Blue Posts, Brimstones

Over the last few days, the metaphorical bottom has fallen out of Brimstone prices. They're torpedoing towards and all-time single-day low (9,200 gold on 11/9/12) faster than Keanu Reeves on a Greyhound. If there were a "consumer confidence" index associated with Brimstones, it would be lower than Congress's approval rating (zing!).

While speculators continue to dump their stockpile of Brimstones for dirt, let's mix in a couple of Blue Posts for context:

11/20/2012 Lylirra:
"We're also exploring ways to improve the worth of Brimstones, as well as crafting in general."

This post caused the first wave of Brimstone speculation, and the ideas it hinted at (new crafting recipes, where Brimstones would theoretically be a crafting reagent) have since come to fruition. Though the new recipes have been pretty successful, the goal of improving the worth of Brimstones has not. Yet. There's reason to believe that one of two things will happen: 1) Players continue to craft amulets, perhaps at an increasing rate once they roll the comparatively easy-to-nail BiS bracers and spaulders. 2) The Brimstone crafting sink fails, and Blizz starts exploring other ways to make Brimstones more valuable. Now, of course there's option 3) Brimstone prices stay low, and Blizz couldn't care less. The drop in price suggests that more and more players believe option 3 is the most likely to play out. Personally, I'm not sold.

Now let's look at a blue post that went somewhat unnoticed a few days ago:

2/26/2013 Lylirra:
"Overall, we feel like we've been making the item game better with each new patch, and definitely have plans to continue to that process. Some of the areas we'd like to focus on for the future include making Legendary items more "game changing" while still being powerful enough for players to want to equip them, introducing more meaningful gold sinks, and continuing to provide players with reliable ways to gear up outside of the Auction House." 

Sure, it's just a few nibbles, but that's how these things work. First of all, it puts changes to Legendaries firmly on the table--maybe even the addition of new ones as well. And where is there the biggest dearth of useful Legendaries? Well, in crafting of course! No ilvl 63s, nothing worth rolling more than a few times (Cain's set, Helm of Command--which could be valuable if EHP mattered more, but Monster Power made it an afterthought). Plus, "gold sink" has become synonymous with "new, BiS crafting recipes." And gearing up outside the AH? The hits just keep coming! So is the writing on the wall? It's hard to be totally sure--it always is with Blizz--but it's food for thought, at least. A blue post stating that they'd like to increase the value of Brimstones--even if it was months ago--is a little like the Federal Reserve stating that they'd like to explore ways of increasing the price of Apple's stock. Could you resist buying some cheap shares if that happened? I know I couldn't...

1.0.7 Crafted Affix Level Roll Probabilities: Preliminary Data

An earlier post described some intriguing information that Chazhang had come across while putting together data on both crafted and farmed items: that the ilvl dictated the probability of an affix roll landing within a certain affix level (regardless of what mlvl monster it dropped from!). In order to test this theory on the new 1.0.7 ilvl 63 crafted gear, I've started tabulating rolls that can be distinguished as coming from a particular affix level (double-stat rolls, for example, cannot always be pinned down since the different affix levels overlap quite a bit--they were consequently left out). Luckily, most rolls have totally unique, non-overlapping affix levels.

The preliminary data strongly supports Chazhang's findings. Here's a sample of the data:

Affix level 63 is consistently rolling well above what we'd expect if the rolls were distributed evenly across affix level, rolling between 29% and 41% of the time for the four affixes listed in this small chart.

What does it mean? It means that getting top-tier rolls on the new crafted items is much easier than getting them from farming! Sure, playing at MP > 0 gets you access to affix level 63 and all of your drops, but the ilvl still affects the probability of hitting those affix levels.

It also makes crafting a good bit more valuable of an investment, just as we suspected when looking over Chazhang's original data. When crafting bracers, for example, you may have expected to hit a "good" All Resist roll about 28.5% of the time, or 2 of the 7 possible affix level rolls. Turns out, you should actually expect that roll more like 46% of the time!

The RMAH Price Floor: Time to Cash In?

