Auction House Farming

Today I'm sharing a method of making a steady income of gold that can be used by anyone that has unlocked the Blacksmith. This should be well known to any WoW players using Enchanting and trawling the AH for Items to Disenchant however works slightly differently on Diablo, and is made fractionally more complex by the lack of addons such as Auctioneer and therefore the mass buyout options available in WoW. It doesn't need any spreadsheets and constant tracking for market fluctuations but this would help to maximize profits if you have the time and patience to follow your market in depth.

First we need to select a market. There are 4 tiers of crafting materials to cover. I recommend picking the one that is within your means to play with. The lowest end is going to be Subtle Essences (20-35g each) and the highest end Fiery Brimstone (100-150k each). In this example I'm picking Subtle Essences, obtainable 100% of the time from Blues in the 1-29 range, along side Fallen Teeth 100% of the time from Rares in the same 1-29 range, and noting that Blues also drop a Fallen Tooth 15% of the time.

I will caveat the following by stating it is an example and I am using round numbers to make the math easier to follow. Lets assume that Subtle Essences are selling for 100g (I know they aren't right now, although they could be going up due to 1.0.3 and people crafting for alts, but last check 30g was the nominal value give or take weekend and peak times market fluctuations. I'm also assuming that Fallen Teeth are selling for 100g each, also not a real figure.

Now we need to acknowledge the 15% Auction house Fee. 100% - 15% is 85%. So we multiply the price we will sell our materials by 0.85 to find the amount we will actually receive on completion of our sale.

So selling my disenchanted Subtle Essences for 100g each gets me 85g in my balance on completion. This is my Magic Number!

Take the market price of our Subtle Essence (100g). You may want adjust for anticipated fluctuations between buying you items and being able to sell the materials if you want additional safety margin or if you are willing to gamble a bit. Multiply by 0.85 to get your Magic Number 85g and start searching for ALL rarities of item on the AH. Lets start with  level 1-29 Swords. Look for items you can bid on for under your 85g. I tend to find 1-3 per page in any given market sector and price bracket. If you set a max buyout you will be looking at 46 pages of items from your figure down to wherever 46 pages gets you to. It is unlikely you will get all the way to the bottom provided you start at a high enough buyout figure! There are simply that many auctions! The buyout figure and the starting bid aren't linked so I regularly see silly numbers like 40million buyout, with 100g starting bid. People do this for several reasons, for example to entice bidders by having a buyout price that puts their item on the first page. You will notice that if looking for low starting bids you will tend to find more per page in low buyout ranges, but you will also find more competition trawling for these same deals in those lower ranges.

I like to keep 100 active WINNING auctions at all times in my chosen sector. If you can't find 100 to bid on note the lowest buyout figure on the last page and rerun you search, lets assume is was 54,000, search again from 54k and you'll be looking at 46pages of items with buyouts from 54,000 on down. By narrowing your search to a range of buyouts you also dodge the other people searching just the Bids without Buyouts, or people going for the 9999999999 and down bracket. Remember you will get your money back if out bid so find every item you can bid on for 85g, be they magic, rare, or even ledgendaries. Now note the bracket you ended on, so when you log in the morning before work you can grab your "out bids" and rebid on either a lower bracket in the same sector (1H weapons for barbarians), or move on to 2H weapons for Wizards. Keep it up over a period of days. It takes 10 mins before leaving for work, during a lunch break, before you log for an evening play session or after a play session. Cut and Paste your Bid amount so you are hitting CTRL+V on each bid pane rather than typing 85 or whatever your "Magic Number" is for your materials. The seconds saved really add up when you get into the brackets with values in the tens of thousands.

At some point you will be ready for a salvaging session. With 100 auctions won and more coming in every hour or so your stash will fill up rapidly so make sure you have at least a full page clear for this so you can send a decent amount from the AH completed tab to stash to salvage at least a page full at a time!

Your going to spend a few minuets salvaging your mix of blues, rares, and maybe even a legendary if some one let one go for 85g in this case...lol. You might even spot an item that you can flip, which is always a bonus, but lets just assume it is all going to be salvaged.

Every item you got for under 85g the difference was refunded and you will make at least that in profit from your Subtle Essence. You saw it at 30g start bid, you bid and won it at 30g, you get 55g and the item so salvage, and get 85g from the sale of the subtle essence.

