Saturday, June 16, 2012

It's raining legendaries

Well, chance is fickle indeed. I played Diablo 3 for a month for countless hours, leveled my Monk to 60, grinded a lot of Hell and a tiny bit of Infeno with > +100% Magic Find and I never saw a legendary item drop. And then, on my noob Barbarian I get 2 legendaries a few days apart, with 0 Magic Find (read that again: ZERO MAGIC FIND). A few days ago I got this legendary amulet. Today, at level 51, I got this sword in Act 1 Hell from a random elite boss:


The Ancient Bonesaber of Zumakalis. Now the first question that needs to be asked is who the hell is Zumakalis? Leaving that aside (because we all know it's some random name that Blizzard slapped on this item), the second question is what to do with this sword?

To me this looks like a very good weapon for a Monk. At level 45 120 DPS is not too shabby. Slap a Ruby on it and you cat get a lot more out of it. Attack speed is decent and it looks like there's quite a bit of life leech on it. That's cool. My Barbarian certainly can't use it at level 51 because it isn't itemized for Barbarians and besides he's already got a more powerful weapon, and my Monk is 60 so it's definitely useless to him. The only remaining option is, of course, to sell it.

Luckily, the RMAH is now functional so I can make some good money with this sword. Or can I? Though I was kinda expecting it, I was dismayed to find out that I can get somewhere between $1.70 and $2.00 for it. Oh, minus Blizzard's $1 fee, that would be in fact $0.70 or $1.00 tops. Yikes! Of course, I understand that this is simply a leveling weapon that will be replaced as soon as possible so it can't hold its value very well. On the other hand it has to be better than the yellow weapon I sold the other day for $1.25.

The sad truth is that competition on the AH is bound to be fierce and people will undercut each other viciously. Now, of course, I could try to sell this on the Gold Auction House but I would get between 50K and 70K for it. Not too tempting. That would value gold at 29K-35K per $1 (before Blizzard's tax) or ~70K gold per $1 after Blizzard's tax. It is obvious to me that even after Blizzard takes their cut, I'd still be better off selling this for the minimum of $1.70. I highly doubt you'll be able to buy less than 100K gold for $1 when commodity auctions are enabled. In fact I predict that prices will go down to 1M / $1 or even less, but that's another story.

So it's settled then, I'm going to try to sell this for a maximum of $2. It's sad but necessary. I can't let it gather dust in my inventory because I can't use it (unless I decide to level a second Monk but I doubt that will ever happen).

I've read a blog post somewhere (sorry, can't remember the blog) where the poster argued that it might be better to keep legendaries unidentified in your inventory until the big "legendary patch" is released (probably 1.1), which buffs legendaries going forward. But this assumes items are assigned attributes at the moment of identifying them, and not when they drop. That's certainly possible but we don't know that and I simply don't want to risk waiting until this item is completely worthless.

Should I sell it then after gold trading is enabled? That would allow me to value this item better in terms of gold per dollar. What do you think?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Stats are determined at the moment of drop, quoting a blue post on this here.