Beta Overachiever: 5 Tips for launch day & 5 Opinions der=0><

[Amarules]

I'll have to disagree with some of your tips.

2) There's no point dumping all of your gold into your Blacksmith. Gold is needed for several things (including upgrading your incredibly small starting stash size) so dumping it all into one thing is a bad idea. My tip in this regard is to save your gold and use it when you need it. If you're finding a bunch of gear you want to save for other characters but have no place to store it, buy more stash space. If you're lacking in a couple of slots search vendors (They sell good gear) or level up your BS enough so you can craft the gear. I found myself splitting my gold between crafting gear (Which is more dependant on crafting materials than gold), leveling the blacksmith and purchasing stash space.

I'd actually disagree with you on that. Its unlikely you are going to want to store huge amounts of stuff too early on. For me the most efficient method is to create as many chars as you can right away and use them all to mule items you find while levelling your first character as opposed to your stash (you can keep useful things like gems/crafting mats in there).

That frees up gold and for me I think the best way to spend it is to pump as much as you can into training the blacksmith upto max level.
The reason is that crafted items are going to be the quickest and most reliable way to obtain items to see you into Inferno once you hit 60. The sooner you are geared the easier farming becomes and the potential content you can run increases.

I would imagine you can level without too many issues relying solely on drops. Allowing you to stockpile crafting materials to be dumped into a full set of crafted upgrades towards the end of normal/nightmare/hell and allow you to transition to the next difficulty smoothly.

If your struggling on a boss you can always dip into your supply. But beta experience was that the drops you get are more than sufficient to get by.

Once you have a decent high level gear set and you can farm well getting stash tabs should be a fairly quick process.

[Wolfpaq777]

I'm going to do my best to leave barrels alone until at least nightmare difficulty. It's true that you can get gold & blues from them, but every second I spend killing a normal barrel could be spent killing a nightmare barrel which will certainly give more gold and better items.

Really, my goal is just to get out of normal difficulty ASAP.

[Griswold]

Opinions 1 & 2, not so great. You've played the beta, not the whole game. I'd reserve judgement until then.

[z00t]

Diablo 3 will do well in reviews, but for the wrong reasons.

Reviewers at places like Gamespot and IGN...they actually have no concept of game design. They don't know what a big deal, in terms of innovation, D3 is. Titan Quest, Torchlight, Path of Exile....they're all still rooted in that 90s design where games punish the player (not that those games were necessarily bad - I enjoyed them for what they were). But Diablo 3 is, to me, the FIRST A-RPG to be designed with modern game design philosophies. Even Titan Quest, with the concept of respeccing, kept the system the same, but just added a gold cost to respeccing as its way of compromising. But all of D3's design has been from a fundamentally different mindset.

[DarkPhenomenon]

I'd actually disagree with you on that. Its unlikely you are going to want to store huge amounts of stuff too early on. For me the most efficient method is to create as many chars as you can right away and use them all to mule items you find while levelling your first character as opposed to your stash (you can keep useful things like gems/crafting mats in there).

That frees up gold and for me I think the best way to spend it is to pump as much as you can into training the blacksmith upto max level.
The reason is that crafted items are going to be the quickest and most reliable way to obtain items to see you into Inferno once you hit 60. The sooner you are geared the easier farming becomes and the potential content you can run increases.

I would imagine you can level without too many issues relying solely on drops. Allowing you to stockpile crafting materials to be dumped into a full set of crafted upgrades towards the end of normal/nightmare/hell and allow you to transition to the next difficulty smoothly.

If your struggling on a boss you can always dip into your supply. But beta experience was that the drops you get are more than sufficient to get by.

Once you have a decent high level gear set and you can farm well getting stash tabs should be a fairly quick process.

Your solution are mules? I find having to swap characters just to store stuff incredibly annoying and you're going to want to keep twink gear for new characters so various low level gear is going to be very useful. I suppose you could save space and initial gold by usings mules. It's easy enough to keep your BS's craftable gear beyond your character level, dumping gold into it will just allow you to craft even higher level gear you can't use which is literally a waste of gold. Once you get your Artisan past level 4 you will be gated by pages while crafting gear will be gated by materials so there is literally no reason to tell people to dump their gold into their artisans. I still stand by my original tip of saving your gold until you need to spend it because then you can spend it on what you actually need instead of trying to guess and potentially being wrong.

[Apocalypse]

I'm going to do my best to leave barrels alone until at least nightmare difficulty. It's true that you can get gold & blues from them, but every second I spend killing a normal barrel could be spent killing a nightmare barrel which will certainly give more gold and better items.

Really, my goal is just to get out of normal difficulty ASAP.

but you will destroy most of the stuff from simply killing the monsters anyway. so many aoe skills

[Flux]

Was anyone else reading the OP, with his 1 post full of advise, and expecting a "buy my D3 guide!" link at the bottom? My admin senses were tingling.

As previous comments show, the gold for blacksmith thing is open to debate.

If you're only playing one character, you'll initially need to spend all of your gold training the smith, (I tend to sell a lot of blue stuff also, since I have way more mats than I need for early crafting, and not enough gold). But even by level 10 or 12 in the beta you'll have the smith to level 3ish, and he'll be overtrained; i.e. the recipes you're adding with more training have clvl reqs of 16+, which you can't use yet.

I'd concentrate on a single character, at least up through normal difficulty. You'll find more gold and value in 10m at level 25
than in 2 hours at level 10.

If you do a 2nd character, say starting a new Wiz or DH after you level a Barb to 15 and get bored with the meathead melee swinging stuff, that 2nd char won't need to spend anything on smith training, and would probably be fully-outfitted by twinks from the first char, so all their gold would be just saved up, or used to buy stash space, etc.

I would not advise recrafting the low level armor recipes. Those early items can only get low level mods with small bonuses, on gear you're going to replace in 5 levels/30 minutes anyway. It's not worth the gold or mats to reroll armor. (Weapons, yes.) Just craft for the defensive bonus and to upgrade over totally useless found items, and save your extra gold for higher level recipes.


One thing unknown; the datamining has always shown lots of recipes that only come from finding plans. i.e. the smith learns about 50% of his total recipes from training, and the other half from plans you find and use to teach him. These plans have never been in the beta though. Earlier patches you'd occasionally find some low level plans that he already knew from training, and there was a rare belt that came only from a plan, but those were only about 2% of the huge number of plans listed in the game code, but never findable.

So we don't know how this will work in the finished game; if we'll need to find a ton of blacksmith plans to learn him up, or if training will cover most/ all of his needs.

[StrudelStraddler]

You could also hoard your gold instead of leveling your smith and then spend it in AH on stuff other people craft. Undoubtedly people who spend all that gold to level up their smith will craft weapons multiple times each to get good attributes, then try to recoup some of the costs by posting attempts that didn't beat their best on AH. That's where you swoop in and pick up the fruits of other people's investments.