Do You Know When To Use Rare Currency In PoE

When I was new to PoE, I saved a few chaos orbs and alchemy orbs etc. When I got decent damage, and haven't really encountered much difficulty, I would have some problems like this: could I start investing in gear from now or should I wait until later in the game to use my orbs? Is it generally better to save as much as you can as long as you're doing fine?

I think this is a problem for most new players, they do not know where / when to use the more rare poe currency. So I hope the following suggestions will help these players.

To add onto this, the poe orbs become more valuable the higher level content you're doing, in a sense. Each item has an item level, and that determines how high the magic/rare affixes can be. So using an alch on a level 70 item can roll much higher numbers than a level 30 item.

Now, sometimes you'll fall behind in damage or tankiness and you might have to craft some gear to keep pushing to the end game, but in general, you save up for late game, where you can get the really good stuff. Also, if you have a build planned out beforehand, don't waste too much currency crafting gear that you know you'll be replacing later.

During leveling:

• Don't buy rares to improve your gear, collect good 4l bases and use lowest tier essences to upgrade them to rare.
• Save chaos, use it to buy gear once you hit 65.
• Transmute white strongboxes you encounter unless they are arcanist gemcutter or carto.
• Chisels for tier t13+ maps, if you can't run those then just sell chisels for chaos.
• Identify blue jewels, if they have 2 damage mods you can try to regal for third damage mod - such jewels can be sold for 15+ chaos.
• Save scours and alchs for rolling maps. Yellow maps just alch and go, red maps alch and scour until you get 70+ quant.
• Vaal - use on rare strongboxes (unless they are carto or arca) for a chance to get 6l.
• Exalts & divines - save to buy good gear.

Another general principle in PoE is that it's cheaper to buy poe items with the stats you need/want than it is to craft one. So yes, in general it's better to save. Nothing wrong with tossing an Alch on a good base weapon when your current one is too low DPS though.