diablo-3
Occasionally I'll happen across a new weapon with a socket but "worse" stats than my current, ruby-socketed weapon. How can I compare the two fairly without giving Shen my money?
(This example is probably too easy because the attack speeds are equal…)
Magic weapon (and all its runed varieties) has a pretty distinctive glow, and when the glow fades, so too has the buff.
But you shouldn't even need to keep track of it. Magic Weapon costs a measly 25 arcane power, which is 2.5 seconds worth of regen or less! I think the real solution is to get in the habit of casting Magic Weapon at the end of every fight, because there's no reason not to refresh the duration.
Between frequent recasting and the buff's 5-minute duration, you'll never have to worry about letting the buff drop.
And for the future, the 1.0.3 patch will add in a buff timer (point 7).
We're adding a buff icon for Magic Weapon in 1.0.3. We don't intend to add one for Familiar as it's a physically visible object on your screen. Magic Weapon was actually impossible to tell if it was up in quite a few cases. We'll be continuing to watch skills and buff icons, though, as there could be some situations where we need to expose more.
You can typically tell what gem is present in an item by looking at the shape of the gem, though it is shrunk somewhat on the gem image within the socketed item. There will be some that are hard to tell - every "refined version of the previous shape" level is going to be hard to tell apart when shrunk down.
The mod of each gem placed in a socket will be shown on the item, so you can derive exactly what's in that socket by looking up the mod. For example, I've got two +18 Int gems in the following, which I can look up to be Flawless Topazes on the Gem site.
Best Answer
Rubies add a flat amount of damage to weapons.
So take the average damage of the weapon, add the bonus for whatever Ruby you're looking to compare it to (11 in this example), then multiply by the attacks per second. Voila! Now you can compare the two weapons equally!
The math gets a great deal more calculated if your weapon has your class' primary stat on it. In that case, I'd suggest paying Covetous Shen - gold is easy to earn, after all.