Auction House Farming

Today I'm sharing a method of making a steady income of gold that can be used by anyone that has unlocked the Blacksmith. This should be well known to any WoW players using Enchanting and trawling the AH for Items to Disenchant however works slightly differently on Diablo, and is made fractionally more complex by the lack of addons such as Auctioneer and therefore the mass buyout options available in WoW. It doesn't need any spreadsheets and constant tracking for market fluctuations but this would help to maximize profits if you have the time and patience to follow your market in depth.

First we need to select a market. There are 4 tiers of crafting materials to cover. I recommend picking the one that is within your means to play with. The lowest end is going to be Subtle Essences (20-35g each) and the highest end Fiery Brimstone (100-150k each). In this example I'm picking Subtle Essences, obtainable 100% of the time from Blues in the 1-29 range, along side Fallen Teeth 100% of the time from Rares in the same 1-29 range, and noting that Blues also drop a Fallen Tooth 15% of the time.

I will caveat the following by stating it is an example and I am using round numbers to make the math easier to follow. Lets assume that Subtle Essences are selling for 100g (I know they aren't right now, although they could be going up due to 1.0.3 and people crafting for alts, but last check 30g was the nominal value give or take weekend and peak times market fluctuations. I'm also assuming that Fallen Teeth are selling for 100g each, also not a real figure.

Now we need to acknowledge the 15% Auction house Fee. 100% - 15% is 85%. So we multiply the price we will sell our materials by 0.85 to find the amount we will actually receive on completion of our sale.

So selling my disenchanted Subtle Essences for 100g each gets me 85g in my balance on completion. This is my Magic Number!

Take the market price of our Subtle Essence (100g). You may want adjust for anticipated fluctuations between buying you items and being able to sell the materials if you want additional safety margin or if you are willing to gamble a bit. Multiply by 0.85 to get your Magic Number 85g and start searching for ALL rarities of item on the AH. Lets start with  level 1-29 Swords. Look for items you can bid on for under your 85g. I tend to find 1-3 per page in any given market sector and price bracket. If you set a max buyout you will be looking at 46 pages of items from your figure down to wherever 46 pages gets you to. It is unlikely you will get all the way to the bottom provided you start at a high enough buyout figure! There are simply that many auctions! The buyout figure and the starting bid aren't linked so I regularly see silly numbers like 40million buyout, with 100g starting bid. People do this for several reasons, for example to entice bidders by having a buyout price that puts their item on the first page. You will notice that if looking for low starting bids you will tend to find more per page in low buyout ranges, but you will also find more competition trawling for these same deals in those lower ranges.

I like to keep 100 active WINNING auctions at all times in my chosen sector. If you can't find 100 to bid on note the lowest buyout figure on the last page and rerun you search, lets assume is was 54,000, search again from 54k and you'll be looking at 46pages of items with buyouts from 54,000 on down. By narrowing your search to a range of buyouts you also dodge the other people searching just the Bids without Buyouts, or people going for the 9999999999 and down bracket. Remember you will get your money back if out bid so find every item you can bid on for 85g, be they magic, rare, or even ledgendaries. Now note the bracket you ended on, so when you log in the morning before work you can grab your "out bids" and rebid on either a lower bracket in the same sector (1H weapons for barbarians), or move on to 2H weapons for Wizards. Keep it up over a period of days. It takes 10 mins before leaving for work, during a lunch break, before you log for an evening play session or after a play session. Cut and Paste your Bid amount so you are hitting CTRL+V on each bid pane rather than typing 85 or whatever your "Magic Number" is for your materials. The seconds saved really add up when you get into the brackets with values in the tens of thousands.

At some point you will be ready for a salvaging session. With 100 auctions won and more coming in every hour or so your stash will fill up rapidly so make sure you have at least a full page clear for this so you can send a decent amount from the AH completed tab to stash to salvage at least a page full at a time!

Your going to spend a few minuets salvaging your mix of blues, rares, and maybe even a legendary if some one let one go for 85g in this case...lol. You might even spot an item that you can flip, which is always a bonus, but lets just assume it is all going to be salvaged.

