How much do you think these are worth? Nothing like them on either auction house.

100M maybe? They can certainly speed things up leveling.

I was thinking around that. I've also thought about stockpiling nice Zuni boots, because blizzard has already stated they will nerf elemental damage (tals ammy, Zuni boots, innas belt, soj, etc...) I think there could be real value there down the line....

Those are nice.

Nuhertz, can you provide a link to the statement from blizzard about nerfing elemental damage? I thought they planned to nerf black damage weapons instead...

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/8569308133

Wyatt: We did not intentionally design physical (black) damage weapons to be superior (damage-wise) to elemental damage weapons. The reason that they are superior is actually due to two bugs.

The first bug is that "+x% damage" was supposed to work for elemental damage only. So, for example, "+5% Fire damage" was supposed to take any fire damage that you did and add 5% more. If you dealt 100 Fire damage, you would get 5% more Fire damage and deal 105 Fire damage in total.

However (and this is where the bug comes in), instead of looking at your elemental damage, the game would always look at your physical damage, and add a percentage of that as elemental damage. So, to continue with my example, "+5% Fire damage" would take 100 physical damage and then produce 100 physical damage, plus 5 fire damage on top of that. As a result, rather than making you want items that matched the elemental damage types you had bonuses for, the bug simply made black weapons the best.

The other bug is the way the MinMaxDamage affix works. As you mention, minimum damage is applied first and increases the maximum damage to be 1 more than the minimum value. This is correct behavior, since we don't want maximums that are less than the minimum. The bug here is that the game always attempts to ensure that the maximum damage on a weapon is higher before maximum damage values are even applied, which results in inflated damage amounts. (We actually fixed this bug in the new version of the Ruby in 1.0.7.)

Wyatt explains what I understand as bugged elemental damage, not black damage. Then explains how it is in the plans to fix it.

We're also looking to revamp itemization, and part of the revamp will include moving to fixed versions of the elemental damage increasing attribute, as well as the MinMaxDamage affix—put simply, we'd fix the bugs for new items. "Legacy" items will continue to use the current (bugged) version. The new versions will likely bear different language such as "Fire damage you deal is increased by 5%" to differentiate from the old mechanics. (That wording isn't final, it’s just an example.)

Thanks a lot! I missed this one! Now i know what to invest in. I'm also buying lots of topaz gems since they said they will be buffed (i hope its in 1.09 )

@lightshunner

Ok, now I must ask for your reference. Where did they say Topaz would be buffed?

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/7895009644

The Topaz, on the other hand, is a different story. No -- the damage from the Topaz is not competitive in comparison to other gems. Thorns damage in general is underpowered in the game and we're looking to correct that n the future. While we're discussing a number of ways to do this, the favored idea internally is to allow Thorns to benefit from your primary stat (Strength, Dexterity, or Intelligence). So if you have, say, 2000 Intelligence as a Wizard or Witch Doctor, then your Thorns items will do +2000% damage, much like your weapon damage. This is, of course, a huge buff to the Thorns property and there is no specific timeline on when we're going to make such a change.

What we don't want to do, however, is buff the Topaz considerably today only to have it be grossly overpowered in the future. This would then put us in the situation where we'd either have to go back and nerf the Topaz, or not move forward with allowing it to buff your primary stat.