Fundamental skills as an auctioneer

This post  is all about fundamental skills you will want to develop as an auctioneer. Some of these are pretty basic but have far reaching consequences once you've mastered them.

For each page in this chapter, I will go over a single skill as well as a tactic to enhance that skill.

As you work through these tactics and begin to hone your craft, be sure to backtrack and retry methods that you may have struggled with previously. The idea here is that the difficulty ramps up as you get better on the auction house.

Let's get you started with a really simple skill involving searching the auction house for deals. From the main gold auction house screen, search for the following, making use of all search features available to you:

Search for magic boots. You're going to end up with way too many search results, which is obvious if you check your last auction page (press the arrows to move to the last search results). If you see more than 45 pages then you need to refine your search because only so many auctions can appear at one time.

To narrow it down a bit, search for level 1 to 20 magic boots with strength.

Look at the results and you'll probably notice that far less showed up. From here, click on the buyout sort so that low priced auctions appear first. Those with "N/A" mean that there is no buyout, only a bid.

If needed, move one page right at a time until there are buyouts showing up.

Knowing the price of a subtle essence, you may be able to find magic boots that are selling for less than the cost of an essence. If you do find these auctions, either bid on them or buy them out.

Tricks to Enhance Your Skills
Search the "N/A" auctions for cheap bids that are also near ending.

Try searching different categories, starting with a broad search and then narrowing it down until you end up with less than 46 pages of results. You could start at specifying a level for your first search, then add an item type criteria for the second, and finally some stat restrictions if necessary.

Be careful not to invest too much into items. Although you can bid on tons of auctions, you don't want to get your money tied up in them completely. Be mindful of bidding on auctions that have more than 24 hours of time left, but base it on the next time you will log on. If you have 48 hours until you log in again, then there's nothing wrong with putting a large portion of your money into bids. Odds are you won't win them all anyway and so your money plus won auctions will be ready once you return to the game.

Alright, let's try something a little more complicated. For this strategy, you will want to start with commodities, but eventually move on to gear. The goal is to find auctions on the gold or RMAH that can be flipped to the opposite auction house.

To properly implement this strategy without taking losses then you will need to completely understand the fees of both auction houses.

The gold auction house is easy as it's 15% for everything.

The RMAH is a little more complex, with three very different fees. Commodities (like gold) have a 15% fee and non-stacking items (like gear or weapons) have a $1 fee. For the purposes of flipping between houses, I would recommend using the Battlenet Balance option instead of cashing out. Since you're going to be flipping anyway, why not move the funds in and out of the Bnet balance to avoid the heavy 15% fee for cashing out to paypal? When you finally do want to cash out for real, just buy a very expensive item and sell it on the
RMAH with paypal selected as the cash out option.

Now for the fun part, finding items to flip. Obviously, you will want to look at both auction houses in order to find good deals, but this is more complicated than just looking right this moment. You're going to want to keep a simple spreadsheet, written journal, or something to record the prices of your targeted commodity. Let's start off with any crafting material.

Track the cost of the commodity any time you get a break in your gameplay. Record the cost on both auction houses at 1, 10, and 100. Once you have a decent record of auctions for a day or two, you can begin (slowly) to dabble in flipping.

Honing Your Skills Further
Pick a very popular weapon or piece of armor that people like to buy. Target this item for your next flipping attempt.

Try using trade chat to reduce the number of fees you suffer on the gold auction house. This will greatly reduce the amount of money you lose when converting to dollars.

Offer people on trade chat a 5% discount from the current auction house price of an item or commodity. This will save you 10% in fees and them 5%, so everyone is a winner!

Some commodities move very quickly, and so attempting to "snipe" cheap auctions when your search criteria is 1x the item proves nearly impossible. Instead, change your buying amount to 10x or even 50x when you attempt to buy.

You can cancel a commodity at any time and you will get back any money owed plus the remainder of your commodity. This is great for freeing up an auction slot or changing your price. I would never recommend having more than one auction slot per commodity type.

Flexibility of Flipping Commodities
In order to encourage posting auctions in Diablo 3, Blizzard took away all posting fees associated with creating auctions on both the GAH and RMAH. Because this could potentially lead to players posting thousands of items and quickly bring their infrastructure to its knees (as well as open up opportunities to scam players with crap items), Blizzard also limited the number of auctions you can have to 10 per auction house (10+10 = 20 total). What I’ve discovered is a terribly simple method (you’re going to facepalm yourself for not thinking of this) for getting around this limit.

How to Circumvent the 10 Auction House Limit
The method is pretty straight forward, and I’ll keep it simple as you could get into quite a bit of debate about the most optimal way to implement this strategy. Basically, you as the player need to take advantage of the cancelling rules for commodity auctions. If you don’t know what they are, here’s how it works:

Cancelling a commodity will send any gold earned thus far by the auction to your completed auction tab as well as any left over commodities from that stack of items. If you had 60 subtle essences and canceled them an hour later, you might see the gold for 30 sold ones come back as well as the remaining 30 subtle essences.
Taking advantage of this fact, a player could buy when the market dropped and sell when ever the market recovered. Rest assured, the prices of all commodities in this game will fluctuate violently; which will in turn leave opportunities for those monitoring these markets.

At any time, a player can cancel his commodities and repost them for a new price, thus circumventing the 10 auctions per auction house limit. If I cancel and repost my stack of subtle essences 30 times, it’s as if I had that many additional auction slots. Not at once, but it’s a hell of a lot better than getting stuck with a 48 hour weapon or piece of armor that was priced too high to sell!

Example of Commodities to Flip:
Gems of all Colors to Tier 8

Crafting Materials for all Blacksmithing Tiers (3 at Inferno Level)

I would recommend using 3 slots for inferno crafting materials and then use the other 7 slots on gems. At any time you can cancel to switch commodities being sold, change pricing, or put up some gear/weapons.

Enhancing Your Skill
The real trick is knowing when to buy. Pick a price point that you will ALWAYS buy at (without putting yourself too long on gold). Stick to that price and play for the long haul. Learn to buy in large quantities in order to avoid missing out because others were faster than you.

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The Diablo fight from a Wizard's perspective

I've been stuck on the "Kill Diablo" quest (Inferno) since Sunday and needless to say the fight is pretty damn unforgiving.