Every Blue gets your Subtle Essence so that is at least a break even.

15% of your Blues drop a Fallen Tooth so all those teeth are profit (you could vendor them and it would still be profit, but AH will of course get you more).

In the level 60 blues and rares bracket you have a 0.1% or 1% (I forget actual drop rates) chance of Fiery Brimstone. More bonus profit if you get lucky!

Every Rare you found you get a Fallen Tooth and a Subtle Essence, since the Subtle Essence was your break even your Fallen Teeth are pure profit.

Cancel the stacks of Essences and Teeth you currently have up, relist with the additional ones you just salvaged and get ready to hear that ITEM SOLD ding while you play or see the big chunk of change in you completed tab next time you log!

A WORD OF WARNING!

IF YOU ARE BUYING 20,000,000g items for you main there is no way to keep them separate from the junk you are planning to salvage SO DON'T GET TOO CLICK HAPPY OR YOU WILL BE A VERY SAD PANDA!!!!!!

One nice thing to note about the AH system is you don't have to worry about a competitor  out bidding you by 1g in the final minutes of an auction. The minimum threshold for new bids will probably put him above his break even number, unless it is vastly different to yours, in which case one of you has gotten their math wrong. Alternatively he knows something you don't, i.e. he is going to use, flip, or if he is planning on disenchanting he is speculating on a price rise or using knowledge of market peaks to raise his "magic number". I get out bid on at least 50% of auctions I bid on. I simply take that money and keep bidding. Being out bid costs you nothing, unless it is happening all the time in which case your time becomes a factor.

                 

Which follower do you use?

On an earlier post I wrote about my build as I was nearing level 30 and Nightmare. 12 Hours Played Build and Progress. I updated my Build in Hell and this has been holding steady through Act 1 and I'm now at Act 2 Chapter 6 Inferno. I also posted A Barbarian Build that works!

Solo Inferno Butcher is on farm in my main build with 5 stacks of Nephalem Valor. Act 2 has been rushed to Chapter 6 sipping everything possible as looking at the sun in that desert will kill you without resistances! I'm looking forward to going back with more gear to kill Magdha again, ideally with 5 stacks and some friends to help on the control side of mob killing and kiting which is becoming more necessary in Inferno.

To that end I want to answer a question I had from Pitlord "Which Follower do you Use?"

In Solo play followers can be both a major asset and a total liability. I am currently using the Enchantress in Inferno butcher farming runs. Templar for Magic/Gold Find to keep down time to a minimum and GF/MF maxed out. The Scoundrel comes out for boss fights where I'm likely pushing the enrage due to build

Here are the builds I use for each and my reasoning behind each, and when I choose to use each.

https://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/follower#0100!1000!0000

The Enchantress is who I'm using right now, whinny voice, kinda annoying ditsy blond chick. But she has some nice utility:

Charm. The charmed enemy is attack able by both you and it's buddies, and attacks it's buddies. It's not doing any damage to me and it's keeping it's buddies from wailing on me. It can equate to 100% damage reduction for 4 seconds which is an eternity in this game. The alternative knock back from Forceful Push messes with my Barb that needs to be in melee range to do damage and self heal. It is too unpredictable when she will use it to help with kiting.

Powered Armor, as with all armor in this game beats the Reflect Missiles due simply to Armor in Diablo 3 reduces ALL types of damage.

Disorientate is 2 secs for an entire group that are now not wailing on me. While I'd like the 15% damage taken pool of Erosion Diablo 3 require intensive movement to avoid hits and damage from the environment so keeping champions and rares that would really benefit from being nuked with an extra 15% DPS in the pool becomes a dangerous proposition.

Focused Mind seemingly goes against my previous choices of control, but the 60sec Cd on Mass Control, and the ditsy blond way she will use all controls on Cd, can't be controlled by the player, and we have no tracking of her internal Cool downs short of a stopwatch makes it unreliable at best. While Focused Mind with my Smite runed Frenzy benefits more from 3% attack speed.

The Templar is my first choice for any farmable content below Inferno. The reason being his shields gives me an extra magic/gold find slot over the other 2 followers:

 Heal vs Taunt. I'm the tank. If you taunt and die who is going to heal me. If I get below 50% you can bet I have a revenge ready, I don't need you taunting mobs away so they are out of range. I need more revenge procs to farm this content faster!

