Here we take a look at a Diablo 3 Act 3 Key farming route. Getting a few stacks of nephalem valor before venturing off into the Stonefort is usually a pretty good idea - after all you do need a full 5 stack for any chance of a key dropping from the key wardens.
Blizzard released information today stating that stacks of gold for sale on the real money auction house (RMAH) are going from 10,000,000 to 50,000,000. Seeing as how a stack of 10,000,000 gold generally sells for about $0.25 USD, and you have to spend a minimum of $1.00 per transaction, this means that you had to purchase 40,000,000 gold at a time for about $1.00 minimum.
After the scheduled maintenance on July 30th, 2013, all new auctions for gold will be stacks of 50,000,000 and will likely sell for the usual $0.25. Since you will still have to spend a minimum of $1.00 per transaction, this means you're going to be able to pick up 200,000,000 gold for about $1.00 USD! This means $10.00 gets you 2,000,000,000 - that's two BILLION gold.
This change will probably be a good thing for new players - people who have little to no gear, as much low end gear is difficult to sell lately and the prices are rock bottom. This also puts a lot of cash into the hands of players who want to use their demonic essences to craft their bind on account (BoA) items. By the same token if you don't already have 100K+ DPS, and unless you're playing hardcore or strictly self found only you have little excuse to be under 100K at this point, you should be able to spend $1.00 and easily break that 100K DPS barrier. With a little research on YouTube and a bit of patience on the auction house you'll be able to easily farm MP5 for demonic essences.
Check out the video to learn more - and see the video description on YouTube for a link to the post Blizzard made on the Diablo 3 forums.
Wonder how to farm keys in Act 2? Vault of the Assassins (VOTA) can help with that! Get your stacks quick and easy, and then head out to start farming your keys in the Dahlgur Oasis. If you're not sure what this is, watch the video to find out.
An added bonus here is that this is one of the best, if not the best, areas to farm Demonic Essences as well. So, really, you're going to be farming Demonic Essences as well as your Act 2 key to make your Infernal Machines, which you'll need to go after Ubers for your Hellfire ring components. Weeeee!
Have you ever considered an Andariels Visage for your #Diablo3 gear setup? If you're on a budget, you just might want to shop around for one. They are a great source of cheap damage. Yeah.. they aren't a crit Mempo of Twilight - but what is? Other than a crit Mempo of Twilight, of course!
Watch this short video for more insights on the Andariel's Visage now!
Check out this video to see how quick and easy it really is to power level your friend's new character all the way to 60!
You do not have to have a Leoric's Signet. You do not need to hunt down a Cain's set. You do not even need to bother trolling the auction house for various bonus experience items, or any other items for that matter. Watch the video to see proof of how easy this can really be.
Before spending a lot of gold on your monk weapons, check out this video if you're planning to use a dual wield sweeping wind cyclone build. Here you will learn a bit about the how and why people like to use a Won Khim Lau.
Don't feel like you have to have a Won Khim Lau. For a build like this they really are great, and sometimes you can even find a pretty good deal on one. However it is often times much easier, and much cheaper, to find a simple rare weapon instead at a lower price. Watch the video to learn more.
Looking for an act 3 paragon farming route? Watch this video! This is essentially the Alkaizer farming route, but if you've never heard of that, you might want to watch the video. If you have then you can really just skip this as you won't learn much of anything new.
This route isn't as popular as it once was because of experience nerfs to some of the monsters, as well as the fact that a lot of people got really tired of farming Act 3 for so long. Now with increased monster density in other acts, people will farm Act 1 quite frequently. As well the monsters tend to get more and more difficult the further you progress into the game which just means that the monsters are also typically easier to kill in Act 1.
If you want to see a pretty good farming route for getting your paragon levels up in Act 1, check out this video!
It is common to start in The Festering Woods for a quick and easy 2 - 5 stacks of Nephalem Valor. From there you could go to The Cemetery of the Forsaken, or simply start in the cemetery. Once in the cemetery you will want to check the outside area for an elite or champion pack assuming you're on a low enough monster power to efficiently take them down. After that you will want to proceed into the various crypts.
After the cemetery, head south through the gates into The Weeping Hollow. The Weeping Hollow is a very popular destination for all kinds of farming ever since Blizzard increased monster density. The Fields of Misery is also a great place to farm and is usually the next destination. You will also have a chance to get an Act 1 key while in he Fields of Misery.
I like to include Leorics Manor as well as there are usually about 70 mobs inside that you should be able to clear within a minute or so.
After that you could head down to Halls of Agony level 2, rush over to the Highland Passage and on into The Cursed Hold. Clear a bunch of mobs in the Cursed Hold, town portal, leave game, resume game and start it all over again.
What monster power should you be farming paragon experience at? Well, that depends! It will depend on whether you are in a multiplayer game and if so how well you and the other players are geared.
Paragon leveling is all about speed; primarily killing speed and travel speed. You want to test an area to see how high you can set the monster power to while still being able to one shot the weak or normal white mobs. Note that some of these trash mobs will have a good chunk of health - you're looking for the normal, every day, run-of-the-mill trash mobs.. Not super weak, like the scorpions in Act 3, and not the tougher Savage Beasts or Trees in Act 1. Just the normal mobs.
Once you find the monster power that you are able to one shot stuff at, do a few tests runs through your favorite map. Take note of how much paragon experience you have before you start the run so you can see how much you have gained. Take note of the time as well or use a stop watch so you can keep an accurate track of how long it takes you to do the run.
After you do this a few times, you will want to lower the monster power 1 level and run through the same route on the same map that you just tested. As you do this you will want to keep track of your paragon experience gained and the time it took.