Every item you got for under 85g the difference was refunded and you will make at least that in profit from your Subtle Essence. You saw it at 30g start bid, you bid and won it at 30g, you get 55g and the item so salvage, and get 85g from the sale of the subtle essence.

Every Blue gets your Subtle Essence so that is at least a break even.

15% of your Blues drop a Fallen Tooth so all those teeth are profit (you could vendor them and it would still be profit, but AH will of course get you more).

In the level 60 blues and rares bracket you have a 0.1% or 1% (I forget actual drop rates) chance of Fiery Brimstone. More bonus profit if you get lucky!

Every Rare you found you get a Fallen Tooth and a Subtle Essence, since the Subtle Essence was your break even your Fallen Teeth are pure profit.

Cancel the stacks of Essences and Teeth you currently have up, relist with the additional ones you just salvaged and get ready to hear that ITEM SOLD ding while you play or see the big chunk of change in you completed tab next time you log!

A WORD OF WARNING!

IF YOU ARE BUYING 20,000,000g items for you main there is no way to keep them separate from the junk you are planning to salvage SO DON'T GET TOO CLICK HAPPY OR YOU WILL BE A VERY SAD PANDA!!!!!!

One nice thing to note about the AH system is you don't have to worry about a competitor  out bidding you by 1g in the final minutes of an auction. The minimum threshold for new bids will probably put him above his break even number, unless it is vastly different to yours, in which case one of you has gotten their math wrong. Alternatively he knows something you don't, i.e. he is going to use, flip, or if he is planning on disenchanting he is speculating on a price rise or using knowledge of market peaks to raise his "magic number". I get out bid on at least 50% of auctions I bid on. I simply take that money and keep bidding. Being out bid costs you nothing, unless it is happening all the time in which case your time becomes a factor.

                 

Tools you will need for the Gem Market

Hello again all!

Today I'd like to discuss the Jewel Crafter and his wares!

We all know him from his aperrance in Act 2 Sewers, his name of course is Covetous Sheen.

What you may not know is the upcoming changes to Gem combining costs both in terms of Gold and Materials and what this will mean, pending the reintroduction of the Commodities Auction House, for those planing to craft gems.

We already know the costs of crafting Gems and have access to the Gem Calculator produced by Diablo 3 Artisans. The Changes can be found in the 1.0.3 design changes blog here.

Blizzards design philosy has always been to use the jeweler as a Gem Sink, evidenced by the need to use 3 of each previous tier to make the next. his is down to 2 for the earlier gems. As it stood you would have needed a whopping 1,594,323 CHIPPED GEMS to MAKE 1 RADIANT STAR GEM, 3x3x3x3.....x3x3 (or 3^13). With the changes that is down to 62208, (3^5 x 2^8)

But we won't be buying Chipped Rubies in stacks of 62208 to craft our Radiant Stars so why does that affect us? Well it doesn't in those terms, but understanding the maths behind it brings me to my next point.

To profit from the gem market we need to know and understand 3 things.

Firstly the crafting costs. What you pay the Jewler to make a gem. Cumulatively these mount up, prior to the patch they cost so much more that since chipped and flawed rubies dropped relatively fequently at low levels there was a glut on the AH and none actually went into the sink. Blizzard clearly hopes to change this. Now to craft at that low level will cost only 10 gold, so when you have 2 in your bags you are much more likely to upgrade, if not for any reason other than to save inventory space.

Secondly the material costs. How much do the gems, and pages, or tomes, cost to buy from the AH.

And thirdly the AH costs. The 15% fee for selling anything is one that frequntly gets over looked. If I determine it cost me 100 gold to make an item in Diablo 3 I need to sell it for 100/(1-0.15). where 0.15 is the 15% fee. Giving me 100/0.85 = 117.6 or 118gold JUST TO BREAK EVEN!

In the absence of real data from the comodities AH which is offline I've used a chipped ruby purchase price of 1 gold, pages and tomes at vendor prices of 34, 54 and 64(the lowest we can ever expect to see). And from combining he crafting costs, material costs at the 1.0.3 levels we get a cost for a Radiant Star from Chipped Rubies of 44,804,331, meaning we have to sell it for 52,710,977 to break even! Thats without buying the plans required for the higher value end game gems!