Intimidate relies on enemies hitting the Templar, so fail for me. Life Regen is always nice. I have pitifully low values of Life per sec on gear so it takes forever to heal out of combat, so Loyalty is the only choice here.

Charge and Onslaught. Don't get any ideas about your follower doing a ton of DPS and finishing off that rare pack while you go for a coffee. 200% of naff all is still naff all! I'll take the stun. If I'm in trouble I can open some distance, pot, wait on Cd's before jumping back in.

Guardian vs Inspire. The saddest thing for me in the Barbarian gameplay is the lack of fury spending we are seeing due to the fury generators simply being better than the spenders. I'm not going to rant about class design, but Inspire..lol. Guardian saved my life a few times in Hell, but I also found that a healing build Templar can be a liability against Vampiric + pool of bad stuff mobs. He will stand in the pool healing himself, which translates to healing the mob that dropped it!

The scoundrel is one I'm yet to find any real use for on my Barbarian other than damage dealing, but hres my take on him:

I could see myself bringing him along to a boss fight like the Butcher were I'm pushing the enrage timer if he hides in a fire area and I can't get decent uptime on him. However Follower DPS is lack lustre at best, so not used this guy much.

Crippling Shot vs. Poision Bolts is simply slows vs DPS. I don't rate slows as highly as I maybe would as something other than a Barbarian, but I'm not a kiter. Stuns do helpout, but unless someone is going to inform me that it also slows mob attack speed I'll take the DPS and just burn the bad guys down.

Dirty Fighting is the clear winner for me here. If my follower needs to Vanish to self heal it's becuase the AI fails and he stood in bad stuff. Either way he will self resurect in a matter of seconds so I'm not going to go to any lenghts to keep him alive, including talenting. Dirty Fighting however has potential to keep me alive, and that much more important!

Multishot vs Powered Snot, yes I called it powered snot due to the whopping 25% weapon damage it does. Most boss fights do have some adds making Multishot work for me, and although I'm a lover of stuns against Rare/Champions were mechanics just don't exist if you are relying on stun locks to kill bosses you are failing at mechanics becuase nearly everything is avoidable to the extent that they have "check me out I did it naked achievements".

Anatomy and Hysteria are simply a question of how much crit do you already have. I have next to zero so 3% extra is going to be more benefit than a proc that relies on something that has next to zero chance of happening. Can I rely on a crit every 6seconds to keep the Hysteria buff up at it's max uptime of 50% for 10% increased damage, or is 3% crit with 100% the better choice.

Hope my explaination of what I use and why helps you make your own descisions about your followers. See you in game and Good Luck!

To Salvage or Not to Salvage...

That is the question, Whether tis nobler in the mind to take the slings and arows dropped by mobs and salvage them or, by vendoring get more gold from them!

The answer is relatively simple.

A blue of a specific level has a 100% chance to produce an Essence, and a 15% chance of producing a Fallen Tooth.

So for normal mode blue items

(100% x price of Subtle Essence + 15% x price of Fallen Tooth) x 85% (due to auction fees) = Value

Lets see a real world senario:

A blue item that vendors for 98gold while subtle essences are going for 30 gold and a fallen tooth for 150 gold.

(1 x 30 + .15x150) x 0.85 = 45g (44.625 rounded)

since 45<98 Vendor the item

For Normal mode Rares it is 100% chace for Fallen Tooth, 100% chance for Subtle Essence

(100% x price of Subtle Essence + 100% x price of Fallen Tooth) x 85% (AH fees) = Value

(1 x 30 + 1 x 150) x 0.85 = 153g

so if the vendor value of the rare is less than 153g you should salvage.

As far as I can tell so far the formulas are the same for all difficulty levels of mats. So all we need do is know the value of essences and rare mats that we will be salvaging into and we can keep this in mind as we visit the vendor/blacksmith when our bags get full.

I'll also reiterate that we need to be following trends in the market. If the price of Essences is currently down in the 15g area, but we know that at a weeekend it is likely to bounce back to 30g or more we need to be using the 30g figure, and not the 15g figure. Auction Sucess: It's all about timing!

