I’ve been doing a lot of complicated stuff on the auction house to make gold, some of it works and some of it doesn’t. But this is the most simple way I have found that works and is repeatable at just about any time of the day. On average I’m making 10,000 gold in a few minutes. You have to let the auction house ‘rest’ between so you can only do this once or twice an hour but it has worked every time.

Subtle Essence

Subtle Essence is the most abundant trade good in the game. Players are still buying them in mass to level their Blacksmiths and selling them in mass to clear out their inventory after they finish Normal difficulty. The average players will probably sell 100-300 of these at a time and probably not care much for the price they go for since the price is dancing between 14 gold (their rock bottom) and 28 gold.

Watching the Price

If you want to watch the price in real time fluctuate do a search for 100, 500 or 1000 Subtle Essence and just keep hitting the search button repeatedly. You will notice a few things. 1) the search is slower than most searches since there are so many damn Subtle Essence posted and 2) the price fluctuates from 14 gold to 28 gold very consistently, but spends most of its time between 20 and 27.

Flipping Subtle Essence

At first it might not seem like it’s worth flipping Subtle Essence, since the value of each is so low. The goal is to buy Subtle Essence for 20 gold or less in stacks of 1,000 and then sell them for 27 or 28 gold. Believe it or not they will sell for 27 gold pretty fast. At least that is the case at the time of writing this.

Just sit there and search for Subtle Essence until the price drops to 20 gold or less. Sometimes it will drop as low as 14 gold because that’s the in-game default sell value. Buy up the essence (20,000 gold) and then resell them for 27 gold a piece. After fees you’ll have 22,950 gold which is about a 3,000 gold profit. I have been able to buy an average of 2,000 Subtle Essence in about 5 minute search time I try and they have sold every time before I return to the auction house.

If you want to find lower prices do searches for 100-500 essences instead of 1,000. You’ll be more likely to see the bottom end of the prices. This takes a little more work but it probably more profitable.

Even though this works really well it won’t be profitable long since the prices of essence will continue to drop and the amount of gold you can farm in Nightmare/Hell right now is soon going to be higher than 6,000 gold in 5 minutes.

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.