Diablo 3 Preparation

[Vilesting]

This whole wall of text has been copied from three posts over from Vile's Golden Auctions

Diablo 3 Preparation Part 1
Diablo 3 Preparation Part 2
Diablo 3 Preparation Part 3

Sorry for the wall of text that is about to hit you, but it is three posts put into one mega post.

In the previous month i had made a voting poll asking you, the readers what are your plans regarding Diablo 3, and whether you will be playing the game or not. Well the poll didn't surprise me much as it showed a more or less a 70% of the population that is playing WoW will be dipping into the Diablo 3 franchise as well, and on top of this you will get the old Diablo fans that will be flocking in to the game.

So this meant only one thing, i could have gone on and made a new blog about Diablo and it's economy, but seeing as how my free time is getting on the slim side i decided to throw in a few posts in which i will explain some of the tricks and ideas i got from playing in the beta, and hopefully help out anyone that is starting out to make some gold, but on top of that if they play their cards right they can earn some real money as well. So without further delays let me get down to the basics.


THE CLASSES

Diablo 3 will have 5 different characters for you to choose from. The Wizard, The Witch Doctor, The Demon Hunter, The Barbarian and The Monk. All of these characters have their own specific game play style, but i won't get into how they play out as that really doesn't make any difference when it comes to making gold in the game. Well the real reason for mentioning this is because i want you to know what you will be choosing from the start up. What i mean by this is that the characters in D3 will be defined by the main attribute it will be using on it's gear, be it Strength, Dexterity or Intelligence and last Vitality.

The reason why this is important is because the way the attributes work for different classes, Strength is what Barbarians will want, Dexterity is the sweet spot for the Monk and Demon Hunter while the Intelligence is what the Witch Doctor and Wizard will want on their gear. So with this fact you might figure out that the demand for the Strength gear is going to be lower opposed to the other gear because only the Barbarians will want it, so if you happen to choose a Barbarian as your main character expect to find cheaper items for you on the AH and all the other gear you acquire while hacking and slashing that has DEX and INT on it you will have a broader buyer pool to sell it to.

THE ARTISANS

In the start of the Beta for D3 there were 3 artisans, The Blacksmith, The Jeweler and The Mystic, but a few patches ago the Mystic got sacked so for game launch we got left with only two of them. The way the artisans work in D3 is you need to find them, then do a quest for them and then they agree to help you out, for a fee of course. Well in the Beta we saw the Blacksmith, and what he was capable of, and in the next post i will get into more of a detail on how to use him to make a hefty profit early on in the game.

For now there is one thing you should know about the artisans, they will require gold to craft things for you , and they will require even more gold to level them up, so they are going to be the gold sink that everyone is going to have to drop in a lot of gold into to be able to level them up. What this means for us is that the demand for gold on the RMAH ( Real Money Auction House ) is going to be a lot higher in the first month or so when people are starting out, so if you have any intent on making cash from D3 you might want to get on this market early on, but then again i will cover this in the next post as i want to keep this more of a informational orientation post.

As for the Jeweler, no one can tell you nothing because no one managed to see him because the Beta only allowed you to go up to level 13 and see about 1/3 of Act I, and the Jeweler comes later on in the game, so everything there is to know out there about him is simply data mined information, and information from Blizzard's site.

THE AUCTION HOUSE

The Auction House in D3 is probably the most innovative feature in this game. Now what i mean is, D3 is taking a whole new approach in the gaming industry where they are offering the chance to sell your virtual goods for real cash, and all of that is legal and can't get you banned.

To everyone that has been playing WoW the layout of the Auction House should be pretty recognizable. There is only one thing though that is going to be rather unique about it, and that is the amount of auctions you can have up at any given time, and that is ten auctions on the GMAH and ten on the RMAH. Blizzard decided to take up this route as they wanted to make sure they keep the auction spamming at a minimum, and lets be honest it might be a bit on the low side but if this didn't happen can you imagine the amount of crap you would have to scroll through to find an item you like if everyone could post 100 items or even more, it will literally crash the servers from the overload.

Another thing is that unlike WoW that had EU, US and Asia side servers, and all of them had servers with their own separate auction houses, D3 is going to be on a Global scale and the only way the RMAH is going to separate people is by the currency they use to pay for the goods. What this means is the Auction House is going to be hectic and very fast. Just to compare it with WoW's AH, if you post all your auctions you might get 2-20 min of being the top dog depending on the server you are on, well in D3 you might be the top dog for about 5-20 sec, but then again that might be the time it takes for you to sell your item as the buying crowd is going to be a lot higher as well.

In the next post i will give you a few ideas on how to take advantage of the Auction House, and how to make some gold by doing the oldest trick in the book, but for now i will leave it at this.

Ok so this was the Intro into the D3 world, in the next post i will focus more on the how to make some gold and how to take advantage of the Auction House and earn some profit.

