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!