Dismal Seal - Greed is good

Now this is the story about an amulet, Act 3 born and raised. The RMAH is where it spent most of its days. See how much I sold this for after the jump.

How Dismal

 

What is it good for?

Absorutery nothing!

This amulet sucks. I found it more than a month ago, and it was on the RMAH for at least a month. But it eventually sold. Or did it? Maybe I'm just trolling you. After that 10m gold post, you just never know, right? It'll be a mystery until we get to the end.

Let's get back to why the amulet sucks.

1. It has no critical hit damage, which is the key affix for Demon Hunter amulets.
2. It has no resists or armor, which makes it a subpar Monk amulet.

All it really has is some crit % and a high primary stat: 300 Dexterity. What does 300 dex really do for you? It adds a bit of damage. It also gives you ~3% dodge according to this stackexchange post. 

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Damn those stackexchange spinoffs. They are like Reddit or tvtropes. Once you start reading, you never come out. I somehow ended up on the Philsophy stackexchange and read this thread for an hour. I'm shaking my fist at the screen right now. What the hell was I even writing about?

All the gear that's fit to sell

Let's differentiate the types of items on the AH.

1. Items that players want. These are items that fit the current metagame. Example.
  If you are looking to sell this type of item, it should be reasonably easy. There is a large demand, so bidding auctions will reach or beat the item's market value. These markets are straight-forward to deal in because players have devised price-scales for the affixes they value most. Just play along and your item will sell.

2. Items that beginners want. Stuff that beginners believe to fit the metagame. Example.
  These items are not necessarily bad items; they simply might benefit a beginner more than an advanced player. As I described in that post, these types of items sell quite well on the RMAH. These items are also generally cheap on the Gold AH, and are good flips as a result.

3. Items that nobody wants. Dismal Seal. These are items that have good rolls, but the rolls don't come together in any meaningful way. They have no obvious use at first glance, but they seem to be too good to just throw away.

Items that nobody wants, you say? Isn't that a bit harsh? 

Dismal Seal works fine on any Demon Hunter, but it's nowhere near optimal. A 60% critical hit damage amulet with 150 dex will add way more dps if you built the Demon Hunter properly. I doubt many people even saw this amulet because they always searched for the Critical Hit Damage affix.


With that, we get to today's topic. Selling items in group 1 and 2 is easy if you just follow the rules. People actually want those items. What exactly do we do when we find an item that is amazing, but there's no room in the metagame for it?

Dismal Seal

No, not this dismal seal

You could do what I did with Dismal Seal, and put it on the auction house for 250$. Some enterprising chap will come along with a build that breaks the amulet and he'll snatch it up in a second! Yea. Right. Back to reality.

There's a couple of things you can do with a type 3 item.

1. Salvage it. Haha, no.
2. Make your best guess based on similar items, and put a fair price. You could stand to lose a lot of money if your best guess wasn't well informed. And it's not like you can roll back your system clock and cancel your auction... oh wait.
3. Highball the thing and drop it slowly. It's what I did with the amulet, because I assumed the ias nerf would change the game's landscape. Couldn't be too safe. The risk you run with this approach is that your item's value will drop over time unless it has extremely good rolls.
   
4. Bidding Auction. This won't work if you have a type 3 item. It will get no visibility because nobody will search for it, and some asshole I will snipe it from you at the last moment. And then laugh at you about it.
5. Keep it: Blizzard might just nerf critical hit damage by half. Suddenly, this amulet is lookin' pretty goooooood.

Let me clarify the last option. For some people, it's always sell, sell, sell, profit, profit, profit. There are plenty of items that you should be hoarding because you expect the value to go up. The game is still young; changes to the metagame happen all the time. At what point did people realize Barbs were actually good? That event changed the market drastically.

Back to the amulet. I tried selling it anywhere between 20$ and 250$ for weeks to no luck. At some point, I realized #5 was actually a valid option. Tired of wasting an RMAH slot for a month straight, I just threw it in my stash. It'll have a use someday, I thought.

How I actually sold it was luck.

Some time last week, I was complaining especially hard about how I wasn't selling anything. The topic shifted to the merits of buying another account for more slots. My girlfriend, being the generous, kind, and loving person that she is, lent me the use of her 10 slots. I suddenly had a wealth of RMAH space! All my random unsold junk went up, along with the amulet.

Auction house slots aren't equal

When I doubled the amount of RMAH slots, I started making more than twice the number of sales. Let me explain why.

Some slots are delegated to selling your expensive items at maximum value; if an item is rare, you want to get as much as you can for it. The rest of the slots are delegated for dumping mediocre 10-20$ items; these fast-sell items flood the AH, so you have to undercut other players to actually sell them.

If you make the assumption that max-value items take longer to sell (because you are pushing their market value rather than trying to undercut other players), then your expensive items are going to just be sitting on the AH for days at a time. This prevents your fast-sells from getting any action.

When you suddenly get twice as many AH slots, the floodgates open on those fast-sells. If you had 5 max-value items, you now have 20-5 = 15 fast-sell slots compared to 10-5 = 5, which results in three times the capacity. Shit sells fast when you are selling 3 times the number of fast-sells.

I made an easy 100$ that week dumping fast-sell items on her account. Best decision I've ever made. Now, I'm not telling you to buy a second account, but if you've got tons of crap to sell or have a very good crafting routine going, then by all means do it. Don't just put your items on mules (I don't have any) and complain on the forums when your stuff doesn't sell. Your max-value items are what's really killing you, not the in-game economy or Chinese botters.

Alright, enough showing off about how I have a girlfriend 20 RMAH slots. Scroll down to see how much the amulet sold for.

That looks fake

No, these look fake

People were complaining that the item-sold screenshot was too small. Sorry, grandpa. The only way I can make it bigger without running off the page is to chop it into 2 pieces. So there ya go.