For those of you trekking through act 4, here's some of the BS you can expect:

• Self-detonating fireballs. The single fireball that Diablo fires off and explodes into a massively near-instakill AOE terrain DOT. Typically they have to actually hit something before they detonate... apparently in this fight, they can explode wherever they please, like right next to you as you dodge out of the way, or right before they hit you as you're about to teleport, causing the AOE to kill you.
• Teleporting fireball terrain AOE DOT field of doom. If you have crystal shell up and are at full health and hit a potion as the fireball hits you and manage to teleport away on impact, you MIGHT survive with barely any hp left. Then again, you might not: the AOE will spawn underneath you in your new location instead of where the fireball hit you.
• Fireball multi-shot nova. That ring of multiple fireballs? Sometimes there are no gaps, it's simply a misleading nova, and no matter where you position yourself you will get hit.
• Infinite-range melee attacks. God help you if you find yourself too close to Diablo with both diamond skin and teleport on cooldown and she decides she wants to string together 3+ melee charge attacks, because you will not escape them all. You could be half-way across the screen and if she decides it's about time you took some damage, you're going to take some damage.

She has other major threats, like the UberDOT melee attack that will kill you if you don't get to a health shrine in time (aka gl in phase 2 bro) but at least dying to her other threats make sense.

---

• Getting hit by it with both healing wells down WILL kill you.

• Getting hit by it during phase 2 WILL kill you.

• Getting hit by it with teleport on cooldown while a fair distance away from the healing well WILL kill you.

---

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So, what have I learned in 3 straight days of slamming myself into the impenetrable wall known as Inferno Diablo? That the fight is way different than it was in Hell.

Positioning:

Think of the map (phase 1 and 3) like a baseball diamond. You've got healing wells at 1st base and 3rd base, Diablo's "spawn" point on the pitcher's mound, a pretty area to kite around in the in-field, and a slightly smaller area in the out-field.

Most people would have you dance around 1st and 3rd base trying to play keep-away with Diablo, but the main difference in this fight is her UberDOT melee attack. You should be playing to avoid this at ALL costs;

Diablo's teleport -> melee attack lands far more frequently than her charge -> melee and all her melee attacks have a chance to inflict this DOT, even if you absorb the damage with diamond skin. For this reason, you don't ever want Diablo to teleport on you.

Luckily, you can make that happen. By keeping Diablo on your screen with a clear line-of-sight between the two of you, she will almost NEVER teleport (I've been doing this all night, she only ever used teleport once and followed it up with the bone prisons)

So if you've followed what I've been saying thus far, you should have already realized what I'm about to say: you want to kite circles around Diablo in the in-field, where there is always LoS.

You should be able to dodge all her regular attacks, and only take infrequent damage from her BS attacks (see above) which you should either shrug off with a potion or make a dash for the healing wells if it's critical damage.

Dealing Damage

The best way to deal damage is to lay hydra and just survive. Adding on ray of frost or magic missile may seem like a good idea at the time, until you realize when you stop moving to attack is when Diablo kills you, almost always.

So, dealing damage becomes all about survival.

• Venom Hydra is the offensive skill of choice.
• Teleport is mandatory, and Wormhole is the ideal candidate because you will need to escape from some hairy situations where 1 teleport just won't do. Fracture will kill you more often than you'd like to think: your images like to eat fireballs and the AOE likes to teleport under you.
• Diamond skin with crystal shell. Mandatory.
• Force armor, unless you've built yourself into a gdlk tank and get better results from Prismatic.
• Slow Time with Perpetuity. This one is vital for avoiding fireballs in scary situations, and popping it in phase 2 pre-emptively before the clones spawn generally prevent any BS one-shotting they'll try to do.
• This leaves you with 1 skill slot. I've been using magic missile /w seeker rune, but at this point I think I might be best off leaving it empty and putting the move command on left-click. There are so few real opportunities to safely stop and attack that you're best bet is to pretend Hydra is your only offense (because, it kinda is.)

Okay, that's enough for now, I'll add more if I can manage to progress further. 

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Diablo 3 farming spot: Act 2 - 350k/h+

I've recently found a farming spot in act 2, any quest after 8. The black soulstone should work but I always do this on Lord of Lies (Belail kill). There's a cave called Cavern of the Betrayer level 1, you need to enter this cave during quest 7, Blood and Sand to retrieve Zoltun Kulle's blood, however I discovered that this cave can be the source of some pretty sweet income as well.

I just did a quick run in here with 157% gold find, it took me 5,5 minutes and I earned about 35k during this time, 60/5,5 = 10,9 which means 381k profit, this number will vary alot depending on your movement speed, pickup radius, gold find (magic find is pretty useless unless doing this on inferno or being really lucky with items), your DPS shouldn't really matter alot but as long as it's above 20k they will die really fast. I do this on hell difficulty but it can probably be done on Inferno or nightmare as well, I just find hell most profitable and really easy to do as there is no need to really focus and kite the mobs you kill, I did this as a demon hunter but I am pretty sure you can do this on any class...

Step by Step to do this quest:

1. Change act to act 2 on any difficulty, I prefer Hell, then select any quest after 8, I prefer 10. Lord of Lies.
2. Choose your follower with highest gold find, I prefer templar as it heals me and keep the enemies at bay for a short time as a demon hunter.
3. Choose the waypoint to Desolate sands.
4. When you get to Desolate sands, run around and search for the "Cave of the Betrayer 1"
5. Enter the Cave and clear whole level 1, shoot all rocks, dead worms/corpses, egg sacks, open any dead bodies, kill all enemies, but you should try to find level 2, meaning if you run to the entrance to level two and realise you have missed a room, do not run back, just enter level 2 as it's a waste of time to go back.
6. Do the same on level 2, when you get to the end of the dungeon, just exit the game and resume, you will be back at the beginning of level 1.
7. Repeat.

This is the cave, but of course the spawn location is different for everyone:

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Diablo 3 Barbarian Max Damage Two-Handed Build

In this post we are going to give you another build that is courtesy of the guys over at www.diablo3hero.com/ and this build is for the Barbarian and will help you on the way to Inferno. We recommend using this build while leveling up to Inferno but not for an Inferno build.

This build will give you very high damage and takes advantage of a dual wield set up so it is a two handed build:

Diablo 3 Barbarian Two-Handed Max Damage Leveling Build

Basically the main focus of the build is on damage and what really make the build work are the passives that complement the main skill slots and depending on what weapon you pick you will get different perks such as critical chance or more damage.