I sincerley doubt we will ever see gems, even the first on the realms going or anything close to these values. So how can we possibly make gold from what is (over the lifespan of a gem a MASSIVE GOLD SINK!)

Simple: I would recomend creating a simple spreadsheet in which you can enter the values of each of the 3 levels of Tomes, and each of the 14 levels of  gems and watch! I made this one which reverses the process, calculating in much the same way as done of my tips for flips post the top buyout price of the previous tier in order to sell for a profit the next tier having taken the crafting prices into account.

So we see that given that Radiant Stars are selling for 1,200,000 gold I need to scoop up the Perfect Stars on the AH under 206,000. As we know how to play the "snatching" game on the commodities AH (search till you find your chosen amount in the price range you want and press buyout repeatedly until you get a failed message telling you you have exhausted the supply...then collect your failed "bid", items, and refunds if there were any posted lower while you were spamming the buyout button).

Now with the prices we see here of 400,000 for Flawless wouldn't it be better to just flip? Well not really...people won't be buying Perfect Stars with Radiants Stars on the AH, knowing they can keep them forever with the ability to remove at will. How many Chipped Rubies did anyone sucessfully flip once the player base was into Normal/Flawless/Square ranges of the game?

Patch day update!

So here we are a couple weeks in and currently patching 1.0.2b.

Where are we with the game?

Well a week or so ago Blizzard posted some info about 1.9% of the population being in Inferno, but th majority of characters still between levels 1-30. More people are hitting Inferno and that is where th money is right now from what I can tell.

How is the AH looking?

The majority of people have been having few problems with Normal, you can roll any clas and /faceroll though to level 30. Nightmare and Hell begin to bring challenges, but most classes can simply plough on though, perhaps buying a new weapon to enable the obliteration of even the most stubborn champion packs in seconds with little regard to anything other than damage and occasionally getting out of the way of something like a Mortar if Ranged, or Desececrate as Melee. Certain combinations start to cuase problems, but at this stage High Damage Output overides the mechanics. The abiity to kill stuff before it even get on the screen or bosses before they can use certain abilities is being heavily abused. In short we aren't selling much to the level 1-55 crowd.

So Inferno is where the money is at?

Right now people seem to be getting stuck in Act 1 Inferno. Some (including myself) have Butcher on farm to to point of it geting boring. So what are those people looking for? DPS stat, Vitality and resist all are the go to stats for every class. Find an item with all 3 in high amounts and you have a million gold item or more. But will people buy it? I'm finding there are 2 factors influencing sales. Firstly the average player is making maybe 100k per hour. If we consider the average gamer only plays 2 to 3 hours a day we are talking at least 3 to 4 days to be able to buy a million gold item, assuming they didn't manage to sell one themselves during the process. So there is limited upgrading of gear. The Million gold items are not simply flying off the shelves. If you wantitems to fly of the shlves we have to be pretty reasonable with our prices, with only 10 slots and the need to sell quickly to maintain any kind of volume I've been pricing stuff below the 100-250k mark. ie.1-2 hours worth of farming for that average player. Alernatively they are buyng gold from 3rd party sites, at the risk of losing all their gold and items which will be put back into circulation when they find themselves hacked!

So what are people buying?

Wheter farming Warden and Butcher with 5 stacks of Nephelem Valor or your favorite Chest, Tresure Goblin, or just Act 3 Hell people need Gold and Magic Find to up their totals for each run, without losing too much of their DPS stat, Vitality and Resistances. So I have been trawling the bottom of the AH for the 50 to 100k items with a Primary stat, Vitality, Resist all, Gold Find and Magic Find. Since I can only search for 3 stats I choose GF, Vit and Resist with a buyout cap. This gets me items I can quickly flip for decent profits during a 2-3 hour gaming session, and ready to restock at the end of the same session for sales while offline.

Hope this is useful to you all in the interim while we wait for RMAH to make gold buying safe and legit, and the long awaited flipping of commodities to resume!