Price floors have a long and complicated history in market economies. Like any market manipulation, they tend to have a host of unintended consequences along with the intended ones. And while the intended consequences tend to get the most attention and examination, the unintended ones often go partially ignored--both because they can be extremely difficult to track down and quantify, and because they can undermine the effect of the intended consequences, much to the dismay of the party responsible for establishing the floor in the first place. Probably the most famous example of a price floor is the one that exists in more than 90% of all labor markets--i.e. the minimum wage. But it's beyond the scope of this blog to try and give a fair examination to that particular floor, so instead I'll focus on the one we're familiar with from D3: the RMAH gold price floor (since we all know you can try to play D3 for money and earn well less than the minimum wage).

Blizzard has moved this floor once since the May 15th release, from 100k/$0.25 to 1m/$0.25. At the time it was attributed to "general improvements" with the AH, citing player feedback:

Blue Post with Floor Raise

That the floor exists at all is maybe somewhat understandable: Blizz doesn't want the AH servers clogged with a heavy load of very small transactions, they want to reduce possible gaming of the RMAH like what happens on the GAH (See Here), and they probably don't mind a little artificial inflation of prices. When the floor is near or below the actual market price of gold, they see the benefit of these things (and probably more) without much downside. The problems rear their ugly heads when the market price starts to drop too far below that floor, which is what has happened (again) over the last few months. But then again, so do the opportunities.

When the market value of gold drops below the price floor, people turn to outside sources (i.e. the black market) for buying gold, or they stop buying altogether. This reduces transaction security for players as well as reducing Blizz's cut of gold sales. Overall, it simply isn't good for the game economy. It also has the interesting effect of inflating the real-money value of items, consequently producing a ripple effect which stalls sales of items along with gold. This is where the opportunity lies. Allow me to explain:

The default exchange rate on the RMAH is currently still 1m/$0.25. The actual exchange rate dictated by a friction-less market is harder to pin down, but it's probably closer to 1m/$0.20, possibly even lower. Let's examine what would happen if the price of gold were to fall to, say, 1m/$0.10, a figure not so outlandish that it can't happen relatively soon. Now, let's step through an interesting process on the RMAH:

• Say you see an item worth 40m listed for its actual market value of $4 on the RMAH, and you decide to buy it.
• Now, you sell that item on the GAH for its gold value, 40m, receiving 34m after the 15% fee.
• You sell that 34m gold on the RMAH, taking another 15% hit but ending up with (34m)*($0.25/1m)*(.85) = $7.22
• Repeat, and profit.

There is obviously and inconsistency here; no market will tolerate this kind of cycle long-term. The buyers and sellers who enabled you to complete this process simply will not continue to buy and sell this way. In short, you cannot create something from nothing--at least not for very long. The effect this has is to drive up prices a little bit on the RMAH until the equilibrium is met and you make less than or equal to your original investment from this cycle. That is not to say that you won't be able to do this, as peoples' valuation of gear and gold can fluctuate wildly, but rather than it cannot take place in a wide-scale and consistent manner.

The effect: your gear is currently overvalued by the RMAH. Since the exchange rate is pinned down in this manner, buyers on the RMAH must, in general, overpay market value for gear. This is one of several things which has really slowed the RMAH, since people know when they're getting a bit of a raw deal. Nonetheless, there are still buyers out there. So, if you can sell you gear for a value on the RMAH equivalent to what you think you could get at the 1m/$0.25 exchange rate, should you? I certainly think so, as long as you can spare the gold for a while. Blizz has attempted to combat the problem of gold inflation by adding more gold sinks and going after gold botters/3rd-party sellers more proactively, but it's not clear that it's going to work. Personally, I think they desperately need to add functionality to the AH that allows you to choose how much gold you want to sell per $0.25, keeping the lower transaction limit but effectively eliminating the price floor. It's not only good for the players, it's good for their balance sheets.

If that does happen, you could see a sudden appreciation of your Blizz Balance in its relative value in gold. So if you've got some spare gold sitting around, it could be a fun investment to try picking up some gear and selling on the RMAH. If it doesn't work out? Well, you can always use it to buy Starcraft: Heart of the Swarm!

A Wizard Efficiency Build for All Gear Levels: "Spectral Blizzard"

Thus far, my blog has concentrated mostly on the economics of D3--serving as a vehicle for me to voice my outlandish ideas and help everyone lose money (you're welcome!). I kid, of course, and I still stand by my predictions thus far, but I was thinking about my next contribution and I decided I'd like to write a nice long piece about my current Wizard build, since I'm having so much fun and success farming/leveling with it.

