How to Test Unidentified Items

There is a large market in unidentified golds, most of them rare skins. Newer players will buy these thinking that they stand a chance of hitting the jackpot with a super-rare item. This never happens because it's a fairly simple matter to determine almost all the mods on a weapon. In the spirit of education stopping scams, here's exactly how you do it. Testing is easiest in the PvP training area and outside the Monastery.

SHIELDS:

Shields have 2 mods, the most popular being

1a: Equip the shield outside. Do you get a health bonus?
1b: If there was no generic health bonus, go into a stance and check for one.
1c: If there was no stance bonus, put an enchantment on yourself and check for one.
1d: If there was no enchantment bonus, get something to hex you. Plague devourers and the torch of hexes are good choices.

2. Repeat the same tests, but have an enemy hit you with each condition. If your damage drops to zero during any test, you have a -damage mod.

Other mods on shields are not very valuable, if you don't have a perfect/near perfect combination of a -damage and a +health mod, the shield isn't worth much.

WARRIOR AND ASSASSIN WEAPONS:

Meet the weapons proficiency requirement. Equip wild blow. Smack a target dummy with wild blow a few times and note the damage. Wild blow gives constant damage because it is a critical hit. Did you gain energy when you hit the target? If so, you have a zealous mod. If you do extra life stealing damage, that's a vampiric mod. Do you get odd damage increases ever few hits? Then you have a sundering mod. Make sure to check for a +health mod, although you don't have to go into stances and enchant yourself for weapons.

Not the damage from wild blow uner each condition, stanced, hexed, over 50% health, enchanted, and under 50% health. To find the percent you have, Divide the amount of increase by the amount of the normal hit. That means that if you did 100 damage with a normal hit, and 115 damage while enchanted, (115-100)/100 = .15. This is where it is important to meet the req of the weapon, as a higher damage number gives you more accuracy.

BOWS:

Since we don't have wild blow here, we'll have to be a little more roundabout. Grab an assassin primary, meet the req of the bow, max out critical strikes, and bring critical eye. Note that this doesn't work for req 13 bows. You only want to pay attention to the damage done when you critical, that is when you gain 3 energy on a hit.

CASTER WEAPONS:

Caster weapons don't have a lot of value to them. Equip it and check if you have any +health or +energy. If you don't have those, the weapon is trash.

Its better when testing weapons to have a clean uncustomized test weapon in your inventory (collectors are fine). Set the weapon attribute to 12 (this is the easiest - 100% of the dmg) not just the req of the weapon.

Equip your 15^50 Test weapon and Wild Blow..Equip your test weapon..Wild Blow. If the numbers are different...then thats it..just sell Unid. only REALLY REALLY REALLY rare/popular skins sell for any decent amount in stance or enchanted form..If you have a weapon like this, you can hit again encahnted and in a stance respectively and see if the number is the same as your test weapons.

:P This is nice info to put out, but I remember a while ago some people got really angry and made them take down this sort of info so ppl who sell UN-ID weapons would still have a market. It was a pretty stupid complaint, and I'm sure ppl who sell Un-ID weapons,like you said, do this themselves to make sure they're selling crap instead of good stuff, but just saying ppl might get angry again and have it taken down again. :P

Didnt Ubermancer post about this a while back O_o