I've seen in a few different threads that everyone has a unique approach to farming.

Some people pick up every Mythic Health Potion, some people only pick up Legendaries.

Looking at the numbers, it seems the quickest way to wealth is rolling past nearly all items to increase your chances of that godly billion gold item dropping in game.

If it takes a second to pick up each item, another second to identify your rares, and a second to salvage each blue, in addition to 30 seconds for each trip back to town to perform all these actions, you are wasting 2-3 minutes each trip where you could be farming.

Assuming all gems are worth 20k, each health potion 10k, all rares/blues worth salvage value of roughly 1.5k gold, each trip back to town nets you what? 100k?

Where is the break even point? What seems like the right pace to you? I'd love to put together actual stats on this rather than just making up numbers.

Also, after looking at those kind of numbers, doesn't AH flipping seem like such a better time investment?

I think you're making a peculiar comparison. AH flipping has basically nothing to do with Diablo 3. People play D3 because it's fun, not to earn money and it's been that way for months. People flip to earn money. That's pretty much like comparing getting a second job to D3 farming. Those are two completely different activities.

I'm "farming" solely to upgrade my gear or buy gear for different builds. I also think it's fun. I love the thrill of ID'ing a Legendary item. It's exactly like a lottery ticket. Over 400 hours of gameplay, I've only sold 4 million Gold on the AH and that was just to see how it functioned.

To give you some idea, I have 3 different Nat's chests, 5 Quivers and 3 SoJs and I use them all for different builds. I'm salvaging solely for the lottery ticket aspect of 1.0.7 crafting. (Plus, you can salvage unID's rares so those Stonebows and Yatagans are still worth picking up for me.)

You're also only considering the highest variance item farming available - looking only for 8-10 figure item drops. I take the approach of finding the 50-200k drops. The right armor gear pieces (gloves, helm, pants, boots, jewelry, kind of belts) can still sell even in this slow market, but rarely for more than 200k. If I can get 5 sales over 2 hours of farming at around 100k, that adds a ton of consistency to my Gold intake and I still get the chance of an 8 figure Legendary dropping. You can find my list on the "Pick up List" tab.

You'll almost definitely earn more Gold/hr by flipping than playing the game, but you also probably make more money waiting tables than farming. That doesn't mean I'm going to go out and start applying for waitstaff jobs.

Ok, so lets forget the AH part of the equation.

How do you farm most efficiently? Pick up only salvageable rares and legendaries? What do you leave behind? What's the average per hour? Sounds like you're at 500k an hour roughly, not including the value of the materials you're collecting.

Usually I pick up health potions and any rare/legendary items lvl61 and up. If I only picked up legendaries I would basically be getting a single brimstone every other day or so. The vast majority of legendaries I've picked up have been garbage.

i used to pick up EVERYTHING, but it greatly slowed me down, so then i opted to only picking up lvl61+ items, pots and gems and only salvaged if it was under 1200g. this again was taking too much time, so then i trimmed it down to only rares, and gems

with pvp around the corner, i'm trying to plvl as much as possible, and so now i'm only picking up jewelry, gloves, 1 handers, and gems.

i don't really worry too much about efficiency, just do enough to keep me satisfied with my run.... if you stress too much about xp/hr or $/hr, then it becomes too much of a chore, rather than fun

my .02

@nuhertz Between Gold and drops, it's probably a baseline of about 500k Gold / hr. With the occasional 500k drop or the single lucky 9-figure drop i had two weeks ago, there's still quite a bit of variability. Overall, though, I've definitely noticed a steady upward trend in my Gold since I started only ID'ing the select yellow arrows and ilvl 63 weapons.

I've done some unintentional low-key flipping. I almost exclusively shop on bid in the AH. Just about everything I win on bid is worth more on Buyout. A lot of my small upgrades have started paying for themselves when I sell my old equipment for 20% more that I paid for the new equipment.

Right now I'm sitting on my Gold and waiting to see if there are any more Ruby changes before sinking 75 million Gold into a single splurge purchase - maybe some nice trifecta gloves if I don't get really lucky and gamble a set from my initial flurry of 1.0.7 crafting.

It depends on what your definition of wealth is. If your definition of wealth is >1 billion gold and everything less than that would not be wealthy, then I don't think you should be f***ing with much except legendaries, maybe 1H and jewelry. The reason being is that those are really the only items that can give you an instant 1 shot of 1 billion gold. With other things like gloves, shoulders, bracers, they could hit hundreds of millions, but the odds are just so infinitesimally small that the time spent IDing the likely thousands of them to hit one is not going to be worth it (we're talking hundreds of millions in gold difference). You definitely don't want to be picking up other crap like pants, mojos, w/e because their upper limits are pretty low.

Let's say you pick up things and salvage them and you earn maybe, 250k an hour over just running around not picking up anything. But the run takes twice as long (let's say 6-7 minutes more per run). It's still going to take 4000 hours to reach 1 billion from salvaging. That's maybe 40000 runs. If you're salvaging, each run is going to take twice as long and you will only do 20000. So over time, you're going to get 20000 more runs by not picking up much. 20000 might not seem like a lot, but I believe it's much more valuable to get in all of those runs as opposed to having a guaranteed billion without the extra 20000 runs. What would be awesome is being able to somehow run a simulation of 20000 runs and looking at the item drops to see if it's actually worth it (>1 billion)...