Another thing to bear in mind about this build is that it does give you a bit of extra power as you will be able to stun mobs a little. When you get to Inferno you are FAR better going for a “high stun” build if you want any chance to survive!

So give this build a go if you want some extra damage while you are leveling or if you need some help taking on those mobs of hell!

For a complete walkthrough for the game and builds for all classes head over to 

www.diablo3hero.com

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4Chan is at it Again with Diablo 3

Many see 4Chan as the definition of Internet troll. They’ve certainly done enough to earn their reputation and it’s not new to see 4Chan members messing around in video games since many are players themselves. I’ve seen them troll in first-person shooters, MMORPGs and even in console games, Internet forums and gamer forums and more. It seems they are at it again now with Diablo III. 

The original thread on the official forums has since been deleted but the remnants remain on Reddit as players discuss how a Sherlock Holmes Kid Figured it all Out and the fingers of blame get pointed back to 4Chan once again. 

It all centers around a massive gold dupe that got the community in an uproar but the real question was whether or not there ever was a gold dupe. 

One poster seems to have it all figured out:

What if Blizzard really is 4chan and they decided to make the Diablo trilogy and wanted to finish the troll job in the 3rd game by causing a gold dupe which would enrage everyone and make some highly comedic value rage threads by the fans.

PROOF:

B is the SECOND letter of the alphabet, in the word Blizzard there are two z's.

2 + 2 = Blizzard is 4chan

nice try trying to clean up the paper trail and smearing the evidence.

They did something similar to this in SWTOR, as some of you might remember. It was basically a concerted effort to accused BioWare of incorrectly banning accounts and other such nonsense to get the community stirred up. 

Do you think this type of trollery is all in good fun or do you find it hurts the spirit of the community in the game? 

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Adding a Paypal Account in Diablo 3

You will need a verified paypal account in order to sync your battle.net account. If you paypal account is already verified, then just ignore this update. Otherwise, go hereto see how to verify your account (you will need a credit card or bank account already linked to paypal). See the below instructions and if you get stuck, try adding your bank account or a credit card to get Battle.net to sync with your paypal account.

Access Battle.net Payment Options under Settings.

1- Your current balances for all currency types.
Keep in mind that this is NOT your paypal account balance! When you cash out, you are NOT accessing your blizzard account balance. You make a decision when you post an auction as to whether it will go to your blizzard balance or paypal account. If it goes to your paypal account, then you will be able to "cash out" from paypal. If you have money in your account balance and want to "cash out," then you'll want to buy something on the RMAH with this money and resell it, but use the paypal cash out option instead.
2- Your billing address which Blizzard uses for your battle.net account.
3- Paypal options. Beneath this link is your paypal account name and billing address.
4- Add a payment method. This is for adding a new paypal account.
To get started, click on the Add Payment Method.

From there you can log in to paypal and assign your account, or create one from scratch. If you need to create an account, then you will need your bank account information (have a check ready for the routing number and bank number). FYI: You need a bank account with EXACTLY THE SAME name listed as the paypal account. Which need to EXACTLY MATCH the name on the bank account you are withdrawing money to.

Then you'll be redirected to this page on battle.net:

Cashing Out From Paypal

Log in to your paypal account.
This is what the account overview page looks like once you are all set up.

Once you start earning money in Diablo 3, it will be transferred into your paypal account. Here's how you cash out.

Mouse over withdraw and then select transfer to bank account.

Here you can select the amount you want (usually you cash out everything) to be sent to your bank account.

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Fresh 60? A mini guide for you on itemization.

Background
Hi, I used to be an addict of d2. During high school, I'd sleep at 10pm and wake up at 3am to farm diablo/mephisto, and then head to school at 7am. I had perhaps 4 amazons, highest being level 93. I played so much that my diablo cd actually shattered into pieces in my cd drive.

In Diablo3, I'm currently playing a glass cannon DH with 65k DPS without sharpshooter and have about about 14million in my stash. Here is my mini guide for new and even experienced players.

Bow vs Xbow vs 1H Xbow
Let me first start by saying I'm not very experienced with 1H Xbow's so you might have to get information on that from a more experienced player.

What's better? Bow or Xbow? In the beginning it's all about getting the highest dps weapon.

Later on when you have decent amount of gold and can afford either one at a similar DPS number, it's about preference. For me it came down to attack animations, the bow just felt and looked 'good' in my eyes.

Itemization
Things you should be focusing on gearing at as a 60:

• Weapon

DON'T GET ONE THAT HAS ATTACK SPEED AS A MODIFIER. The attack speed is already calculated into the weapon. A weapon with 1000 damage and 20% increase attack speed does NOT equal to 1000 damage, and you get a 20% increase in speed. That weapon means 900ish damage along with 20% increased attack speed in order to achieve 1000 damage.

Always look for dex, sockets, +crit damage, as those are the only modifiers that are NOT calculated into the weapon damage number that you see.

• Dex

Make sure you get it on everything. Adds damage, increases dodge chance.

• Max Discipline

More discipline, more smoke screens. Quiver and chest slots are your main pieces that will grant you this. I have + 9 on quiver and +9 on chest, I can get 4 consecutive smoke screens. Other notables are 1h xbows can give you discipline, as well as a good roll hellcat waistguard. Discipline regenerates at 1 per second. Smoke screen costs 14 discipline. Without any +disc gear, you have 30 discipline. 30max disc - 14(ss) +2(regen) -14(ss) +2(regen) = 25 discipline. You will be around 6 discipline after blowing two consecutive SS. Now say you have +8 discipline on your quiver, after using your second SS you will be at (6+8) 14 disc, which means now you can chain 3 SS instead of two. This is very important. Although 2 SS doesn't look very comparable to 3, once Prep is calculated, you will be able to use SS 6 times instead of 4 which will keep you alive much longer.

• Move Speed

Make sure you have 12% on your boots. As for anything above that, it's preference. I used to have 25% move speed until I realized that I get hit by offscreen spears/arrows head on too often.

• Attack Speed

Attack speed increases your overall dps a LOT... on paper. Your dps number shows the damage you'd be doing if you were standing there and attacking, this is very rare in inferno.
My tip: Get the attack speed you feel comfortable with. What do I mean by that? Get a number where you feel comfortable stutter stepping while at the same time being able to shoot while standing at a comfortable rate. My personal number is between 2~2.10 (found in your character info).

