As in many games, especially Blizzard’s past MMO World of Warcraft, farming has been a critical element to the economy. Players who want to make extra gold or earn high quality gear will run the same content over and over again until they are rich or pass out at their keyboard. This is called farming and it’s definitely going to be an important element in Diablo 3.
With the introduction of the first Blizzard real-money auction house in Diablo 3, players will be able to sell their gold and equipment for real-money to be deposited into their PayPal account after the in-game transaction. Due to transaction fees and the real-money barrier to entry of the real money auction house I have said in the past I expect the money making process will work like this: Players will work their butts off in the game to earn trade goods, gear, gold, rune stones and gems which will then be sold on the gold based auction house for gold. Once players have a substantial amount of gold which makes the transaction fees make sense, they will sell the gold in big lots on the real money auction house for withdrawable real-money.
So where does all this gold, trade goods and such come from? Most of them will come from playing the game. Players with better gear, better technique and better access to exclusive content, especially in the early weeks of the game, will have a huge money making advantage over others.
Diablo 3 Farming Tips
After playing the beta I’ve come up with and learned several ways that we can increase our money making potential.
The Right Equipment
Magic find and Gold find gear is implemented in Diablo 3. These are properties found on gear of all types that increases the chance you either find magic find or gold. It’s still debatable which is more profitable and we likely will not know which one is better until after the live version has been out for awhile. Magic Find increases your chance of finding magic quality items which can then be salvaged and turned into Essences and sold on the auction house. Gold Find increases the amount of gold that falls when your party kills a monster. By stacking gold or magic find on all your equipment you can create a set of equipment with massive gold making potential. Check out my Magic Find gear breakdown for more details and subscribe to learn more about gold find later this week.
+ Movement Speed
One other small but very important property to make sure you have is + Movement Speed. This is only found on boots but you’ll need to make sure you find a set of boots that can do this as well as offer you the attirubtes that you need to be effective at doing damage. This will you a slight increase in speed which will translate into a slight increase in the amount of gold you can make in a given amount of time.
Farming the Right Things
In Diablo 3 the difficulty of the monsters depends on the number of players in the game (up to 4) so if you are in a game with 4 players you will want to make sure you are playing with the other 3 or the rate at which you kill monsters will be dampened slightly. The best content to farm in the beta is not going to help us figure out what to farm in the live version. We will have to figure out which dungeons have the best chance of pitting us against elite monsters with high magic item drop rates while also figuring out which dungeons are close together and allow us to run several without spending too much time recreating games and traveling. It’s likely that the end-game encounter against Diablo will be ran most especially early on. That’s why I encourage players to level and gear up quickly so that they can run this content as soon as possible.
There are going to be lot of tricks and techniques discovered when the game actually goes live, so please consider subscribing to this blog and checking out the rest of the resources here between now and when Diablo 3 is released.
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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