Last Epoch Circle of Fortune vs Merchant Guild in Season 5: What Changed

Patch 1.5 reworked both trade factions at once: Merchant's Guild stopped gating purchases behind rank, and Circle of Fortune deleted Prophecy rerolling and added Lenses. A third faction is usually left out of that comparison — The Woven, which runs your Weaver Tree instead of a market. Current as of Patch 1.5.1.1, October 3, 2026.

There Are Three Item Factions, Not Two

Favor buys other players' gear in one and Prophecy charges in the other. The Woven is a parallel track, not a competitor.

Merchant's Guild in Season 5: Rank Gating Is Dead

Season 4 gated purchases behind rank, Black Market tokens piled up, and Eleventh Hour Games answered the feedback:

Official source: Faction Updates — Coming to Last Epoch October 1

Due to overwhelming feedback regarding the overabundance of Black Market tokens in Season 4, come Season 5, the Merchant's Guild will no longer gate item purchases behind ranks.

Ranks now sell supply instead of access: bags of keys, shards, glyphs and runes bought with excess favor and gold, both costs rising with rarity. Any pre-season-5 guide telling you to rank up before buying a weapon class is out of date. The rest targets whoever runs a stall:

• One UI for search and listing. The separate list panel is gone, you list from the sidebar with results visible, and shoppers swap stall type without walking to another NPC.
• Grouped affix searches. The affix picker now has All, Any, Prefixes, Suffixes, Non-Sealed and Sealed groups, each with an optional minimum count, so one query can ask for several prefixes, suffixes and sealed affixes at once.
• T6 and T7 filters that ignore sealed affixes. That is what makes them useful for Rune of Havoc and Rune of Redemption crafting bases. The # of T6s filter is new; the T7 change is why.
• Price suggestions. Listing shows a price from recent actual sales of similar items, with a tooltip breaking down what pushed it up.
• Automatic Price Lowering. Opt-in per listing: a price floor, a drop of a flat value or a percent of the original list price, and a frequency of hourly, daily or weekly.

Circle of Fortune in Season 5: Prophecies Charge Instead of Rolling

Rerolling is gone. You pick the exact reward, the slot charges as you earn favor, and completing its trigger spends one charge per drop. Charges bank up to 99, so a slot holding four pays out four times. Each slot takes one reward and one Lens.

Two triggers per slot instead of one narrow list is the quiet change that makes the system usable. Rewards also grow with rank: rares, uniques and idols at rank 1, all rare gear becoming Exalted at rank 4, Champion items and Harbinger's Spoils at ranks 5 and 6, Havoc and Redemption runes at rank 11, Experimental items at T7 by rank 12.

Lenses: Bought Once, Applied to the Whole Stash

Lenses come from Galila and unlock for your whole stash on purchase, moving into storage so they never cost a stash tab. Within one character each reward and Lens occupies one slot.

Ranks 5 to 7 add seven more, from faster charges and duplicated rewards to a small chance your rewards become one Grole Egg.

Tyranny's tooltip was wrong on launch: roughly 1.5x base charge rate with nothing banked, inconsistently, draining banked favor at 100% of your income rate to reach 2x. It now gives a flat 2x with nothing banked and drains a bank at 10% of your income for 2.1x.

Official source: Last Epoch 1.5.1 Patch Notes

The Woven: The Faction That Does Not Sell Gear

You unlock The Woven by completing your first Cemetery, meet Masque at the Haven of Silk, and rank up with Memory Amber from Tombs and Cemeteries. Ranks sell Woven Echoes, echoes go into your timeline through the Altar of the Weaver, and both ranking up and completing echoes pay out Weaver Tree points. That tree is a passive tree scoped to the Monolith: its nodes raise the odds of specific rewards and Echo types and let you imprint an item to target-farm copies. The Season 2 reveal put the total at 50 points, and Season 5 added three nodes.

Every Season 5 Woven change points at the seasonal mechanic: Ubiquity of Rage makes Echoes more likely to contain Rage of Morditas encounters, Seekers of Ice and Blood makes that encounter's Uniques and subtypes far more common while second-phase enemies hit harder, and Portents of Blood swaps one second-phase enemy for a random Omen. Imprinted items also drop around 20% more often from enemies and Echo rewards and 40% more often from Lost Caches.

If your season runs through the Monolith, that is where The Woven pays. Node ordering is in the Weaver Tree guide, the content those nodes modify in the Monolith of Fate guide, and the encounter itself in the Rage of Morditas farming guide.

Can You Switch Factions? What Actually Breaks

You can switch. The official forum thread "Faction Lock on items and Changing your Faction" is the fullest account of the cost.

Gear you cannot use afterwards. Bazaar purchases are bound to Merchant's Guild, and CoF rewards can drop tagged. Players disagree on the scale: one argues only pieces a faction reward directly produced carry the tag, estimating half his kept Exalts were tagged; another says his stash is majority-tagged.

Direction matters more than the rule. Moving from Merchant's Guild to Circle of Fortune is cheap: only Bazaar-bought items carry the MG lock, while Monolith and dungeon drops stay usable. The other direction is expensive.

Favor resets partially. You lose favor on the faction you leave but keep it on the one you join, and Legacy characters keep their highest rank. That is why veterans say switching costs less in Legacy than in a season.

None of this is permanent damage, but rebuilding a character around a different faction mid-season costs time, gold and shards. Removing rank gating lowers the gold half of that bill.

Which One Should a New Season 5 Character Pick?

Sentiment in the Merchant's Guild vs Circle of Fortune thread from May 2026 is split, and it predates the rework.

• Circle of Fortune — solo or self-found players, alt rosters, anyone who wants a chosen drop instead of a purchase.
• Merchant's Guild — one or two characters a season who want finished gear now, and off-meta builds whose pieces nobody wants.
• The Woven — everyone pushing the Monolith, regardless of the other two.

Since ranks no longer buy item access, the old "I must rank up before I can buy a weapon" objection has evaporated. What remains is whether anyone is listing what you want at a price you will pay.

FAQ

How many item factions are there? Three. Only Merchant's Guild and Circle of Fortune touch the item economy.

Do I still need Merchant's Guild rank to buy things? No. Patch 1.5 removed rank gating and Black Market tokens; ranks now unlock bags of materials and keys.

Can I reroll a Prophecy? No. You pick the reward, it charges with favor, and triggers cash it in.

Do Lenses work on every character? Once bought, a Lens unlocks for your whole stash, but within one character each reward and Lens occupies one slot.