Will Crafting mats rebound?

**Ayewyn** · 17-05-2012, 10:33

Simple question. Do you think the crafting mats will rebound from their current prices? Right now crafting mats are selling for less than you would get selling the items, by quite a lot. I've seen normal ess drop into the teens. I am not sure this can hold up. At some point people are going to realize that it is better to sell the blues/yellows than salvage them, and when that start happening supply will dry up and the price will rise to meet the vendor rate of the items. Unless you think this is a sustainable price discrepancy, you might want to buy a few stacks for resale when ever people stop acting crazy.

**Trump** · 17-05-2012, 10:37

no. (note: my advice is specific to all gear <30, that is, things crafted via normal. This may also apply to nightmare in the future but does not currently)

there is plenty of equipment that is being sold on the auction house which is BELOW the cost of crafting them even if crafting mats are 0g.

the only winning move is not to play in terms of crafting normal gear. for the buyer, definitely buy all gear from <30 on the AH and don't try to craft them.

salvaging normal mode items is a mistake. sell them to vendors. an alternative strategy is to not pick them up.

**Greizer** · 20-05-2012, 10:31

The AH is filled with Normal and Nm drops, so no one is crafting low-lvl items. This must be what's making the mats so cheap. Another cause could be constant undercutting: you can see the 'last 10 trades' and people have a natural tendency to undercut in order to sell faster. Over time this leads to drastic drop in price, until the market corrects itself (meaning every muppet figures out the thing the op said).

Aren't crafted items better (on average at least) than drops? I don't remember. If they're not, then the situation will only get worse as items accumulate, meaning that no one will salvage and no one will buy low-lvl mats, making them disappear from the AH. If crafted items are better than drops, then the mats will rebound I think. But as people get 5 chars to 60, they stop caring about low lvl items altogether... If you happened to work at Blizz and knew that Low-lvl duels will be implemented, you could make a pretty penny.

Overall I'd say that although they take up a lot of stash space, since the cost is so low and the potential profits pretty neat if the value does go up, it's worth it to stock up on low-lvl crafting mats while they're cheap. I'll go and buy a stack of 1000 and see what happens.

**semakka** · 20-05-2012, 13:01

This entirely depends on PvP.

If they will make arena-style for lvl 10,19,29 etc...might rebound.

**Enlil** · 20-05-2012, 16:57

I think that mat prices being lower than the vendor sale price is a joke.
Even hell essence are selling for about 50g

But inferno mats are selling for 10x that amount, only inferno blues are worth converting to mats and and not selling directly to vendors.
a bit more of a balance of prices between normal - inferno is needed.

No one ever thought that vendors prices for mats would be more than the market value of those mats in all the debates about this we have had on this site over the past months.

**aj2000** · 22-05-2012, 02:05

No one foresaw that crafting will be mostly useless and supplanted.

Hopefully this will be tweaked down the line.

**galzohar** · 22-05-2012, 05:46

Too many people salvage everything only to realize later how useless salvaging has been, and try to cut their losses and sell the mats for as cheap as necessary. Also, at higher levels, the real cost is gold (and pages), not mats, so again mats go so cheap that they aren't any more expensive than the average vendor price of the items. Of course, since lots of people just salvage everything, the price of mats is even lower than the average vendor price.

The only exception is inferno mats. Since at act 1 inferno you don't get a lot of level 60 items but do get a reasonable amount of tomes, salvaging becomes worth it. As people advance through inferno to places where most drops are level 60 items (assuming such places exist), my bet is the prices will stabilize there too towards the "salvage is about as good as vendor". In fact, I bet tome cost will go down bigtime too, due to the high crafting cost.

On an unrelated note, flawless squares (the highest you can make before inferno) is worth less than just the gold it costs to upgrade squares into them, resulting in any gems under flawless square being dirt-cheap and constantly dropping in value. It doesn't help that gems can be removed relatively cheap so they are never destroyed (only destroyed by upgrading, but ugprading gems lower than flawless squares is not worth it and upgrading up from flawless squares is difficult).

**betazoid** · 22-05-2012, 07:20

No, only Inferno stuff will be useful and have some value. Other difficulty levels tomes etc are limiting factor, not salvaged items.

**jwfcp** · 24-05-2012, 18:09

nope, the inherent problem for normal mats is that you can coast through normal without buying or crafting anything. nightmare and hell too. the obvious solution is to make the damn thing harder, through and through, slow down the leveling process, close the cheesy power leveling loopholes and make the jump from normal to nightmare as hard as the jump from hell to inferno. way too late for that, would have been nice if they let us test for this in the beta, this would have been resolved in about a week.

I was walking though goat town the other day and you know what I saw? a rainbow.