Black Mushrooms, Liquid Rainbows and Gibbering Gemstones

If you haven’t realized already, I’ve been distracted by a little thing called Mists of Pandaria. It turns out they released the beta a bit prematurely in an attempt to entertain soon to be Diablo 3 players like myself before Diablo 3 comes out. It worked. As I bring my attention back to Diablo 3 I was quickly caught off guard as I realized how little we actually know about Diablo 3.

The Value of Gold

We really have no idea what gold is going to be worth. I tried to project gold farming rates in Inferno difficulty and came up with a range of ratios. I calculated the ratio of the value of white quality gear at level 1 and level 60, the ratio of sell values of gems, the ratios of level 5 crafts vs. level 60 crafts. All the ratios were extremely different than each other. While last month I discovered the rate of gold farming was right around 20-30,000 gold an hour in beta, that really means jack for the live version. Although, some blacksmith crafting items cost anywhere from a quarter million to a full million gold just to craft.

The Role of Gems

I spurred a lot of debate at DiabloFans last week with my how to make 1 trillion gold article. The 1-trillion number was calculated by using the vendor buy values of chipped gems and Page reagents (which I consider to be the bare minimum values). Even with these pathetically low values a Radiant Star gem costs 1,000,000,000 gold in crafting costs. Folks said that they simply won’t be worth that (as if they know what 1 trillion gold will be worth) which would suggest that there will be no market for gems and they will just be huge gold sinks for players seeking a novel stat increase. It’s possible, but we have no idea. Keep my gem calculator handy for when you decide to join in on the gem combining market.

Liquid Rainbows and Black Mushrooms Abound

I found Liquid Rainbows, Black Mushrooms and Gibbering Gemstones in some datamined info. It looks like they have been around for awhile and despite their hillarious names I have no idea where they come from or what they are used for. I see that they are used for at least 1 blacksmithing recipe, but otherwise they make no sense to me. If you have the inside scoop on these let me know, otherwise I’ll jot them down under the list of crap we don’t know anything about.

Inferno Difficulty

The big question on my mind is how hard Inferno is going to be. When I load up World of Warcraft it still takes 5-6 days of playing to reach max level, then it takes a few weeks to a month of casual play to acquire most of the best non-raid gear in the game. You can kill Deathwing within a week or two after reaching 85 if you buy PvP gear to increase your iLvl. The game is fricken easy but very time consuming. Five days of playing takes most players a month or real life time. However, if you want to kill Deathwing on Heroic you have to make some friends and build up social reputation with them.

Will Inferno require a crew of finely tuned and well organized friends? Will you be able to blow through Hell but then get stuck in the first few hours of Inferno? Will Inferno be as exclusive as Heroic raids are in WoW or will Inferno be the equivalent of levels 80 to 85 in WoW? This is actually a really exciting thing to NOT know. Will it take 5 days of played to beat Hell? How about Inferno? Tell me!

Important: Many of the strategies and tips I share here were originally inspired by the people at the Diablo 3 Gold Secrets Forum. If you're serious about making the big bucks in Diablo 3, or just being the best players, you need to signup ASAP.

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2 Comments.

  1. It’s very hard next to impossible to know the gold value until we know the average gold per hour in higher difficulty modes. We also have to consider the gold repair @ Hell/Inferno vs. farming lower difficulty.

    In D3, gold is gonna be the most sought after commodity because you can buy EVERYTHING with it. For example, in WoW gold isn’t really that important because you cannot buy your “best in slot” items but in D3 you can. Therefore, gold > anything else. Gold will be a lot easier to farm than in WoW, but the demand will be A LOT higher so…

    About the difficulty level, I’m pretty sure soloing inferno will be the way to go for quite some time. If the difficulty is tuned so tight = less room for errors/mistake and if you play with 3 other players, then the risk to fail is much higher because each player have to perform a perfect “rotation” and if one person messes up it could be over quickly.

  2. The blacksmith recipe with the mushroom and the liquid rainbow is (most certainly) for the secret pony level, which apparently has many bright colors as an answer to all the shouts some years ago when the first d3 screenshots were revealed.

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