New Sticky in PC?

I'm wondering what you guys think about this, because a LOT of PC items are usually pieces of junk and a waste of the space in the PC imo..
Couldn't there be some sort of sticky that could help new players sort out the merchfood from the valuables or useful ones? Because there is only a sticky about Greens, mods etc etc, but nothing on actual weapons.. That would save the new guys a. the effort to post a PC b. wait for someone to tell em it is merch food c. save the guy the effort to tell the other guy that his junk is merch food...
I know no-one forces me, or anyone else to post on their threads and tell em it is a piece of junk, but I see loads of even blue q13 nonmax stuff being pc'ed.. Or just general skins that aren't even worth trying to sell, and it could save ppl effort and time..

I'd suggest a list with all the common NF skins, a guide on how to recognize valuable stuff, meaning the OS ones, the q9 15^50's only actually, cause those are the only ones that can go for 25k+ (which is a lot to some), a guide on shields and their use/value, wands, foci etc etc.. If necessary, i'd even like to contribute to it, to make it as good as possible, because it would help a lot of ppl out..

There was another thread with this same kind of idea in this section a couple months ago here if you're interested. Over the years in PC, there have been attempts at guides with popular skins by campaign.

My reservations about the feasibility of such a thing as you suggest are about the same as those I posted there. It's a nice idea, but the practical application of making and keeping such a list up-to-date and accurate is quite a task.

If you do take it on, please be careful to make it obvious when each price or claim of "merch vs. not merch" was last updated. Odds are very high that it will get out-of-date over time. At that point, it can do more harm than good if folks can easily mistake it for current.

I do wish you the best of luck with it!

I think this is a good idea, but also agree with everything Luny said. Only recently have I started checking if the skins I've picked up are worth anything, because if you haven't been paying attention to ingame WTS/WTB or guru then you won't know how much a max r8, nice skin weapon will sell for. So even though I've been playing for years, I still have no idea what skins are worth anything.

there use to be one pre-nf when skins were actually worth something, arrival made many on-inscripts above req9 lose alot of value common-skin wise

I know it's hard to keep up to date, but there are enough people that know enough bout prices to help out.. I'll give it a try some day, but kind of busy now, so it'll have to wait..
And raptors, what the hell did you write there?

There used be guides for rare skins before nf for diff skins and reqs 15^50, but nowadays its just pointless. And many ppl tried do this before hardly any succeed, it takes so much time and is easyly outdated, and updating everything takes goodwhile and required alot knowledge which many ppl dont have

Great idea in theory, but near impossible to implement. There are so many skins and skin variation ingame that it is difficult to keep track of what is worth something and what not, not even taking into account that some skins / requirements (r7/8 dual modded inherrent shield) become worth more over time and others worth less (100K+e for an Elemental sword nowadays anyone?).

is an elemental sword worth that much?

It was when Eotn was released. an r9 Elemental sword was around 100K+5e. Nowadays you would be lucky if someone feels sorry for you and buys it for 5K to make you stop spamming trade chat.

Some weapons/Offhands increase in worth depending on requirement and dont matter so much for skins. Other items loose worth like mad (See Elemental sword example) and others stay relatively stable or even rise in price depending on the exact skin and stats sought after.

Other skins are virtually identical apart from minor details (Tyrian / Canthan Dragon Axe for example) which have massive price differences for weapons with the same stats.

Dragpn axe as Serpent axe?

And Elemental swords werent much in eotn release rly, but at Nf release u were able get 400e for r9 one and 200-300e for r9 colossal scimitar

And before Nf. r9 15^50 Sephis axe was 500-600k, same for Deadbow

Now theyre 5k. inscription ruined that. as well as Hardmode with easy farmability in low lvl areas..

I know I'm new, and I'm far from a power trader... but I do have a suggestion from my end of things of what might be useful - and not quite so hard to maintain.

Instead of a list of skins/req's/etc. listing relatively current sale prices (like the Greens or Inscrip/Mods lists), which would take an entire team of people working non-stop to maintain... why not just a list of the more popular skins? No prices... just "if you find something with these skins, it's worth investigating further by searching this site, looking at the following (links) auction sites, looking at the GWestimator, etc."

Include some information about what req's or inherent modifiers/inscription slots are potentially desirable... and an explanation of WHY they're so popular, too. Like I have a shield I know is worth about 8k, because I've found multiple instances of it bought/sold at that price, but I don't really know why THAT shield is so desirable, but some other nearly identical shield isn't... and it's not the skin.