• + Crit Chance

I typically always try to hit the round numbers, 20%, 25%, or 33%.
The higher the better, but not if you're sacrificing other stats for it. Most players drop sharpshooter around the 20~25% crit chance area.

• + Crit Damage

If you're using a xbow, make sure to try to get a crit damage modifier or socket. This will add that number +50% from your passive.

• Notable

Inna's blessing belt will give you a bump in dps by 5-6% holy damage, very expensive. Quivers can have damage increase to certain skills such as elemental arrow up to 11% from what I've seen. This is very beastly and costly.

Itemization tl;dr in this order: Increase max disc by at least 8-> 12% movespeed on boots -> Attack speed at your comfortable rate -> Crit chance 20,25, or 33% -> Crit damage


I was thinking about making another guide on skills and/or item slots, if anyone is interested let me know.
Happy hunting!

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MONK: Unlimited "Near Death Experience"

I went farming in act 3, for the resplended chests with my 322% magic find as I stepped over a very mysterious, yet funny bug.

As we all know "Near Death Experience" is a passive buff, that makes us "absorb" the killing blow on us, and knocks all enemies away when procced.

Besides it also restores our HP and Spirit to 35% (afaik).

This does normally have a 2 minute cooldown, but heres the bug.

They fixed it, so when you die it resets the cooldown on the spell.
Now heres the funny thing.

If you Zone our while you have the debuff, it will remove the debuff, and you are to use it once again instanty.
So if you find, say, an elite pack, you get the pack low, and are all out of cooldowns.
Simply fight the mobs close to a "door/zone" and go ind, and back out, to have it procced again.
Free spirit and HP.

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Monks: Gold Find Farming Build, 300-400k an hour

This is a build I came up with for monks struggling to find a place to farm to get past A2-A3 Inferno. With the Crypts patched, the most effective place to gold find I found is NM Core of Arreat (Act 3 - Heart of Sin [Kill Azmodan]). Right now normal people can get this run done in around 2 minutes just killing the monsters, which would give a net profit of 200-300k an hour. With this build I'm able to finish runs in ~1:30 including opening every chest and demonic vessel (pots), calculating to be 300-400k an hour. So without any further introduction I'll skip the shitting and get to the point.

The build:

This build essentially combines tempest rush with spirit regeneration skills in order to allow you to rush your way throughout the strip. I have MoH specced to give +3 spirit per second and the passive to add +2 on top of that. On the gold find helmet and weapon (shitty 700 dps blue fist I bought for 40k) I have ~4 spirit per second and the tempest rune to reduce it to 8 seconds to channel. Due to the way the spirit regeneration adds up I only have ~8 spirit regeneration so I still lose 2 spirit per second but with the large pool I can still power my way throughout the entire run.

Equipment:

The gold find gear I have has a total of ~200% GF and ~25 gold pickup radius. I bought this all for about 150k total and tried to get just a few dex for damage, with this shitty set of gear on I have around 700 dex.

The run:
Basically you start up NM Act 3 - Heart of Sin on the last part, Kill Azmodan. You can do the first run by killing your way through to the end and hitting the checkpoint at the door from azmodan. From there you make a new game and it'll drop you right at the door and you can start doing it backwards everytime. Essentially you pop the mantra and summon the ally (I'm still experimenting with this third skill slot) and tempest rush your way to the first group of mobs. I pop sweeping winds when I see enough monsters that my tempest won't kill it.

The method I have for keeping my sweeping wind and spirit up is by killing monsters with FoT everytime I stop for a pot or a chest. 2-3 punches gets me enough spirit to easily get to the next pit stop leaving extra in case my wind stops. The radius of fire storm covers almost the entire width of the map so I prefer it over blade storm or the extended duration ones. I also stop rushing to kill elites (also to charge up my spirit).




Technical things:

• Tempest rushing through the large groups of spiders yields quite a bit of gold
• Click on every chest and demonic vessel, they give 200-500 gold usually.
• Make sure your fire storm radius hits the bone piles ant hill looking things, those give 200-400 gold very often as well
• Very often goblins spawn in this run, kill them with FoT
• Succubus are annoying to deal with, if one runs away from you don't waste time trying to kill it.

I think that's about it I hope this helps you struggling monks!

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An in-depth guide to inferno Act 3 Tower Elite Farming

First off I will like to show of two videos, where somebody explains the general premise. I will go into a bit more depth, and explain some of the problems I have solved after.



As you can see in the vids, he runs through from the last waypoint available, from quest III-7(b):

Run through that level and get through the door. This spawn is WRONG:

This spawn is right:

Until you get the right one, leave and resume, and run through the tower again. Once you get the right one, when you leave and resume, you go back to the checkpoint you got when you entered the right zone. This is very important, and greatly speeds up the runs. Getting the checkpoint is the hard part.

You are on a big stairway, the immediate area to the right is one of the platforms where you want to 'drag' elite packs. You run up to them and agro them, then get right up to the edge, and die. You respawn at the top of the stairs. Proceed to dps them down without getting hurt! When they get low, swap out to full MF gear, and finish the job for good loot.

The red lines are for mobs/bad places you are standing, green are for good places to stand.

Here are bad places to stand if they have Teleport(TP), Mortar(MR) or Frozen(FR). They can and will kill you:

Here are much better places to stand, but can still be a bit weird sometimes:

Down the stairs you started on, there is a small bridge, and to the left of it you can see the platform below you. Here is another area to drag elites, using the same method described above. This is a bad place to stand. Small gap, hard to find the right angles to get everything:

This is much better. Easy to drag them to the general area, you can even stand out of the enrage AoE from the right places here. And of course, out of range of TP, MR and FR:

This also works, the mobs often get stuck on the circled areas. You are safe right in the corner there, with good vision as well:

This is very, very bad. Often, when initially checking if any groups have spawned, we will be surprised by 3 teleporting spearmen, who happily jump the gap and ace us. Again, its only TP, FR and MR you have to worry about, but make sure you know the affix before you stand here:

That sums up most of it. You fight your way through all of the random whites (be careful of the ghoul spawns) and find elites, dragging them to the death zones specified. Goblins are really common, probably just under 50% chance of finding one imo. Typically find 2 elite packs, but sometimes 1 and sometimes 4.

