D3, and all of its farming goodness and treasure goblins, is out, but all is not well

Granted, the game has only been out for a week, but there are some glaring flaws in the game.

The game has been completed by numerous people. Something that Blizzard said wouldn’t be doable for weeks after launch. I am not surprised, since this has always been the case with WOW, but I do feel like it cheapens the time you invest in it. It sounds sad, but it does make you feel like the time you “invest” in the game is wasted, since it is too easy anyway.

The difficulty isn’t ramped elegantly, and isn’t really affected by skill. Unless you use a twink build, you will need the gear and there is no way around. Blizzard has stated, that here will do everything to avoid cookiecutter builds, so if someone discovers a clever mechanic and use it, you can be sure it will get hotfixed and nerfed in the ground. So get farming and once you are done farming, hit auction house. You need the gear and, to a lesser extent, the micro skills to survive on the higher difficulties.

The D3 auction house is a bust

The auction house is looking to be a failure, and I don’t see how Blizzard intend to make the money they expect off it. The UI is horrible and unintuitive. How do they expect people to part with their money, if they can’t easily find what they want? Why can’t you browse by category and just take a look around? Why can’t you check effects on gems? It is a mystery to me, why they didn’t rely more on the AH interface from WOW. It works and people are familiar with it.

There are some features I like in the AH: The fact you can set a maximum price, that you can search on stats and effects and that you can compare gear to your characters. But other than that, I am not that impressed.

However, I don’t see the real money auction house becoming a huge success for selling items. I have feeling people will use it to buy gold and then use the gold money auction house. People don’t feel as bad spending real money on gold and then spending that gold on gear on the gold money AH. Then it’s just buying in-game currency. No biggie, that is almost the same as paying a subscription! But if you buy items, you are suddenly confronted with the fact, that you are using real world money to buy virtual items…and that is a huge reality check for people. So gold money auction house is the place to be and get to know. This is where you will make the most money.

D3 crafting is just sad, but you should still do it

The crafting is sad in Diablo 3. There, I said it. You really shouldn’t do any crafting in this game, right now. You are much better off buying your gear on the AH and wait for Blizzard to upgrade the crafters. However, there is some merit on leveling them up now and be ready. When the “crafting”-patch hits everyone will want to level their jeweler or blacksmith and get their hands on the new jeweler recipes or blacksmith recipes. When that happens, leveling up your artisan is going to be expensive. So you might as well be ahead of the curve and level up your crafters now, when it is cheap.

You can still make money in D3

You can still make money in D3. You just have to be clever about it. Yesterday I wrote about making money on the D3 AH. That strategy is the only valid strategy right now I see for making money off the AH.

The D3 Treasure goblin is always your best friend!

Of course, there is still the tried and true method of farming for gold yourself. If you intend to do your own goldfarming, then I suggest either going the magic find route or the gold find route. Once you have reached an acceptable level of gold or magic find, then go to the highest area on the highest difficulty, where you can farm the mobs without dieing to anything besides bad luck and bad pulls.

Until the markets settle down, step back, level up and bottom trawl for bargains.

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