The open beta this weekend has been both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because a lot more people have had the chance to play the game. A curse because the servers are very erratic and the Auction Houses (both Gold and Real Money) are more often offline than functioning.
Yesterday I talked about how the previous evening I managed to more than triple my Beta Bucks in about 10 minutes. All that action happened on the Real Money Auction House.
Yesterday and today I switched my attention to the Gold Auction House (GAH).
One strategy that worked really well is that I kept an eye out for some special rings sold by one of the vendors in the game, namely Radek the Fence on the north side. The best rings in the game are the ones with 2-4 damage and an additional stat. For me, personally, the additional stat that works best with all classes is 5% increased attack speed (IAS). However, other people prefer attributes that are beneficial to their own class.
I bought 4 rings with +5 Strength in addition to 2-4 damage, as well as 6 rings with 5% IAS in addition to 2-4 damage. Honestly I was expecting the IAS rings to sell better but I was wrong. One of them did sell quickly but the biggest (and quickest) sellers were the +5 Str rings. I assume that Barbarians were very popular this weekend.
I spent 2084G x 4 = 8,336G for all 4 rings. I sold them for a total of 31,122 (varying amounts each) but essentially under 10K gold. I decided not to be greedy because it seems most people try to sell stuff for insane amounts of gold (tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands). I turned a very nice profit of 22K gold.
Even the 5% IAS rings aren't a complete loss at this point. I sold a single ring but that one already made up for more than half the cost of all 6 rings. If I sell the other 5 at a loss I will still turn a profit, overall.
Rings are not the only thing I traded. I also sold a bunch of hand crossbows that the same vendor sells. Since vendor items are generated randomly, sometimes these crossbows can have very good DPS rolls on them, occasionally over 19 DPS. These are probably the highest DPS 1-handed weapons in the beta. No wonder they are very prized. Myself, I have a couple of 18.3DPS hand crossbows on my Demon Hunter. So whenever I found 17+DPS crossbows on the vendor, I bought a few on them and flipped them for a higher price on the GAH.
Finally, crafted shoulders also sold for a nice profit but again, shoulders don't drop from monsters in the game, so the only way to obtain them is via crafting.
When trading on the Auction House I try, as always, not to flood it. I will post 1 or 2 of the same item but not more. I've already noticed that there are hundreds of hand crossbows for sale so probably others have also figured the crossbow thing out.
I might have sold a lot more had the Auction House been stable. Alas, it was mostly down for me so I couldn't even check on my auction, much less post items.
While these are good Auction House strategies for the beta, I'm skeptical that they will continue to work in the full game, at low levels. That's because people will outgrow the early levels very quickly and items which seem powerful now will be underpowered in a few short levels. For now, I'm just enjoying these little ways of making some extra gold in the beta.
No comments:
Post a Comment