If you get a bad pack annoying you on the stairs, just leave/resume to reset. Seriously, its not worth the battle.

Remember, that once you have found the right spawn once, you NEVER have to run through the previous section until you lose the checkpoint by swapping missions. If you leave/resume and you are in town, the game has spawned the wrong instance of the tower. Just leave/resume until you get the right one again, you will respawn on the stairs when its right.

Keep in mind that I'm not preaching 'awesome' drops, simply the best method I have found for dropping the most rares in the shortest time. Act 3, so up to ilevel 63, I run it with 4 people, we get 1-2 rares per pack on average. Roughly 10 rares every ten minutes for the group, and we share pretty everything.

Skill recommendations:

Demon Hunter: I run hungering arrow/devouring, and nether tentacles. SS is a must for reflect damage groups. Bat companion is perfect for spamming more tentacles, for more dps. Other spells are optional, I use caltrops with the slow rune to make the ghouls easier to handle, and to keep any fast packs under control.

Wizard: The wizards I run it with use the homing magic missile, and the really big arcane ball. Venom Hydra is awesome for dps, but can be tricky to land over the wall. Same goes for blizzard. Other skills are optional. Update from wizard: Arcane w/Celestial, Magic Weapon w/Force Weapon gives more dps too.

Barbarian: Obviously can't dps it himself, but Ignore Pain with the group rune really for reflect damage packs, and helps to clear out the whites with us. Another soldier standing there in MF gear.

Monk: Get the skill that increases party damage, bring your healing spells too. Healing is great for reflects damage.

Witch Doctor: Really not much to say, have never run it with a WD. Splinters I'm guessing, maybe the poison geyser for your spender. I don't think any spawns will be useful over the gap.

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France threatens Blizzard with legal action on connection-issues

In France, the very serious “UFC Que Choisir” organization (focused on protecting consumers of all kinds of products) has received over 1500 complaints in 4 days from gamers about connect-ability issues and has asked Blizzard to have a permanent solution within 15 days and to communicate completely and transparently about problems encountered in due time.

They are also requesting that affected gamers be given damages for troubles they may have had, and, in a much broader but more official manner, are asking the DGCCRF to have a close look at online-only DRMed games and how they work, including economically. They basically feel that it’s wrong to assume that an entire nation (well, at least France) has equal internet quality and reception across its entire territory and hence, online-only seems are harmful for some (many?) consumers (which is who they’re trying to protect).

Sources:

• http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/france-threatening-blizzard-with-legal-action
• http://www.quechoisir.org/telecom-multimedia/image-son/communique-diablo-3-face-a-l-enfer-vecu-par-les-joueurs-l-ufc-que-choisir-prend-les-manettes
• http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2012/06/12/l-ufc-que-choisir-s-attaque-a-diablo-3_1716898_651865.html

To be perfectly honest - I welcome these kinds of lawsuits. Lots of people consider this kind of action self-entitled and immature, but in my opinion immature would be to keep quiet and let it go. For too long videogame companies have enjoyed the leniency of consumer self-censorship and they need to be held to the same standard as any other. You wouldn't keep quiet if anyone else would fail to provide you the service you paid for. You wouldn't keep quiet if one day there would be no water in the tap, if your parcel was lost in the post office or if your food was late in a restaurant, so why would you now?

Gamers need to understand that companies don't own their games. Gamers do. If you have paid for a service - you have every damn right to receive it every single time. If Blizzard can't keep their end of a bargain - maybe they shouldn't have pushed always-on-DRM, and maybe - just maybe - they shouldn't announce their server maintenance after it has already started.

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How to fix the "Diablo is running" error when multiboxing

The biggest problem people are facing when they try to multibox Diablo 3 right now, is the Diablo is running error. Here is a small but sweet solution to this problem. You can just copy/paste and add -launch to the shortcut.

1. Open diablo III install location (Windows 7: C:/Program Files/Diablo III)
2. Right click .agent.db -> Open with...
3. Select program from list, select Notepad
4. Locate: "supports_multibox" : false,
5. Change to: "supports_multibox" : true,
6. Save file
7. Go to C:/ProgramData/Battle.net
8. Delete the folder titled "Agent"

You should now be able to open up multiple diablo windows without getting the "Diablo is running" error.

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Blizzard issues a round of account suspensions and bans to several thousand Diablo III players for botting/cheating/ToS violations

Good job Blizzard! ... Wait I can't login!!! Ohh, maintenance :D Yeah, announcing this during a time where people can't log in is some Grade A trolling.

We recently issued a round of account suspensions and bans to several thousand Diablo® III players who were in violation of the Battle.net® Terms of Use for cheating and/or using botting or hacking programs while playing. In addition to undermining the spirit of fair play that’s essential to everyone’s enjoyment of the game, botting, hacking, and other such exploitive behavior can contribute to stability and performance issues with the Battle.net service. As always, maintaining a stable, safe, and fun online-gaming experience for legitimate players is a top priority for us, and we'll be continuing to keep watch on Battle.net and take action as needed.

Apparently you can roll back your system clock 2 days and your account will be unbanned. I guess bans are stored client side, who knew?

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Bored with Diablo 3? Here are some ideas for you

I don't get the people who claim that the game is over for you if you beat it on inferno, or people who are bored. I'm not at the "end" yet myself (Farming Act 1 inferno), but I have a long list of things I want to do. And they are going to keep me occupied for a long time.

1. You know there are 4 other classes you can level to 60 and attempt to beat inferno with, right?
2. Being able to barely beat Diablo inferno, and having the gear to put a beatdown on everything you encounter in Act IV inferno are two vastly different things. I look forward to doing timed speed runs of each act of inferno and constantly trying to beat my record.
3. I wanna try out weird builds with every class, which will probably require long periods of time gaining weird gear specific to the weird build. All-thorns Monk. Ranged Barbarian. Melee Wizard.
4. PVP. Just because it's not out yet doesn't mean you can't start collecting gear for it.
5. Beating inferno with a hardcore character. First I gear a softcore character well enough that he has little risk of dying in Inferno Act IV. Then I play a hardcore character until it has the same stats as that softcore character and beat inferno on hardcore. This will take a LOT of time.
6. Unlock Whimseyshire on all difficulties.

If none of these things sound fun to you then I am very sorry that Diablo couldn't be what you hoped it would be, but it's not the game for you because these things are what it is about.

