A month ago I wrote a little about farming the Den of the Fallen in the Weeping Hallow (this is in the second or third quest in the beta). I never published it because it just wasn’t a competitive way of farming subtle essence, at least not compared to the ways that others were sharing with me at the time. Also at about the same time, Blizzard stated that you won’t be farming bosses in Diablo 3. They said that rare packs (groups of blue mobs) and elites (a single yellow enemy) would drop the best loot in the game. Instead of running repetitive boss runs over and over, they want us to explore the world looking for random spawns. Jerks…

There are already some effective ways to farm rare packs, like porting to the Old Ruins and looking for the Damp Cellar. Den of the Fallen might be one of them. This mini-dungeon spawns in a random location somewhere in the Weeping Hallow, which is a small outdoor zone you can get to relatively quickly from New Tristam. The problem is that the cave itself is often hard find and sometimes isn’t even there.

The other day I saw at DiabloFans that Apoc had posted some details about how the Weeping Hallow map is generated. You can read up via the link to get the details. In summary, there are only certain blocks that are dynamic and these are where most of the magic happens.

Here is a visual of which blocks are random in the Weeping Hallow:

The next image shows the blocks that are not taken up by roads, and therefore can be ‘spawns’ for things like the Den of the Fallen.

This is profound. It means that we can determine which blocks to visit when we’re searching for a mini-dungeon, rare pack, elite mob or another awesome area specific event. This can cut our farming time down to a fraction of what it was without knowing this information. Here is a screen shot of what my map looked like after I ran the 5 block sweep:

As we can see, understanding how the map generation works CAN save us a lot of time. It’s more complicated than I explained it above, so visit the original source here and get a good idea of how the generation works. This is also not about farming in the beta, this gives us a heads up as to what we should be looking for in the live version of the game. I don’t expect many people to actually farm Weeping Hallow for a Den of the Fallen, but these same principles will apply in the live version. Be one of the first to take advantage of them and you’ll be ahead of the curve

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.