Saving Mana with Weapons: A How-To Guide

Guide for Mythical Items:
Are you at the 200m soft mana cap with nothing left to upgrade on your gear and would like to save more mana? Or are you needing to buy a better gear piece but the seller wants more than 200m mana for it? This guide is for you!

After doing some testing today, I believe I have found the knack to saving mana using weapons. Which weapon you use does make a difference!

How this works: You upgrade the damage on your weapon. When the weapon reaches 200m, give or take a couple million, you stop upgrading!

There is one factor I have found important:
1. The base sell value to the tavernkeep.
Previously the base damage of the weapon was important. The base damage no longer applies to the number of upgrades needed to reach 200m.

What matters about the Tavernkeep sell value:

After 7.16b, the tavernkeep sell value impacts the end result less, but still is important. A 3m weapon will still reach 200m value with less upgrades than a 1m weapon.

The more a weapon is worth, the less mana you will have to invest for it to reach the 200m sell value. I recommend using weapons with a sell value no less than 2m.

Thank you Rizen for providing the awesome cost-per-upgrade spreadsheet!
Rizen's Useful Spreadsheets: http://forums.trendyent.com/showthread.php?36106-Rizen-s-Useful-Spreadsheets-amp-Possibly-m


This guide is current as of Patch 7.18b

I'd advise just doing Nightmare Ogre Crush and upgrading that weapon. It always upgrades for more than the cost of the upgrade. Usually make about 15-30 million mana upgrading the weapon.

Is this considered an exploit then, if it sells for more than it costs to upgrade?

Is this considered an exploit then, if it sells for more than it costs to upgrade?

Certainly not an exploit. Weapons with better stats, better damage, better everything, those are worth more, generally speaking. So when you begin upgrading an item, it's logical for the item to be worth more with less upgrades.

As far as the Ogre Party Hat is concerned, that's very interesting. I wonder if other challenge rewards yield the same result?

Nice guide. MitchellW - I suppose it does, but probably not like the projectile speed exploit for mana I heard about many moons ago, but I feel that until this whole 2b mana and 200m shopkeeper caps are lifted, we aren't left with much choice other than to upgrade random weapons in inbox and hope to sell them to people for more (like i've had to do) or to use Disciple's guide which is a lot easier than waiting around in your shop for people to buy a certain item. It's kinda like a bank in that way.

Upgrading for more mana isn't that much of an exploit, or at least not for the amount of mana you get for it now.

You'll find that you actually get more mana by upgrading almost any high base damage mythical weapon a few times (Not just 3m+ weapons) before selling it, rather than selling without upgrading.

You'll also find that upgrading weapons to get mana takes longer and is more tedious than getting mana through NM HC ES/Glitter/Mistymire autosells as well, so it's mostly just useful for banking mana without an alt.

I was going to add something along the lines of the last paragraph of what keldorn said, but he said it better than I ever could, so nice one :)

Certainly not an exploit. Weapons with better stats, better damage, better everything, those are worth more, generally speaking. So when you begin upgrading an item, it's logical for the item to be worth more with less upgrades.

As far as the Ogre Party Hat is concerned, that's very interesting. I wonder if other challenge rewards yield the same result?

I know for sure that the staff from raining goblins does as well, but doesn't upgrade as well as the OPH

From what i have seen after upgrading to around level 25 you start to loose some mana comparing the upgrade cost and the actual value increase. It is not much but some atleast....

This is great. I've been banking mana in weapons for quite some time now, but never really payed attention to gain/loss. My general rule of thumb was always that I would get back ~2/3 of my mana. I had no idea this could be an arbitrage opportunity!

This'll get patched. It's a funny coincidence that Ogre Crush is doing it too, since High Fives used to scale better than their investment.

This works with mobile moxie as well. I just upgraded a 155^ with around 1000K base and it cost less to upgrade than it's worth right now. I don't know the exact figure but it's probably around the 20 mill mark. I spent just over 200 mill and it's worth 254 mill now.

I do this too. O:!

Thanks, I'll try it out. First post btw ;)

Updated guide for 7.16b.

Just FYI, tested a base damage 1000 ogre party hat with 148^. I had to invest 284 million to get it to 200 million. All my ogre party hats that I had invested in that were 200 mill are now all worth 160 million. I have lost billions because of this patch. I think I'm probably through with this game.

Just FYI, tested a base damage 1000 ogre party hat with 148^. I had to invest 284 million to get it to 200 million. All my ogre party hats that I had invested in that were 200 mill are now all worth 160 million. I have lost billions because of this patch. I think I'm probably through with this game.

The party hats were a known mana glitch and were fixed twice now due to the rates being off. They now store mana at the same rate other items do.

