Here is a four-man run with our DPS Barbarian, my Demon Hunter, and our two MF Whores – Wizard and Monk. Yes, that Monk farms with 1K DPS and we do just fine! Check out all the rares that drop with the high average magic find.
Here is a video of our four-man group (from Demon Hunter point-of-view) magic find farming Act II Inferno Vault of the Assassin. Tank Barbarian has 17K DPS, 222% base MF, DPS Barbarian has 25K DPS, 250% base MF, Demon Hunter has 90K DPS, 182% base MF, and Witch Doctor has 25K DPS, 237% base MF.
Here is a video of our three-man group (from Demon Hunter point-of-view) magic find farming Act II Inferno, Vault of the Assassin. The video includes my Demon Hunter with 90K DPS, 182% base MF, our DPS Barbarian with 25K DPS, 250% base MF, and our Tank Barbarian with 17K DPS, 222% base MF.
Here is a video of my Demon Hunter with 90K DPS, 182% base MF farming with our DPS Barbarian with 25K DPS, 250% base MF.
Here is a video of my Demon Hunter solo farming Act II Inferno, Vault of the Assassin with 90K DPS, 182% base MF – 201% with Templar.
Our fourth core member of our farming team is another Barbarian, this one mostly in tank spec. His current build is:
Passives:
Hit the break to see a gallery of his gear.
Here is our primary magic find farming Barbarian. For Act II farming, he uses a shield rather than dual-wielding to up our collective MF. Here is his build:
Passives:
Hit the break to see a gallery of his gear.
You’ve just spent hours farming and now your stash is full of rares that you just got done identifying. Part of you feels like it was time wasted, since nothing jumps out to you that it’s worth anything. Well here’s the bad news: chances are, you’re wrong. And the good news? Chances are you can make some gold – or even real money!
After much thought, I realized that this will be a multi-part guide. Not because I give a crap about traffic on this website, but because if anyone wants to actually learn anything, it has to be really detailed. So because of that, I’m going to break down the guide into multiple parts, with each post focusing on a single piece of gear. Ideally I’ll be able to break down the stats of what to look for on the item, the max that each stat can roll, and what each class values.
But until then, this post will give you some general advice and tips on what to look for to start learning how whether an item is worth selling on the auction houses in Diablo III.
Hit the break to rest the rest of this lengthy post.
When building my Demon Hunter, one of the easiest ways to figure out my goal was to look at snapshots of other people’s gear to determine exactly what stats I would need to obtain the DPS I wanted. Now before I get in depth on how to build a Demon Hunter to efficiently farm every Act in Diablo III with magic find, the most important tip I can give anyone is to use a spreadsheet. It’s an invaluable tool to determine what pieces of gear to get, and if the increase in DPS is worth it. The one that I personally recommend can be found here and is the most comprehensive one I have used to date when shopping. Its format is also great in theorycrafting on shifting crit hit chance from piece to piece, while tweaking crit hit damage to determine what pieces you need down the road. My initial goal was to have 175% base MF (no follower), 30% crit hit chance, 300% crit hit damage and 2,200 dex. But at the end of the day, I was going to be happy with 90K DPS without Sharpshooter – it’s about 174K with if you are wondering – since that is more than enough to efficiently farm any Act in the game.
First and foremost, the gear isn’t cheap. At all. Up to this stage, I did several builds for my Demon Hunter which I’ll summarize below. I was able to hit 80K DPS with steals on the auction house, but climbing to that 90K mark involved paying a whole lot of gold for the items. Up to a certain point, deals can still be had if you are willing to compromise on damage. But once you get into that top-tier group of gear, no one prices it so significantly that it’s considered a steal. For example, I had a set of boots that had +240 dex, +12% movement speed, and +11% magic find that I was able to get for 750,000. It was a complete steal. When I started looking for boots with a vit upgrade, it cost me 15,000,000. A steep price to pay for a few more points of dex and vit, but that’s how Diablo III goes.
I was one of those Demon Hunters that started playing the game dual wielding and stacking IAS gear. I got every Legendary I possibly could with IAS, and stacked the crap out of it. At one point I had hit 111K DPS with Sharpshooter a week or so into the game’s launch. Once I hit the Act II Inferno wall, I decided to start tweaking my gear to start stacking MF. I shopped for MF equivalent pieces of my Legendaries, which weren’t cheap, but I was able to shift my entire gear to include MF in every piece with a whole lot of IAS. I had hit 60K DPS or so and then the IAS nerf happened.
I had dropped to about 41K DPS, so it was back to the drawing board for me. The first thing for me to do was to get over the fact that I would never fire over 3.5 attacks per second ever again, so I decided to set my goal to be 2.00 APS. I dumped every piece of Legendary I could, minus my Andariel’s Visage (more on that below) and started rebuilding to the stage that I am at now.
Hit the break to see detailed screenshots of each piece of gear, why I chose it, and what I paid for it.
I spend quite a bit of my free time reading through /r/diablo posts, and a particular one caught my attention. There’s a good chance that I probably spend more time sitting on the Auction Houses in the game than actually farming, mostly because it’s an interesting study in human nature, economics, and just the general habits of people on how they value something that isn’t real. Early on, I made millions doing what most people hate – ‘flipping’ items on the gold auction house. Once I figured out what Demon Hunters desired in building their class, I would quickly browse through several pieces of armor, scooping up underpriced pieces and relisting them for a profit. Admittedly, that got boring and recently the only flips I do is if I spot a severely underpriced item while browsing for upgrades for myself.
So with that being said, I pay a lot of attention on what goes on between the RMAH and the GAH, what items are converting at the proper $2.50 / mill ratio (which surprisingly many people do not follow) and generally which way the market is heading. And while there’s truth that the market as a whole has slowed down, there is still plenty of money to be made on the AH. I spent the past couple of days putting some items to the test in hoping to figure out how best to optimize sales in today’s market.
When the ability to sell gold appeared on the RMAH, I knew the market was going to shift. Everyone with the best items would undoubtedly unload it on the GAH believing that they could fetch exorbitant amounts for it now that people could just purchase gold. The problem is, a price floor was sent on the value of gold, which was $2.50 / million. Now assuming that the vast majority of Diablo III players are semi-intelligent (hint: they’re not) most people would somewhat stabilize the market between the RMAH and the GAH at $2.50 /million. That is, if you have a million dollar item, you’d sell it on the RMAH for around $2.50. Otherwise, someone else would just buy 1 million in gold with $2.50 and buy it on the GAH. Right?
Entirely wrong. Completely wrong in fact. Just how wrong? Read on after the break for a detailed post on how to price your items and start making millions off your drops.