G'day Reddit!

After working my way through one of the other price check threads (sorry for hijacking your show, Flim, just bored at work x.x), I thought I'd summarize a lot of the recommendations I made in there in how to acquire a price baseline.

Identifying the relevant item stats to compare

The most important part of pricing your item.

You can direly mislead yourself on the value of an item by prioritizing worthless stats when attempting to price the item yourself on the market. For example, if you have a ring with 1500 Thorns(random example), including that thorns value in your price comparison may skew the price you conclude is "ok" for the item.

So, let's go over the stats that you'll want to keep in mind. THIS IS WHERE I NEED SOME HELP. I only play Barbarian, so the other classes are guesswork and/or hearsay! I'll update the guide later based on input, if I get any, to help folks out more accurately price non-beard items. Also, these stats are primarily for Inferno gear, as that's where most of the confusion lies (since the value of stats shifts dramatically to account for the builds necessary to beat Inferno).

I'll try to list the stats in rough order of importance, but those orders are always different depending on who you ask, so take with a grain of salt.

• Barbarians: All Resistance, %Block on Shield (and Block Amount), Armor, Vitality, %Life, %Reduction from melee/elites, Strength, Physical Resistance, Fire Resistance, Life On Hit, %Reduction from Ranged attacks, Attack Speed, Critical Hit%, Critical Hit Dmg%, Intelligence.

• Demon Hunters: Attack Speed, Dexterity, Movement Speed, Critical Hit%, Critical Hit Dmg%, All Resistance, Vitality, Slow/Stun/Blind/Freeze on Hit.

• Monk: All Resistance, Physical/Fire Resistance (many monks stack a single resistance. I think phys/fire are the most common), Dexterity, Armor, Attack Speed, Shield Block % and Shield Block Amount, Life Regeneration, Life On Hit.

• Wizard (total guesswork): All Resistance, Intelligence, Vitality, Life Regen, Attack Speed, %Block on Shield (&BAmt), %redux from melee/elite, Physical Resistance, Fire Resistance, Life%, Armor

• Witch Doctor (total guesswork): All Resistance, Intelligence, Vitality, Attack Speed, DMG on shrunken-head-things?, Physical Resistance, Fire Resistance, Life%, Armor

Also, people tend to create an ALTERNATE set of Magic Find and/or Gold Find gear. The stats associated with high MF/GF are much less relevant, though I'm sure pickup radius, movement speed, and vitality count for a goodly bit. Possibly resource regeneration, too.

Lastly, stats to NOT price by include but certainly aren't limited to: Life On Kill, Thorns, Life Steal % and Health Globe Amount. Further, Dexterity in particular is largely undesired by non-DH/Monk classes.

When we get a drop, the first thing we want to do is identify Why It's Good^tm

This pretty much means seeing what stats on the item match the ones listed above for each class, how close they are towards the top of the list (which, remember, is in rough order), and how good the mods are.

For example, if I got a piece of Chest Armor with 120 str, 80 dex, 120 vit, 60 all res, 7% life, and 30% Critical Hit Damage, I'd be presented with a conundrum - it's got 5 good stats, and a 6th stat that's relevant! So how should I best price it?

First is to identify the class that BEST fits the item. In this case, despite having a good dex mod, it's not a high-priority item for monks and demon hunters (though it's still good for them, don't get me wrong). Having All Res, Str, Vit, CritDmg%, and %Life puts it VERY solidly in barbarian territory, and they're the ones who are going to pay the most for it.

Having figured out the class most relevant to it, I'll need to identify the stats the barbarians themselves are looking at when they decide to buy the item or not. In this case, that's going to be Str, Vit, All Res, and to a lesser extent %Life. CritDmg% on such a defensive piece of gear is more of a nice-to-have.

Pricing - Done By Comparison

So, the primary method of finding a price baseline is to find similar items and see what THEY'RE selling for. So, here, we're gonna look for chest armor with 110str, 110 vit, and 55 all res. It's important to lower the ranges from what our armor's at, to avoid eliminating items that may not quite meet our criteria yet are strictly better (for example, an item with 180 str, 112 vit, and 56 resistances).