In the previous post i went over the basics that you need to know if you want to play Diablo 3. Today we are going to take a more detailed look at Diablo 3 economy, and more importantly going to take a look at how to use some of the ideas to make some gold, but first we are going to take a closer look at the Auction House.

DETAILED LOOK AT THE DIABLO AUCTION HOUSE FEES

First thing you need to understand about how D3's auction house is going to function is to understand the fees you will be paying to Blizzard. They made a system where they will allow the common player to be able to make real money by playing the game, but at the same time they implemented their fee on every single transaction as well.

As you can see on this table here, on every single transaction that you do on the RMAH Blizzard will charge you depending on what you are selling, if you are selling a weapon or armor you will have to pay 1$ fee to Blizzard, while at the same time you will be paying 15% fee on commodity items ( crafting materials and gold ). So knowing this you end up with prices having a bit of a weird threshold as 0c profit is basically 1$, which in return means that you have to sell your items at prices above that.

Now i mentioned that you will be able to make real money, and you can if you have a Paypal account associated with your account but there is going to be one more thing you need to know if you decide to take this route. Blizzard has a double dip effect if you choose to take the money out instead of putting it in your Blizzard account. What this means is that if you sold that item for 10$, Blizzard will take their initial 1$ and then on top of that they will take an additional 15% before your cash is transferred into your Paypal. So to make it more clear, you sold an item for 10$ and after the fees that Blizzard has in place if you deposit that amount in your Blizzard account you will get 9$ but if you decide to get it to your PayPal account you will actually get 7.65$ Another way of looking at this is like Blizzard being the big brother and he wants his 30% taxes.

Ok now that we got the boring financial jibber-jabber out of the way lets take a look at how we are actually going to be using the Auction house in game.

AUCTION HOUSE PLAY STYLE

Like i mentioned in the Part 1 of the Diablo 3 posts the D3 auction house is going to be kind of limited as you will only be able to post 10 auctions per auction type ( RMAH and GAH ), so you can only have 20 auctions up at any given time. By knowing this fact we actually are facing a rather unique challenge where we will need to do a selective posting, as you really don't want to spend your 10 AH slots for items that are worth low to nothing when you could have made some serious gold by placing the right items. In the next Part 3 of this series i will cover the affixes in D3 so you will get the idea of how much a given item is worth.

One of the most important things that will make you money from the D3 AH is the all so known bidding system. You see even though you are going to have 10/10 slots to post your items, there will be no limit on the amount of items you can bid on. A while back i made a post about bidding in WoW but if you read that one and then you log onto Diablo 3 AH you will see that the same principal still holds. This is going to be especially profitable during the first month or so when people are just starting out and they don't know how to price their commodities. A perfect example for this would be what was happening on the Beta. When you would go through a Skeleton King kill you usually end up with a rare ( yellow colored ) item that had some good stats on it. Now people that played it for the first time they would go and kill the SK, then if that item wasn't for their class they would put it on the AH, and depending on how much gold they have at that moment they use that as a reference, and that is how there were rare items on the AH for 500-2000g. Now at that time you usually get about 1000g from killing all those monsters and looting all those chests, but what i did was bid on those items and pick them up for as low as 300g and then turn around and relist them for 15-40k depending on the affixes they have.

One of the things worth mentioning is that when you go for an item using the bid system you have a option that will let you put down your bid, but at the same time you will set up a threshold for bidding. What this means is that you want to bid on an item and you put down 100g for it, but you want to make sure you get it even if the price goes up to 300g. So by setting your threshold at 300g, if someone undercuts your 100g your bid will go on above his if he is still under your 300g threshold. So more or less it's like you are there bidding even though you are away.

So in this installment we covered the fees you should expect to see on the RMAH, covered a bit about the auction house and the bidding system. Up until now we've looked at how things will work in D3, but in the last Part 3 i will cover all the bases for affixes, crafting and dungeon running so those will actually be about direct ways to make gold. But until the next post i leave you with what we have here.

For the full post check out Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 of the Diablo 3 preparation post.

Here we are for the third and last part of these mini D3 preparation posts. In the Part 1 and Part 2 of the posts we had peek at what to expect in the fees section, and we saw a bit about how the auction house is going to work. Well today we are going to take a look at the crafting portion of the game, the affixes and a general idea of what to expect for the first month that the game is going to be out.

THE CRAFTING ASPECT

Crafting is going to be a big part of the Diablo 3 economy, and a very important aspect that will make the game all that more exciting.

Just like in any game that has a crafting system, it need to have some sort of different levels and skill you must master in order to be able to craft the most powerful items and weapons. Well in D3 this system is kinda similar to that, but with a bit of an added twist.

