How I run Arreat Craters on NM

Recently I wrote a guide to my favorite Diablo 3 gold farming spot and while it was pretty detailed, you can’t really beat a good old fashioned Youtube video! So I have finally made a video of a typical run.

While it isn’t anything fancy, it shows my general method, what to do and what to avoid. As always, your mileage may vary, so try different things and do what works for you and your skill build.

Speed is the name of the game!

The run in the video takes around 9-10 minutes, but that is with me talking about talent build, equipment and dungeon layouts. I make 45k gold on the run and if I hadn’t been commenting, I would be able to do at least 8 of these an hour. The 45k is on the low end of the gold scale, since I didn’t get that many elites, few chests and no treasure goblins. So low-end estimate is 360k gold an hour and higher end estimate is 55k per run, which comes out to 440k an hour.

I have around 270% GF unbuffed, 12% movement speed on my boots and I try and do the following on the run:

• Go for the big groups of mobs. Don’t stop and get one or two mobs, but rather keep moving and either they will catch up to you or they won’t matter.
• Have around 10k DPS and pile on the GF% gear from there. Because this is NM, you don’t need huge amounts of your main stat, DPS or vitality, so pump up your GF instead.
• If you get sidetracked too much, TP and hit the next level in the run.
• I pick up only yellows, since you can quickly spend too much time afterwards sorting through your loot to get room in the bags.

It’s a pretty simple run and it still works after the recent hotfixes and patch 1.0.3.

The future of GF vs. MF

Now, pure goldfarming gear is still pretty good and it actually sells really well on the AH, so you might have problems getting more than 200% GF without paying an arm and a leg. This is because the loot system is a mess, which I wrote about earlier. Because the loot sucks in Diablo 3, people prefer spending their time farming pure gold and then just buy their upgrades, instead of farming it on their own.

While this is very understandable, I also believe Blizzard are very aware of this, since the future of Diablo 3 depends on people actually bothering playing the endgame, which is farming loot. If Diablo 3 tanks because they fail to fix the loot end-game, there will be no RMAH and no income cash cow for Activision/Blizzard. Blizzard had hoped to make Diablo 3 their new WOW cash cow, bit instead they have a fleeing playerbase, dead endgame, a tanking RMAH, no official white market gold selling and huge problems with the black market botters.

This is what I call a troubled end-game: Critics love it 10 hours in, fans hate it 100 hours in. Where do you think Blizzard make the most money? 10 hours in or 100 hours in?

That is from Metacritic and is very symptomatic of the current state of the game. On the surface Diablo 3 is a great game, 50-100+ hours in it’s starting to crack, because people reach the endgame and find that the loot sucks.

What I am getting at is, that Blizzard know this. They know they have a problem and they will throw everything at this problem to make it right again. Not because they love their fans, but because money talks. So at some point in the future, Blizzard will have balanced their endgame loot correctly and MF gear will be worth more than GF gear.

This effect is further enhanced by the raging inflation in the game, where gold is quickly losing its value. Because you can only farm so much gold per hour until you reach a soft cap, your “real income” per hour is slowly being lowered. The 500k gold you can farm in an hour, will buy you less in a month, than what it does now. So in order to keep up with the inflation, you need to start farming for gear, since gear will be selling for more and more gold. I will delve deeper in to this in a future article.

But until then, farm for gold in arreat craters and work on your MF gear.

If you haven’t already, check out the Diablo 3 farming Facebook group and the Diablo 3 farming Youtube channel for more tips, tricks and guides. Expect lots more content on the Youtube channel, since I will A) upload videos before I write the articles for them on main site and B) it is fast to record a 5 minute video, compress and upload it compared to writing a full article. So you will see more 4-5 minute videos on AH strats or quick updates and longer 10-15 minute farming runs.

Now get farming, ya lazy bum!

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