Basic Auction House guide

With this guide you will basically learn how the basics of how to snipe items and sell them for an insane profit. I like to use legendary items for this because its easier. If you know how to trade feel free to use rares.

The recommended items is a great spot to start out looking for gear. Your currently selected hero will determine what gear you see here. Look at my buyout buttons arrow, see how that is pointing up? Clicking buyout will change which way that arrow faces. If it faces up, the cheapest items will start your list. If it faces down, the most expensive items will start your list. I'm not a fan of a hundred million gold on anything so I usually keep the arrow facing up.

Now lets get started
*Get your search preferences setup *

1. 1. Equipment search (Set it to Barbarian)(This may vary)
2. 2. Armor (Generally selling armor makes me money far faster then selling weapons)
3. 3.Set rarity to Legendary

Your Screen should now look similar to mine

Now what?

Good question, but there are a number of ways to make money from here. If you don't have a lot of capital still try this method for practice but method 2 or 3 will be better for you.
Sometimes this method requires more time to sell items but the return on them can be freakin' huge and totally worth giving up an auction slot for a day.

• Check out this most popular items list, I memorized a lot of items on here because they tend to sell the fastest and usually maintain a steady price. Plus you can really hit it big here if you snipe a popular item with good stats.

Here is an example of why it is so important to know your items and the stats they can spawn with.
Let's use Inna's Temperance as the example item here. It is a very popular item and over the days I've seen the prices on it vary quite a bit. When I first started looking at it, it was a steady 350k-400k for just a normal stat Inna's Temperance. I'm assuming other people in the market noticed that as well seeing as how it's flooded with these and the price has dropped by almost 50%.

Remember when I said the right stats will make you more gold? Well a few days ago I missed an Inna's Temperance for 200k which had 90 Strength on it. The moment I realized that was worth a ton I tried to buy it but poof it was gone, someone beat me to it. Look at the price difference 90 strength makes.

Keep going through the list of popuar items for each class, I understand typing in each individual item sucks but if you put in the work you'll eventually have it pay off. Plus I've been doing it long enough to where I know what items I like to check on every few hours.

I didn't find any good deals for the popular items what should I do?
2. Try out my next favorite method. With the same search settings as I stated above:
Instead of typing in a specific item and checking its prices, you're going to look for cheap items that you can sell fast for at least double of what you spent.
I recommend this over method 1 to anyone who doesn't have a lot of gold to invest. Don't worry that will change soon though!

Okay so you have your search settings all set up and you have your buyout arrow pointing up so you see the cheapest items.

Your screen should look similar to this.

Look for any items here that are selling for 2500-5000 a nice tip is that if you see the same items over and over and over again, generally they aren't worth buying. I see those same belts every single day at the same prices, I never really buy them unless the price is just absurdly low.

Scroll through the market, do you see any items that pop out at you?
For example look at this Giant Skull, we can tell it could be a potential buy because it is surrounded by a bunch of low tier cheap items.

Lets check the market to see if that would be a good buy.

Sure is! What a snipe! It's not the biggest profit but hey man it's a start! The next cheapest Giant Skull was 19k gold.

Now here is another fork in the road
1. Do you want to sell this item as a quick profit of probably 11k gold?
OR
2. Did it happen to have good stats and is potentially worth billions?

Lets hope for #2 as we search the market.

Go back to your stash and look at that beautiful item you sniped for next to nothing.
136 strength and 23 Intelligence? Might not be the best stats, lets just check to be sure.
Go back to the Search tab and search for a giant skull with Preferred Stats of 130 str
What do you know a 130+ str giant skull sells for a lot of gold!
(I didn't get a screenshot but it was 350k for the cheapest.)

