Sell to shop vs. Transmogrify

[SabreCat]

In Fuxa's "Let's Learn ToME" videos, he spends an enormous amount of time and effort managing encumbrance and making runs to town to sell things, despite having the Transmogrification Chest. The implication was that you get substantially more money by making the trip to a shop than letting the Chest take care of it. Is that actually the case? If so, how much more do you get by going out of your way for it? I haven't noticed a big difference.

[Effigy]

In my experience, the value difference from transmuting versus selling is minimal. Usually less than 1gp difference. Unless you know of a specific artifact that sells for significantly more than the transmute value, I would just transmute everything you don't want.

There are certain cases where the difference is bigger, but they seem to be rare and you'd have to memorize them if you want to take advantage. For instance, Spellhunt Remnants transmute for 25gp but sell to the Derth jeweler for 30gp. However, they sell for less than 25gp at some vendors. So it becomes a question not only of which item to sell, but where. Ultimately, I doubt it's worth the trouble because 5gp is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

[breadsmith]

Sell Alchemist gems, transmog everything else. You might lose all of 50 gold in the long run from selling to shops, but if you really need that money it'll give you plenty of money for farportal spelunking, which should make it up.

[Stuntofthelitter]

There's no difference in value from transmog vs selling, with the bizarre exception of alchemist gems due to how the shop code works. So apart from those, treat the chest like a shop with a 25g cap.

[Alisar]

Awhile ago, I looked through the code to find the answer about transmog vs shops. For example I'll use an item costing 42.5 gold.

All items get sold at 5% cost except for gems which get sold at 40%. Item (theoretically) would sell for 2.125 gold.
Transmoging an item rounds the sell price down to two decimal places, to a maximum of 25 gold. Item transmogs for 2.12 gold.
Selling to a store rounds the sell price up to one decimal place, to a maximum that depends on each store. Items sells for 2.2 gold.
Different stores have different max gold price, but it's generally 25 gold. The only two stores that are higher than this are derth jeweler (30) and the rescued last hope merchant (35).

So the total difference between transmog and store for this example is 0.08 gold. Unless you're selling very expensive items to derth jeweler or last hope merchant, the absolute largest difference you can get is 0.1 gold per item.


TL;DR - Stores vs Transmog: Total difference is at absolute most 0.1 gold per item, unless you're selling very expensive items (>25 gold) at derth jeweler or last hope merchant.