If your definition of wealth is much less, I'd say add gloves, shoulders, bracers, and maybe emeralds. When emeralds were worth like 15k, I think they were definitely worth picking up ALL the time. You don't have to ID them, salvage them, and they only take up a tiny space. Plus, you can stack 100 of them, so you're not going to have to keep returning to town to clear space for them. Literally 15k in 1 second. Now, I wouldn't say they're worth picking up unless you want to break up some of the tedium.

I think we try to convince ourselves that we should pick up more than we have to because of isolated examples of success. "Oh, I saw a guy pick up rare pants that were worth 100M, therefore, I should start picking up pants." But that's akin to playing Keno or slots and saying, "I saw a guy win on these, therefore, I should start playing" without acknowledging the fact that you are already at a disadvantage. I mean, I guess it's still possible to earn more gold/hr picking up Yatagans and Slag Hammers than a guy only picking up legendaries, even over a long period of time. With such high variance, there's not gonna be a guarantee of ANY wealth unless you play for maybe, a few thousand hours anyway.

At the end of the day, it's a game. Do what you wanna do.

My P70 monk can do an Alkaiser Run in 10 minutes or less using Tempest Rush, and I only need to use a town portal after a few runs.

Hence, I would be thinking along this line:

There is time lost of not tempest rushing
- in picking up items. Most of the time you need to walk at least one or two steps to pick it up
- in picking up every gold piles. A big Pick Up radius is helpful here.
- from more frequent trips to town. In town you lose more time in walking to the salvage place, in clicking salvage icon then the item, walking to the merchant, ....
- in IDing items. 1 second each, and more over after IDing you will be browsing over the stats, deciding whether to vendor or to sell, and if you decide to sell further time lost in thinking about pricing, comparing similar item etc

If I continue tempest rushing, time lost above can easily net me more gold. An encounter with another dense pack can already net me a few 10ks, and it only takes me a few seconds (at most 5 seconds?) to reach another dense pack in Alkaiser route. Another dense pack also give you more new lottery tickets of finding the set/ legendary items. Some rares, gems and tomes are valuable.......but once I attach a probability of finding a good item, and look at the opportunity cost of picking them up vs more gold/ tickets from fresh mobs, I will skip them.

Moreover, I like the momentum of tempest rushing with minimal stop.

Personally, I'm trying to get the 100 mil gold achievement so I'm just concentrating on gold collection at Inferno/MP4. I'm now hitting a minimum of 550k gold/hour with my 72 Wiz. I only pick up legendaries, jewels, and tomes. Because I'm bouncing between this and leveling SC toons to 60, I'm still about 2 million away. It truly is a job to gold farm.

I'm also trying to get the 100mil achievement. I'm GF capped in my gear (paragon 48 only). At the moment I still only see about 1 legendary item drop per paragon level I gain. And I average about 450k/h gold just on my pickup.

But I have some of the worst luck in the world, so I pick up most rares as well. The gold I gain from them is guaranteed... I mean the item already dropped. On the other hand the 1 bil legendary probably won't ever show up because of my low legendary drop rate. Besides, if it rolls around I won't miss it because I am already picking up the legendaries that drop.

I do very long runs in act 3, clearing most of the areas. Takes me just over 30 minutes. During this I have specific times when I go through town between certain areas. When in town I id and vendor. But I do give priority to certain items so that I don't fill up my inventory too quick. I mostly skip belts and 2h weapons.




And just to make a long story longer. This is supposed to be a game, not a job. Definitely not a source of income. I have played with a guy that has a 350k DPS barbarian. He can probably easily play any MP level he wants, and he has been Paragon 100 for months. But all he does when he plays is run Cadaea + Azmodan on MP3. Takes him no time at all, and he is probably seeing good legendary drops.
BUT... I personally think he stopped playing a game ages ago. There is 0 challenge to any fight.
I mean, the way he does it they might as well remove all content from the game and give you one button that says: "click to spawn random item".


I enjoy running around clicking stuff for the sake of clicking stuff. Thats what Diablo is all about for me.

Ps. @Khan I know it "slows down the run". But clicking on chests and guard corpses is a good source of gold piles. I see 2k+ gold piles spill out of them more often than not.

Posted by Bort at 02/06/2013 09:12 PM

This is supposed to be a game, not a job. Definitely not a source of income.

The D3 commodities exchange (aka RMAH) is definitely a game in itself for me. The income from that is basically for bragging rights used against my friends who are Activision/Blizzard stockholders. I love throwing my returns in their face because they're basically stagnant on their blizzard positions. "You watch tv, I play D3. And who's making more money here engaging in electron-based entertainment?"

This is supposed to be a game, not a job. Definitely not a source of income.

People are hooked on doing various things in a game.
Some wants this 100m achievement.
Some wants to reach P100 ASAP.
Some wants to make runs efficient.
Some wants to play AH tycoon.

Personally, I have been saying my P70 monk this and that, and I have been perfecting my runs to split seconds. The fact is, my P70 monk has been P70 for over a month now, because I finally got bored with "farming". I had good time in Hardcore since then, and now enjoying leveling WD and Wizard in softcore.

BTW, farming efficiency wise, ...........if you can't one-shot them.............farm pass them. 2 examples in Act 3 are the big fat guy who often rose from the ground, and the other fat thing who seems to crawl on 2 hands. They are the biggest mobs, you won't miss them.