Well now what do I do? Should I sell it for 300k gold? Let's think about this for a minute, how do other helms such as a rare, compare to this? We're doing this to find out if its worth selling a Giant Skull for such a high price, if it can beat similar helms in its level range it may be worth trying.
So lets go back to our search tab and compare

I'm setting the Level cap to 52 (Giant Skull level) and setting the rarity to ALL. Because it is a high str item and basically only barbs will want STR I will leave the "Barbarian" setting alone.
Here is a picture of my search settings

Now take a look at those search results.
As you can see the average helm with this much str sells for at minimum 350k

Lets get more specific what happens if I add the "Has Sockets" to stats?
Well look at that, those prices are nuts.

See that giant skull for 50k? It really screws up the market, makes me nervous that is is there really.

Why would I be nervous? Well, I'm not the first one to think of this method of trading and that guy might have been trying to do exactly what I'm doing now and it didn't work for him.

Here is another fork in the road and it's a risky one that has potential to pay off huge.

1. Should I buy that other Giant Skull for 50k and set a new market price?
OR
2. Should I try to sell MY Giant Skull for 42k and hope it sells before that one?

Well I'm gonna say screw it and buy his Giant Skull as well.* I want to essentially elimiante my competor so people think my helm is the cheapest on the market.*
Plus if this works I'm going to make a killing all because I was patient.

Let's go back to see what these stat Giant Skulls are worth again. At minimum 350k

Well the Giant Skull I paid 50k for has worse stats than the one I paid 8k for. So I'm going to try to sell it faster at a lower price.

The sad part is the Giant Skull for 350k has 39 vit.

For a barb (Which is who we will be selling this to) a helm with STR + VIT is very important. So I can't really compete with that.

Now I have to price this helm around that guys Giant Skull. Would someone pay 50k less for a helm without vit?

If you are shopping for a 300k gold helm, you could probably afford a 350k helm. So I'm going to say no.
I'd say 75k-100k cheaper would personally make me consider taking the cheaper helm.

My better Giant Skull will be posted for 245k
I'll put the one I bought for 50k up for 225k

Are these going to sell at that price?
Honestly man it's possible, but I doubt I'll get them to sell for that in a day.
I just personally haven't been playing long enough to know if this is an item that people use frequently.
I may have to knock 75k-100k off the prices to get a sale but it will happen eventually. If you truly want to get rid of the item you could sell the Giant Skull you purchased for 8k and sell it for 20k and move on with your life.

Turns out that 50k Giant Skull is a Legacy item as well. I've hit it big with legacy items before. See below for an example. Wanderlust is a legacy item I sniped.

The third and last method of the way I trade!
It's essentially the same as method 2, just a more specific way of getting items.

Go back to your original search settings

Sometimes doing an overall search of EVERY item isn't the best way to find a great buy.

Click the "All Armor Item Types" tab and look at the drop down menu.

Don't be like Drake, start at the top and work your way to the bottom of the list. Select Amulet.


Click search and look at what pops up

By narrowing it down to just Amulets you can see some awesome deals. Look at Traveler's Pledge, would that be worth buying? Let's check.

Yes! That is an excellent buy, I could easily sell that for a profit.

While taking screenshots and typing this stuff out, I lost the item to someone else. You have to act fast and sometimes buy first research later.

Keep repeating steps 1-3 for each category and hopefully you will find a good item worth selling. Don't forget to skim the pages! Sometimes you can find an item for 200,000 gold and it will sell for a 1.5 million! I've found a few of those!

Here are some examples of awesome trades I made with these methods:

Questions/Concerns:
"I have far more gold then you bloozntooz these methods aren't worth my time!"
That's cool man, I just started playing again after a 4 month break, I only had 100k gold now I've got 4 million after 5 days of playing. My methods are for people who are struggling.

Why waste my time on this when I could just spend $4 and be worth 100mill?
Some people don't want to spend real money. Don't complain that there is nothing left to do in the game when you took the easy route to wealth. Getting rich by putting in a ton of work was the best part of d2 for me.