Namely if you want to level up your crafters, or artisans as they are called, you will need to fork out gold. Every time you pay an artisan some gold he will progress further more into his craft and gain an additional item that he will be able to craft for you. With each payment that you give the artisan, he learns a more powerful item and a higher level item for that matter. After a certain amount of payments have been given the artisan he will "level up" which will be easy to notice as his store will change it's appearance into a more advanced building.

Lets say that you managed to get all the gold needed to level your artisans and you feel you have mastered that artisan, well this is where that twist i mentioned earlier comes in. The game has extra world drop patterns that you can collect from killing monsters, or purchase from the Auction House (RMAH or GAH).

So here you are, you have leveled your artisan a bit, you have made some gold and now you want to craft some items, so what do you do ? Well crafting takes a bit more then a leveled artisan and some patterns, you will need materials in order to be able to craft items. The way you obtain these materials is by salvaging items with magic properties in them, it's the WoW's equivalent of disenchanting. So now that you have the leveled artisan, you have the materials to craft with all you will need is some gold to pay the artisan to craft your item (yeah he's like that, you pay him so he can expand his store and then he turns around and charges you) and you will have your item.

One last thing i want to explain about the crafting system before i skip over to the next thing. When crafting items in D3 you will never know what you are going to get. What i mean with this is that the affixes ( the magical bonuses ) are always going to be different, and it will all boil down to your luck at getting a piece of gear with awesome affixes.

THE AFFIXES

The affixes, or the stats that can appear on items in D3 are quite a bit. To make it easier to understand it would be ok to divide them into two categories, affixes for combat and affixes for "farming". As you can see on the image above, there are affixes like +Pysical and Elemental ( cold, fire, etc.) resistance, thorns ( returned damage ), movement speed etc. There is no need to name them all as you can see them from the picture and get the idea.

What i want to explain about the affixes is why i said you can divide them into two categories. Well the first category is the combat oriented buyers, they will always be on the lookout for pieces of gear that will have +Primary Stat and +Damage on it, at the same time the other category of buyers will focus on +magic find and +gold drop.

One thing that is kinda important that i haven't mentioned until now and it is about affixes is that while being in a group the +magic and +gold find are shared with the group. So if you have a group of 4 people and one of them has gear that is all +magic find, at the same time the second person has +gold find gear on then the remaining two even if they don't have any magic/gold finding gear on they will get that bonus from their friends. So as you can see it will be very profitable, and that much more interesting to play with your friends rather then play on your own.

HOW TO PROFIT FROM ALL OF THIS

So we saw how everything works in the AH, we saw what the affixes do, we saw how the artisans work and now for the end i am going to give you a few free tips on how to take all of these informations and use them to get some profit.

As i mentioned before the RMAH is going to be delayed for about a week, what this means for us is that we are going to have about a week to earn some gold that we can put on the RMAH and profit off the huge demand there's going to be for gold in the first month while everyone is starting out.

The best way to use that initial one week wait would be to have fun and actually play the game. After you have played for a while you are bound to pickup a few rare items on your carnage. What you need to do is define if that item is Combat or Farming item and price it correctly. In the beginning you will have a much better luck selling +magic/gold items as people will not understand that a +100% magic drop doesn't mean you get a magic item from every kill, but rather if that mob has a 1% chance to drop a magic item with your +100% Magic drop increase that same mob will have a 2% chance to drop an item. So to sum it up with these stats, it is going to be a very profitable to sell the +M/G drop items, and when pricing them check the Auction House so you get an idea on how much it is going to be worth it and either put it up at that price or undercut for a very small amount, and if there isn't any up there put it up for 80% of the gold you made that day.

One of the best things that you want to profit off is going to be selling the weapons. To clarify, a weapon with higher DPS would be superior to any gear that offers +stats on anything pretty much damage wise. So it's a fact that weapon DPS is king when it comes to racking in high prices on the GAH or RMAH. At the same time if you get a weapon that has +Magic Find/Gold Drop then you can market that weapon to the "farmers" as well, so that weapon would be even more valuable.

And last tip i leave you with that made me a ton of gold in the Beta would be the vendors. Just like you can profit off the vendors in WoW by buying and reselling patterns and items on the AH, you can do the same in D3 but instead of patterns you would buy out gear, rings to be more precise. There is a vendor that sells these rings but he is a bit in the background so many of the people usually don't see him when they are out and about killing monsters and raiding dungeons. I sold quite a bit of those items and i am sure that they will sell just as good when the game goes live.

For now that is all that you should need to know to get you started and prepared for the release of D3 and if there is anything else that you would like to know just put it in the comment. If you would like to know anything else about D3 and how it is going to work, again put it in the comment and i will try to do my best to answer any questions that i have the answer to.

This was the Third part of the mini Diablo 3 preparation category, you can find the Part 1 and Part 2 in the Diablo 3 category. Anyways i hope you guys enjoyed reading this as much as i enjoyed writing it, so have fun and i'll see you in Diablo 3.