Immortal King's Stride - 1.04-mageddon

Patch 1.04 shook up lots of things. If you've been reading my posts, then you will know that a bunch of concepts and techniques are now invalidated. See what's happened to some old favourites after the jump. As well as the price of those boots.

Man, these kind of suck

It's been two weeks since the last post. How much money has everyone made? Hopefully, you've taken my advice and just played the damn game. Why? Because when an item like the badly rolled Immortal King boots (above) sells for 50$, it kind of makes you want to just farm, doesn't it?

So that's why there's been no posts. It's not because I'm lazy.

In this post, I'm going to talk about some old concepts, and how they have fared since the sweeping tide of Patch 1.04. Instead of going back and updating every outdated post, I figured I'd just list some of the ideas that are now flip-turned upside-down. There's no sense in rewriting every article whenever a new patch comes out.

Padding

Can't pad no more! 1.04 made it so that gems inside sockets don't affect the affix values, so an Emerald will not add to CHD/Dexterity/Gold Find on a search anymore.

One of my most profitable flip strategies was to find rings with a Key Affix (IAS/CHD/CHC), 60-70ish Primary Affix (Str/Dex/Int), and an open socket. Then I would pad the ring to push it over 100 and then pop the ring back on the AH for 4-5x. Not any more.

So what is the state of the union for padding? Well, here's two ways padding can still be useful.

Gem Incentive

Let's say you want to sell some pants, and notice there is an exact same pair of pants on the AH.

Instead of pricing your pants for less, you can toss some gems in there and price it the same or a bit higher. Chances are that buyers will look at the two and pick yours. Everyone loves to buy pants and get free gems. If you have some spare gems that you don't want, this is a great way to draw attention to your item.

Of course, you can always set your price lower than the other pants and win by undercutting. But let's think about what will happen:

Let's say you set your price lower than the other pants. Minutes later, the owner of the other pants comes online, and notices that he is being undercut by your pair of cheaper pants. Because 1.04 allows free auction cancelling at any time, he will just cancel his pants and relist them to beat your price. This forces you to counter back and try to beat his. A price war occurs. In this situation, nobody wins.

If you set your pants at the same or slightly higher and incentivize your pants with some neat gems, then he won't notice because he just looks at the relative prices. The guy has lots of auctions to manage after all. The end result is that prices stay stable. However, buyers will notice your pants and buy yours. This is because they will scan through at least the first couple items before making a purchase decision.

The key takeaway here is that sellers don't spend much time comparing their items against the competition, whereas buyers spend much more time looking through all the items that match their criteria before they buy. This difference between buyer and seller is what "Gem Incentive" is trying to exploit.

Reverse Padding

Because padding doesn't work anymore, armors with max sockets and low stats are now seriously undervalued (and armors with high stats and low sockets are overvalued).

Think about it: A gem can add 50 stats easily, so a chest with 80 Strength and 3 sockets (80 + 3*50 = 230 Str) is going to be stronger than a chest with 120 Str and and 2 sockets (120 + 2*50 = 220 Str). However, players will be searching on criterias of 100+ Str among other things. That 3 socket armor with 80 Strength won't even be seen unless buyers choose a 3-socket affix criteria, which I suspect that average players will not do. The average player does not value sockets as much as the expert player who can afford 50-stat gems.

 Because padding doesn't exist anymore, the chest armor market is now effectively divided into "chest armors with 3 sockets", "chest armors with 2 sockets", "chest armors with 1 socket", and "legendary/set chest armors that you can't afford". When a market is separated like this, price gaps can occur.

I guarantee you that a chest armor with no sockets and stats of 150 Str, 100 Vit, 70 All Resist will sell much better now than a chest with 3 sockets, 0 Str, 120 Vit, and 75 AR. This was not true before the patch, when these items were on the same playing field. Because the market is now subdivided, it's ripe with the opportunity to find cheap armors that don't follow the proper price curve. The takeaway here is to assign a proper value to sockets (50 stats), and use it to your advantage.

Rare Crafting

What's crafting? You can do that in this game?

Okay, seriously now. If you want to know how bad crafting is now, take a look at this:

This used to cost 10m gold

Ouch.

Here's my advice: Don't craft. It's not a good idea anymore. Here's why.