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Diablo III Farmer makes 60 Million Gold an Hour

One gold farmer makes millions of gold per hour in Diablo III and shows you exactly how he does it in a YouTube video. This is actually pretty interesting when you think about it. No matter how you feel about gold farmers in MMOs, you have to look with at least a bit of awe at what this guy is actually doing.

This from Cinema Blend:

An alleged Chinese gold farmer has come forward to talk with Markee Dragon, a video game enthusiast who has been investigating the mass amount of Diablo III account infiltration claims. Turns out, a lot of accounts that have been farmed were due to using the same username/passwords in forums and fansites, and this particular gold farmer is making 4 million gold an hour off these compromised accounts.

With the incredible fame and popularity of D3 and the compromised accounts, it’s no surprise that someone would find a way to exploit the situation. In fact, I’m willing to bet he is not the only one farming using these methods but he might be one of the top in terms of earnings. 

The article continues:

Mr. Gold also points out that there are other hackers, farmers, botters and spammers he wants Blizzard to get rid of. They're cramping his style, apparently. Officially he calls it "over-inflating" the gold economy. He wants Blizzard to update their security protocol named Warden to weed out the small-time bots and gold farmers who are eating into his profits. He's assured that his methods are mostly undetectable for the next couple of months, but by then they will already have enough gold to make millions in real-life money.

You have to laugh a little at this guy and the fact that he openly admits to being on basically 24/7 and says that Blizzard has never said anything to him and he thinks Blizz should go after the real “bad guys”. I wonder if he will get shut down now that he has gone public with his farming methods?

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Forever Alone

This screenshot was mailed to us. I love one of my friends who every time we talked about D3 he would be like "Naw man, fuck that game." a couple of days after release, look who logs in on D3... that guy... I told him he's a bitch.

Hey, at least your friends are online. Mostly people that I haven't seen on battle.net in two years are now online with Diablo. Good time to catch up with them honestly.

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How to Cancel Auction house Items in Diablo 3

This trick only works with your own auctions. But here is a silly bug or maybe it is working as intended, who knows.

Go into your auction house, and with it open tab into windows and change your date to 2 or 3 days previous, tab back into Diablo 3, and you may have to change tabs (to say Sell back to Auctions) to get it to show up, but the cancel button will be there.

You have to have the auction window open to have this work.

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Demon Hunter Itemization Guide

Athene uploaded a pretty interesting Demon Hunter Itemization Guide. This is a really great watch as has an interesting philosophy on Attack speed vs. cret cs. dex. Check it out below:



Also remember to check out his demon hunter build:

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Designer addresses melee vs. ranged disparity

Reddit did a AMA with Wyatt Cheng, Andrew Chambers, and Jay Wilson - all Diablo 3 game designers the other day. If you didn't check it out, you can do so HERE. We will also post the full transcript when the reddit admins have finished it up. THE AMA was excellent, but one question didn't get much attention as it should: Why do ranged do more damage than melee, when melee have much less uptime and much more risk.


Luckily the developers thought it was a really relevant concern, so Wyatt Cheng took some time to write up the following response on the official forums:

06/06/2012 08:48 PMPosted by Adamant

Can you please explain/reconcile the disparity between melee and ranged in this game?

I'll state up front that I do think there's a disparity between melee and ranged, and I would like to see that closed. I feel like if I talk a lot about thought processes and design philosophy and don't state this up front people will lose the forest for the trees and conclude we think everything is fine. So I'll say it again: melee vs. ranged disparity is not fine, changes are being made, and even if you disagree with the approach outlined below we can hopefully have the common ground that the current situation needs improvement.

It may not look like it on the surface, but a large number of the changes in 1.0.3 are actually targeted at closing the melee/ranged gap. Let me go through some of them.

Hardcore
I'm going to use Hardcore as a starting point. In Hardcore, there's actually a reasonable distribution of classes, and I don't think the melee vs. ranged disparity is as large. There are a lot of Hardcore players of every class in Inferno without a huge disparity. Why is this important? It's because a significant portion of the melee/ranged disparity is related to a ranged character's ability to progress even while dying. A melee player can throw themselves at a monster and die, doing almost no damage to an elite enemy. A ranged player can do a huge amount of damage to an elite enemy, die, respawn, and basically attrition the enemy down with repeated deaths. In the Hardcore environment where a single bad Mortar, Vortex, Jailer, or Reflects Damage will kill a glass cannon-ranged character, the disparity between ranged and melee is an order of magnitude less.

Repair Costs
One of the more controversial changes in 1.0.3 is the increased repair costs. The design intent of these increased repair costs is to make death more meaningful. One of the top arguments we see against the increased repair costs is "I'm already dying dozens of times to make any progress in Inferno. Don't you see this is going to make this impossible?" This concern is most often brought up by ranged glass cannons. Many melee players respond "increased repair costs seem fine" because they haven't been using death-zerging as a tactic. Melee can't easily death-zerg an enemy down, but ranged can. I don't think the answer is to make death-zerging more attractive for melee; I'd rather make death-zerging a less profitable strategy for ranged.

Enemy Health and Damage
We're also looking to adjust the damage and health of enemies in Inferno Acts II, III, and IV. This is another change that is primarily for melee with secondary benefits for ranged. A lot of ranged are building glass cannon with the mentality "well, I'll just try not to get hit at all." So, reducing incoming damage when they weren't taking any before isn't significant for them, whereas reducing incoming damage for the melee is a big deal. For the ranged classes, I'm hoping that the incoming damage reduction will make some survival stats more appealing to ranged classes. While before the damage was so large it just felt pointless to try and mitigate any of it at all, after the change hopefully ranged classes will think "well, if I just put on a modest amount of survivability, I don't get 1-shot, so that's worth it." There are some ranged players who are already doing this -- stacking survivability so they don’t have to endlessly kite -- and it just feels like the minimum amount of survivability to avoid the 1-shot is so large it's unattainable. That's one of the things 1.0.3 seeks to address.

Damage Reduction in Co-op
Another change which is targeted at improving life for melee is the reduction in co-op damage. Again, since many ranged players just build glass cannon and avoid damage completely, they didn't really care if incoming damage went up as other players entered the game, but the melee characters really noticed. It was very easy for your life-on-hit to have you at a steady equilibrium, but as soon as another player entered the game your life-on-hit was no longer covering the incoming damage and death became imminent.