I tend to take the time to look up nearly everything I find when I'm doing a dungeon crawl, just because doing so is part of the "pleasure" of playing for me... and there have been any number of things I WOULD have merch'd, based on assumptions I have about what people want/don't want, had I not spent the time to look everything up. People generally don't want to invest the kind of time I do in looking things up... it's not a pleasurable part of their game play. Doing so feeds into my OCD - others aren't like that. So in some ways, traders/collectors lose out by the information not being readily and easily accessible and understandable by new players... they're merch'ing things you are looking for. They just don't realize it.

I happened across a thread where you guys were tracking information about low-req high-dmg items, trying to find picture examples of each. I happened to find a blue sword in the range of one of the pictures you didn't yet have. Took a screen shot and submitted it and it was added to the list. But how many hundreds or thousands of other people came across that same item, with the same stats, and had no idea that someone WANTED to know something about it? Simply because they didn't understand that, yes, a low-req item with a close-to-max damage output was kind of unusual. Not "valuable" in the sense of gold sale worth... but "valuable" in the sense of furthering knowledge.

I've always assumed that the only q8 someone might want is a) gold, b) max damage, c) inscribable, d) modifiable... but is that correct? Would someone want one that is just blue? Or lacking an inscription slot? Or less-than-max? Do they even drop with those parameters? I have no idea... and finding out that specific information isn't as simple as searching this site. And if you really knew just how many hours I spent researching and gaining information, and I STILL don't know if my assumptions are correct, you'd easily be able to see why there's a lot of valuable items slipping through the inventories of other newbies... all because a basic guide of what MIGHT be valuable (and WHY) isn't readily available, isn't compiled in one location.

Having a sticky that basically says... "these are the things that MAY indicate your items are potentially more valuable...and here's WHY those things are potentially more valuable... and here's HOW they would potentially want to mesh together (gold/purple/blue and req and dmg and inscrip/uninscrip and inherent/uninherent) to be valuable..." would be, well, INvaluable to new players - and likely mean you'd end up completing those amazing collections that much faster.

I want to add something else... I'm sorry I'm being so wordy on this subject, but strangely enough I'm a little bit passionate about it.

There's a lot of knowledge you guys have that you assume is just "common sense." I've run into that more than once on Guru... I had a few people give me crap about the fact that I had a rough time with a particular quest, because the "best way to do the quest" was a matter of "common sense." It's old hat to them, so they couldn't understand why I struggled with it... and even told me that the reason I couldn't find information about how to beat the quest was because it's "so easy."

Maybe it is... actually, from where I sit NOW, I understand why (from their perspective) beating the quest was a matter of common sense and easy... but at the time I was faced with the quest, I lacked other knowledge about the game/game mechanics... and fact is, it WAS hard for me because of that.

It's a very similar issue when it comes to value of items... to you, who have been trading for so long... it's "common sense" that "X inherent mod will only appear with Y skin on Z weapon because game update ABC made all of those inscribable except DEF - so if you find a DEF, everyone wants it." (Yes, I totally made that up LOL)

You not only know what's in-demand, you know WHY it is...

We don't. We find DEF... we see that it DOESN'T have an inscription slot (and inscription slots are always better, right??? )... so it must be junk for the merchant.

Never mind the fact that there are a hundred collectors chomping at the bit to find DEF at any price.

Some of us are playing an MMO for the first time - me! - despite a history of gaming which probably extends well before many of YOU were born. I played Pong. On my TV. With a bulky console that had two paddles and switches. It was - at the time - the coolest. thing. ever. I thought Jumpman was amazing, I couldn't believe the graphics... in color, even! No more "Do you wish to go North? Y/N" for me! PacMan was truly awesome... and I was the Donkey Kong queen at the arcade.

That doesn't mean I inherently understand why someone will shower me in ectos if I can provide them with a Bone Dragon Staff... but couldn't care less about a Dragon Staff the Jade Brotherhood drops on the ground.

We don't know the game the way you do, we don't know the limitations the way you do, we don't know the rarity of skins the way you do, we don't know that the last update nerfed something important the way you do... and if you're not telling us, we won't be on the lookout for it - and thus, we won't be making it available for you to wheel and deal it out of us. LOL

Indeed, perhaps a guide on what is valuable is too hard and too much work to make, but couldn't we like make a guide that says what is definitely merchfood and what isn't? That would prolly help as well, because, it might be discouraging as well when some new guys post something and we simple say: it's junk, perhaps they DO get something valuable in the future and want a PC but they think "well, they said my last stuff is all junk, and I don't wanna be humiliated again, so it'll prolly be merchfood again" That could mean a loss of a lot of valuable and perhaps very wanted items.. And it would be a lot easier to make just a "how to recognize merchfood guide"

The idea won't work if you plan on doing all skins. If you stick to the main dungeon skins you might have a fighting chance at keeping it up to date.
Emerald blade
eternal blade
obsidian edge
frog scepter
bone dragon staff
and all the other EotN specific drops. Those are skins that you'd have a hope maintaining a price order on and it might be a good idea. The r8-13 uninscribable market is too unpredictable and too vast to consider charting.

