Patch Day...

It's time for another patch day, and there are some big changes if you play the auction house.  Things are getting fixed, bugs squashed, and paths corrected.  And we sit here and write blogs to kill time before we can play again.  But how is this going to affect your ability to make money?  The official patch notes are posted on Reddit.  Let's take a look.

There are two things that jump out right away.  Crafting changes and changes to drop rates. These are the obvious 'first glance' changes that are going to impact the AH and RMAH right away.




The cost of jewel crafting has been greatly reduced.
Jeweler

• The gold and material cost to combine gems ranks 2-8 has been reduced
• Combinations for these ranks now only require 2 gems, down from 3
  • The gold cost to combine each rank of gems is now as follows:
    • Rank 2 - Flawed: 10 gold (down from 500 gold)
    • Rank 3 - Regular: 25 gold (down from 750 gold)
    • Rank 4 - Flawless: 40 gold (down from 1250 gold)
    • Rank 5 - Perfect: 55 gold (down from 2000 gold)
    • Rank 6 - Radiant: 70 gold (down from 3500 gold)
    • Rank 7 - Square: 85 gold (down from 7500 gold)
    • Rank 8 - Flawless Square: 100 gold (down from 20,000 gold)

It might be tempting to immediately start buying gems in order to combine and resell higher level Gems.  A 'buy and resell' strategy will work over the long run.  However the real opportunity once the servers come back up is to post whatever gems you have at the moment.

If, like me, you have been keeping a pile of gems and not really doing anything with them you have a great opportunity.  Previously it was so expensive to combine gems, and gems drop frequently enough, that there was no reason to combine anything other than your primary stat gem.  This change will tighten up the gem market, and we may see a bit of a rush in the gem market for a day or so.

This situation is instantly profitable, because you didn't pay for them and they just sat around.  Now they should move.  If you paid tons of gold for your gems...  It's a different situation.  Changing the rates at which things are combined is unlikely to change the price much...  Just the volume of transactions.  So if you sunk resources into acquiring gems you'll probably be disappointed as the market is about to be flooded by guys like me who have been sitting on a treasure chest of free gems.

In 'real world terms' this change 'increases liquidity'.  Prices should correspondingly drop, but if you move enough items it will net out to be the same return in gold, just in a much shorter amount of time.  As time is money that's a good thing.

The Magic Item Drop Rates have changed.
High-end items (items level 61-63) will now drop in all Acts of Inferno and Acts III and IV of Hell difficulty

• The new approximate drop rates are as follows:
  • Hell - Act III and Act IV
  • iLvl 61: 9%
  • iLvl 62: 1.9%
  • iLvl 63: 0%
  • Inferno - Act I
  • iLvl 61: 17.7%
  • iLvl 62: 7.9%
  • iLvl 63: 2.0%
  • Inferno - Act II
  • iLvl 61: 18.6%
  • iLvl 62: 12.4%
  • iLvl 63: 4.1%
  • Inferno - Act III and Act IV
  • iLvl 61: 24.1%
  • iLvl 62: 16.1%
  • iLvl 63: 8.0%

Being a bit behind the curve (have a day job) means that I just made it to Inferno.  Which means I haven't been sitting there sucking up level 60 items that spawn randomly.  Pre 1.0.3 a single level 60 item dropped for me in the game.  Which forces me to buy hundreds from the AH.

It looks like this change pushes back the rate at which 61, 62, 63 level items drop.  Why are (required) level 60 items so important?  Most of my gold is made selling Exquisite Essence.  This change means a higher chance of seeing items drop capable of salvaging into EE.  Which means you don't have to lock as much gold up in the AH waiting for auctions to bring you items to salvage.

Misc

There are some miscellaneous small tweeks that will effect how a few people play.  Anyone relying on pots, vases, and corpses for the bulk of their income is going to find that less viable.

• Repair costs have been increased for item levels between 53 and 63
• Magic Find will no longer be considered when looting objects in the environment such as chests, barrels, vases, pots, and corpses

• Weapon racks will no longer drop weapons 100% of the time
• Destructible objects no longer have a chance to drop items, and will only have a small chance to drop gold when destroyed

Is this the end of the world?  Not really.  Chaining together destruction of objects in the game world for bonus XP is still very compelling.  It pushes some kind of positive brain chemistry button.  This change won't stop anyone from bashing the crap out of the environment...  You just won't get rich doing it (like you could in 1.0).