Hey Everyone,

I recently mentioned my affirmation regarding purchasing reasonably priced gear off the AH.  My whole desire to only use gear that I either crafted or recieved as a drop has gone out the window.  It started with weapons and has now morphed into filling in the really low level gear that hasn’t seen decent replacements drop.

When I received the gift weapon while mid way through Act 3 Nightmare and saw the dramatic difference it changed my perception of the leveling experience in Diablo 3.  I understand how important gear is in pretty much every RPG, but as you increase the difficulty in Diablo gear becomes expoentially more important.

Playing through low levels without decent gear can be a challenge because things take longer to kill so it means you have to perform your kiting, or whatever process you use to kill mobs, for a longer period of time.  As you ramp the difficulty though, the amount of health on mobs and the amount of damage they do, especially the rares and elites, makes that increase in performance time very difficult to sustain.

I am currently working my way through Act 2 on Hell difficulty.  It is lots of fun, but even with a 300+ dps weapon at level 56, I was having some struggles doing enough damage while keeping myself alive.  I’ve settled on a nice solid build that walk a compromise between damage and survivability.  I would say I very experienced at kiting, I still make mistakes, but given a reasonably sized area, even fairly small areas depending on mob run speed, I can usually kite large packs indefinitely.  So at what point do you make the decision that kiting a huge pack for 30 minutes just is no longer a matter of difficulty.

I decided that I wanted to get my gear more inline with my level.  That combined with my build adjustments, increasing familiarity with the mobs, and just better use of abilities in appropriate situations dramatically changed how I felt about the difficulty level.  I was getting my face melted repeatedly.  I killed everything that cropped up in front of me, but oh my did it cost me.  Repair bills, time, ego, but certainly it was a good exercise in fighting tooth and nail to prove something.

Now, I feel a bit like I’ve over geared myself.  At level 56 I was only using a couple pieces of gear that were in my level range, like 50+.  I had a couple pieces that were mid 40’s and the rest was all mixed between 19 and 35.  This disparity was further impacted by the beautiful nature of Diablo 3 itemization, not all Diablo 3 gear is created equal, indeed!

I spent around 30k and replaced all of the pieces that were sub 50 except my chest and pants which are decent at mid 40’s.  All told I spent  approximately 35k on AH gear.  If that sounds like a lot, you just need to get to the higher difficulties. To put this contrast I spent around 35 – 40k in craft the level 54 rare helm.  Why so much?  Well, the mats have a cost, the crafting cost alone is 10k without mats, and I had to make three in order to get an item that was even somewhat decent for me.

After a conversation with my brother, it definitely hit home that crafting was dramatically less efficient to the AH as far as cost/benefit goes, and at the same time serves a similar function.  I was trying to get upgrades through crafting, but I was at the mercy of the random number generator.  Instead, I could look at spending money through the AH to get the upgrades and remove the RNG completely.

I sound a little like I’m trying to justify my use of the AH, and maybe I am, because part of me feels like I have exploited something.  I haven’t, these are all mechanisms available within the framework of the game.  In WoW, I wouldn’t think twice about acquiring a massive gear upgrade that brought down the difficulty of content.  For some reason it feels odd to me that the difficulty of the experience on Hell was so closely tied to being under geared for the content.

I could be made to eat my own words.  I have probably opened pandoras’ AH box.  I’ll just have to reserve so much judgement until I’ve experienced a bit more content post upgrades.  It would be interesting to see what sort of gear level the difficulty levels are tuned to.  If Hell is tuned to players in the mid 50’s with an average gear level in the low 50’s, then I’m right in that sweet spot.  If the content is tuned to a much lower average item level, then I’ve just geared the challenge out of this difficulty experience.  I suppose I could take the gear off, but well, I still want to hurry through to Inferno and level 60.  The real challenge for me is going to be Inferno anyway.  At some point, I’m sure we will out gear the Inferno content as well.

Until next time;

Stay Safe Out There,
~Aten