My week in Diablo 3

After posting regularly for a while, I hit the wall.  Actually not a writing inspired wall, but rather the Inferno ACT 1 wall.  A solid stone curtain wall of frustration and self doubt.  It took me a week or two of grinding to get exactly nowhere with gear.  Culminating in 5 or six wasted attempts at killing The Butcher, with help, for the first time last night.  In reality I could not get past Araneae the Spider Queen alone.  A friend hopped me from there to the end of Act I.  Despairing and assuming the worst (that I'm bad at this game), I decided to do something really weird.  I decided to ditch my Rare level 60 gear and start buying Magic items.

The plan was this: Stop with the hodge podge of weird attributes on the gear.  Most of the gear was in the direction of +damage and + life with some additions to various resistances and resist all...  But it really wasn't cohesive.  Start buying Chromatic [Item] of Valor instead.  Cohesive armor that increases resistance to all, and Vitality. Markco has a more nuanced approach to it, but I'm going dead simple.

Playing as the Barbarian means that three of my abilities have life gain Skill Runes associated with them.  Frenzy, Rend, and Revenge are the three main attacks.  Which basically spams life gain as I attack.  So far I have replaced 5 items and have done a single farming run, with success.  I need to do a few more farming runs tonight.


Another trick I picked up.  Selling unidentified items.  Especially ilevel 63 items.  Sell them in trade chat for 250,000 to 275,000 gold.  I love this because it's way more then I can get for putting them up on the AH.  I HATE trying to price and sell items let alone try and flip them.  Having always been better on the buy side of the equation means I'm way better at generating cash from commodities.  Unidentified items are basically reduced to a commodity.  Like selling a Magic: the Gathering booster pack.  You're selling the hope.  Most people don't get that the odds are stacked against them.  That I can sell!

I have got some new things to try, and a new plan, which means I'm a lot more excited about this weeks round of farming then last weeks.