Guide Lootrunning - Assessing The Value Of An Unidentified Item

I had the thought while lootrunning today that a systematic study of the value of an unidentified item might be helpful.

The information contained in an unidentified item is a four-level range (the ranges shown are actually exclusive of the lower item), the type of gear, the level of the loot chest, and in the case of armor the material of the item. This means that you can't necessarily value items on their own - they have to be grouped together into sets of items that appear identical in a lootchest. Note that while disconnecting and reconnecting will sometimes cause weapons to morph into accurate skins, this is obviously not useful while lootrunning.

Example 1
I'll use the simplest possible example to start. Consider an item which appears in a loot chest as "Legendary Ring, Level 4-8". The reason this is a simple example is that the set of items that meet this description is exactly one item - Concentration. Furthermore, Concentration always has the same stats regardless of rolls, so it's easy to price - all Concentrations will tend toward a single price point, because they are all identical. Suppose the going price of Concentration is approximately 3 LE (this is a guess, but should be about right). This means that, provided you are lootrunning for monetary profit only, you can safely take "Legendary Ring, Level 4-8" over any other item worth less than about 3 LE.

Example 2
Being the simplest possible example, pricing a Concentration obviously is not of much use. Let's jump up one further, and suppose that Downfall does not exist (which it didn't until about six months ago). Now, every "Legendary Ring, Level 96-100" is guaranteed to be a Prism. This is not particularly more helpful than pricing Concentration, since Prism is so valuable, but it should give a baseline for Example 3.

Let's begin by ignoring the elemental defense percent bonuses and reflection, since they are essentially irrelevant when pricing Prism, giving at most minor prices variations - many times people buy and sell Prisms without even listing the values of those stats. Prism can range from 20sp to 4sp, and in general the particular distribution of these sp aren't particularly relevant - Prism is almost never used in a non-rainbow situation since it requires so much investment in every stat to equip. I'm not a particularly great price-checker, but let's use the following price points for Prism. We can then arrive at the expected price by multiplying the chance of a roll by the sale price, and adding those together:

From this we obtain an average price for a Prism, which is therefore the value of any item "Legendary Ring, Level 96-100" (provided we pretend Downfall doesn't exist, as I mentioned earlier). Note that I haven't subtracted the identification cost yet (I meant to, but as of writing I've already dumped the spreadsheet with the calculations...). Thanks to @NicBOMB 's Wynnprobability calculator for the roll chances, which incidentally informs us that a 5sp Prism is six times rarer than a 20sp Prism.

Example 3
Now let's expand a bit more and consider "Unique Bracelet, Level 76-80", which is more in line with what one might regularly find in a loot chest. This could be either Latchkey or Broken Gauntlet. In some cases we can actually judge which one it is if the loot chest's level range only overlaps one of the two, but let's suppose it overlaps both of them, and that it is therefore equally likely to be either of them (I assume the latter follows from the former - based on my experiences with unleveled chests in the past, it seems that any level of item within the level range is equally likely, after selection of the type and tier of item of course).

Latchkey may have some value as a skill points booster, so let's suppose a 7sp Latchkey (1/101 chance) is worth 2 LE, a 6sp Latchkey (20/101 chance) is worth 1 LE, a 5sp (also 20/101, as are all the remaining rolls) is worth 32 EB, and 4sp or below Latchkeys generally don't sell, and are therefore worth their blacksmith price. Identification cost is around 40 emeralds, which is negligible for marketable Latchkeys but means that blacksmith'ed Latchkeys apprxomiately break even. This means that on average, a Latchkey is worth on average about 20 EB. Let's suppose that Broken Gauntlet does not sell (have you ever seen it bought or sold?), and therefore is on average worth nothing, since uniques and rares will approximately break even, between identification and blacksmith price, particularly at higher levels. This means that, if found in a loot chest between levels 75 and 81, "Unique Bracelet, Level 76-80" is worth an average of 10 EB. This could help quite a bit when deciding whether or not to take an item.

Further Complications
I used accessories for my examples because they are all loot-exclusive. Conventional wisdom implies that mob drop items are less common in loot chests than loot-exclusive items, since Sitis became much less common after it was changed from loot-exclusive to mob drop. This makes the situation with weapons and armor much more complicated in cases when an unidentified item could be either loot-exclusive or mob drop.

Final Notes
Many people already use the unidentified tags to determine whether or not to keep an item (e.g. Marsh Waders is practically never used so there's not much point in taking "Rare Leggings, Level 88-92"). Hopefully applying this method can help you choose between various different types of items. Ideally we would have a big database with pricechecks for large numbers of items at various rolls, and average prices for those items, but at least this is a start.

 

o.O

 

Hey that's me!

Good choice for describing the chances btw. Fractions are great.