640 replies to this topic

[Kilu]

I made the decision very early on to not buy anything from the AH. I haven't even clicked the button to see what's in there. Maybe I'll sell something in the future (all thw yellow drops I seem be getting are for other classes), but I don't see myself buying any gear from there. I work for all my shit and it feels great.


Finished normal the other day, and beat the skeleton king on nightmare earlier today. I was breezing through the beginning of the act and it didn't really feel more difficult, until I met some elites. They added some crazy shit to those guys. Makes me a little worried about the future.
I've been mostly soloing the game so far, maybe I need to team up at some point.

[Sindra]

So the AH just ate about 20k of my gold from buyouts I did, thus I'd strongly advise against using it. No transaction history, didn't show up in completed items, nothing. I wish they'd just take it down instead of letting people gamble their hard work on a part of the game that's not ready yet. I've heard of many others who've had the same problem, some even losing millions of gold...

No wonder the RMAH isn't up yet. Can you imagine the shitstorm if people lost actual cash to this? lol, and the whole idea behind the AH was so that people wouldn't get scammed. Nice work, Blizzard...

Itll show up eventually. It did for me this morning when I kept bidding on stuff and it kept 'timing out' or I was getting all kinds of errors. Woke up and checked my auctions and I had a bunch of gold from being outbid in my completed box along with some weapons I ended up winning. The AH is a mess right now and I think bilzz is TRYING to fix it but it's just not happening fast enough.

Yeah, they showed up for me a little while ago. I didn't even have anything show up in my transaction history (even now), so I just assumed the worst. Still sucks for lower level people who probably don't even need the items after such a delay. I heard an official response from Blizzard that it could take up to 5 days to receive an item. Seriously, 5 days!?! FedEx is quicker than that... I buyout a cheap item before I use the AH now to make sure it's not lagging.

Almost in hell now. From what DH has told me, I'm not lookin forward to havin to farm the AH bigtime before I can even survive it...

Oh good, I wasn't the only one hitting this issue. Lost 15k trying to grab some better gear and it just went POOF.

[GENTLYPORKING]

I threw three yellows in the auction house on Friday, logged on today and the items are no longer there, nor is the money I would have made from selling them. My transaction history is also blank...

[Sindra]

See, and I remember vaguely seeing a message as I was logging in about the auction being down or something, but then it was allowing listings so I thought it was the Real-Money House. Then I lost my gold and didn't get the items, so I went back and read it as the "Commodity Auction" being down due to fixes. But again...it was down as in "not accessible".

I put in a support ticket. We'll see if anything gets done. I doubt it, but it'd be nice. It's been two weeks and months worth of beta testing. This stuff should be fixed.

[Rize]

I bought some items yesterday morning and the gold vanished... the items appeared like 6 hours later after the AH went down and came back up. Your stuff is *probably* there somewhere, just going to have to wait until they sort it out.


My Wizard is now playing Inferno mode and getting utterly killed by everything. It's great Once you hit level 60 there is no more level requirement on items to worry about so I went to the AH and suddenly Act IV Inferno weapons are available to me.... except the 1 to 2 million gold price tag of course.

[Brandon Strader]

There's nothing more satisfying than mowing down a mob of the fallen

It gets annoying when they are revived by a Fallen Prophet because they don't give EXP after that but eh

[GENTLYPORKING]

Beat it on Nightmare, spent a lot of the day farming for the pieces for the Staff of Herding (item used to get to Whimsyshire). What a silly place. Let me know if you want to run through it without spending the hours and the 150,000 to make it.

[Kilu]

They are applying a new patch so it's currently down, I guess I need to find something else to waste my time in for now.

[Disposable Hero]

Yeah I thought about calling into work today (I just work part time with some friends of mine while Im in school), but since the servers are down guess I'll go in. Curious to see the patch notes for sure. I've heard they are nerfing the difficulty some and buffing legendary items. Hard for me to comment on the difficulty without being in inferno, but I do think legendaries needed a boost. Most mods on them are pretty inferior to rares right now.

I'm kind of in a sticky spot though because I feel like items are so over priced right now, but you kind of have to pay for them to keep upgrading gear to make it through hell difficulty, let alone inferno. There are a couple of issues though. 1) the drop rates are pretty bad, so finding your initial gear for high level characters is pretty tough to do soloing and 2) the gear you buy for the mid 50s for hell are obsolete even before you finish hell and are certainly obsolete by time you hit 60. I haven't decided how I want to go about this going forward. I've been upgrading my gear incrementally, but I just don't feel like it's good enough right now, and it's hard when working on a 500k budget. Most decent high level items are going to run you 100k or more, and those will be no good for high level hell and inferno. I suppose I should start new characters, but I like to have an elite character first to help gear up my lower level characters and pet builds. Guess I'm going to stick to pub games and catching time with any of you guys so we can quest some. I know I at least want to be able to handle hell decently and work my up through inferno. The new patch could change some things though, guess we'll see.

[GENTLYPORKING]

Do you know exactly how the difficulty will change? Before finishing Nightmare, I invested 300k in new weapons and equipment in hte auction house(couldn't get any good drops). Breezed through the end of Nightmare, now getting destroyed early into Act 1 on Hell. I really don't have any money right now to upgrade again.

[Disposable Hero]

Sure don't GP. It's been mostly speculation and rumors, so I'm not even sure I'd plan for it. Just what I've been hearing on the forums. Yeah Hell is no joke either. Champs and Super Uniques are pretty brutal unless you are geared right. We'll see how it goes tonight post patch.