Also, to help find SIMILAR items, it's best to set a maximum buyout of what you THINK the item might be worth. If no items are found, raise the MBO and look again. If you get a bunch of results, look at the ones on top. Are they significantly better than your item for the class most likely to buy it? You need to lower the MBO and look again. You want to find items at the top that are similar in usefulness (as best as you can tell) to the item you're looking to sell.

Then, price around there - maybe a bit lower if you're unsure or if keeping your AH slots free is important (e.g. you're selling a lot of stuff from a bunch of farming runs).

If you have >3 stats that seem relevant, what you want to do is identify the MOST important stat or combo of stats, and adjust the other 1-2 to cycle in the other relevant stats. In this example, we'd keep str/all-res and cycle out Vit for %Life and search that. Then, we'd search vit/life%/all-res. CritDmg% isn't important enough to factor in to the prices. In all of these secondary searches, we're looking to see if the value of the located goods varies significantly UPWARDS of our initial baseline notion from the first search. For example, if Vit/Life%/All-Res turned up results 500k more valuable than str/vit/all-res, we'd want to use that as our price baseline, and then sell our item for even more because it has a pretty high Strength value on it.

Weapons

Next, weapons. For weaponry, the single most important stat is the DPS of the weapon. When you get a nice one, the first thing you need to do is run a search for weapons of the same type (as in, 1H or 2H) for a maximum buyout of 10,000 gold. Then sort by DPS. Are the values at the top equal to or greater than your item? If so, chances are, despite nice stats, your item won't sell - it simply isn't powerful enough.

This initial 10k-gold search is what I call the "Minimum Sale Threshold" search. Unless it has some REALLY HIGH stat redeeming it (to pull an example from the price check thread, there was a 1H axe listed with 230 str and 300 vit - that's HUGE), you're better off vendoring/salvaging the item and not wasting the effort.

This is ESPECIALLY important on legendary weapons - we get so psyched when we get one, but weapons are BY FAR the biggest disappointment of all the legendaries. They tend to just suck. See if they have a stat that's not usually available on a weapon (best example: Magic Find!) and if not, salvage it for the Fiery Essence.

If you're above the MST, you need to do mostly the same steps as for armor, but you have to adjust the Maximum Buyout until the top entries of the DPS Filter are about the potency of your weapon for your search.

Lastly, weapon stats aside from str, dex, int, vit, life on hit, crit dmg%, a socket, and possibly attack speed are GENERALLY going to considered irrelevant. And even then, DPS is about 80-90% of the price in most cases.

Legendaries

You can find a listing of all legendary and set items over at http://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/ - Search up your Legendary. Then, locate the variable-yet-predefined (VYP) stats on the armor. For example, Stormshield's block rate is 17-32%. For each of these VYP stats, identify where YOUR legendary falls in its available range. Also identify how important that stat is (for example, Andariel's Visage has a range of 31-35 Poison Resistance. No one cares about this.). Use the correlation of "How Important Each VYP Stat Is" and "How Good Is My Legendary For All The Significant VYP Stats" to determine how good your legendary is. If there are random magical properties, see if yours rolled ones that're relevant for the class your legendary is likely geared towards (most lean in the direction of one or two specific classes).

All that comparison is basically to rate how good YOUR COPY of that legendary is. Once that's determined, you have two searches ahead of you. The first is to find what the MINIMUM price for similar-quality copies of that legendary are (I stress MINIMUM because legendaries, above everything else, are subject to bullshit listings.) Then, second, is to determine what a Rare with roughly equivalent stats is worth, IF applicable. This mostly applies to legendaries that DO NOT have a stat normally found on rare items of the same slot (e.g. Attack Speed on Chest), OR legendaries that vastly overpower an important stat for a given slot (e.g. String of Ears' Melee Reduction). Use the armor search method above to try and compare rares with your unique. This second search is the sanity check.

Once you know what price your legendary is generally priced at for similar quality, and how SANE a price that is, you can make a more educated guess as to what the price for YOURS should be.

Also, as you may've noticed, there's a lot of guess and check in here. It's still pretty early in the D3 game community, so G&C is what most of us are operating by. This also isn't the end-all-be-all method to getting The Real Value of your item, but more of a guide to find a pretty good guess as to what it might be.

Thanks for your time, and happy AHing!

I'll edit this guide later today or Monday based on feedback I get - especially for stats to look for for each class, as that's probably the key point of the guide.