The AH is now offline, so there's no way to check what crafting materials go for anymore. New ones are also Account bound, so you can't even trade them even if you wanted to.
It depends on what crafting material you are looking for. If you're looking for Subtle Essence and Fallen Tooth, your best bet is to farm as much gold as you can, and buy it from the auction house.
Currently, the crafting materials are selling for 20 and 45 gold, respectively. That is drastically cheaper than buying shop items, or even farming them yourself.
Source: this answer.
So, the answer fluctuates. In the event that the crafting material cost on the auction house rises above the cost of buying an equivalent magical item you can salvage, buy it from shops. In either case, gold find helps you.
For magic find, it will also depend on how long it takes you to find and gather magical items. The time investment will fall somewhere between the other two scenarios. It will take less time to find items you can salvage than it would to gather 1000 gold, but quite a bit longer than to gather just 25 or 100 gold.
The only time you want to really find magic items is when crafting material cost on the auction house goes above the cost of shop items. Which, at that point, becomes a stable economy for you on it's own. Buy magic items from shops, salvage, post crafting materials on auction house. Repeat. Use extra gold to buy items to salvage materials for yourself.
So, short answer, from least to most time investment, using Subtle Essence as an example:
- If: Crafting materials are dirt cheap (Costs less than you would get from selling magical items): Sell magic items and buy from auction house.
- If: Crafting materials are more expensive (more than selling your magic items) and less expensive than buying items from shops for salvage:
- If: Gathering requisite gold will take longer than finding magical items: Find magical items.
- Else Gather gold and buy from auction house.
- If: Crafting materials are more expense than buying magical items from shops: Buy items from shops, salvage materials, post on auction house for profit until price drops below viability.
Credit to LessPop_MoreFizz for the original information and inspiration.
Determining the "fair market value" of an item is a chore at this point, although I'm certain that at some point in the near future auction house analysis tools will be created by Blizzard or the community.
Market value is likely to fluctuate considerably as people play the game in different patterns, so saying "X is a good rule of thumb," especially in the early going, is a losing proposition. Right now, for instance, low level crafting components are probably vastly undervalued as many people are playing low level areas. When the game starts to age, we'll likely see far fewer low level items, and more bits of high-level components.
Essentially the three pieces of information you're seeing are:
- The current lowest price available for you to buy the quantity of the item in question.
- The average sales price of the last 10 of those commodity sold, which is supposed to indicate the short-term trading value of the item. However, this is unclear as to whether the price is inclusive of "bulk orders" or not - if someone buys 100, what 10 of these count?
- The average sales price of the last 24 hours worth of sales, which is supposed to indicate the long-term trading value of the item. However, this appears buggy - at times, this has read 0 for extended periods, even though it's clear there are many sales going on.
If you're listing a commodity below the lowest price on offer, and then not seeing the buyout price change, that's because you can't buy your own auction - so you're seeing the next cheapest item for sale from another vendor. This is what you'd want if you're going for a quick sale, but might not be what you want if you're trying to maximize profit.
As far as pricing your own commodity auctions, I've found that only empirical data sampled over time is available at this time. For instance, I'm often buying Square Rubies, and I know that around ~8k gold is an "average" price - I see them listed for far less and occasionally try to buy, but frequently am out-sniped. If all I see is 10k+ gems on offer, I'll probably wait for a price break.
Selling is similar to buying, just in reverse. If you've got something you think is particularly valuable, sample the current values of the 3 pieces of information you have available, and then watch for times when the current market price is above what you've determined is fair. Then you can list your item slightly below this and turn a profit, or list it at what's typically "average" for a quick sale.
Best Answer
There are four common sources for gold find:
The first three sources are added together, to give you your base additional gold find percentage. As of 2.0.5, the difficulty's gold bonus isn't added, but multiplied, to get your final gold find percentage. What this current bonus does is multiply that number.
So the basic formula would be:
(Equipment % + Shrine % + Paragon %) * Difficulty % * Bonus % = End result.
The net effect is that you will find roughly twice as much gold as you were before, no matter what difficulty you play, or how much gold find you have.