The twelve versions of the same item

Two listings, same name, same item level, wildly different prices. Usually that is not a bargain — it is a different item. Here is how Midnight encodes stat allocation, and how we worked out which number means what.

The thing the auction house will not tell you

Search for a bind-on-equip with secondary stats and you will find copies of it at prices that make no sense next to each other. One at 40,000 gold, one at 199,000, both item level 282. Nothing in the listing explains the gap.

The gap is the stats. A piece that rolled haste and versatility can ship with the haste share large and the versatility share small, or the other way round, or roughly even. Those are three different goods with three different markets, and to a player stacking one stat they are not remotely interchangeable.

Six possible pairs, each in three allocations, plus single-stat rolls. That is why a single "average price" for an item like this is worse than useless — it is the average of things nobody would swap for one another.

Where the split is stored

Every auction listing carries a set of modifiers — small numbered key/value pairs the game uses to describe what exactly this copy is. Two of them matter here:

Both are present on the same listing, and both orders of every pair are live on the auction house at any time. The order is not cosmetic — it is the version.

Which one is the big share?

Nothing labels them. Type 29 and type 30 are just numbers, and getting them the wrong way round would mislabel every item on the site — confidently, and in a way nobody would notice until they bought the wrong piece.

So we did not guess. We took a listing whose tooltip we could read in game, and worked backwards.

The item was a Raging Storm Sash on Ravencrest, priced at 199,999 gold. Its tooltip read 79 haste, 38 mastery and 50 leech. Leech is the useful part: it is a tertiary stat, it appears on only a small fraction of listings, and it is stored as a separate bonus id entirely. That makes it a fingerprint — of all the copies on that realm, exactly one carried leech at that price.

Having pinned the listing by its fingerprint, we could read its raw modifiers with confidence about which physical item they belonged to:

The amounts are on a different scale than the tooltip, which is expected. What matters is the pairing: haste was the big stat in game, and haste is the one carried by type 29. That settles it in one observation, and the leech fingerprint is what makes the observation trustworthy rather than a coincidence.

Older gear does not carry the modifiers

Gear from before this system arrived splits its stats too, but stores it as a plain suffix bonus with no ordering information. For those we work the allocation out from the stat amounts themselves: when one stat's share exceeds the other by more than a few percent, it is an ordered roll; when they sit close together, it is an even split.

That threshold is deliberately conservative. Calling an even roll "high haste" is a worse error than declining to call it at all, because the first sends someone to the wrong item and the second only omits it from a filter.

How this shows up when you search

Every stat combination on the site is one filter bit, so you can ask for exactly the version you want:

The filter is applied per listing, not per realm. That distinction matters more than it sounds: asking a realm "do you have a socketed one and a fast one" is a different question from "do you have one auction that is both", and only the second is a thing you can actually buy.

What to do with this

Before you buy a bind-on-equip with secondaries, check which allocation you are looking at. The cheap listing is often cheap because it rolled the split nobody on your class wants — which is a genuine bargain if you are the exception, and a waste if you assumed all copies were equal.

And if you are selling: list the desirable allocation separately in your pricing. Undercutting the item as a category means undercutting your good roll against someone else's bad one.