So Diablo 3 has taken up a lot of my non-work life for the past 6 months, and I've loved it. Went from 200+ hours grinding away on my DH to enjoying my Barb.

At this point, my barb is good enough for MP10 Ubers and the only real thing I'm doing is to continue grinding Plvls, upgrading gear that costs hundreds of millions, etc. On a side note: doing farming runs have gotten kind of depressing, I literally doze off mid-run sometimes. Additionally, my few IRL friends have all stopped playing (so credit goes to this forum for keeping me going with this game).

Anyways, I think I'll grind until Plvl 50 (I should get there by week's end) and then take a break until PVP / new content. So here are my questions for some of the other guys maybe in the similar position
- What are you doing to keep things interesting? I've debated Hardcore, I've debated lvling my WD to 60..
- If I am going to take a break, should I hold off on buying gear (I've been tempted to buy an echoing fury and also a mempo w/cc for some time now...)

I still play D3 because I dont have to pay an extra 15 a month like WoW. Paragon Levels keeps me going as I just hit 60, my old banned account, highest was 13, haha. Also took a stab at HC and have fell in love with it despite not even making it to 60 yet.

Id say keep your gold for now. If your done playing, by the time PvP comes out, shit will be even cheaper.

if you want to take a break, not only keep your gold, but consider selling your gear.
experience taught us you'll be able to buy much better gear for a much cheaper price in few months.

You can't really retire from something that's optional (and free to play) :D.

If it's not fun, don't do it. It's a game and there are so many things in the world that we HAVE to do that aren't fun. I play way less now and the only thing that keeps me going is the glimmer of hope that I will hit that gg, multi-billion gold item. That would at least justify some of the effort spent in farming as well as give me greater leverage in flipping items and/or saving money for PvP. That being said, I do a few things to break the boredom:

1) I never play for more than an hour straight. Sometimes I only play 20 minutes (one run). This makes it much, much less depressing if I find a string of shitty items (or maybe none at all). It also makes it feel like much less of a time sink while maintaining gradual progress.
2) I switched classes recently. Monk to DH was the easiest choice and it's a little bit more fresh (visually, strategically). Even though you get hurt with the lack of PL MF, it's definitely a nice change of pace to gain levels every 30 minutes.
3) If you derive some enjoyment from it, you can try to flip items on the AH. There's definitely some joy I get from making a quick 10-20M gold even if it's just reading text. Engaging other parts of my brain is really the lure here. And I never look at items for more than 20 minutes at a time.

My personal opinion is that you should sell everything that's unnecessary and build wealth for PvP. We know pretty much zilch about the mechanics of it and it's difficult to speculate on much right now. For all we know, PvP could be a complete failure and would probably result in this dying community reaching its final destination. The things I am willing to speculate on are 1) the value of gold will spike and 2) the value of certain items will change. It's a huge risk to spend all your gold on an item right now that might have little value in PvP, especially if it's an item that's not "integral" to farming. At least if you have a billion gold or $250 or whatever, you can not only take advantage of people who really want to "dominate" PvP, but you can also walk away from the game with maximal gain.

TBH, I don't really understand how you can quit. There are tons of things you can do that are more important than Diablo 3. But if you have the time and the desire to play, then I say... WHY NOT?

i may be going on a force hiatus... so if you don't see me online, you'll know why.. plus with the holidays coming up, i'll be traveling a lot to visit family and what not... i'll try to check back in on the forums to make sure i don't miss any juicy contests :)

HC breathes life back into the game for a lot of people. It doesn't take too long to see if it'd be different for you, since the pre-60 game is a lot more exciting.

Playing HC has definitely got my interest back. I started playing about a week ago and I was cruising along with a bored, couldn't care less attitude when the Skeleton King knocked me down to about 10 hp. Just like that, the game had my attention again. I'm trying to do it without using the AH at all but I think I'm gonna have to start playing in groups to maximize the drop potential which is pretty abysmal as many of you well know. Its definitely a challenge and actually holds my interest now. Give it a try, you might rediscover the game.

I'm just building wealth with gold and commodities waiting for PvP/better legendary options panic buying to sell things off. I'm also slowly taking each class to 60 and beating Inferno with them. Started a new HC Barbarian also.

Haven't hit that point where I'm bored with D3 yet, but assuming I do...I imagine I'll just load up SC2 for awhile instead! :-)

But TBH, I totally agree with @Metta's philosophy: "You can't really retire from something that's optional (and free to play) :D....There are tons of things you can do that are more important than Diablo 3. But if you have the time and the desire to play, then I say... WHY NOT?"

