Auction House Guide

Diablo 3 Auction House Guide by Stoichio.

Also check out the "Auction, Sell or Salvage Guide." in our Guides section.

And the Auction House or Sell Web App in our Tools section.

Hello and welcome to my guide to the auction house!

 Sellers' Guide

 Buyers' Guide

If you want to know how to make some gold, or when to buy things on the auction house, I have some tips and strategies for you!

The first section will cover the sellers' guide, and the second, the buyers' guide.

Sellers' Guide

First, lets establish the mindset of the typical buyer. In order to be a smart seller, you must know what the consumers look for and want. A good way to do this is analyze your own buying habits, specifically what prices you pay attention to and what stats are your favorite, as it is likely that your buying habits are similar to someone else's.

I find that players have a tendency to first scan over the buyout price of the item. It is critical that you price your item's buyout price because even though its an "auction" house, its really just a yard sale. So when we are talking about setting a price, I'm talking about setting the buyout price. To find a competitive buyout price, do a search on the item you are selling.

Price and DPS/armor are directly proportional to each other in this case so if you see a trend between the two, price your item slightly bellow the trending price.

Next, when a has identified an affordable item, they will glance over stats. The will look at the rarity of the item first (yellows sell better than blues), and then the stats. In my experience, items with 4-5 stats always sell better than items with 1-3. In addition, the more sockets the better.

This is because when people quantify the fact that the item has 4 or 5 stats in their head and then add in the fact that they have sockets. Then they really only pay large attention to the first 3 stats. What this means is sell items with lots of stats, sockets, and the first 3 stats of the list are good.

Guide continued after the page break.

Finally, some tips about what sells well on the AH and what does not:

• Legendaries are very hard to sell simply because there are tons of them on the market already, so it is difficult to get your item found (And also because they are currently weak. They will be buffed in an upcoming patch though. Note: Only new legendaries will be buffed, not ones that dropped before the patch.
• Yellows sell better than blues
• The easiest demographic of people to sell to is level 1-39. After level 40, the demographic becomes smarter and starts to look for a specific stat set to fill a niche in their build. This means that ALL of the stats on the item have to be good to sell to that group.
• Sell items with an unusually high dps/armor that just don't fit your specific needs
• It is possible to auction off vendor items. Yes I've done it and made a net profit. Just follow the same procedure.
• Items with Magic find, gold find, or attack speed are in greater demand and therefore sell better
• Unless you have a ring or amulet with godly stats, don't bother selling them

Buyers' Guide

Buying from the auction house is very fun and can actually save you some gold. There are many situations when it is better to buy off the AH. The first scenario is relating to salvaging items. When considering salvaging--don't. It is currently not economically beneficial to salvage an item for reasons that it is easiest to explain with math.

The value of subtle essence is about 10-20 on the AH

The value of an item to create subtle essence is around 200

If you sell the item you make 200 gold

If you salvage the item, you now have dust worth 10-20 gold

Therefore, it is better to sell the item and buy the dust because you will end with a net profit of 180-190 (200-[10 or 20]=180 or 190)

The next scenario is what to do with gems. This is a fairly new revelation that is basically it is better to buy your gems off the AH than it is to make them. I only agree with this to a point. With lower value gems, this is true, it is better to simply buy a flawed gem for cheap than it is to combine 3 chipped gems for 500 gold into a flawed gem.

You could just buy the flawed gem and then sell the chipped ones for max profit. However, the system tips after a certain gem level as the price goes up on the AH (when I checked, there are no auctions selling gems past the radiant square level). So be wary when doing things with gems.

The next scenario boils down to if you are getting curb stomped in Nightmare and on, it is easier to just buy from the AH. You could go and farm items, but say it takes 8 hours to get the item you want. It will take around 10 minutes to find all the items you want on the AH.

The remaining 7 hours 50 minutes you can then spend playing through the game, collecting gold and basically getting further in the story or leveling.

Thanks for reading, and I hope that this helps you make some money or make better choices on the AH!