Sent from my MB860 using Tapatalk

I had a 200m go to 166m, though I only put about 180m in it. If you really need to trade over 200m, I recommend charging items no higher than 150m and make sure they are very high valued (I think the ogre hat I had started at 1.8m) before you start. You will likely lose mana, but it will not be as much as would normally be.

Updated guide today. The base damage no longer applies!

I apologize if these ideas are already common / debunked, but I just thought of two things:

• 
  
• People talk about the risk and trust inherent in making trades / purchases for more than 200 million mana (which I believe is the max you can trade in one go?), but if you have a bunch of weapons upgraded to be worth 200 million each, if you wanted to buy something worth, say, 500 million, you could make a trade where you give them 100 million mana + 2 weapons worth 200 million, and they give you the 500 million item, all in one go. Essentially making these upgraded weapons a form of currency.
  
• 
  
• If you want to keep your banked mana below 200 million so you can still earn money from beating maps + autosell, but want the option of having more than 200 million mana for when you go shopping, I suppose you could just put a bunch of weapons worth 200 million mana in your AFK shop, priced at 199 million mana. People can buy them and just sell them to the tavern for a quick 1 million mana profit, and you only lose 0.5% of your investment, but have the possibility to get your bank very high, very quickly.
  

I apologize if these ideas are already common / debunked, but I just thought of two things:

• 
  
• People talk about the risk and trust inherent in making trades / purchases for more than 200 million mana (which I believe is the max you can trade in one go?), but if you have a bunch of weapons upgraded to be worth 200 million each, if you wanted to buy something worth, say, 500 million, you could make a trade where you give them 100 million mana + 2 weapons worth 200 million, and they give you the 500 million item, all in one go. Essentially making these upgraded weapons a form of currency.
  
• 
  
• If you want to keep your banked mana below 200 million so you can still earn money from beating maps + autosell, but want the option of having more than 200 million mana for when you go shopping, I suppose you could just put a bunch of weapons worth 200 million mana in your AFK shop, priced at 199 million mana. People can buy them and just sell them to the tavern for a quick 1 million mana profit, and you only lose 0.5% of your investment, but have the possibility to get your bank very high, very quickly.
  

The shop version is still just as dangerous for the mana giver. As for mana tokens, the problem is the inherent inefficiency of investing that mana, especially after the recent nerfs. You're only going to get a 60-70% return. Suprisingly, every billion mana transaction I've made has been very smooth, going both ways. So I haven't found an incentive to do a multi weapon trade.

In contrast, the Anni and Hellfire Torch trades in D2 were horrific. Although, funny story, the one guy who did try to scam me out of my Hellfire Torch ended up giving me a Ber for free. The weirdest way I've ever made 15 SoJs at the time was by Stockholm Syndrome.

as a junk seller. i don't even accept mana for floor items. i only accept items wroth 200, 400, 600 or 800 milllion as currency. Otherwise, when you sell 1 item, you have to shut down your shop because of the 2b cap. very annoying and inefficient process.

The shop version is still just as dangerous for the mana giver. As for mana tokens, the problem is the inherent inefficiency of investing that mana, especially after the recent nerfs. You're only going to get a 60-70% return. Suprisingly, every billion mana transaction I've made has been very smooth, going both ways. So I haven't found an incentive to do a multi weapon trade.

In contrast, the Anni and Hellfire Torch trades in D2 were horrific. Although, funny story, the one guy who did try to scam me out of my Hellfire Torch ended up giving me a Ber for free. The weirdest way I've ever made 15 SoJs at the time was by Stockholm Syndrome.

Ah, I see, that's nice to hear. I'm still too poor to even contemplate making purchases at that level :P. Though, I apologize, I'm a bit confused by your first sentence. Could you explain it like I'm lvl 5? :kobold:

Ah, I see, that's nice to hear. I'm still too poor to even contemplate making purchases at that level :P. Though, I apologize, I'm a bit confused by your first sentence. Could you explain it like I'm lvl 5? :kobold:

Well, if you had, say, 5x200mil purchases in a store. You still have to purchase 1 bils worth of mana before the guy can hit the trade button. You can't do it simultaneously. So, the guy can just as easily keep the money and not hit trade if you're manually trading mana, or if you bought his 5 crap items. Luckily this community is the best I've seen in that respect.

Out of topic, i know, but why cant we at least have our mana invested beeing the same as the weapon value, instead of losing so much mana. Just to get a 200M mana token, you kinda need to invest.. i dont know, like 300M or what, and thats a huge loss. Ye, most ppl will say, dont upgrade something till 200M, stop at 150 or 100M, but still... Everyone is using this invest thingy because it makes trades easier and ofc more safe, and lets ppl be able to store mana and keep farming, without having to stop at the 200M soft or the 2b hard cap (which is stupid anw). Dunno really, but hope TE can do something bout this weapon values compared to the mana invested to them. Not change back to the OPH time, investing 150M to get 200, but at least full value or something closer to that than it is now.