Take the average of time spent to paragon experience earned for 2 or 3 different monster powers, after you have found how high you can go while still being able to pretty much one shot the regular trash mobs. Then you will know what monster power you should be farming with your current gear, build, and class in that patch version.
A look at the auction house regarding selling crafting materials that you have salvaged from your new player gold and essence farming runs.
Be careful what unit price you post your items at as there is no 5 minute grace period for this auction postings. If your prices are very low, you will sell out everything you posted to the auction house instantly. On the flip side, you can also post your items at a higher price and just let it ride for a while until inventory runs low and only higher priced materials are available.
Learn about the archon wizard build in the embedded video above. For a wizard this is currently the fastest build to level paragon experience solo in patch 1.08. You could use either this build, a critical mass freeze wizard build, perhaps a black ice build or some other with a specific premade multiplayer game. Public games are just too random and unreliable. Often you will go into an MP5 or MP6 public game and at least one person in the game with you will have 40 - 70K dps which just isn't enough for them to pull their own weight. Another problem is that often people will disagree about what farming routes to take.
If you're into Diablo 3 and your D3 Wizard, I suggest you get to grinding out those paragon levels quick. Blizzard is talking about nerfing Barbarian's Wrath of the Berserker, as well as Wizard's Archon and Critical Mass Freeze builds. It may be a few months before that happens, but unless you play 10+ hours a day odds are fairly good that you'll want to get in your exp now before it is too late!
If you want to get a really good idea of how you can gear a critical mass freeze wizard, which can actually survive if you take a hit in MP10, for less than 10,000,000 gold you should watch this video.
The idea comes from Zisspire and some friends who claimed that they couldn't replicate the same build for anywhere near the 22,000,000 gold shown in Ziss's video. Well.. I did it for about 9,358,000. A little less life and less damage, however also 70 paragon levels lower, less than half as much gold spent, and done by me, a casual gamer. =)
If you are a new player and want to learn how to farm gold you will want to check this video. This is really a guide for how to farm gold and demonic essences, though with an emphasis on gold farming.
This is really better for people who are new, don't have much going for themselves in game yet, and cannot or will not use the real money auction house. Unfortunately with the state of the economy in Diablo 3, especially after the patch 1.08 gold dupe fiasco which Blizzard refused to address, a few million gold per hour really isn't going to do a whole lot for you.
For those of you who are purists, or who have whatever other reasons to not buy gold or items, this is something you should really watch.
You might wonder what is better to level your paragon levels as a wizard:
Critical Mass/Freeze?
Archon?
Kiting build?
This is a simple answer. You want to build your wizard out as an archon wizard with the highest DPS you can afford. From there you will want to test to see what monster power you can do really fast runs with. For instance in Act 1 the regular skeletons, meaning not the ones with shields or two handed executioners axes and certainly not elites or champions, should die pretty much immediately when you hit them.
Whatever monster power you are able to insta-gib the regular mobs on is the monster power you're most likely going to want to do your paragon experience farming at. Don't be afraid to play with the monster power, going up 1 level or even down 1 level, just to be sure you have the most efficient monster power for your current character abilities.
Make a note of how much paragon experience you have, how much you need for the next level, and what level you currently are.. just in case. From there I suggest you head into Act 1 and then out to the Weeping Hollow and clear the map. Don't feel like you have to hunt down and kill every single last monster, as that will often lead to wasting time which in turn leads to less than the fastest leveling. After you've done this a number of times on various monster powers you will know which MP level is going to give you the most experience per hour. Now you just have to do the runs to increase your paragon level!
Don't feel like you have to do full act clears. In fact this is usually not going to be efficient. Also don't play the game in story mode. Don't just start act 1, quest 1, and then play all the way through to the butcher, and then continuing on into act 2, and so on. You can if that's what you want to do, but we're talking about grinding out paragon levels here and nothing else.
A quick look at the sweeping wind monk build in Diablo 3 patch 1.08. This build works better while dual wielding weapons because this gives you more attacks per second. More attacks also means more chances for critical hits. Critical hits give Sweeping Wind: Cyclone a chance to produce a lightning tornado, or cyclone, which are the blue whirlwind/tornadoes. These tornadoes do 26% weapon damage.
Sweeping Wind itself also does 60% weapon damage while at a 3 stack. The stacks build based on critical hits. Critical hits are key in Diablo 3 for so many reasons, and this is just one example.
If you are looking to farm act 1 keys to make your infernal machine you should check out this video. Probably the fastest way to get this done is going to be to grab some friends to form a multiplayer game. Public games can work too but sometimes finding people that are geared appropriately and are on the same page as you can be tough.
Head over to The Festering Woods to get your 3 - 5 stacks there. The Crypt of the Ancients and The Warriors Rest are always present on The Festering Woods map, as well you can always find either events or wandering champ/elite packs outside in the woods. Once you've done that, if you don't already have your 5 stacks of nephalem valor (NV) which will be required to have a chance at a key drop, head over to Leoric's Manor. You can count on getting 1 - 3 stacks between Leorics Manor and Leorics Manor Courtyard. These are small, fast maps to get to and clear.
If you're really unlucky and still don't have your 5 stack, head to the Cemetery. Sometimes you can find a pack outside around the waypoint port in. If not, simply head into a crypt as there are always packs in the crypts. Alternatively you could also go straight to the Fields of Misery where Odeg the Keywarden can be found.
If you do go to the Fields of Misery before you have 5 NV stacks, make sure you find pack(s) to finish off your 5 stack before you kill Odeg. Don't worry if you run into the keywarden too early. Just run away. You don't have to kill it before you have a 5 stack.