And off course if the item is maxed out stats you could also sell it on the AH, but that should go without saying!

12 hours played build and progress

So the strategy so far has been conservative leveling. I have a real life (son to look after during the day, girl to cook dinner for and cuddle at night etc etc.) So I'm not doing a D3 Marathon trying to crank out to Inferno in the first week.

Remember my conservative leveling and gold farming strategy? So I have been playing through quests, Getting to the end boss, and then leaving game to check the AH prices of crafting mats etc. to flip, and checking public games interface for my restart point and going back in solo again. So right now I'm going back in having gotten 2 quests into Act 3 at level 26 Iwill be starting over from 2 quests short of the end of act 2, killing Belial again, and thus out leveling the content even more before continuing on.

Barbarian Gear:
I'm running with a self healing focused build, so I'm looking for weapons with the Vampiric affix (heals you for x.xx% of the damage done. Gear is predominantly Strenght, and Magic Find. However Experience, Gold Find is on a few pieces simply because I'm dealing with random allocation within my own drops. And with damage done converting to heals I'm not shying away from DPS stats if the overall benefit is there.
Note: Don't trust the numbers in your inventory when switching between Dual wield, 2H, and Sword and Board. (+/- x.x damage and protection, or even the DPS number on the weapon), Equip the items and check your stats Damage number. I have been having some surprising results. The calculation system just doesn't work well switching between weapon types.

Barbarian Build:
No buff to worry about losing yet, so no penalties for switching builds about at this stage, but mostly I've been running, currently  at level 26:

1) Leap with Impact (+Armor on landing) - Jump in and be able to take the beating!
2) Revenge with Vengeance (+Fury and Heal on hit) - this is like having a health globe on demand!
3) Battle Rage (+30% damage) - stacks with the damage done = heals so keeping this up at all times!
4) Call of the Ancients (3 npcs help for 15secs) - had trouble getting mobs to stand in Earthquake!
L) Cleave with Rupture/Reaping or Frenzy with Triumph - 2H/1H playing about with these
R) Rend with Blood lust (Heals for 9% damage done) - most of the self healing
Passives: Blood thirst and either Weapons Master or Ruthlessness depending on weapons.

Mobs to watch out for:
So glad I wasn't playing Hardcore. First encounter with Stinger packs in Act2 lead to my first death. They "cast" small wasps which getting hit by can be fatal if it's a pincer of 3-4 streams and you, as in my case are spamming rend expecting these "adds" to die. They are not target able adds they are projectiles!

Fallen Maniacs in Act 3. Indoors these things come running at you around corners so you may or may not see them coming. They explode on contact with you or your follower. I've taken to jumping out of the way and letting my Templar take the beating.

Hungering Pestilence in Act 3. I've seen these in the outside areas and the answer is like with Belial to just keep moving so you are never standing in stuff that spawns under your feet.

Conservative Leveling and Gold Farming Strategy

With the changes to the RMAH release I thought I would outline my personal revised gold plan.

Using the Public Games interface to determine level requirements.

On opening the public games interface you will notice that in this pane the quests are sorted by level, in the Beta the only games you could join as a lvl 13 character were Reign of the Black King, 4-13. Using this as a base line will be my starting point. So every level after my first kill of the Skeleton King I will finish my current quest and then log out.

Why will I be doing this? Well in the first instance this will allow me to check the public games pane and choose the lowest restart point for my character. Similar to WoW these will essentially be the equivalent of "Green" Quests in the quest log. Anything below this would be Grey and therefore, whilst Diablo quests still grant xp, the gains will be lower than if I choose the lowest public game as a start point (Green/Yellow) and the dropped items will have a higher level.

In the second instance it will allow for a quick check of the state of the AH. Crafting materials prices, Gems, and the bidding on a few Auctions, which will be forming a substantial portion of my gold farming, scooping up deals I can later resell as is of after savagling/combining.

So I will be leveling while farming easy content, steadily progressing, but not at the rate of the rat race, and not exposing myself to deaths.

My mantra will be to play like I'm playing Hardcore! DO NOT DIE!


Cash flow predictions...

I'm predicting a modest income of 10,000 gold per hour from playing and replaying the initial 13 levels, based on the beta, this is expected to increase as I progress though the remainder of the game in Normal, Acts 2 through 4 should provide higher drop rates of gold based on previous Blizzard Games.