1. The cost to craft is still the same. The base gold price is still the same. And Essences won't drop by that much because nobody will sell them for 100g. At some price point, players will just sell the item to the merch instead of salvaging it. Tomes, while dropping in price, did not really affect the price of crafting in the first place.
2. The game is now an easysauce cakewalk farmfest. I'm not going to say Trail of Cinders ruined the economy, but it damn well contributed to it. 1.04 made Inferno significantly easier to play and farm, and this affects crafters negatively. Why craft when you can clear all of Act 3 in an hour and get 80 rares?
3. The prices for all items have dropped. Patch 1.04 basically tripled all weapon drops because 61s and 62s can be as good as 63s. The new Legendaries also significantly lowered the power level of the best rares comparatively. I'm not going to try to craft boots when new Fire Walkers are selling for 500k and beating some of my best rolls.
4. Gold find items mean jack-shit. Remember when you celebrated when you crafted a pair of boots with GF, Pickup Radius, and move speed? Well, now you just need to get some Paragon levels and boom, you're a gold finding machine without any specific GF gear. I expect NM gold find runs to die out as people gain Paragon levels; this kills GF gear that don't have significant stats. With Paragon level 45, I'm rocking a solid 250% gold find right now with NV stacks, and clearing Inferno with it. Easy money.

Side note: I get a ton of shit from people telling me that my advice for buying Weapon Crafting recipes and Materials in a previous article was ill advised. The price has tanked on those. Well, no shit.

Think for a second back to the 4 reasons I just gave for why crafting isn't a good idea anymore. These reasons aren't based off some new evidence that came out recently; anyone can guess that this will happen in 1.04 if they thought about it. There is absolutely no long term potential for Weapon Crafting recipes and Materials. It was a short term flip. Once you saw a reasonable profit, you were supposed to sell, sell, sell.

Investments work like this: If someone recommends you buy something, and you agree that it will go up, then buy it. When you realize that the price for the item has stopped increasing, then you want to sell it and reap your profits. Don't wait until it tanks, then blame me. That's just hilariously bad and I will laugh at you. Ha ha ha; there you go.

Auction House Flipping

As delicious as ever

The new Legendaries have created a ton of new markets to thrive in. There's tons of new tips and tricks for working with Legendaries that I will talk about in future posts. I won't talk about them now because I'm making tons of money and don't want to share the market is still not set in stone, and prices are very jumpy.

The one piece of advice that I will give concerns the two tiers of Legendary/Set items: Bad rolls vs Rare rolls.

Remember back to my advice on flipping in a previous post: I would buy an item if I could guarantee its value through rarity. An item would surely maintain value if it was very rare with hard-to-roll affixes. The same principle applies to the new gold & green items.

Now, let's break it down for the people who haven't found any cool items yet. Legendaries aren't hard to find. I had one good day where I found 8 Legendaries. Yeah. Sue me.

What this means is that eventually (if it hasn't already happened), there will be tons of Legendaries on the AH. And people are greedy. The want dollars for their items, and will get in price wars to sell their items. This results in a slow, but steady, decline in prices for items. It's natural.

What does this mean for you? It means you should find good deals on rare high-end items and snap them up for the long term. Brownie points if you get them for your primary class. The best investment is for something you can use at the same time.

Because you can guarantee their value through rarity, these items will maintain value (or even increase). On the other hand, those badly rolled IK boots will not.

These are not worth 50$, seriously

Remember folks, there is a difference between rare items and items with rare rolls. The Witching Hour and Leoric's Signet are rare items and command a high value, but these items do not necessarily have rare rolls. I guarantee you that a 20% Signet will be worth half as much in 2 weeks, whereas a 29% Signet will maintain value.

Speaking of Leoric's Signet, I've got to give a shout-out to Slicktorine, the bestest Diabloshit reader ever of all time. On a quiet Saturday afternoon, he alerted me of a 26% Signet that had been recently posted on the RMAH. Easily worth 175$ at the time, it was put up at 100$.

A price mistake.

Because he didn't have Bdollars at the time, he would have had to infuse money via Paypal and get tacked with a theoretical reverse-15% fee. Because of the slow price decline of the ring (Act 2 normal farming anyone?), as well as the 15% fee, it dawned on him that he wasn't in the best position to make a profit.

So he did what any good friend would do, and told me about it. I snapped it up instantly. For science, I tested out the exp gain of the ring: It's the real deal. I went from 38 to 40 very quickly. Afterwards, I posted it for a solid 150$, and it sold within a day. Awesome.

I owe that man some burritos.

I wanna see items getting sold.

How are these 50$, I still don't get it

Those IK boots sold for 50$. Because I've already told you how much it sold for (repeatedly), I'll show you something else because I want to show off. Here's a screenshot of today's sales.

Click on me to enlarge