Assassin Skills Discussion

[Crystalion]

I don't know if there is anything to this, but it seemed to me that normal weapons (not exceptional and not unique) tend to have the highest mods when I would shop Mala other merchants in Hell Diff.  However, the best always seemed to be the rare combos, with three or four elemental mods.
...I probably need to review Gambling details if I want to provide advice on gambling for high elemental javelin mods.

For non-weenie base items with magic_level = 0 (i.e. most everything) there is commonly a significant downward tug on alvl by qlvl. If the ilvl is high enough, or the desired alvl low enough, then this doesn't matter. However, as you might guess, it commonly does matter. In short, the way "it seemed" to you is most likely true.

As a practical matter, therefore, it is not uncommon for characters of modest clvl to "want" to gamble only the weenie items (low qlvl therefore higher alvl) looking for those nice combo rares you refer to. The kicker, as was discussed in threads during beta, is that in v1.10 you can upgrade them to elite. As the elite forms of weapons and armor tend to all be pretty equivalent (roughly speaking and with various glaring exceptions, such as sin boot damage) this means that sometimes even a character of fairly high clvl might still want to gamble weenier base items.

Unfortunately the details of all this typically require some research with an affix calculator, to gauge the sweetspot for what you're after. This isn't particularly convenient advice to dispense in a guide, eh? :blink: