Any Class semi-newb question about rings, braces and necklaces

I am a 78 and have done a lot of builds, but still plenty I don't know. One thing that has me really scratching my head is the bling as you move up levels. I have a decoder Ring from lv 41 sitting in my ender chest. It has +4% spell, +6%loot and +10% xp. The xp does have a * next to it that I see on some other items; not exactly sure what that means. But as I move up and browse the market, i see things at higher levels that don't seem any better on bonuses and may eve add some deficits and negative hp yet carry a hefty price tag. Why is that?

 

The star next to the identification means that its above average I think. An identification can have up to 3 stars, 3 stars meaning it has the maximum value and no stars meaning it is at or below average. Some accessories with deficits can still have significant upsides to them, like recalcitrance, which although it decreases your health by 2600, it also gives you attack speed, something very hard to come by on accessories and extremely valuable in melee builds. That's why its so valued on the TM.

 

Yeah, there are examples where I get it, like Knucklebones where you get that attack speed and some other bonuses that are better than anything I have seen at lower tiers. But then I look at something like Ingress, a fabled lv 105 item, that only seems on par with some lv 40 to 70 rings I have or have had. I took my current build and set the level up to 105 and tried swapping in various rings I own replacing them with the Ingress and saw gains that weren't all that significant and could even be cancelled out by the actual rolls. In a couple of cases, looking at what I actually have versus the one I saw on the market, they absolutely were.

 

The power of ingress (and forbearance for a similar example) isn't really its identifications, but rather its skill point bonuses. Ingress and Forbearance both give a whopping +10 skill points which can really help in late game builds when you're trying to wear multiple pieces of armor with high skill point requirements. Skill point bonuses don't have as much of an impact at lower levels since items tend to have lower skill point requirements but they become really meta in late game builds. Here's an example:
https://hppeng-wynn.github.io/build...40OH0ux0e1V111B161g00001006COzz++++-jdNpdfIAR
In this build, convergence has high skill point requirements of 65 intelligence and defense, and slayer has high requirements of 60 agility and 75 dexterity. This, in addition to libra's 33 strength requirement, means that I need 298 skill points to equip everything, which is impossible with only the 200 skill points you have at max level. In this build, I'm using a lot of accessories that pretty much only give skill points. Each summa gives me 10 skill points, prowess gives me 20, and diamond fusion necklace gives me 25. Thanks to those additional skill points from the accessories (and 8 more from tomes) I'm able to use both slayer and convergence in the same build, a particularly strong combination since both of them decrease the 3rd spell cost, giving me 1 mana uppercuts. This is pretty much only possible using skill point bonus items. That's why accessories with skill point bonuses can be so valued even with mediocre identifications otherwise, it allows you to use more item combinations than would be possible without them.