The primary advantage the build has over other popular wizard builds is efficiency. And after all, what is economics all about if not efficiency? Making money, you say? Ok, well, you've got me there...

Reddit has a post today with updated numbers about the most popular builds for 1.0.7, found here:

Popular Skills for All Classes

It shouldn't come as a surprise that pretty much every popular Wizard skill set revolves around two ideas: CM/WW Perma-Freeze and Archon Forever. They're both awesome builds, no doubt, and they're both builds that I've utilized in the past. But for all their popularity, they do have some drawbacks.

I'm definitely not the first to use the following build, as the core idea has been around for quite a while. But I'd like to give you my take on it, with a couple original little tweaks and ideas that should help make the build accessible and enticing for Wizard players of varying gear levels and goals (i.e. farming and/or leveling).

The Skills

The whole build revolves around a few core ideas:

• Allow yourself maximum skill slots to buff your DPS and Movespeed. There is no better way to maximize efficiency than to increase your damage output and your clear speed. These are absolutely key. This rules out CM/WW--it takes too many skill slots to implement.
• Avoid using channeled spells to kill trash mobs, as they are inherently inefficient. Elites are another matter because you can't expect to dispose of them without needing to stand still for at least a few seconds (though preferably under 10). This rules out both Archon and CM/WW again--they both require you to channel and stand still in order to kill trash mobs.
• Relieve pressure from your gearing. Or, in other words, don't have some stringent metric you must hit in order for the build to work properly. Again, CM/WW and Archon require certain gear affixes  and stat minimums to work, which I'll cover in detail later on.
• Stay simple, nimble, and adaptive, allowing you to meet any champion affix combo with ease and also allowing you to carry other champs with ease. Archon has real problems here, especially in groups.

In order to meet these 4 requirements, we need two damage-dealing skills--one primarily for disposing of trash mobs quickly, the other for downing elites quickly and without possibility of death. The choices: Blizzard (Stark Winter) and Spectral Blades (Healing Blades).

Blizzard is a phenomenal skill in 1.0.7. I can't say enough about the damage buff is received (from 260% to 510%), allowing it to simply melt trash mobs like thermite melts ice. The idea is to set the MP level so that 1 click = 1 blizzard = all trash under the falling ice dies by about halfway to three-quarters of the blizzard duration. With the damage buff, this is not hard to do. Here is my rough guide to MP level by DPS, which you'll need to test on your own to make it work just right for you:

• DPS unbuffed < 100k ------> MP0 (A3, 20% Faster Alkaizer runs, great for both farming and leveling)
• DPS unbuffed = 100k - 150k ------> MP1 - MP2 (A3 20% Alk runs again, or for nice elite pack density do A2 VotA runs, which are just Vault of the Assassin to Black Canyon Mines and repeat)
• DPS unbuffed = 150k - 200k ------> MP2 - MP3 (ditto)
• DPS unbuffed > 200k ------> MP3+ (ditto)

Spectral Blades, on the other hand, is mainly there for dealing with elite packs. It delivers a healthy dose of damage and has a fantastic rune in Healing Blades, which will alleviate most if not all need for healing affixes on your gear. It gives you a 5% lifesteal on Spectral Blade attacks, which is enormous. If you've tuned your MP level correctly and you have even just mediocre EHP, this skill should be all you need in order to stay alive against any champion affix combo. Add in the 1.5% lifesteal from Blood Magic on all attacks and you should be comfortable walking right up to elites and tanking them on low MP. Just drop a Blizzard, run up for about 5 strikes of Spectral Blades, collect your loot, and move on! No need for any LoH or lifesteal on your weapon. Here's the full skill loadout I use solo, where you can fully benefit from movespeed bonuses:

"Spectral Blizzard" Build V1 - Solo

Notice those 4 damage buffs (Sparkflint, Magic Weapon, Glass Cannon, and Cold Blooded) giving you an effective 57% additional damage (37% on-sheet, plus another 20% when affected by Blizzard)! Plus, Teleport (Wormhole) and Storm Armor (Scramble) boosting your effective movespeed quite nicely. If this isn't the fastest clearing Wiz build, it's awfully close to it. Sure, you can't sit there for 5 minutes clearing a pack on MP10 with CM/WW perma-freeze, but you'll more than make up for it with sheer volume of elite packs killed at lower MP levels. MP10 isn't even offering 2x the MF/GF (375% base, assuming you're at the cap, and 625% at MP10), and you can go well over twice as fast using this build as you can with other builds at higher MP levels. The new XP bonus does offer you about 6x the XP at MP10 (assuming you're using a Hellfire Ring and with Paragon Stacks), but it has been demonstrated many times that speed runs at lower MP can be extremely efficient for leveling, and they're far less tedious and frustrating.

