Thursday, 23 May 2013

Basic Auction House guide

With this guide you will basically learn how the basics of how to snipe items and sell them for an insane profit. I like to use legendary items for this because its easier. If you know how to trade feel free to use rares.

The recommended items is a great spot to start out looking for gear. Your currently selected hero will determine what gear you see here. Look at my buyout buttons arrow, see how that is pointing up? Clicking buyout will change which way that arrow faces. If it faces up, the cheapest items will start your list. If it faces down, the most expensive items will start your list. I'm not a fan of a hundred million gold on anything so I usually keep the arrow facing up.

Now lets get started
*Get your search preferences setup *

  1. 1. Equipment search (Set it to Barbarian)(This may vary)
  2. 2. Armor (Generally selling armor makes me money far faster then selling weapons)
  3. 3.Set rarity to Legendary

Your Screen should now look similar to mine

Now what?

Good question, but there are a number of ways to make money from here. If you don't have a lot of capital still try this method for practice but method 2 or 3 will be better for you.
Sometimes this method requires more time to sell items but the return on them can be freakin' huge and totally worth giving up an auction slot for a day.

  • Check out this most popular items list, I memorized a lot of items on here because they tend to sell the fastest and usually maintain a steady price. Plus you can really hit it big here if you snipe a popular item with good stats.

Here is an example of why it is so important to know your items and the stats they can spawn with.
Let's use Inna's Temperance as the example item here. It is a very popular item and over the days I've seen the prices on it vary quite a bit. When I first started looking at it, it was a steady 350k-400k for just a normal stat Inna's Temperance. I'm assuming other people in the market noticed that as well seeing as how it's flooded with these and the price has dropped by almost 50%.

Remember when I said the right stats will make you more gold? Well a few days ago I missed an Inna's Temperance for 200k which had 90 Strength on it. The moment I realized that was worth a ton I tried to buy it but poof it was gone, someone beat me to it. Look at the price difference 90 strength makes.

Keep going through the list of popuar items for each class, I understand typing in each individual item sucks but if you put in the work you'll eventually have it pay off. Plus I've been doing it long enough to where I know what items I like to check on every few hours.

I didn't find any good deals for the popular items what should I do?
2. Try out my next favorite method. With the same search settings as I stated above:
Instead of typing in a specific item and checking its prices, you're going to look for cheap items that you can sell fast for at least double of what you spent.
I recommend this over method 1 to anyone who doesn't have a lot of gold to invest. Don't worry that will change soon though!

Okay so you have your search settings all set up and you have your buyout arrow pointing up so you see the cheapest items.

Your screen should look similar to this.

Look for any items here that are selling for 2500-5000 a nice tip is that if you see the same items over and over and over again, generally they aren't worth buying. I see those same belts every single day at the same prices, I never really buy them unless the price is just absurdly low.

Scroll through the market, do you see any items that pop out at you?
For example look at this Giant Skull, we can tell it could be a potential buy because it is surrounded by a bunch of low tier cheap items.

Lets check the market to see if that would be a good buy.

Sure is! What a snipe! It's not the biggest profit but hey man it's a start! The next cheapest Giant Skull was 19k gold.

Now here is another fork in the road
1. Do you want to sell this item as a quick profit of probably 11k gold?
2. Did it happen to have good stats and is potentially worth billions?

Lets hope for #2 as we search the market.

Go back to your stash and look at that beautiful item you sniped for next to nothing.
136 strength and 23 Intelligence? Might not be the best stats, lets just check to be sure.
Go back to the Search tab and search for a giant skull with Preferred Stats of 130 str
What do you know a 130+ str giant skull sells for a lot of gold!
(I didn't get a screenshot but it was 350k for the cheapest.)

Well now what do I do? Should I sell it for 300k gold? Let's think about this for a minute, how do other helms such as a rare, compare to this? We're doing this to find out if its worth selling a Giant Skull for such a high price, if it can beat similar helms in its level range it may be worth trying.
So lets go back to our search tab and compare

I'm setting the Level cap to 52 (Giant Skull level) and setting the rarity to ALL. Because it is a high str item and basically only barbs will want STR I will leave the "Barbarian" setting alone.
Here is a picture of my search settings

Now take a look at those search results.
As you can see the average helm with this much str sells for at minimum 350k

Lets get more specific what happens if I add the "Has Sockets" to stats?
Well look at that, those prices are nuts.