Stash costs, are illustrated below, so first hour played I should have Stash Tab 1 unlocked. I don;t propose to open up additional tabs until at least week 2 as I don;t view it as necessary with the ability to mule items on alternate characters. The sash will primarily be used for collecting AH items for resale or salvaging.

Tab	Tab Cost	Upgrade Cost	Total Cost
Tab 1	0	2,500	10,000
Tab 2	10,000	2,500	20,000
Tab 3	50,000	2,500	60,000
Total Cost	60,000	30,000	90,000

Blacksmith leveling

Starting to Apprentice Blacksmith 8000                       
Apprentice to Journeyman 18000                                  
Journeyman to Adept 28000                                         
Adept to Master 34000                                                  
Master to Grandmaster 67,000 gold and 5 Pages        

Based on my previous estimation of gold per hour it will take about 16hrs to raise the gold purely by leveling until hitting the point that pages are required. This will be a choke point depending on the frequency of drops and availability and price on the AH. A choice to be made here will be to horde for own leveling, or sell what is not immediately needed to generate more income. I don't tend to horde items like this beyond overcoming a temporary slump in the market. I expect these to go for a premium early on, so I will be focusing on selling until I actually need these. Same applies to tomes.

Jeweler Leveling

Starting to Apprentice Jeweler 5000
Apprentice to Journeyman 5000
Journeyman to Adept 10000 gold and 5 Pages

So while being cheaper the pages kick in earlier in the progression, with only 2 hrs gold to level yto this point. Gemming would not be much of a priority until well beyond normal, however with the ability to add sockets and remove old gems to replace with new, some players will be seeking to gain an edge though gemming with the highest end gems they can get, without the drawbacks (of wow for example) of losing valuable gems in the twinking of a lower level piece of gear. Overlapping with crafting the saleability of an item could be improved by selling already socketed, increasing the items value to players. What about if you dropped a socket, or 3, onto your skeleton king first kill rare drop? How much would it be worth now to those power levelers with 3 red +experience gems available?

So thats my first 20hrs of play gold generation, while anything I make selling gear or materials on the AH just gravy. In reality it should be less playtime as I will be contiuing to level and get more gold per hour in the later acts.

What just happend?

So I took a few days off from playing the beta towards the end, feeling I had things pretty well planned out for release..and whammo! I check my reading list this morning and find the RMAH release has been postponed to a week after the game release and transaction and listing fees have been radically altered.

No matter. Part of the game is dealing with Blizzard changing the goal posts, so how will I be going about my business taking these changes into account?

Leveling up in the first week.
I don't intend to race to 60. This I foresee as being disastrous from a gold making point of view. The long standing threat of "YOU WILL DIE" hangs over us along with the repair bills, one of the biggest gold sinks in the game. One we as potential gold sellers need to avoid like the plague! SO what is the plan? Play though on normal, acquire gear, ideally with some magic find and main stat (Strenght since I'll be playing Barbarian). Then on completion of normal TURN AROUND and run through again!

Multiple Magic Find runs in Normal.
The chances of playing though Normal mode once and picking up a decent set of main stat and Magic Find gear in the first run are limited, however a second run though with the newly acquired set will be faster and yield more drops. This in turn allows for 2 things. Firstly a better set of stats prior to entry to Nightmare, and a large quantity of Subtle Essences from the stuff not worth anything to you or others. These can be used for crafting or selling directly on the gold AH to enable stockpiling of gold prior to the RMAH release. Rinse and repeat for Nightmare-Hell, and Hell-Inferno.

Farming the AH for salvageable items and gems.
With the stockpile of gold from re-runs I should be getting my artisans up to a level that corresponds to my characters. This will enable both salvaging and gem combining. Unlike WoW, where a single AH search with Auctioneer will allow you to gobble up every crafting item under a certain price threshold, AH farming in Diablo 3 will require more time investment to search multiple pages for salvageable items to bid, at the same time it is unlikely any one, or even combination of players will find and bid on every item, so there will always be items you can grab for a low cost, provided you are patient and set realistic thresholds. So before and after logging for the evening, or during breaks where you want to just grab a soda or a bite to eat browse and bid on everything you can salvage or gems you can combine. With luck you will also find an under priced item you can flip.

