D2R price vs value vs Usefulness

Diablo II Resurrected: Item Price, Value, and Usefulness

I usually only talk about video games in my Chinese blog, but I’m not sure about a lot of the terms in D2R so I’m writing this one in English. This post about item evaluation in 3 aspects, and I’ll explain what they are.

• Price: buy/sell price in certain currencies (rune, perfect gem, FG - d2jsp forum gold, US dollar, etc.)
• Value: the absolute “value” of an item. It’s the main reason why I’m writing this post, as I want to figure out what items are overpriced.
• Usefulness: how useful an item is, i.e. help you farm item, xp, etc.

Price

I’m not writing a price guide (however I found this one is particularly useful), what I’m going to do is listing some general rules:

Price is based on supply & demand, like almost all goods & services in the world.

For example, Shako & Arach are perhaps similarly useful, and their price could be very similar while ladder starts, because supply/demand relationship is very similar. Both are pretty rare to find. But later on, Shako’s price drops significantly due to its not being BIS of a lot of builds, so a lot of replaced shako goes to the market.

Price is dynamic, but in general, will drop in time.

This one is obvious, the real life money people spend in the game decreases while ladder progresses, while items are kept being farmed. The official price of FG is $0.034, and an Enigma would cost 8K weeks ago, while now it’s around 4K.

What about price not in real life currency, but in rune?

Item price drops, and rune price drops, too. The general rule is back to #1: the higher demand / lower supply, the higher the price is likely to be. This is why Ber is always more expensive than Zod.

How to check price?

d2jsp is a good place to check real life money price, while discord is good for price in runes. The more / frequent trade you do, the better sense you get about price.

Best way to profit?

Invest real life money, study the market, and flipping. By doing so, you are helping the economy by doing something a real life trader is doing, so don’t feel bad about it. However, like real life traders, more people lose money and only a small amount of elite can actual profit, and they profit a lot.

Value

Mods is not equally distributed among all gears, so it is very hard to provide evaluation for different item types. However, charms can be equally placed on your character, so it can provide some sort of reference.

The post popular charms could be SC: 20 life + 5 all res, and GC: 1 skill + 45 life. For 3 slots you can only equip 3 SCs or 1 GC, so value wise, you can have either 60 life + 15 all res, or 1 single tree skill + 45 life, so we assume 1 skill = 15 life + 15 all res. This is our basic methodology of mods evaluation.

Since an item can only roll 3 single tree skills or 2 all skills, we assume 3 single skill = 2 all skill.

FCR is pretty hard to evaluate though. Most people wear chance guards for 40 MF, and wear magefist for 20 FCR. So we assume 1 FCR = 2 MF, which is again a very rough estimation.

Regarding elemental damage, I just blindly assume 10% lightning damage is about 1 lightning skill so they are equal.

Now we suppose 20 life = 5 all res = 20v (v is our basic evaluation unit, which is equal to one life or one res), we have:

• Life: 1v
• 1 any res: 1v
• 1 all res: 4v
• 1% elemental damage: 7.5v
• 1 single tree skill: 75v
• 1 all skill: 112.5v
• 1 AR: 1v
• 1 max damage: 6.7v
• 1 FRW: 6.7v
• 1 MF: 2.85v
• 1 FCR: 5.7v
• 1 FHR: 4v

The reason why I took mana out of the equation is that mana potion and insight are too easy to obtain, and they bring no literal impact to most builds.

Now let’s take a look at some examples and see how far my theory is away from our actual feeling about the game.

Sorc weapon

Here are several popular sorc weapon choices:

• Wizardspike: 50 * 5.7 + 75 * 4 = 585v
• Occy: 112.5 * 3 + 20 * 4 + 30 * 5.7 + 20 * 2 + 50 * 2.85 = 771v
• Temper: 112.5 * 3 + 40 * 5.7 + 7.5 * 20 = 715.5v
• HOTO: 112.5 * 3 + 40 * 5.7 + 10 * 2 = 40 * 4 = 745.5v

Occy has the most value and it’s very cheap due to no variables, so you should use it if you don’t really care about the random teleport side effect.

HOTO is surprisingly not that better than temper. Yes, it’s definitely an update and is much more balanced, but if you have limited budget, better spend it on something else first (like 1 bo CTA which grants you at least 35% life and 1 skill - that could be double the value of your offhand Gull)!

Wizardspike has not surprisingly the least value, which explains why people stop using it at an early stage.

Replace your shako with rare circlet?

• Shako: 112.5 * 2 + 120 * 2 + 50 * 2.85 + 8 * 2 = 623.5v
• 2 skill, 20 fcr, 20 frw, 15 all res: 112.5 * 2 + 5.7 * 20 + 6.7 * 20 + 15 * 4 = 533v

Even with a pretty good circlet, which is definitely more expensive than shako, it may not be an upgrade to you, especially if you still need MF. I believe the choice highly depends on your other gears.

Ire vs vipermagi?

• Ire: 112.5 + 2.85 * 100 = 397.5v
• Vipermagi: 112.5 + 5.7 * 30 + 35 * 4 = 423.5v

Usually it’s ridiculous to compare MF chest and FCR chest, but what if we do it anyway? Since we are not counting attributes like magic reduction and defense, I’d say these 2 are really close. If you can’t decide which one to choose (which will determine other pieces of your gears accordingly, based on your desired FCR), now you have one more reason to be undecided.

Usefulness

There are a lot of reasons why my evaluation above doesn’t help much, and one of them is that static “value” cannot represent dynamic “usefulness”. For example:

• 100 life may help you tank one hit of Nik’s corpse explosion at a certain difficulty, and that’s 0 and 1.
• For 25 res, 50% to 75% gives you 50% damage reduction, while 0% to 25% only gives you 1/4.
• Depend on your goal, MF may be very or not at all useful, or even harmful like doing cow farming for bases.
• I was too lazy to add def, physical / magical damage reduction, elemental absorb… and I didn’t even talk about melee, PK, and BVB lol

Conclusion

No conclusion yet.

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