See that giant skull for 50k? It really screws up the market, makes me nervous that is is there really.

Why would I be nervous? Well, I'm not the first one to think of this method of trading and that guy might have been trying to do exactly what I'm doing now and it didn't work for him.

Here is another fork in the road and it's a risky one that has potential to pay off huge.

1. Should I buy that other Giant Skull for 50k and set a new market price?
2. Should I try to sell MY Giant Skull for 42k and hope it sells before that one?

Well I'm gonna say screw it and buy his Giant Skull as well.* I want to essentially elimiante my competor so people think my helm is the cheapest on the market.*
Plus if this works I'm going to make a killing all because I was patient.

Let's go back to see what these stat Giant Skulls are worth again. At minimum 350k

Well the Giant Skull I paid 50k for has worse stats than the one I paid 8k for. So I'm going to try to sell it faster at a lower price.

The sad part is the Giant Skull for 350k has 39 vit.

For a barb (Which is who we will be selling this to) a helm with STR + VIT is very important. So I can't really compete with that.

Now I have to price this helm around that guys Giant Skull. Would someone pay 50k less for a helm without vit?

If you are shopping for a 300k gold helm, you could probably afford a 350k helm. So I'm going to say no.
I'd say 75k-100k cheaper would personally make me consider taking the cheaper helm.

My better Giant Skull will be posted for 245k
I'll put the one I bought for 50k up for 225k

Are these going to sell at that price?
Honestly man it's possible, but I doubt I'll get them to sell for that in a day.
I just personally haven't been playing long enough to know if this is an item that people use frequently.
I may have to knock 75k-100k off the prices to get a sale but it will happen eventually. If you truly want to get rid of the item you could sell the Giant Skull you purchased for 8k and sell it for 20k and move on with your life.

Turns out that 50k Giant Skull is a Legacy item as well. I've hit it big with legacy items before. See below for an example. Wanderlust is a legacy item I sniped.

The third and last method of the way I trade!
It's essentially the same as method 2, just a more specific way of getting items.

Go back to your original search settings

Sometimes doing an overall search of EVERY item isn't the best way to find a great buy.

Click the "All Armor Item Types" tab and look at the drop down menu.

Don't be like Drake, start at the top and work your way to the bottom of the list. Select Amulet.

Click search and look at what pops up

By narrowing it down to just Amulets you can see some awesome deals. Look at Traveler's Pledge, would that be worth buying? Let's check.

Yes! That is an excellent buy, I could easily sell that for a profit.

While taking screenshots and typing this stuff out, I lost the item to someone else. You have to act fast and sometimes buy first research later.

Keep repeating steps 1-3 for each category and hopefully you will find a good item worth selling. Don't forget to skim the pages! Sometimes you can find an item for 200,000 gold and it will sell for a 1.5 million! I've found a few of those!

Here are some examples of awesome trades I made with these methods:

"I have far more gold then you bloozntooz these methods aren't worth my time!"
That's cool man, I just started playing again after a 4 month break, I only had 100k gold now I've got 4 million after 5 days of playing. My methods are for people who are struggling.

Why waste my time on this when I could just spend $4 and be worth 100mill?
Some people don't want to spend real money. Don't complain that there is nothing left to do in the game when you took the easy route to wealth. Getting rich by putting in a ton of work was the best part of d2 for me.

I'm not finding good items on the auction house. How am I supposed to profit?
The cool part of these methods is that you don't need to find a "good" item on the auction house. You just need to find an item worth more than you paid. If you spend 5000 gold on an item worth 30k, sell it at market price (30k) or just below and it will be gone in less than an hour. Do that 10 times a day and you make a decent amount of money. Eventually you will get lucky and get an item for 10k that sells for 300k. Think of it like fishing, everyone wants to catch a big ass fish but you're usually still satisfied when you catch something smaller.

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