Updated:

Vendors or Merchants are NPCs selling a variety of things like crafting resources, equipment and other things. Every NPC can be traded but non-vendor NPCs only have some random low-level loot like a single health pot.

Overview

  • Vendors restock some of their inventory every level up or every real-life hour
  • Items that have been sold to a vendor will remain forever in its inventory.
  • The stats of the newly added items are getting rolled upon opening the trade window.
  • Most vendors only sell 2 items of the highest rarity available at your current level.

Tips & Tricks

The item generation can be abused by saving and reloading the game before trading the restocked vendors. This can be repeated until the items have the desired stats (Save-Scumming). Some characteristics of this method:

  • The item itself is predetermined and won't change after reload, however:
  • Trading multiple vendors in a different order will result in a different set of items. Vendor 2 will have different items depending on vendor 1 has been traded or not and they will have the same inventory after a reload if you trade them in the same order again.
  • Rune sockets are predetermined and an item is either sold with or without a rune socked. Reloading savegames won't change that.
  • Offering a gift to a vendor, then closing the window will also reset a vendors inventory. The  "Offering a gift" dialog option will appear if the vendor's attitude is very low towards that party member.
  • Killing a vendor usually gives you all their gold, if you don't want to pickpocket a vendor you can buy everything he has with your gold and then just murder him to retrieve your gold back. Keep in mind this doesn't work for every vendor.