In other words, there's no need for it to be so black & white & for you to either play or quit completely. There's only 24 hours in a day, & if you're not getting as much enjoyment out of it (or are falling asleep at the keyboard while doing runs...), then drop the number of hours of D3 playing time down a bit. Or even knock it all the way down to zero for a couple of days, if you must. & when you feel the urge to go kill some demons again, just load it up again... ;-)

- What are you doing to keep things interesting? I've debated Hardcore, I've debated lvling my WD to 60..
- If I am going to take a break, should I hold off on buying gear (I've been tempted to buy an echoing fury and also a mempo w/cc for some time now...)

To keep things interesting for me:
1. Try new build. If not because of Tempest Rush I would have died from boredom in walking with DW long time ago.
2. Try new gears. Enjoying my SoJ now.
3. Do not lobby to take off RD mobs. They are pretty much the only mobs which made my pupils dilate a bit while rushing through MP0
4. Do not rush P-levels to 100 after hitting P67 recently.
5. Do not play for extended period of time. I play max a couple of hours per day. I do not play other games, and I find that D3 suits me well. I am a full time father looking after 3 kid/ babies. In solo game I could simply hit [esc] and pause the game if I need to switch my focus to house duties. I also like the 'lottery' element of the UNID. I hope to strike a perfect roll multibillion item one day, however remote the chances are.
6. Browse the AH for bargain.
7. Read interesting articles in D3rmt forum.
8. Hack I might switch to my DH [a different class] soon, after reading some inspiring posts about DH here.

If you are going to take a break.............keep super uber gears if you have any, sell others.

I'm an achievement hunter

I started hunting achievements on release day. I was pretty much almost done with normal difficulty when most people started playing inferno, because I wanted to see each area, explore each little dungeon and find every book.

And I'm still going at it.
But what I have gained by doing it this way is that even though I have played almost every day since release I'm still enjoying the game. I have played all the classes. I have played through HC.
I have read all the books, seen all the dungeons and side areas.
My highest Plvl is only 26.


I'm doing unique hunting right now. And still have very far to go. This is very similar to item/plvl grinding I guess, with the difference that I don't do the same area all the time. I have a list of all the unique mobs I still need to find, and I do runs hitting a couple of the areas at a time. I will repeat the same run until it gets boring, then I change it up and try a different set of areas. Keeps me going strong for now.

@Bort I'm getting frustrated with trying to find Bashiok. Have you got him?

@Khan. Yip. Took me about 48 dedicated searches to find Torsar, which also spawns in the oasis.
I found Bashiok twice during these searches.

This 48 is on top of the number of times I did oasis to level 11 characters to lvl 60, and doing key runs.


But yeah, I feel the same way about finding Dataminer. Did the jar of souls dungeon a ton of times now, and still no Haunted achievement.

It did take 138 dedicated runs to find one of the act 1 unique guys, so some of them just seems to take forever.

I have reached PL50 and decided on the following-

Keep playing the AH, level up a WD at 60 / hardcore (barb or wizard) with my cousin, and high MP ubers. If anyone wants to join the party, holler at me!

@eleganthobo Are we talkin bout HC ubers?

I'll tell you what keeps me tied to Diablo 3.

I remember when I was just a little kid, my dad showed up with a CD he got on his job with multiple demos of programs and some games. One of those games, Diablo 1.
I used to play that demo over, and over, and over again, until a friend of my father lend me the full-game, and man I sh*t bricks with that game.

After that, 2000, a friend showed me Diablo 2, and I quickly fall in-love with that game. I probably spent years on Single Player until I got internet connection in my house, but by that time I completely forgot about Diablo, so it was not until 2010 that I started playing again D2, but online.

I've been tracking Diablo 3 since the rumors in 2005 and the confirmed sequel on 2006, so when March 15th arrived, I had already pre-ordered my Collector Edition.

Now, here's the thing. So far, the story's nothing special, but this is when it takes a little spin.
I live in Argentina (for those who don't know where that is, it's at the bottom of the American Continent) and we have high taxes for things coming from another countries, plus as u can imagine, the stocks are VERY low (finding a CE in Argentina's like seeing an Alien) and Argentina got assigned the Spanish version of the CE, something I was NOT gonna settle for (I wanted the American version, ofc).
Bam, outta nowhere, I had found a place where they were getting American CEs. Long-story-short, they promised us 200 CE, they only got 10, Argentina only got 200 (or 400 if I'm not mistaken). I was not one of the 'lucky ones' (not to mention they were promised by June 12nd, and they came on August 31st), so I had to buy a re-sell for 2.000$ (something like 450$USD) and before that I was going to pay 700$ (170$USD).

Why do I keep playing Diablo 3? Because Blizzard lied to us and sent us practically nothing, I've sent a lot of tickets, there was even a thread on the forums about that, and Blizzard didn't do sh*t. Because I own the entire collection (with their collector's edition), and because I still hope that this game gets better. But I now barely play once or twice a week.

@razer22 nah, doing HC high mp ubers seems insane. softcore for me, for now.