Auction House and Twinking: Level Requirement Reduced mods are the new Gems

I'm an optimizer.  When playing through to level 60 on my second character, I would stop every five or so levels to hit up the Auction House (AH) and rebuild so that I could easily stomp my way to Hell difficulty.  I thought I had a pretty good handle on the system, using the max buyout tool to make sure I didn't get ripped off on some pretty amazing gear.  I knew "Level Requirement Reduced" (LRR) existed, but I assumed that those items would show up naturally with my default level restriction.

Boy was I wrong.  The AH has a strange quirk with LRR in that the actual level reduced is not accounted for in the search results.  In other words, a level 60 sword with 10 levels reduced does not appear in the search results for a level 50 character!  This might be an oversight, but it's a huge one for optimizers.

Take this chart into consideration:


Notice the huge spike at level 60?

There is roughly a 2.5x gain in damage for the top weapons between levels 59 to 60.  A level 60 weapon with LRR can be devastatingly more effective than any weapon of the same naturally occurring level.

Consider this item, -10 LRR, that sold for 100k in gold:

Pretty nice right?  Compare it with the 1 handed weapons available at level 50 at the same time:

There's no comparison!  It's a blowout item that will likely last until level 60 and at a huge price reduction.  Also consider that LRR can get as low as -18 for fantastic twinking opportunities as early as level 42.

TL;DR:  You have to search for Level Requirement Reduced (LRR) manually in the Auction House (AH); Starting at level 42, search for LRR gear (-18) as level 60 gear is a massive improvement over equivalent level gear.