Today I put to test Shattered Crown runs with my Demon Hunter. I originally overlooked this quest because it involved running to the north part of Tristam, entering a cellar, and killing a dozen zombies. This takes well over the 60 seconds that my farming Subtle Essence runs took. However, with the Demon Hunter’s Vault, Tactical Advantage, Strafe and Rapid Fire this can be done in under 60 seconds pretty easily and even faster with high DPS gear and practice.

What I found was I can farm 21,000 gold an hour doing this run. Doing several long and monotonous tests, I averaged 1.25 magic items for every full run. Each magic item is still salvaging into 1 Subtle Essence and one fifth of the time into 1 Fallen Tooth. I can sell these on the gold based auction house for 130 gold each right now and that results in right around 188 gold per run. Including the gold dropped form the zombies and gold earned from completing the first objective of the quest (killing Mira Eamon) I found, on average, 160 gold per run. I was just barely able to do 1 run per minute including everything involved. If I maintained these averages of about 348 gold per run over 60 minutes I would make 20,880 gold an hour.

This can probably be sped up and made more efficient with more practice, but the point is that we’re sitting comfortably at 15,000-25,000 gold/hr in our various tests. The best part about these runs is that they will be available in other difficulties but instead drop more valuable essence like Shimmering Essence, Wishful Essence and Iridescent Essence. Taking advantage of these runs might be one of the most profitable ways to make real money early in D3.

Here’s the video:

Stay tuned for more farming tests and insight on how to make gold in the live version of Diablo 3.

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.