I'm sure I'll get some flak for this, but this build is also fantastic for multiboxing. It is far less restrictive and  more adaptable than other Wiz builds, making it easy to keep your champs coordinated and your run times down, especially for mixed-champ parties. It gives you the ability to focus all of the DPS on your main champ while simply increasing the MF/GF, pickup radius, and EHP of the others. Personally, I carry two other champs at MP2 with about 200k unbuffed DPS, where the other two contribute effectively nothing to the overall DPS of the party. The runs are incredibly smooth.

The Gear

This is usually the tough part for any build, but not here! The awesome thing about "Spectral Blizzard" is the lack of gear requirements. Namely:

• You don't need any particular Crit Chance or Attack Speed, as on-sheet DPS is all that really matters.
• You need little to no healing affixes--I personally have about 1k life regen, with zero additional LoH, Lifesteal, or Potion/Globe bonus. And I don't even really need the regen all that much.
• EHP is important, but you just need enough to stay comfortable and rarely ever die. Low MP levels relax this need quite a bit.

You don't need to worry about proc-ing anything, so Crit Chance and Attack Speed are as good or bad as any other DPS increase. You only need be concerned that you're getting enough hits/second in to heal with your Spectral Blades and enough EHP to not get 3-shot or so. Personally, I have a measly 1.2 attacks/second weapon with about 1.5 attacks/second total including buffs IAS on gear. It's plenty. My Crit Chance is high only because it's such a good way to increase DPS. My only suggestion is that you try to keep EHP to about double your unbuffed DPS, and to try and do so with as little Vit as possible. Not that more Vit is bad, but it scales poorly with all healing bonuses. Try to keep your health between 30k-40k and focus the rest of your energy on AR/Armor. This will allow you to recover a good bit of your health with each Spectral Blades attack.

I may return to add some gearing ideas in the future, but for now let me know what you think. If you try this build and it doesn't work for you, let me know and maybe I can help!

Chazhang's Affix Rolls by Item Level

The following comes courtesy of Chazhang, a fellow theorycrafter kind enough to forward me the results of some of his affix roll testing a week or two ago. This is only a snippet of the work he did, but I find it particularly relevant to 1.0.7 crafting. In short, it suggests that top-tier rolls should be much more common on the new crafted items due to them being ilvl 63.

Brimstones and 1.0.7 Crafting: Part Deux

According to this handy AH tracker over at D3RMT (http://www.d3rmt.com/auction-house/item/fiery-brimstone/usgold/) Brimstones have now hit a 3-month low, trading right around 21k. The last time they were lower was before the announcement that the development team was actively looking into ways to increase their value, back on 11/21/2012. That led to the price shooting from about 10k to 57k, eventually settling down closer to 35k and relaxing to 21k over the following month and a half. News of amulets using Brimstones as a reagent on 1/12/2013 sent them back up to about 46k briefly before their second relaxation period, which is what we find ourselves currently in the midst of.

Ok, enough with the history lesson. The real question is: where do they go from here?

Some folks have posited that my estimates about the number of Brimstones in circulation in an earlier post are pretty far off. Though I aimed high, perhaps I aimed a little too high. This actually helps the projection of Brimstones values--the more scarce, the higher the value. However, the rate at which Brimstones enter the economy is inherently coupled to the rate at which Demonic Essences enter players' inventories. In that sense the only value which truly matters is that relative rate, along with the the percentage of Demonic Essences being used for amulet crafting.