Crafting.
It is likely many players will be trying to craft something, sink a ton of gold into it, and be largely unimpressed with the resulting imperfect gear. Crafting is going to require investment of the gold, essences and teeth that have been farmed from multiple runs. A perfect or near perfect high DPS weapon or main stat + experience/magic/gold is going to be highly sought by those trying to win the 1-60 rat race, but I'll most likely wait to see what stats are selling. It doesn't have to be prefect, you can break even with 50% of the max stats available coming up on maybe 1 in 3 or 4 pieces as people will buy any improvement, but remember, without the ability to buy gold no-one will have the 500,000 gold you need to sell that prefect piece of armor for after it took 50 tries to get it.

After the first week:
Arbitrage
I'll have to rework my percentages somewhat, however come the end of that first week and the release of the RMAH there will be a turbulent time while the gold and item values stabilise.

Selling Gold
Once the RMAH is released we will see thousands of players who have horded 100's of thousands if not millions of gold with which to flood the AH almost instantly. Some players will be desperate at this point, knowing the RMAH is coming and those pants in the gold AH are 500,000 and they will be ready to buy some of that gold. But the long and short of it is that initial supply will outstrip demand so although prices will start high, maybe the $10 per thousand that has been steady on Beta, the undercutting will be intense, and within minutes the price could well be rock bottom, at a point where people stop listing. After a time though the bonce back and settle at a going rate. So there may be a chance to make a few bucks if you can determine the low point in that initial slump before the market recovers, and don't mind investing real money to buy that cheap gold.

Beta 18 Run throughs

To test the Diablo 3 gold farming strategies I suggested I did another few runs through to gather some actual figures to enable comparisions between the strategies. It's a small sample size, a little over 1 hour played per strategy, but revealing.

Full Run Through Act 1.

Character : 45dps Lvl 13 Barbarian,
Time Taken: 1hr 10mins
Gold Looted/Quest Rewards: 14514               Gold Find: 8%
Magic Items Looted: 36                                   Magic Find: 6%

Magic Items base (not attributable to gold find) (36/1.06):34, 29.1 per hour unbuffed.
Gold Base (not attributable to Gold Find) (14514/1.08):13438, 11520 per hour unbuffed.

Run Through "Reign of the Black King" questline.

Character : 45dps Lvl 13 Barbarian,
Time Taken: 1hr 5mins, 2 runs completed
Gold Looted/Quest Rewards: 11513               Gold Find: 8%
Magic Items Looted: 28                                   Magic Find: 6%

Magic Items base (not attributable to gold find) (23/1.06):22, 20 per hour unbuffed.
Gold Base (not attributable to Gold Find) (11513/1.08):10660, 9840 per hour unbuffed.

So for Act 1 at least farming the complete stroyline is about 17% more productive than farming just the final quest area. I am quite suprised by this finding, although with hindsight I see the difference is going to be in both the quest rewards and the large number of cellars/rare mobs in the external areas versus the final dungeon. It seems true what Blizzard intended that exploring should yield better rewards than boss runs.

Farming Cemetary and Dark Cellar Rares.

tbc.

Farming and Crafting ideas (Post 1)

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!

Excel Spreadsheet to show item max and min item affixes

I created this excel spreadsheet based on the beta data from www.d3inferno.com/ to help me analyse Items in D3. Having the Max and Min Stats for any given item level will enable me to quickly reference the item I just picked up, crafted or am looking at in the AH to see if it is maxed out for it's Item Level. I will state that I omitted the class specific abilities as simply too numerous to put together, so this is somewhat incomplete as is.

A blue post that caught my eye

To be clear: On your first kill of a boss in normal difficulty, you are guaranteed a random rare and a class rare, as well as some blues and other stuff. All other kills on all difficulties result in standard drop probabilities. You have a decent chance of getting a rare or two every time you kill a boss.

So will it still be worthwhile running though multiple times? I think not, the gold drops and value of the low end items reachable will be negated by the higher value drops of later levels. The excessive farming of the Skeleton King in beta was also achieved by a waypoint co-op "exploit" which is likely to be fixed rapidly if not already, and even if it is not it is unlikely to be advantageous at higher levels than Act 1 Normal.

