Diablo 3: Fun and Profit

This weekend I played Diablo 3 and actually enjoyed it. Given that most of you gave up on the game, I wanted to pass along the secret I discovered to making D3 an enjoyable gaming experience.

Here’s the trick: You have to spend about 50,000,000 gold on the Auction House.

Since May I had utilized the same general strategy: Buy cheap MF gear to get me to cap, then farm, turn a profit, and spend none of it. The Scrooge McDuck strategy worked for a while, but as Blizzard fucked with Inferno and MF and drop rates the game steadily declined in enjoyment. Dying every 3 minutes and then porting to the Chinese gold farmer to leech kills was anti-fun. Then Blizzard introduced the Monster Power system and so there were no more public games full of Chinese farmers to join. I had to try to solo content. That did not work.

So, this weekend I got really drunk and decided to actually spend some of the gold I had obtained.

Ho-Ly Shit did it make a difference.

Now the game has become, basically, the Cow Level from D2. Run through packs to trigger them, collect them all in one big mess, and AOE the fuck out of them. Then run over the corpses to auto-collect gold and rush off to the next pack.

Since I allowed myself to spend gold, I now have a reason to farm Paragon levels. Every level increases my MF, which means that I get to slowly dump MF gear in favor of stat gear. As I progress through content I can increase the Monster Power (Think /player 8 from D2) and so increase drops, XP, etc.

If you don’t have tons of gold stockpiled, you can buy gold for fairly low prices. The current rate is about $1 for 2M gold. So, you can drop $25 or so to get a nice farming set. With a bit of persistence you can get that $25 back through RMAH sales, and end up breaking even or making a bit of profit.

So, yeah, D3 has the potential for enjoyment if you invest a bit of gold / $ in your gear. It’s still not D2, but it’s a damn better game than it was this summer.