The: What is my item worth?

So you just looted a piece of gear and you're not sure how much its worth or if you should even bother to put it up on the AH. You could completely guess its worth but then you either risk losing a lot of potential gold, or you risk overpricing it and wasting one of your valuable 10 auction slots for 2 days. Neither option is good, so how do you assign your item a value?

Diablo 3 is still very new. Newer and better items appear on the AH daily and the market is fluctuating a lot. Different regions also have different fluctuations and just because something is worth X gold in the US doesn't mean it's worth as much on the EU servers. As such there are no rules as to how items should be priced. It completely depends on whatever supply/demand is going on in your server at the moment you want to sell your item.

When you get a new piece of gear, you first need to figure out what its purpose is and if it is worth selling. A lot of items have 'wasted' stats (eg. intelligence on a ring that otherwise has tanking stats) which do not contribute to the value of the item. Look for what stats it has the highest of and what classes would make use of them. Wizards and witch doctors can use gear that have both intelligence and crit % on them, but no classes would look for gear with lots of both dexterity and intelligence on it. A lot of gear (including rares!) have so many wasted stats that they should simply be sold to a vendor.

So if you really think your item is worth selling, how do you check its worth?

Start by writing down the item's stats down in notepad or something similar so you can remind yourself what they are. Go to the auction house and make sure the 'search equipment for' is set to a class that can equip the item you are trying to sell. Change the item type to whatever it is you are trying to sell. If it is a low level requirement item you may want to change the level range. If your item is a rare with more than 2 VALUABLE stats, you may want to change the 'rarity' to rare as well.

Now you want to play with the 'preferred stats' option. Look at your item's stats and decide what are the most important stats on it. Usually this will be a combination of its 'premier' stat (str, dex or int) and a secondary stat, such as resistance, crit damage/chance, or attack speed. Inserting vitality is an option as well if your item has vit on it. Set the minimum value of each stat to a number just below what your item has, eg if your item has 71 intel, set the minimum value to 65 intel. This will allow you to get an idea of how items that are slightly worse than yours are priced.

Now play with the 'max buyout' value. You want to start low and increase the number until you start seeing items for sale at whatever price you've set as the maximum buyout. Start mousing over the items and checking their stats - are they better or worse than your item? If you only see one item at this price, perhaps it is an outlier and someone has underpriced it; increase your max buyout and if you suddenly find several more items with similar stats you will know that this was the case.

Once you have discovered what items similar to yours are selling for, you have to decide how to price it. If you feel your item is worth a lot and want to make every penny out of it, feel free to price it equal to what others are pricing it at. I find that the (stupid) 10 item limit is incredibly restricting and thus I underprice all my items by a little to try and free up item slots, but that's personal preference.

I should add that weapons are slightly different from most other pieces of gear. The only important stat that a weapon has is the big DPS number at the top of its description, which already take into account any +attack speed or +% damage mods it has (though I hear it doesn't take into account %crit). Any other stats like extra strength, vitality, etc etc are all secondary in importance to that big DPS number. As such, when you price weapons, you should not add any 'preferred stats' and simply price it based on its DPS value.

Lastly this guide is mainly for blue/rare items and not any green set pieces or (good) legendaries. Those should be approached slightly differently.

I am writing this guide at 1am and am a little groggy so if anyone has any other suggestions or corrections, please feel free to post them. If everyone is happy perhaps this should make its way to the OP as well.

Hope we have alot of input and responses, I sit on auction bay alot more than playing the game tbh. =)