I'm not finding good items on the auction house. How am I supposed to profit?
The cool part of these methods is that you don't need to find a "good" item on the auction house. You just need to find an item worth more than you paid. If you spend 5000 gold on an item worth 30k, sell it at market price (30k) or just below and it will be gone in less than an hour. Do that 10 times a day and you make a decent amount of money. Eventually you will get lucky and get an item for 10k that sells for 300k. Think of it like fishing, everyone wants to catch a big ass fish but you're usually still satisfied when you catch something smaller.

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[Idea] Re-run with party button

Now that we're all running pub games, wouldn't it be nice if finally when you found a party you mesh with that you could choose to start a new run with the same party?

I've needed this multiple times now. While its not too difficult to leave and invite everyone to your party, it would definitely make the process much quicker if we could just choose to re-run with party. I see it working like this, a small dialog box similar to the party invite shows up, whoever accepts would join the next game and whoever didn't would stay in the same game.

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Combined Farm Route that allows you to obtain the most legendaries, demonic essences and experience per hour. In addition, the document has data(exp/hour, group exp/hour, mobs killed per hour, SS of starting points) that will allow you to make your own farm routes.

TLDR: VoA -> Desolate Sands -> Dahlgur Oasis -> Eastern Channel -> Western Channel

Result: 25+ Demonics/Hour, 6+ Legendaries(got 21 hour;RNG), 160m+ Exp Hour

Data: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eDYucvOpSUUsf_O0NsYgOo6zGZmFJZkyzdiBSYyae8c/edit


Video: 


Happy Hunting

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Blizzard Donates Money Made from Dupe to a Good Cause

After the Diablo 3 gold dupe that broke out after the 1.08 patch went live, Blizzard responded by locking down the Auction House and banning players who had executed the exploit to dupe. Now, however, after Blizzard has identified who duped the gold and banned them, they were stuck with the players’ auctions that had previously been posted, and needed something to do with all of the money they now had sitting around.

Blizzards plan of action, however, is clever; rather than cause an outrage by many in keeping the money made, Blizzard has said “We'll be donating all proceeds from auctions conducted by the suspended or banned players—including all of THEIR sale proceeds that we intercepted as well as our transaction fee—to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals."

While the economy in Diablo 3 may still take a big hit due to all of the gold that was duped, even players who were banned for using the exploit can console themselves in knowing that at the very least the money they would have made is being donated to a good cause. While the exact amount of money made has not been announced yet, it could be a sizeable amount.

Let us know, were you banned due to this dupe? If so, how do you feel about what Blizzard is planning to use the money you may have earned, and finally, do you think they handled the situation properly or could they have dealt with it differently? ...

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One thing I've always wanted. Purely for aesthetics/badassery

It's always bugged me that the lobby only shows your currently chosen character so my idea is similar to what it looks like when you group up with friends in the lobby. I think your menu should include all your characters standing there looking like a team of badasses.

As you choose a different hero, that hero moves to the front of the pack.

Yeah, probably not on Blizz's radar, but I think it adds to the grind if you can see all your characters in their glory. Maybe not all ten, but maybe your 5-6 most recently played characters?

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Suggested Stats (DPS, EHP) for MPlvls

Since public games are incredibly popular and beneficial to go to now, I thought it'd be handy to have a general idea of what people should be gearing towards for each monster power. Especially since people will join MP10 with too low DPS (including myself!) without knowing that they're a huge hindrance to the group.

You can already see multiple posts with people complaining about teammates slowing the group down because of deaths or low DPS.


