I realize it’s still the beta, but I feel like it’s a good opportunity to take a look around and take note of what’s going on. Thursday Blizzard released patch 14. Among the changes included tweaks to the cost of vendor items, sell value of items, drop rate of gold, cost to craft at Blacksmith and the cost to level your blacksmith. The details of these changes were too vague to really investigate right away, so I had to head into Tristam and take some notes.

The first thing I noticed was that the blacksmith prices were in fact increased a lot. Instead of it costing 100 gold to craft something it was costing anywhere from 300-1200 gold. Vendor items were also jacked up into the 1,000s for the same gear that was for sale previously for 600-800 gold. Add that to the doubled cost to level your blacksmith and the additional materials needed to craft and we can see that Blizzard is trying to make the game a little harder.

Given that motive, I expected to retest my gold farming strategies and see dismal results. Yesterday I explained how gold find works in Patch 13, I loaded up The Skeleton King and ran some more gold runs to see what I found and here are the results:

In Patch 13 the base rate to farm gold using this method was right at 10,000 gold per hour or 165 gold per minute. The 18,000 gold per hour I received today was with 26% Gold Find gear, so it adjusts back to 14,285 gold per hour. Why the hell did Blizzard make it easier to farm gold and increase the prices of everything? Your guess is as good as mine.

This change is the equivalent to giving everyone an extra 42% +Gold Find while also increasing prices in town by anywhere from 50% to 100%. Blizzard works in mysterious ways!

Interestingly, when running these methods its very noticeable that Blizzard changed something. Instead of seeing pile after pile of 10-30 gold drop at a time, you’ll see about half the number of piles drop but some of them include as much as 50-65 gold. No shit, in the 30 minutes of testing I saw several piles above 50 gold. It seems that Blizzzard wants to remove the monotony of looting while maintaining the profitability of playing.

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.