores each one by recomputing your build with that item equipped. The output is ΔDPS and ΔEHP per candidate — not a weighting heuristic, the actual recomputed stats.
Budget optimiser. Given a currency budget, which combination of slot upgrades buys the most improvement. This is the feature worth the setup time: it routinely finds that a cheap boots upgrade beats the expensive weapon you were saving for.
Build audit. What your build is missing — uncapped resistances, a defensive layer you have no investment in, an obviously stale weapon.
Check an item. Paste or copy any item and get its ΔDPS/ΔEHP for your build, without searching. This is the one to use when someone offers you something in a trade.
Rune planner. Scores socketables against the build rather than by market price. Since runes are swappable and do not use affix slots, this is often the cheapest real upgrade available.
Passive suggestions. Which next passive point gains you the most.
Gem what-if. What adding each support gem to your main skill would do.
Diminishing returns. Sweeps a single modifier's value across a range and plots the result — the answer to "how much more crit do I actually want", which is almost never "more".
Apply to PoB. Writes a chosen upgrade into your build file so you can keep planning from there. It keeps a .bak of the original.
How to actually use it
Run the build audit first. If your resistances are uncapped, no DPS upgrade matters. Fix the audit's findings before you shop.
Then run the budget optimiser, not per-slot searches. Per-slot searching finds the best item for a slot. The optimiser finds the best *use of your currency*, which is a different and more useful answer.
Sanity-check the top result. A candidate that shows an enormous gain is usually a build the recompute got wrong — a missing dependency, a conditional mod evaluated as always-on. Look at the item and ask whether the number is plausible before you spend.
Trust ΔEHP as much as ΔDPS. A 15% DPS gain that costs you 20% of your effective health is a downgrade in practice. The page shows both because both matter.
Re-run after every real change. The optimum shifts as your build changes. Yesterday's answer was for yesterday's character.
Known limits
- Headless PoB can only model what PoB models. Uncommon interactions, some conditional mods and newly-added mechanics may be approximated or ignored.
- Every candidate scored is a trade search. The page is rate-limited by the same GGG bucket as a price check. Narrow the slot before you fire a wide search.
- It scores the listing as written. It cannot know the seller is offline or that the item is already sold.
- It cannot price your playstyle. A build with slightly less DPS you can pilot beats a spreadsheet-optimal one you die in.
Related
- The Character Planner (Build → Character Planner) imports builds from Path of Building codes, Mobalytics, Maxroll and Grinding Gear Games' own passive-tree planner link, if you want to plan before you buy.
- How to read an item for judging a candidate by hand when you disagree with the score.