All

• kill MOST elite packs under 30 seconds (disputed: see comments)
• kill trash under 3-5 seconds
• deaths average 0.25 or less per elite pack

Barbarian

• MP10: 650k EHP (55k HP for act 1 HoA), 200k DPS (170k solo)

Wizard

Critical Mass Build
Wiki Guide
MP5: 2.307 aps, 40% crit chance, 50k dps 400+ life on hit, 20+ APoC 3500 armor, 500 all resist, 35k hp
MP7: 2.501 aps, 45% crit chance, 75k dps 800+ life on hit, 20+ APoC 4000 armor, 550 all resist, 35k hp
MP8+ with 2.501 aps and highest DPS: 2.501 aps, 55% crit chance (Frost Nova: Deep Freeze will also be a big help), 150k+ dps 800+ life on hit, 20+ APoC 5000 armor, 700 all resist, 45k+ hp
MP8+ with 2.73 aps and decent DPS: 2.73 aps, 50-55% crit chance, 125k+ dps 800+ life on hit, 20 APoC 5000 armor, 700 all resist, 40k+ hp
MP8+ with 3.01 aps and lower DPS: 3.01 aps, 50%+ crit chance, 75k+ dps 800+ life on hit, 20 APoC 4500 armor, 650 all resist, 35k+ hp
MP10 ubers with decent dps and a solid freeze: 2.73 or 3.01 aps, 55%+ crit chance, 100k+ dps 800+ life on hit, 20 APoC 5500+ armor, 700+ all resist, 40k+ hp
SNS Build

Build Guide

MP10 138k DPS, EHP 340k

Monk

Backlash Build
D3Up Guide

• MP10: 500k EHP, 200k DPS (150k for soloing)

Demon Hunter
Grenades Build
Wiki Guide
MP 8 SOLO, MP 10 GROUP: 225k EHP, 200k DPS (full stats)

Bola/Spike Build
MP10: ~320k EHP, 340k unbuffed DPS (full stats)
Witch Doctor
MP10: 370k EHP, 160k DPS

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Dupe takes the Diablo 3 Auction House offline

Ever since the Diablo 3 launch people have been searching for (and finding) dupes. The Diablo 3 1.0.8 patch released yesterday brought us another dupe exploit allowing many users, as stated on a Battle.net forum post, to make billions, and for certain users, trillions of gold. We're not entirely sure how much gold was duped, but we do know the exploit was real and that the real money auction house was/is down as a result.

"After the release of Patch 1.0.8 this morning, we found that some players were exploiting a bug that enabled them to duplicate gold through the Auction House," Diablo 3 Community Manager Lylirra explained. "We're working on fixing the bug right now, and bringing the Auction Houses offline helps us troubleshoot in a more stable environment while preventing further exploiting."

A fix has been found for the issue and Blizzard is currently testing that fix. They've announced that despite recieving a lot of requests for a rollback, they won't actually do one. "We've been able to successfully identify players who duplicated gold by using this specific bug, and are focusing on these accounts to make corrections. While this is a time-consuming and very detailed process, we believe it's the most appropriate choice given the circumstances," she wrote. "We know that some of you may disagree, but we feel that performing a full roll back would impact the community in an even greater way, as it would require significant downtime as well as revert the progress legitimate players have made since patch 1.0.8 was released this morning."

When we asked our sources at Blizzard what would happen to the exploiters, they were unable to tell us. We assume a lot of people are going to be banned, but they might have already made their money from the dupe. The only thing we've been able to learn is that they're in the process of "reviewing the accounts involved and taking appropriate actions, including temporary locks, suspensions, and/or bans."

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Legendary item uniqueness and its link to build diversity

Yesterday during Diablo discussions we brought up a few topics related to item and build diversity that I wanted to expand upon using an example. The concepts that we were speaking of were:

• Legendaries that have specific affixes not available on rares
• Legendary procs/properties that scale with various stats
• Legendary procs/properties that synergize with specific skills
• Legendaries that are designed to encourage certain play styles and builds
• Legendaries leading to gear polarization/different prioritization of stats

In an ideal world I think that if someone was playing a build that you never saw before and you took a look at their armory, your first thought should be “What is this guy/girl smoking?”; however, after looking through their gear choices, the synergy and scaling between their gear, skills and procs and after doing some runs with them this person that they actually have a badass build that is on par with the cookie cutter build you’ve been playing all along. Achieving this is obviously not a simple task and requires a lot of balancing.