I don't mean to repeat "you can't do it!" here, honest. However, I thought you might find this helpful. I went into the PC section and sorted threads by Views rather than last post, from the beginning rather than last month. I found the following abandoned threads which attempted to do something like this.

If you're serious about this, perhaps you could review these threads for ideas ... both of what to do and what not to do ... to help make yours better stand the test of time.

Again, I beg you to be very careful with your formatting. Make it obvious when a line/entry was last updated. Also, PLEASE avoid any claim, even implied, like, "if something is not on this list, then it's merch food." That seems inherently so very dangerous to me.

These are VERY old and out-of-date threads. For reference ONLY. Do not post replies and resurrect these things.

Prices Baseline v2 ... from Dec. 2005
Baseline Pricing on Rare Skin Weapons ... last updated Jan. 2006, when GW was just the one campaign.

Nightfall Rare Weapons Price Guide ... last updated Jan. 2008
Gwen Weapon Price Guide (Under Construction) ... last updated Dec. 2007

Item List ... a noble attempt ending (~Apr. 2006) it total ragequit.
Weapon Price Guidlines ... from the same OP as above, last edited Sept. 2005

noobies guide to valuing ... from May 2006

I remeber seeing threads like these...and thinking to myself...what kinda of masochist would do this to themselves...

My little input...
If it were to be done. I think it'd be best to have it as a team effort with one person keeping an eye on swords one person on axes ect. Focus only on inscribable weapons for the reason I think it was carnage said about the uninsc market being volitile and what may sell for 100k one week might get half of that the next. Focus not on actually values but whether it's worth getting pc'ed.

Some people with 2 long posts may have mentioned all that already but they were to long and consecutive for me to read past the first 2 lines.

Except one thing he said.
Shall I slap you know or do you wish to wait until I can grab my gauntlet.

AncientPC, Derrty and raine all great guys, shame they quit. I did one for unid way back when you could get 200k for unid Summit axe...good days

These kind of threads do not work. They require far more effort then it's worth putting in.

That's "one thing SHE said," thank you very much.

And I'd rather wait for the gauntlet... I like shiny.

so sorry.

and...
*slaps you with this*
although technically thats more of a glove then a guantlet.

ahh those threads are RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing epic. i used the rare weapons one for quite awhile..

Those threads are way too hard to maintain. Raine had a team of people helping and he couldn't keep up. We had a ton of epic traders helping with it, and different people updating, and it is just too much work. Best bet would be doing the idea about posting basic items that could have some value. Just listing the random dungeon rare is not going to help what the OP stated.

What about splitting the PC area somehow, perhaps martial weapons / shields / casting and offhands / minipets / other stuff. That way people could more easily find comparable items that have already been PC'd.

So, if for example I found a Celestial shield, I could look in the shield area for a comparable one before asking for even posting a PC request...

Minipet/other stuff already has a guide, although it's pretty outdated (some are januari 2010.. so)

But once I can find enough time, I'll try to make a "how to recognize merchfood" try-out, and I'll post it on here as a word doc, so you guys can alter it as well.. But that's gonna take me an hour at the least, so can't do it right now

Tons of PC requests for stuff that even the merch would think twice before accepting could be avoided if people would research their drops on wiki.

If it drops in many places, then it's a safe bet it's merch fodder.

How it dyes - stuff that dyes well is worth more than stuff that only dyes poorly, or not at all.

Req is important - the higher the req, the lower the price.

Max dmg or armor/en - if it does not have max and req is 9 or greater, it's merch fodder (precious few exceptions, like a q9 14-28 Silverwing etc).

Rarity is very important - most of the times only gold drops are worth anything. There are a few purple items of worth (only crysta comes to mind now tbh), but this can be seen on wiki.

Common sense, eh?

Also, people rarely check the PC forum to see if items like the ones they have have been PCed lately. Many a time did I PC an item twice in one day, from 2 different users. Also, checking the wtb and wts forums can help, too - one can see if someone else has sold items like his and see what kind of bids he got etc.

Conclusion? Don't be lazy! A bit of research can provide you with the answer you want, and some more game-related knowledge. Of course, if you still have doubts, then, by all means, post it on the PC forum and someone is bound to answer you. There are items that are hard to PC without solid knowledge of the game's economy, as are most OS items, but a good chunk of the stuff that needs PCing is inscr, so...

