Diablo III General Discussion - Page 84

That said, I have honed some certain skills that aren't really too hard to come by if you actually play the game (it's people that actually play the game that are hard to come by). The big thing here is knowing how to level fast (because higher level people become richer faster). Leveling fast obviously takes the ability to just be able to move from monster to monster quickly and efficiently (like killing shamans first in act1). It requires knowing which skills to use (and when) and what items to go for for your build. It requires proper and quick inventory maintenance which can eventually shave off hours of wasted play time. The trickiest and probably least known thing about leveling fast (legitly) is knowing which games to join and when to leave your current game, which is a bit of a guessing game (in some senses akin to playing poker) - this is tied in to rushing yourself through the acts to do the baal runs.

I do not claim to have any difficult talents in the leveling department (other than maybe knowing when to leave current game and knowing how to find a better one).

So great, we're high level now. We happen to be a sorceress with very crappy mediocre gear, and the best thing for us to do is moat trick farm Mephisto until we get our shako/occy/travs/nagels/goldwrap/chancies/etc. First off you can have some crappy mediocre gear and still teleport through most of hell just fine WITHOUT A MAPHACK if you have the right mods on your crappy gear. You really need these mods and pretty much only these mods: faster cast rate, faster hit recovery, life, resists. In pretty much that order too (most people overlook faster hit recovery, a fatal mistake). There's different degrees of teleporting: you can teleport all the way to the corner of your screen which is really risky and might make you die, or you can play it safe and only teleport to just within the edge of your light radius. With experience you will know when you can be risky (edge of screen blind teleporting) and when you can't be.

And then there's the skill of knowing how to find the entrance to the next dungeon without a maphack. Once you have teleported to Catacombs Level 4, or Durance of Hate Level 3, or Throne of Destruction hundreds of times you start to subconsciously gravitate towards the right area a lot of the time. Personally, I bet I would win some sort of legit mephisto teleporting triple elimination tournament against 31 other random players 9 times out of 10.

Great. We've farmed Mephisto for a while, and now we have some decent items for trade. There used to be a time when there was no such thing as currency (a time where I thrived). If you really knew what you were doing, you would become extremely intimate with the market value of every item. "Buy low, sell high". In a lot of other games this is almost a waste of time, but not so in D2 (even current day). There are a lot of dumb people out there who have good items and do not know what they're worth, so they're willing to let them go at a fraction of what they're worth. There is a certain skill in being able to find these people, and yet another skill to be able to convince them to trade with you while also making them think they're getting a good deal. I'm pretty good at this stuff (used to be a lot better), but my brother is like the fucking master at it. It was far from uncommon that he would take a single item worth very little and a few hours later have an item worth 20 or more times that item AND another two of the items (and then repeat with higher value items). Even in these d2jsp days he has taken an item worth ~40fg and traded it for an item worth 400+fg. Several if not dozens of times.

In the past four ladder resets I have reached the top 10 on the overall ladder by the 20-30 hour mark (and thats with taking a good night's sleep and some time to prepare food etc AFTER the reset). And then only to be overtaken by legions of sorceress/hammerdin bots because people are beginning to set them up.

Anyways, I won't really have the much of the "spare time" half of the equation when D3 hits. Oh well. I'm not sure what you really want from me. You think I'm going to give you all of my secrets, or you never really tried to play the game the way it was supposed to be played? You can believe what you want.