Sample build: This example is purely an illustrative one that is obviously not completely balanced, but demonstrates the concepts and their importance.

Bloodbeam WD (After finishing writing this I realize the damage output is probably a bit too high…)

First glance on stats from gear when unbuffed:

2500 int, 1000 str, 1000 dex, 45% ias, no crit stats, 400 all res (including base int), 3000 armor, 50k HP, 500 DPS 11% IAS 3% lifesteal dagger socketed with... A TOPAZ to hit 20k thorns (going to introduce thorns legendary so that this number isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds with current standards).

First glance at their skill setup:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#aZUYXd!gTY!ZaabYb

At this point if you never saw this before you should be thinking “Um……”

However, the WD has a few unique legendaries on him that have some interesting text associated with them:

Legendary WD Helm: +2000 thorns and “Blood spilled returns to haunt your foes” (or something less lame sounding)

Legendary offhand: +3000 thorns damage and “Offense is the best defense” (again not the coolest sounding thing…)

Legendary belt: “Chance to unleash the Angel’s wrath to punish the weak” (I’m a scientist alright! Get off my back about flavor text!)

Legendary glove: +25% damage to holy skills

So let’s look at the first unique item ability:

“Blood spilled returns to haunt your foes”
Creates an AoE damage circle (similar to SW on monks) around you and your pets that can proc whenever you are hit, this can stack up to 3 times and will last 5 seconds, damage dealt is holy damage. The animation would be similar to SW but with droplets of blood spinning around you.

The base proc rate is 5%, but scales up to 80% based on the total amount of strength you have and hitting 99% max of 80% asymptotically at 2000 str. At 1000 str the proc rate would be ~55%.

The base radius of the circle is 8 yards, but scales up to 20 yards based on the total amount of dexterity you have hitting 99% max of 20 yards asymptotically at 2000 dex. At 1000 dex the radius would be ~16 yards.

The base damage normally scales off of thorns damage doing 33, 66 and 100% depending on stacks; however, for every 500 int the scaling in increased 1 fold. So unbuffed 2500 int would be 5 more; 5 + 1 (base) = 6x scaling coefficient on 20k thorns = 120k DPS, but fully buffed (4430 int) we now have a 9.86x scaling coefficient meaning 197k DPS.

Then throw on the fact that because we went with Fierce loyalty, your pets also have thorns damage and will also do 120-197k DPS in their swirly majiggers. And on top of that we’ll be doing an extra 25% damage from these sources because of the legendary glove we got, so you and your 3 zombie dogs will be doing: 150/246k DPS in a 16 yard radius around you when you’re at full stacks. This will allow you to just plow through trash while having all 4 of you converge on a pack of elites to get overlap of these circles leads to almost 1M DPS.

“Offense is the best defense”
Simple ability here: For every 1000 points of thorns damage you receive 20 all res and 200 armor.

So now that 20k thorns gives us a bonus of 400 all res and 4000 armor, so our total mitigation is 400 + 400 + 1930*0.1 = 993 all res fully buffed, and 3000 + 4000 = 7000 armor OR when using haunt, 10000 armor. Take into account the fact that you could use jungle fortitude and get your dogs to tank 10% for you, all of sudden you’re able to get away with just 3% LS.

“Chance to unleash Angel’s wrath to punish the weak”
This proc is a chain lightning like ability that is checked every time you attack, but the animation is a white/yellow beam type thing that deals holy damage.

The base proc rate is 5%. This value is also increased by up to 80% depending on the amount of dex you have topping out at 2000 similar to before. With 1000 dex we’d get 55% proc rate.

The number of targets that it jumps to (cannot jump to the same target consecutively) is determined by user’s strength. Base rate is 2, but increases up to a maximum of 10 depending on strength using diminishing returns. Let’s say that with 1000 str we hit 7 targets with a 50% chance to jump to an 8th.

