inflation investment

I observe that valuable items cost more and more high runes.
A 20/20 torch could be bought for a single

Jah rune 2 years ago.
I asume that there is some kind of inflation.
Maybe due to bots picking up high runes; but the reason is not relevant here.

What can I do to not be a victim of it and all my

Jah runes are worth less and less?
I could buy high torches...but they need shared space.

Do you guys have other ideas what one can buy to avoid loosing Wealth due to inflation?
It should be something that keeps its worth but most important, it should be easily sellable. Like

Jah runes today.

Ist runes might keep a sort of golden standard

If you got lots of

Jah/

Ber, you may also invest into 3/20/20 Fine Small Charm of Vita. Not sure if bots id and check charms. Same goes for other useful magical items, like 3 WC + 3

Find Item and/or BO Barb Helmets or 3 Combat Skills + 3 FoH Scepters. All of them at best with 2 OS. Tri-Res rare

Boots, 3/20 Gloves, 2/20 Rare gloves should also be quiet stable or grow in value. Oh and there are also great crafts you may consider investing in like 2/20 Sorc/Nec/Barb Amus. JMODs and other useful Jeweler's Items also grew in value since release...and then there are perfect rw bases.

The more the economy matures, the more people won't be looking for mid-range gear anymore, let alone low-range. You can see this happen with every new ladder season as folks quickly progress from "WOHOO!

Shako!" to "great...another worthless

Shako..." in a matter of days. In the mid to later stages of that same maturation, the for lack of a better word "upper class gamers" - i.e. those with their core gear and multiple high runes to blow - won't care about a random high rune anymore. They also won't care about mid-roll endgame gear. Or to a large extent even higher roll endgame gear. They start only caring about true top-end gear and perfect rolls. Effectively, "wtb

Ber to make Enigma with" gets replaced with "wtb 775/15/15 Enigma" and the like.

That's why something like a 3/20/20 or perfect torches or really any (not tooooo common) perfect roll on endgame pieces will just keep moving up and up in rune value while the high runes you pay form them become comparatively less valuable. This is especially true for pvp gear as that's a whole 'nother customer base to buy the stuff.
3/20/20s actually stand out in that list of perfect stuff as once you cross the threshold from eRich to eFilthyRich, HRs become largely irrelevant and 3/20/20s have long since established themselves as the common true top-end currency.

While you can observe this every ladder season, you see the whole thing 'on crack' on non-ladder as that's by definition significantly more matured than any ladder season ever could and keeps being bumped even further every time ladder rolls over into it with a season ending.
To some extent, the NL maturity also carries over into future L seasons, due to (V)RM trading allowing for NL<>L Wealth transfers.

Ist is a bit special in terms of holding value, largely because it has long since been the established currency for "anything low" when looking at endgame trading. Specifically, that's looking at packs of crafting mats, lower runes for rerolls and that sort of thing. I.e. the stuff you keep buying in the hopes of turning something into a perfect roll with it.
As a result,

Ist value itself tends to be relatively stable, allowing you to for example trade an early

Ber for 20+ or if early enough even 30+

Ist while buying back said

Ber for a handful of

Ist a bit later in the season.
Though if you're looking at long-term "protected storage" of significant Wealth, turning everything into Ists will inherently cost you a ton of mule space so it isn't really ideal in that sense.
(Which in turn actually increases value even further because the truly "eWealthy" won't waste their space on a billion Ists..they'll keep HRs to trade down to Ists as/when needed to turn into crafting mats and the like, again ensuring Ists always keep a healthy market value).

Blubbalutsch wrote: 3 months ago

...
Not sure if bots id and check charms.
...

They did 20 years ago so...they better still do that.
Given, I'm not really familiar with D2:R bots beyond a couple random videos of them and the ones I saw randomly joining my games and those were all significantly worse than they were 20 yrs ago (age of AI my ass) but IDing and keeping selectively is about as basic functionality as it gets for something inherently designed to get you loot.

To turn it the other way around, it's less the items that cost less than the currency (the runes) that deflate due to them being more and more common.

There's no truly safe way to store value, because at any moment blizzard might make a new runeword or item that changes the relative value of everything.

Baal charms used to be worth something. If

Cham were put in a new runeword its value could skyrocket. The limit on

Cham's value is 2xJah.