At this point it's probably a good spot to add a small addendum to my affix roll probability post seen below, and it has to do with relative affix roll probabilities. While compiling my data, another D3 theorycrafter contacted me with his own set of data based on actually crafting items in-game, as well as tabulating the rolls of farmed items. He came upon something pretty interesting: even though items roll with the mlvl taken into account (so any item that drops in inferno at MP > 0 will be a mlvl 63 item), and thus have access to ilvl 63 affixes, the ilvl on the item still affects the relative probability of what level affixes get rolled. Simply put, an mlvl 63, ilvl 58 item still has a diminished chance of hitting good rolls compared to a mlvl 63, ilvl 63 item. Basically, his data showed a spike where affix level = ilvl of about 40% occurrence, up from around 15%-20% for other affix level rolls.

So, what does this mean from Brimstones? Well, amulet crafting is probably a good bit better than I predicted in my original post on the matter, making it truly an enticing proposition. You're getting ilvl 63 rolls, which means you're hitting the top 1 or 2 roll tiers almost 50% of the time, not around 20% of the time (varies with affix) like previously predicted. As TryHardEnmity explains in his instructional video about 1.0.7 crafting, he's seeing top-end rolls a significant amount of the time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zxBDigoxtjs#!

Let's take all of this and filter it down. The primary driver of a theoretical increase in Brimstone prices in the weeks and months to come will be the rate at which they are consumed via crafting. As crafting comes into a little clearer view, I would hazard a guess that more players will begin to craft amulets at an increasing rate. A very informal poll on the D3 Battle.net site suggested that amulets are far and away the most popular choice for crafting at the moment. One real concern is peoples' perseverance: is the average player going to be able to commit to crafting the 1,000+ amulets expected to hit one that keeps them from needing an upgrade in that slot for quite some time? People, after all, are notoriously difficult to predict.

The Speculation Game: Tal Rasha's Sacrifice

In case you missed it, the week leading up to the deployment of 1.0.7 featured a strange website bug that removed the set bonuses for quite a number of set items. It fueled speculation that some set item bonuses were in for a re-work, including (but not limited to) the 2/3/4 bonus for Tal Rasha's Sacrifice, as well as the ever popular 7% crit chance 2-piece bonus for Natalya's set. While there did seem to be some grounds for the speculation--some of the bonuses are a little overpowered, others laughably weak--in the end it proved to be nothing more than a glitch. So, end of story, right?

Maybe.

Personally, I was looking forward to the bonuses changing. I play a wizard that employs the 2-piece Tal set and getting something, anything, other than a befuddling 3% bonus to a damage type that I don't use would be welcomed. And, call me crazy, but something tells me we'll see a change to it in a not-too-distant patch. My reasoning isn't exactly airtight, but there's been clamoring for some time now from the community that the Tal bonuses need reworking, and it's not exactly the most intrusive change to implement. Set bonuses aren't randomly generated--you'd be messing with everyone's gear in perfectly equal measure--and who's to complain about a random buff that makes your gear more valuable? Yes, I realize that people put money into alternative pieces partly because the lack of an appealing set bonus, but most Tal gear is at least close to BiS anyway, and it's not as if crit chance Mempos or high int/vit Zuni Marrows are going to lose all that much value if Tal pieces get a modest little buff. That leads me to my fun piece of speculation for the week:

Blizzard has shown a tendency thus far in D3 listen to ideas that the community rallies around and make common-sense changes to balance the game. If a logical, much needed buff to Tal set bonuses is incoming, the next month or two could be a great time to pick up a few top-end pieces as an investment. Personally, I've invested in a few high-end Guise of Wisdoms, and let me explain why:

• They're currently pretty cheap thanks to how insanely powerful Mempos are as a clear BiS option.
• They can actually potentially offer more than a Mempo does sans the attack speed, which is so important that it drives Mempo prices to be about 10x the price of a comparable Guise.
• One solid 2-piece and/or 3-piece set bonus, and all of a sudden they're competitive with Mempos for BiS.
• If one of those set bonuses happens to be, say, 9% IAS, all of a sudden they're standalone BiS for Wizards and Witch Doctors.
• Consequently they're the one item currently available for purchase that has the (admittedly small) chance to appreciate in value 10x or more.

It's far from a slam dunk, of course, but if you've got some spare gold sitting around, why not invest a little of it with the possibility of hitting on a 5x-20x return on your investment? If you've got a little patience, it might just pay off big.