PoE 2 regex cheat sheet: waystones, tablets, relics, vendor

Path of Exile 2 kept the search box, and it kept the 250-character limit. What changed is what you are searching through — waystones instead of maps, tablets and relics instead of scarabs, and a vendor window that has no sockets to ask about.

This is the short reference for all five PoE 2 builders: what each is for, and where each one differs from its PoE 1 cousin.

Waystones — the one that asks two questions

Waystones are the interesting case, and the only place in either game where a single string is answering two opposite questions at once.

Rolling a map in PoE 1 is a subtraction: you have a list of modifiers you will not run, and you want the ones carrying none of them. Waystones are not like that. There are modifiers you refuse, and there are modifiers you are specifically hunting — extra rare monsters, more quantity — and a real roll wants both conditions in one string.

So the builder gives every modifier two buttons rather than one: will not run and must have. The result lights up a waystone that avoids everything in the first list and carries everything in the second.

That is also why a waystone string gets long faster than a map string. Each “must have” is a separate assertion the pattern has to make, and assertions cost more characters than exclusions. The meter above the string is the thing to watch.

Tablets and relics — pure wishlists

Tablets and relics are the opposite of maps: there is nothing on them to refuse. Every modifier is a bonus, so the only question is which bonuses you care about, and the string lights up an item carrying at least one of them.

Tablets also let you ask for the base itself, not only the modifiers — a control the PoE 1 builders have no use for, because a map base is not what you are filtering on.

Vendor — same idea, fewer knobs

The PoE 2 vendor search works like its PoE 1 counterpart: tick the modifiers you want on a piece of gear, get a string for the vendor window.

The difference is what is missing. PoE 1 gear has sockets and links, so that builder carries a whole socket panel — chains, colours, minimum counts. PoE 2 gear does not work that way, so there is no panel, and the strings stay much shorter for it. If you have used the PoE 1 one and wondered where the socket controls went: they were never needed here.

Price in stash — the one that is not about items

Price in stash is the same builder in both games, and it does not look at modifiers at all. It searches the price you wrote on a tab or an item: everything under a number, everything over one, or everything in a band between two.

It is the tool for cleaning up after a league — finding what you underpriced, or pulling everything cheap into one place to dump.

The rules that carry over from PoE 1

Everything in the PoE 1 primer applies here too, because it is the same search box:

• you are matching printed text, so the client’s language matters — switch the site language and the patterns follow;
• 250 characters, and that is the real constraint;
• every pattern here is the shortest fragment unique to its line, checked against the whole item pool before it ships;
• the string tells you what an item says, never what it is worth. No arithmetic, no comparing two numbers.

One PoE 2 specific worth knowing

The game is still moving. Modifiers get added and reworded between patches, and a pattern that was unique last patch can stop being unique when a new modifier arrives containing the same fragment.

The data here is rebuilt from the game’s own dumps rather than typed by hand, so a rebuild after a patch is a command rather than an afternoon — but a string you saved three patches ago is worth regenerating rather than trusting. That is true of every regex tool, including the ones that do not say so.

Start with waystones, or see the whole section.