Diablo 3 Farming

In the beta with just 4 quests and around an hour of playtime we were able to find, test and master over a half dozen different ways to farm in Diablo 3. These methods give us more gold per hour and per minute than doing anything else in game, other than possibly playing the auction house. Will strategies like this work in the live version of the game? Yes they will, you will just need to be one of the first people to take advantage of them. If you’re not, by the time you read online that people made a bunch of gold farming a certain quest, boss or area in the game you’ll be quicker to learn that the market for that item has already been diluted.

Farming Manglemaw

What can we do to prepare ourselves for the live version? Well, once the live version is out I will be populating Diablo 3 Farming, a website dedicated to keeping tabs on the best ways to farm various trade goods. Until then, let’s take a look at what we’ve learned from the beta.

Farming Builds

There’s no doubt that the right farming build will do a lot to help you succeed. Farming builds are based on mobility, massive AoE damage and a fast rate of resource regeneration. This allows you to blow through easy’ish content and reach the boss, spawning area or room quicker than otherwise. I’ve created a build for each class that focuses on exactly this:

I’ve also gathered and written a collection of Diablo 3 bulids to help in other scenarios.

The best Farming Class

I’m not sure anyone will pick their class based solely on its potential to farm. I also don’t think we can know for sure which class is the best without playing through the game with each of them. But, tentatively, I’m declaring the Demon Hunter the best farming class. It’s mobility and ranged + instant splash damage with Bola Shot was extremely useful in the beta. I’ll be looking for these same abilities in other classes to compete as a farmer in the live version.

Farming Methods

We probably won’t use the same exact farming areas in the live version that we used in the beta. I highly doubt that they will be the best, but they are solid fallbacks once we reach Hell and Inferno  mode and want to farm Wishful and Exquisite Essences. However, we’re left to study the methods from the beta in order to understand how they work so that we can apply that once we are in the live version.

Farming Captain Daltyn, Manglemaw & Mira Eamon

I was able to effectively farm all three of these bosses. Manglemaw had the highest gold per hour rate since the reset was done by leaving and continuing the game. This seems like an exploit and I expected it to get fixed but it still works in the latest patch. Captain Daltyn is about a 45-60 run from the beginning of The Legacy of Cain and Mira Eamon is a 45-60 second run from the beginning of Shattered Crown. All these bosses drop 1-2 blue quality (magic) items that can be salvaged into materials and sold on the auction house. Look for mini bosses that can be reached quickly from the starting area or that can be re-spawned by leaving the game and coming back.

Farming High Spawn Areas

We know that main bosses won’t have the best drops, instead we learned that rare packs (blue mobs) and elites (yellow mobs), which spawn somewhat randomly will have the best loot drops. We can find areas where there are a lot of these and farm those areas repeatedly for loots. In the beta the Den of the Fallen in Weeping Hallow was one of those places. It’s much easier to find if you understand how the map is generated. You can also join any game and way point to the Old Ruins where there is a chance of finding a Dark Cellar which more often than not has an elite, a treasure goblin and usually a chest. I believe this latest method was the most effective.

Farming Gold

I also found that you could farm gold just by repeating an area with high drop rate of gold. The best example of this was the Royal Crypts where you could smash pottery with Bola Shot or Strafe and collect lots of gold. The best part about this method is that it’s a great candidate to improve with +Gold Find gear. The base drop rate of gold was between 20,000-25,000 gold at level 13, with +Gold Find applied directly and 500% gold find you’d get 100,00-125,000 gold an hour! Stacking gear while farming bosses like mentioned above is not effective.

All these methods beat out, big time, just running the Skeleton King over and over, which yields about half of the typical farming method above.

I think that covers everything we learned in the beta about farming. What we learn about it in the live version, as always, will be posted here first. Make sure you subscribe to Diablo 3 Artisans so that you don’t miss out.

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.

Leave a comment

3 Comments.

  1. More 1 very important thing!!The time!!

    You need very quick ”SSD”to log in and out ;)

  2. Hi,

    I’ve started a new forum called Diablo 3 Entrepreneur and would love it if you would join and help make it the #1 place for budding Diablo 3 Entrepreneurs!

    I know its early days and has very little to offer so I’m willing to provide you with a custom title + founder staff access + link back to your blog (for life) and a little money incentive is available also if thats what drives you!

  3. Here is a little video make by me:

    http://youtu.be/O_N3RBVfuyY

    Download here:
    http://tinyurl.com/diablo3bot

Leave a Reply to angel Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>