A wealth of information is out there now regarding these 2 key areas for making gold early on at release. The advantage anyone who has played the beta has now is, or should be a pretty thorough knowledge of the first 13 levels on normal mode, and what stats will ultimately prove most desirable during peoples initial play though.
Marko has been analyzing various crafting gears and stats, while others have been touting the multiple farming strategies available.
For me I want to cover both over the next couple days in articles starting with Farming:
There are multiple ways to profit from farming, some with a group, or accomplice, others solo. Some are based around stacking Magic or Gold Find, others simply on killing quickly.
Strategy 1 : Simply run through the Act 1 game (beta levels) on normal repeatedly building up a damage/gold/magic find set. This sounds simple, and is. Each run through takes under an hour, even being thorough and when I say thorough I mean breaking every barrel, turning over every corpse, exploring every dead end, searching every book shelf.
What are the benefits of this strat? Well death remains a near impossibility. You will kill quickly, have high magic/gold find. I tend to get over 10k per run and near 40 salvageable blues, at beta prices these mats go for 120-150g each. Total 15-16k per hour.
Downside? Once players are though this content, unlike WoW where you have to level by crafting items, they will not need these mats as they won't be crafting normal level gear. Farming this section will cease to be profitable compared to farming other areas and difficulties where players do need the gear/mats. My thoughts would be the best place to do this after release will be an area at the transition between 2 difficulty levels, initially between normal and nightmare, then nightmare and hell, and finally hell and inferno. Here the gold/drops should be the best, and the demand for those drops the highest as players try to gear though the transition.
Strategy1b:
As above but limit your runs to a quest/quests within the act, the later quests are likley to be more profitable, for example Reign of the Black King.
Strategy 2: Locate farmable packs/areas. These include my favorite run which involves getting to the Cemetery of the Forsaken Checkpoint. From here run a lap of the graveyard to find the rare spawn (may or may not be here), kill and loot that, then go to the Waypoint, hit Old Ruins. Run a lap of the Old Ruins looking for the entrance to the Dark Cellar (random spawn so may or may not be here). Kill/loot whatever is inside (treasure pygmy, rare mob/pack, chest). Then use town portal (T) and log out. When you resume game you are back at the Cemetery. Rinse and repeat.
Benefits? These rare packs have increased chances to drop Magic Items, and Gold. The strategy holds true for any phase of the game where checkpoints and waypoint placement allows, including Manglemaw where from the checkpoint after you kill him you can log out and back in to do a 180 though the door and kill him again.
Downsides? Blizzard could easily nerfbat these strategies into the ground, move the checkpoints away, fix the door on Manglemaw. (Link to an article on Diablo Fans and video). However I actually doubt it, and the reason I doubt it is that it isn't actually all that profitable compared to Strategy 1. Smashing these couple mini bosses/rares and re logging gives comparable gold/magic items per hour from what I've seen so far to running the whole act. Simply put instead of spending 1 to 2 minutes simply running to find the are mobs in strategy 1 you are on a constant roll of kills. Once release hits and we are into harder content this may change. Farming a pack of rares for rare/legendary items worth 100's of thousands to the right bidder may tip the scales, but since any item can drop from any mob I'll probably be sticking to my first Strat.
Strategy 3: Working together to take advantage of increased first kill drop rates. This I have seen touted on various sites, and there are youtube videos showing the details of how they work, are based on the first boss kill by a character granting additional rares. So how does it work? As with strat 2 you are farming a boss repeatedly, eg. The Skeleton King. You and your buddy get to the checkpoint and both of you are saved to it on your mains. One of you drops group and brings a newly created character that hides in a corner while you kill the boss, then he loots the rares that drop because it was his first time and hands them over to you. He then deletes that character and logs on to his main, starting back at the checkpoint you saved at, you log your main to get saved to the checkpoint again, and then drop group and bring your newly created character.
Benefits? If it works at higher difficulty levels I can see those dong it able to make considerable sums in a very short period of time. However I personally hope it doesn't work because it's so broken, which brings me to the downsides.
Downsides? The first time though thing works fine in Normal against the Skeleton King. He is very straight forward to solo with any reasonably geared level 13, with a level 60 it will probably be a one shot. The question mark is going to be over how profitable this becomes. Will a level 1 be able to get Nightmare/Hell/Inferno rares from a first kill by being carried by a geared 60? The SK rares, frankly, are for the most part pretty worthless. Stats wise I see much better blue items regularly on the AH. Is anyone going to be buying these outside of the Beta?
Further more I'd be concerned if this could be considered an exploit. You would be utilising a feature of the game in a way that was not intended. Blizzard did not intend for people to be logging in and out to get saved to checkpoints so they could create level 1 characters to stand in corners and not take part in kills and then scoop up rare and potentially valuable items. It would be similar if someone in WoW found a way to abuse the raid lockout system to reset raid bosses enabling a guild to kill them an infinite number of times a week.
Strategy 4: Farm the Auction House, where some say the "Real PvP is at". Yes, if that's what floats your boat go for it. I won't be one to sit for hours refreshing the screen looking for the nubbins that just posted a legendary sabre for 100gold, or 100 subtle essences for the default 14g vendor price. It works, it's great, but simply not my cup of tea.
On the other hand there is no reason not to, in the course of your normal logging in and out have a look at prices and take advantage of price fluctuations, bid on low priced items you can flip, as that only takes 5 minutes of your time, and you might get uber lucky finding something like I suggested above.
There is also high potential for arbitrage between the auction houses, buy something on RMAH for $1, sell it on Gold AH for 2000 gold, sell the gold on RMAH for $2. Since we don't know yet what the prices will look like for gold/items in RMAH or Gold it's hard to say how much profit may lie in doing this, and early in the game as Marko points out in his guide players won't have the large gold stockpiles to make large gold purchases, so this one will be further down the line from release.
So there you have it, my summary of farming ideas from both my personal beta experiences and gathered from the far corners of the interweb! Links on the side bar to some of my sources. Please check those guys out too!
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