For more blue posts about DIablo 3 check out the blues tracker at http://www.diablofans.com/

Beta 17 run through

I ran though Beta 17 having previously completed the Betamaxed and Overachiever in Beta 16. My run though Beta 17 has been with a view to forming strats for gold, item and real money farming and I'd like to share those findings with you.

I chose a Barbarian as they have a good level of survivability combined with melee range AoE attacks, namely the spammable Cleave and Hammer for fury dump. By remaining in melee range I am closer to the gold and items as they drop thus making for more efficient farming than a Wizard or Demon Hunter which tends to leave dead mobs, and therefore gold, spread further away due to kiting and atacking from range, which will become more so in higher difficulty levels. The Witch Doctor's pets in Beta 16 I found to be an annoyance due to attacking mobs around corners etc. which again leaves loot spread far and wide. The Monk would also be viable, however are squishier that the Barbarian. Whilst the other classes also have mobility and control the Barbarian's Leap and Ground Stomp at the low levels seem ideally suited to my needs.

I aimed to cover the whole map on the run, which took 1.5 hours hours, including back tacking when I found the exit but had left areas uncleared (particualry Defiled Crypt levels and Cathedral. This run finished with me at level 10 on the Skeleton King, and a total of 13,000 gold. For a comparison I re ran the level this time going as fast as possible to the end, this left me at level 8 on the skeleton king which made for a longer and harder solo fight, less gear, and neted a lttle over 6k gold after 45mins. Needless to say mathematically both runs result in a gold farm rate of 8k per hour. Assuming I can get $1 per thousand gold on live servers this is $8 per hour, a california minimum wage before selling additional items!

In Beta the prices of gold are somewhat inflated due to the $50 beta bucks everyone gets, however prices last night were in the $9 to $14 per thousand range. This may actually not be far off the levels on live servers in the first week or so of launch as people will not have gold to level atrisans, stashes, and buy crafting mats and gear and demand will be highest. As dificulties increase the amount of gold dropped from mobs in game will also increase, however so will the average players repair bills and gear expenses, those wanting to level to 60 and inferno the fastest will be those paying a premium for gold in the forst weeks of launch. I think some site talks of $20 per thousand to be over exagerated but for me anything over $1 a thousand would be good, and I can see this balancing out over the course of the game on the gold per hour farmed to $ per hour on RMAH ratios.

I also collected a number of magic items, and the obligatory rare from the first kill of the Skeleton King. BEaring in mind that no-one on live servers will likely have the 10's or even 100's of thousands of gold to spend on rares in early weeks after the games release, short of buying it from the RMAH, my thought process is to sell the rares on RMAH, along with any good magic items I can get.

By "good" when refering to magic items I'm refering to those with large quantities of desirable stats. Namely:

Strenght
Dexterity
Inteligence
Gold Find
Magic FInd
Additional Damage
Experience Gain
High DPS weapons
Vampiric/of the Leech weapons

Other stats I don't expect people to pay for at the low levels being:

Vitality (more HP is nice but hardly needed in normal)
Orb/Gold Radius (this just takes up space that could have something else, and wouldn't you rather control your health orbs though the fight than pick up while still on full HP? As for the gold it's going to be faster yes, but so is killing faster. There are (I know of at least one WD spell) that works off this attribute so maybe later in game).

Keeping track of and learning to judge what is a good value and what is a low value for DPS on a weapon at each level, and stats will be a big factor in my sucess. Of the magical properites availible is +1 strenght and 3% magic find of any use to anyone next to the +5 strenght + 8% gold find...probably not. So its not going to get one of my AH slots.

Now for the remainder of the items, the blacksmith comes into play. Salvage. Salvaging unwanted magic items in the first run got me 30+ essences, and over 10 teeth. On live servers these I do expect to see going for gold on the action house, and will most likely be selling as fast as they can be posted to people playing the crafting game. But remeber, no-one will have the gold to pay for big money crafted gear, so why bother gold sinking into leveling the artisans in the first week? I'll be aiming to make the gold from these to RMAH it.

This won't be hard, as the first wekend will be on us soon enough, and with it an influx of players wanting mats. With subtle essences taking little space to stockpile this will be the best time to sell.

By the end of the month of May I'd hope to be seeing some levelof income, all while staying at home watching the baby with a few hours play time while he is napping!