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.
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