[Rize]

I went to the AH yesterday and spent maybe 80 grand upgrading my level 40 barbarian's various armor parts (I think I upgraded every single part spending between 1k and 7k per part). I was just looking for 50/50 str/vit as a base search and then scanning for good deals. Usually I could find something much better than 50/50 for at least one of the stats. For boots I think I had to ditch the str (high strength just doesn't show up on cheap boots). I actually bought one pair of legendary bracers entirely by accident.

http://us.battle.net...tem/slave-bonds

It only cost me about 5k and it had the str/vit I happened to be looking for, plus movement speed! When I was finished the only glaring deficiency was that I had zero bonus to gold/health pickup radius which is just intolerable. So I spent 20k to get rare pair of gloves with even better str/vit bonuses than the pair I had bought a few minutes before plus a 6 yard radius.

In theory, the amount of gold and items in the economy both grow continually, but it's currently hard to tell whether items or gold will grow faster. Depending on which, you will have the value of gold increasing or decreasing relative to items. I think items are increasing faster because a lot of gold is destroyed (15% for each auction and anything you spend in game) which means saving gold is worthwhile. However, I have no patience for that.

Using the AH effectively seems to be a skill in it's own right. Searching for the highest bang for your buck is different for each armor part. Boots don't like to spawn very high str and vit at level 40, so a search on that turns up really expensive stuff. If you search for the right stats on the right parts though, you can put together a great set of boosts for relatively little.

EDIT:

Another note. You shouldn't have to spend more than a few grand a part for solid items fitting your skill level. If you need items that are very powerful for your skill level, then you pay. So look for the best values, gain some levels and then do it again with new best values for the higher level.

EDIT2:

Also, I bought one item for 500 gold that was waaaaaaay overpowered for that price. I'm thinking the guy meant to put an extra zero on it. Since the AH hides the buyer and seller there was nothing to be done bu6t snap it up before someone else did. Can't even remember what it was... I'll check my logs later.

[Rize]

These are my character builds at the moment. You can get a lot of extra mileage without spending a dime on equipment by making more efficient use of your skills. Forget versatility and focus on buffing one or two attacks. Also forget about the once every 2 minute mega skills. They're fun and can definitely do some damage to a mob, but they're mostly inactive as you wait for the right moment or wait for the 2 minute cool down during a boss fight. Also forget movement skills like teleport and sprint. Unfortunately, the skill slots are too valuable to survival.

Wizard (Inferno, requires level 55). Just one attack here with two SHTF skills and 3 buffs. Since my damage is limited by running out of AP and I have no free signature attack (except swinging my weapon raw), all of my AP boosting skills can be seen as damage boosting and I use a big slow maul to maximize damage per AP. I have to avoid IAS rings and amulets even though they report increase in damage compared to my intelligence boosting rings. I settled on Arcane Orb since it's hard to miss distant enemies with it and when I'm kiting a boss pack it goes through all of them even if they are spaced out. I rely on high vitality armor and my two SHTF defensive skills with very short cooldowns (evocation is vital) for defense. When things go well, I alternate so one is always ready while the other is cooling down. When things really go south, I spam everything then run!

Barbarian (Nightmare, requires level 33). Here I have two attacks, 3 buffs, one SHTF skill. Passive skills go to raw damage with one to life leech (defense basically). I could replace the damage passives with defense passives. Note that I use no Fury attacks, but instead keep fury maxed as often as possible to get the 25% damage buff. I had to ditch sprint unfortunately. As much as I like faster movement, devoting the extra buff slot to survival ultimately gets you more loot in the long run.

If you've got a build you're proud of, post a link. I'm going to look at some new Wizard builds from the ground up and see if I can come up with some other one-attack wonder.


EDIT:

Here is a slightly alternate Wizard build. I could swap energy weapon for arcane mines. I'll lose 10% damage and life leech, but can drop mines while running from fast packs that slow their movement speed and damage them without me having to turn around and cast a spell. Of course, they don't arm until 2 seconds have passed, so I need frost nova to delay them long enough to arm the mines. Gear with extra movement speed would help too. This might work!

[Ashane]

Yeah, I really didn't have to spend much at all to get my WD suited up for Hell, and I can solo act 1-2 no problem (3k dps, 33k HP). Usually spent 1-8k a piece. Legendaries suck and are way overpriced, so I didn't even bother with those. Like Rize, I would do searches for gear that has 40 int/vit as a minimum, sort the buyout from lowest to highest and just scout out the good deals.

I've also been making a ton of gold reselling my old gear for 2-3x the price I paid. Up to 700k saved up now. Don't vendor shit that's got a good amount of str/int/dex with vit on it.. People almost always buy that. Jewelry almost always gets snapped pretty quick too.

[XMark]

Here's my build for my level 35 Demon Hunter, currently on Act 1 Nightmare:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/demon-hunter#bZYTdS!Ycb!aaaaaa

Basically everything that I can possibly have that slows down or stuns enemies (followers also set with their with stunning/blinding/slowing options), and I get damage bonuses on slowed down enemies. Plus the 20% damage bonus when I keep my distance (which is easier when they're slowed or stunned) and the chain gang means I can damage up to 4 enemies at once. Also like to drop bombs in the middle of big groups of enemies, or to cover a retreat. And vault is a lifesaver if you get swarmed or walled in.

Mortar enemy groups seem to be my major weakness, though.