Additional Changes
And finally, there are always minor polish adjustments designed to help melee -- such as the AI on some monsters (BEES!!!) being tweaked to run away less often, which again helps melee more than ranged. I actually spent some extra time the other day to make sure if a Sand Wasp runs away from you, and you start chasing the wasp, it doesn't turn and shoot 4 bees in your face (hopefully that makes 1.0.3). I'm also working with one of our gameplay engineers to make it so if you sidestep the Dark Berserker’s power hit (where he brings his giant mace down), he doesn’t turn to track you as he swings (though that change probably won't make 1.0.3). These kind of AI adjustments are things ranged players don’t even notice, but are huge for melee.

Another adjustment being made is increasing both the maximum range and the dead zone of Mortar. Mortar was specifically designed to be an anti-range affix, but many ranged players would just stand even farther away, whereas melee would sometimes get caught in the cross-fire of two Mortars. Increasing the maximum range and the dead zone helps with both of these.

I really hate the disparity in what each class gets out of stats. It's almost completely pointless to build up armor and resists on a demon hunter because you can never get enough to be really tanky while a wizard can, with a single skill, get +65% armor and +40% resists. Barbarians have something similar and I have to assume monks do as well (never tried the class) but witch doctors don't have anything either. An item with defensive stats can be twice as good for one class as for another. A wizard might have 7000 armor and 900 in all resists but a DH in the same caliber of gear would have 3000 armor and 500 resists. Why even bother, then?

Enemy damage is obviously tuned to be a threat to the classes with gigantic defensive boosts, it has to be, so there's no realistic way for the classes without boosts to ever become capable of taking even a little bit of damage. This creates a really lopsided situation where DHs and WDs go glass cannon because there's really no other option, and a lot of items are underwhelming for them because they might as well have 1 hp so what good is a hat with +100 vit? It'll give you 20k hp instead of 18k, but you still get hit for 70k.

This in turn has forced the developers to give these classes skills that make them actually invulnerable in order to be playable at all, allowing them to go all DPS. The class has to be viable, and survivability is pointless, so they are viable with zero survivability. They are viable with 100% DPS, in fact it's the only way they're viable, so we're seeing 150k DPS DHs clearing the game and farming wherever they want because the game mechanics have to allow it. You die a lot that way and it's frankly rather annoying to play when literally any damage kills you, including largely unavoidable crap like fire grates and falling logs. I don't think it's overpowered, but it's awful game design and it has a terrible effect on everything because the whole game has to be shaped around these ridiculous factors.

It's as if the developers sat there going "Okay, wizards need a bunch of bonus armor and resists. But then demon hunters need a spammable skill that makes them invulnerable since we tuned monster damage with wizards and barbarians in mind. But this allows them to do insane damage by ignoring defense, so enemies need to have absurd amounts of health and crazy abilities that force you to run around constantly. But then the melee classes are nearly unplayable... but we have no solution to that, let's ship the game."

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Diablo 3 Wizard “Damage Absorb” Build

Today we have another build courtesy of the guys over at www.diablo3hero.com – which leads me to another point, if you are looking for an AWESOME guide for Diablo 3 you need to check that one out it is one of the best we have seen!

Anyway we have a Diablo 3 Wizard “Damage Absorb” Build for you and when you think of the wizard you don’t think of a tanking class or being able to survive for long in the middle of combat.

This build tries to change all of that!

Here is the Build:

Diablo 3 Wizard “Damage Absorb” Build:

To use the build you will need to get yourself a half-decent melee weapon and that will be enhanced with Spectral Blade. Then for your tanking skills so you can absorb all the damage you have Diamond Skin, Ice Armor and Archon and the passives will help to improve your critical and backing up your armor even more.

If you are looking for something a little different for the Wizard in Diablo 3 and are sick of being too squishy give this one a go!

For a complete set of leveling builds, a leveling guide and also a full Inferno walkthrough head over to www.diablo3hero.com

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Most effective legit gold farming area

I've been doing research on the currently most effective method of farming gold.

So far I've tested the 5 top farming areas over a duration of 10 runs to get a good average of data.

1. A1 Inferno - Royal Crypts: 453909g/h
2. A3 Nightmare - Arreat Level 2 & Arreat Core: 209167g/h
3. A1 Nightmare - Whimsyshire: 205267g/h
4. A1 Inferno - Dark Cellar: 187478g/h
5. A3 Nightmare - Arreat Core: 180942g/h

So farming the Ashes in the Royal Crypts has by far the highest farm value.
And doing so as a barbarian yields 17652 gold over 140 seconds per round which is basically 126 gold pieces per second.

This data applies to the barbarian class with the following info:

• - +242% Gold find
• - +21y Pickup radius
• - +62% Movement Speed
• - 1.76 Attacks per Second

• - Spear as a weapon with Weapons Master passive skill for increased attack speed
• - Gloves with attack speed
• - Boots with movement speed

• - Cleave with Reaping Swing for virtually unlimited fury
• - Leap to jump over certain unpassable areas
• - Sprint with Marathon gives 50% increased movement speed, due to cleave with reaping swing, this skill can pretty much be spammed

Equipping a follower with gold find rings and an amulet will slightly increase the players gold find, I chose the Templar due to him being the only follower capable of carrying a shield which can also have gold find


Pickup radius will remove the need to walk back to the gold to pick it up. A perfect radius would be 26y - mine is currently 21y and I sometimes miss (but very seldom).

High movement speed reduces the time needed to travel in between ashes.

Attacks per Second is often overlooked, this stat reduces the down time while destroying ashes, considering you can only continue to move once the swing cool down is over.

The reason I'm posting this with a comparison is because everywhere you have different data which is mostly unreliable due to different classes with different gear posting there often incorrect g/h.

I hope this gives everyone some clarity on what is actually worth farming and a bit on how to do so effectively as a barbarian.

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Diablo 3's monstrous first day - an infographic

Here is a nice info graphic from the the guys over at VideoGameDesignSchools.

Created by: VideoGameDesignSchools.org

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Power Leveling Guide 1 - 60

This little guide was made by a good friend of the blog.  Check it out

To get the most out of this tip, you first and foremost need a high level friend. This friend is going to do the killing. Then 2 other friends, the level of those doesn’t really matter, but sub 60 is best, since they also get XP.

