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.
Specifically, no. 4 of the 5 rings use non-unique graphics as shown here. Only Natalya's Mark has a unique graphic.
You can narrow down the list by graphic but not uniquely determine which you have.
Best Answer
As @yx. mentioned already, gloves are very popular for crafting as good rolls can add CritChance, CritDamage, IAS etc. - if you get all 3 of them, then it can be very profitable. The 6 property Exalted Grand Sovereign Vambraces recipe is extremely expensive, an alternative may be the 5 prop version - now that crafting costs have been reduced for 4/5 prop recipes, you can get double the attempts to get a good item for the same cost. Unfortunately, the 5 prop gloves has also skyrocketed from around 350k to 1m+ since the cost reduction.
Some things to keep in mind when choosing a recipe:
Don't invest in weapons: Very unprofitable to craft these; as they must have a few properties to be worth anything at all. viz., +dmg as well as +%dmg at a minimum, and preferably +CritDmg as well - if not, then it is just vendor food.
Don't go for class specific items: If you follow the previous point, this only applies to wizard hats, demon hunter cloaks etc. The reason is that you need a more specific roll for these, e.g.:
So, what is left? Basically ...
Non-class specific armor is your best bet to get more chances of a useful roll where you can try to recoup costs; while you wait for the amazing combos that earn you millions.
Now, among the various slots which ones to target is affected by awareness of the other choices available for that slot, and the importance of specific affixes. The ones I consider as comparatively worse investments and a reason why, are:
Unless you want to be a dedicated crafter (and are very rich already) the 6 property recipes are out of your reach. Gloves are a popular choice so you can consider 5 prop vambraces; unsure of the market for rare chest armor or bracers but they might be a cheaper alternative.