Thats still too vague. There are still too many exceptions to the low requ non max rule (Shields, 20/20 non inscribable staves with maybe 11-21 damage etc.). You see there are always exceptions to any rule (How else would politicians have survived untill now? ).

@TheGizzy Non-Inscribable weapons are often much more worth than inscribable ones. Those Dragon Staves you ignored from the Jades coudl have easily been worth more than any BDS if it were a perfect r9 20/20 Curses for example.

The idea behind that is players are paying for the rarity of the item. The BDS is so expensive because, for some reason players think it makes them look good running around with an anorexic dragon pinned to a stick and that particular staff is a rare drop from just one particular chest. Non-inscribable weapons (Caster weapons for popular skill lines mainly are extremely rare to find in perfect matching (Or even non matching and usefull) combinations. Mostly you will get junk like r10 divine favors + 19% HCT Soul Reapíng which is both non matching, non maxed and completely useless for any build because it requires 2 primary attributes which is impossible.
However, if you get that one r9 Curses Canthan Dragon Staff with 20/20 Curses, then it will easily be more worth than a Bone Dragon Staff.

Very true. Those were meant as some sort of general guidelines, mostly for inscr weapons.

Bottom line, I doubt very much someone has the time/willpower to make and maintain such a thread. Great ideea and it would be very useful, but such an undertaking is... wow.

there are many exeptions, but still enough peoples who are too lazy or not interested to read a big PC thread. i have many experienced ingame friends who just dont want to have a look on guru, they prefer to ask me about some items or simple give them to merchant without any agony... what i finally want to say? pplz who are too lazy to use search tool will keep posting their crap (or not crap, whatever) items in pc-threads, and doing aloooooot of work for 50 normal peoples (sorry about that)?.. im not sure
but it may be just interesting!

As others have said, there's way too much variance between the prices of Canthan/Tyrian uninsc stuff and inscribables to keep a thorough PC list of *every* weapon/shield/offhand. It's just too much work for one person imo.

Here's the new link for the inscribable list that I put together on GuildWiki (originally in response to the thread that Luny linked earlier). It's obviously not intended to be a pure PC sorta thing, but rather a rough guide for inscribable stuff that's worth keeping - and getting a more precise PC for. There's obviously a huge difference between the price of (say) a req9 insc Grinning Recurve and a Silverwing with the same stats, so the PC forum is your friend.

As I said in that earlier thread, anyone who's familiar with prices should feel free to edit the list if they notice something I might've missed. And if anyone feels ambitious enough to attach an approximate price range to any of the items, that's cool too.

As far as Tyrian/Canthan stuff goes, it might be easier for someone to write up something outlining which inherent mods make an item valuable (rather than trying to PC every single item).

What we need is someone with OCD who's willing to put aside a considerable part of their life to update all those great old price guides.

Not meaning to trivialise that affliction, but that's what it would take.

Hey, I am all for anyone who wants to spend the next 5 years of their life trying to get that up and running.....however, it shant be me (I STILL have no idea of the price of weapons....outside of a few skins that I KNOW are rare (and will never see).)
there is just too vast of an amount of weapons to keep track of it all, and then the thread would be of an epic length---
most peeps wont even bother looking thru anything longer than a few lines:

tl,dr.



but anyone wishing to undertake such a task....would be welcome to try.

umm, non-insciptables in most cases are worth more then inscriptables, a thread for inscriptables from nf and nightfall could limit the amount of crap people need pc for.

I mean no offense by this, and I don't mean to pick on superraptors or single him out. But that statement seems incredibly misleading to me. I'd guess there's a MUCH higher percentage of inherent gear that is "merch food" than inscribable gear, simply because so many of the fixed inherent mods that drop are things people don't want and can't change.

I also think folks are likely to have a harder time searching/figuring PC on their own for inherent gear than for inscribable gear.

In June 2010, I asked this section if inherent vs. inscription really did still reasonably raise the value/demand for common, core skins available in both flavors. You might be interested to read some of the replies here.

Short Version

I'm chiming in to warn against any direct or implied statement in a PC guide which reads like, "Inherent gear is usually worth more than inscribable gear." I do not think it's a case of usually at all, and any such statement needs some good context or people who need help with PC will easily misunderstand.

If they are posting a worthless item for a PC odds are they won't take the time to search or check a stickied thread lol.

Hmmm... Kind of true.. But at least some will, but will the time saved from having to say "merch" be equal or greater than the time put in the new Sticky?

just saying that inherent gear should always be asked to pc'ed for and a sticky for inscriptable skins from eotn and nf could limit clutter.