To start off, you can go normal difficulty, but later you will need nightmare and perhaps hell. But switch over to those setting when the XP stop increasing.

Ok, the quest is Act II part 8 step 3 (The black soulstone).

Now to the tricky part, and you need to hold focus here.
Your team is 4 players, and we are going to name them, so we can tell them apart.

1. Grunskulle (Your level 60 player)
2. Migidiot (That’s you, the weaker dude :P)
3. Timeflake
4. Dr.Roth

Now you are set, so let’s begin.

Grunskulle makes the game, everybody enters the game. Grunskulle goes down and kills the boss. (Zoltun Kulle). You don’t have to accept the boss event. If the players don’t have the waypoint, “flag-down” t o Grunskulle. But do not, NOT, take the soulstone.

When the boss is killed, and the quest is updated. Everybody, except Grunskulle, leaves the game.
You, Timeflake and Dr.Roth resumes the game, the next part happens in steps, to get the most out of the trick.

Now there are 4 games running, so we need to turn the quest in, but again in steps.

You go down and get the soulstone, to ticker the next part of the quest.
You can now talk to Adria, to finish the quest and get the xp.
Leave your game and join Timeflakes game, he will then get the soulstone. Then you leave Timeflakes game and resume the game. Then you turn in the quest and get the xp.
Then go back to Timeflakes game, and guess what, turn in the quest, and get the xp.

Now it will get interesting…

You and Timeflake go in to Dr.Roths game, he will get the soulstone, Timeflake and you leave the game, and resumes. You turn in the quest, get the xp. Leave and go to Timeflakes game, you both turn in (xp). You both leave and go to Dr.Roths game and you all turn in the quest. (xp)

Then you go back to the original game (Grunskulles), Grunskulle gets the soulstone, and You, Timeflake and Dr.Roth leaves. All players resumes, you turn in the quest (xp), and leaves. Go to Timeflakes game, turn in and xp. You and Timeflake goes to Dr.Roths game, turns in (xp) and you three goes to Grunskulles game, turns in and xp for the last time.

I did type xp a lot, but is just to visualize the amount of turn-ins you get from this. I count 11 ! And yes you also get gold from this ! So that’s not bad at all. The xp for the turn-in scale with level, at level 12 it’s 7700 xp and 980 gold. At level 13 it’s 8050 xp and 1000 gold. 14 = 8400 xp and 1020 gold.

And all you have to do now, in rinse and repeat.

Good luck out there !

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Awesome Farming ACT 3 Buff Nephalem x5 Resplendent chest 700k+ per hour

I want to share my farming spot (averaging 700k gold per hour) that can be utilized by ranged characters.

The Fortified Bunker on Act 3 contains:

• Resplendent Chest 80% of the time
• 1-3 Elites
• A door (crucial for the farming method)
• You can take Tyrael at the quest "Kill the Siegebreaker" (Tyrael can block ennemies and deal 50k damage second)
• Resplendent chest can be spawn at lv1 & 2

Begin the quest on Act 3.

• - Start War Engine (the Quest after GHOM)
• - Look for the Fortified Bunker that I have labeled on this map:
• 
• Clear the instance. At the end of the instance, just before the resplendent chest, there are elites to be found.
• Use the door in the following picture to safely range DPS down the elites.
• 

For any waypoint :
In Eu > Drakke#2184 (25K PO because this spot is huge)

From one hour of farming, I've gotten:

• 1 set
• 2 Legendaries
• ~24 item golds
• Many blues
• ~700k PO

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Diablo III stat attribute cheat sheet

The purpose of this cheat sheet is to show the min/max of different Attributes, per Item Slot.
The info for it comes From Multiple sources, Including the Brady Games Guide, and the "Diablo III - Item Affixes" 

It is not intended to be a full replacement for anything, just a quick guide for looking up Values in relation to “Perfect” stats for items at lvl60. For more detailed info regarding each attrib type, and some Attrib types skipped from this cheat sheet, I suggest checking the above mentioned sources.

Gold Find:
Ammy: 5-50%
Ring/OH/Armor: 5-25%

Magic Find:
Ammy: 2-45%
Ring/OH/Armor: 2-20%

Damage%:
Weapon: 10-50%

+Min Damage OR +Max Damage:
Polearm, Spear, Bow, Ceremonial Knife, Wand: 9-33%
Dagger, Hand Xbow: 9-30%
Ammy, Ring: 9-33%

+Min AND +Max Damage:
Polearm, Spear, Bow, Ceremonial Knife, Wand: 1-286% min / 1-381% max
Dagger, Hand Xbow: 1-250% Min / 1-333% Max.
Ammy, Ring: 1-33% min/max

+Elemental Damage:
Polearm, Spear, Bow, Ceremonial Knife, Wand: 1-667%(Fire, Holy, Light, Poision, Arcane) 1-399%(cold)
Dagger, Hand Xbow: 1-532% (Fire, Holy, Light, Poision, Arcane) 1-334% (Cold)

+Life on hit:
Weapon, Ammy, Follower items: 2-959
Ring: 1-479

+Life on kill:
Weapon, Ammy, Follower items: 2-2878
Ring: 2-1439

Critical hit bonus:
Ammy, Gloves, OH: 2-19%
Ring, Bracers, Helm: 1-12%

Crit Damage Bonus:
Weapon, Ammy, Follower items: 20-100%
Ring, Gloves: 10-50%

+Max Life
Ammy, Shield: 5-16%
Ring, Helm, chest, Belt, Shoulders, OH: 3-12%

+Exp:
Weapon, Armor, OH, Jewelery: 1-24%

+IAS:
Weapon: 2-25%
Ammy, Gloves, Ring: 2-17%

+IMS:
Boots: 4-12%

+Resist (Phys, Light, Fire, Poision, Cold, Arcane):
Ammy, ring, Armor, Shield, Follow Special: 11-60

+Resist All:
Ammy, ring, Armor, Shield, Follow Special: 11-80

Str/Dex/Int/Vit boost:
Ammy, Belt, Shoulders, Weapon, Follower item: 1-200
Ring, Armor, Offhand: 1-100

Str&dex, Str&int, Str&vit, Dex&int, Dex&vit, Int&vit Boost:
Ammy, Weapon, Follower item: 12-150
Ring, Armor, Offhand: 8-100

Gold/HP pickup Radius:
Armor: 2-7

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