A small charm might be perfect now, but who knows if it will stay that way.

The best way to handle possible market volatility is diversification of investment into a variety of staples. Some of it will out perform, some of it will not.

I recently hit 200

Jah runes in my stash and figured it'd be best to start diversifying. Just bought my first 5/20 small charm for 38

Jah! The 3/20/20's are like ~200

Jah, which is just CRAZY to even think about trading.. Was glad I could keep the 5/20 to under 40

Jah, as any more than that and I would most likely be scammed (given my luck with trusting people).

But yea, if you have

Jah's coming out your ears, might as well buy a perfect charm or two, just in case.. Pally 20/20 torches seem to go for around 40

Jah as well right now. Might see if I can snag one of those next (and would actually be a useful upgrade).

Since

Jah to a 3/20/20 is a huge

Leap in value, here are some steppingstones:

5 All res/7MF SC ~ 5-10

Jah
5 All res/20 life SC ~ 35-40

Jah
3/20/20 SC ~ 140-200

Jah

A little offtopic but...

Zero187 wrote: 3 months ago

I recently hit 200

Jah runes in my stash...

I play single player and I just found my first

Jah. You guys talk about hundreds. Insane numbers for me, but congrats to you!

Florian_G wrote: 3 months ago

A little offtopic but...

Zero187 wrote: 3 months ago

I recently hit 200

Jah runes in my stash...

I play single player and I just found my first

Jah. You guys talk about hundreds. Insane numbers for me, but congrats to you!

Thanks, been playing almost every day since launch about 2.5 years ago. Didn't get the chance to experience original D2, so had a lot of time to make up for! I've found 19 Jahs so far and done a TON of trading to get the rest. Maybe close to 2000 trades or so between this website and Traderie just selling all the stuff I find. Most valuable item sold was a perfect upped

Guillaume's Face that went for 20

Jah.

Me, sitting on my last 2x

Jah from all-time high of 6x

Jah all made thru trades be like: I'm still a rich dude! :')

I mean, let's keep a little perspective. Ladders reset the value each season start, so largely irrelevant in terms of inflation. Git while the gittin's gud, then wait for next Ladder.

On the non-ladder, in two years some stuff has doubled in

Jah price. Not too bad if you ask me. Also need to keep in mind that something costing more Jahs means something else sells for more Jahs, making it easier to get Jahs to spend Jahs.

It isn't like in real life. No danger that you are going to pay 2

Jah for a

Griffon's Eye, then the Eye Bubble bursts and they go for a

Lem. Unless of course the Devs break the drop rate on something or introduce The

Helm of New Hotness that makes Griffons seem about as good as a Rock Stopper.

Just my 2 cents, which has usually traded at around a

Chipped Topaz. One person gave me an

El Rune for it once; that was a good day.

Perfect charms hold their value very well and I use them as stores of Wealth - this was true from D2 original and I believe should hold true for quite some time (perfect rolls are v rare, highly desirable and very condensed in space: think of them as gold in real economy)

The trade-off is liquidity: these very high value items can take time to liquidate (sell) at the price you want, unless you accept low-ball, instant/ next-min sales

It's just like the real economy: no one trades gold in bulk, and super-prime property will take time to sell at the best price

Only store items where the price point outweighs the needed space to store them as opposed to storing jahs in the same space.
Best items to hold value while being liquid at the same time:

20/11 small charms
5/7mf and 5/10eg small charms
20/5 small charms
Perfect torches
25/20 (20/15) griffon
15/30/2 CoA
3/19+/19+ small charms
20/20/x annis
40+life/skillers (sorc, pcomb, pnb, jav, assa, ele/shape)
775 enigmas in 15ed bases, hopefully 15/0 and 15/15. 15/x valuable but not very liquid.

I guess jsp users have this one in the bag because they can hoard their currency without keeping any items on them whatsoever while staying 100% liquid at all times.

I’d recommend the gear focused for high end PvP, those guys pay through the nose for 0.000001% increase in quality.

The rarest magic items are among the most expensive stuff in the game and will almost never go down in value.

Examples include jmods, +6 javalins, sorc wands that give +6 to a main skill and that mastery with 20fcr and 2 open sockets, ect. (That last one would hold all the Wealth i currently have - and I’m not exactly a budget player anymore!)