Finally the damage of the proc is determined by the base value and has a 2 multipliers based on the degree of slow on the mob and the user’s Int. The first multiplier can be increased by up to a bonus 500% depending on the amount of slow on the mob. With 80% slow you would get a 4x multiplier, with 92% slow (poison darts and one of the other slows) you would get a 4.6x multiplier. The int multiplier would be similar to before where every 500 int adds 100% damage. So if the base was 5000 dmg, we would have: 5000 * (1+4.6) * (1+2500 or 4430/500) = 168k or 276k damage PER target. Finally let’s not forget that we get an extra 25% bonus damage since its holy so we do a total of 210k or 345k damage each time.

Now you see why this WD stacked 45% IAS on a 1.67 APS weapon to get 2.42 attacks/s. At the 55% proc rate you’d be launching 1.33 of these beams/sec on average which would decimate elites whenever you encountered them. Poison dart is also one of the best choices here since its fast, long range, costs little mana and provides a 100% chance of slowing (although slow spiders could still be viable).

Now that we’ve gone over what a potential build would be like let’s analyze how it fulfills the concepts mentioned earlier:

Legendaries that have specific affixes not available on rares
3 of the legendaries here have very unique procs/abilities on them that you could make an entire build around alone. The last +25% bonus to holy is like the WKL where despite the sheet DPS loss, depending on your skills used you can get a large DPS gain.

Legendary procs/properties that scale with various stats
We made the proc rates and utility of the spell here scale off of non-primary stats and thorns. Normally a WD would really only consider getting Str for the purpose of Armor, otherwise they’d ignore non-primary stats. Thorns in this build increases both the offensive power and defensive power of it.

Legendary procs/properties that synergize with specific skills
Here we have the swirly AoE DPS that works wonderfully with pets once they have the fierce loyalty passive. Furthermore, we have synergy between the multitude of slows that the WD possesses and holy chain lightning proc.

Legendaries that are designed to encourage certain play styles and builds
This kind of setup makes pets extremely strong since they actually do damage with stats that you can control! Furthermore, it rewards playing a bit more ranged since slowing the enemies now provides increased damage output as well as utility.

Legendaries leading to gear polarization/different prioritization of stats
The stats sought after by this build are completely different than the normal bears build that focuses on Crit stats and Int and only overlaps with 0CD ZDs really in the department of IAS. We’re going for as much thorns when gearing for this build while picking up a lot of non-primary attributes in addition to getting Int.

One last point about these items that I wanted to make is that in order to balance it out and get the items out faster, I believe that Blizz needs to use the PTR and players more. When these items are designed and you feel confident with them, make an announcement and put them on the PTR. Let the players try it out and see if they can break the game with the item. Depending on how over/underwhelming the builds that emerge from it, adjust the procs and damage accordingly. The main point is that you don’t have to wait till you finished ALL of the items and test them all the PTR all at once. I think it would be much better is players could be more focused on certain elements rather than getting a smorgasbord of changes thrown at them.

I want to end by saying this is in reality only half of the equation. The larger paradigm for determining what builds succeed and fail is dependent on both the player side as well as the environment side and I’ll make a post about the latter variable on a later date.

So for those who managed to make it this far down the wall of text I’m wondering what you guys think of these concepts as the fundamental building blocks for how legendaries should be designed in the future and/or even examples of how these could be applied.

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Itemization and item customization, how will they change Diablo 3? Your thoughts!

So it appears the next big changes coming to Diablo 3 will be both itemization and the ability to customize items. I think both of these ideas are going to really improve peoples desire to play this game, and I think it will bring back a lot of players. Actually being able to find gear for your player while playing the game, rather than spending time in the AH trying to find an upgrade, is what we have all been waiting for. This all sounds great, but what will it change?

First off, if item drops are going to be better and more geared towards the character you are playing, isn't that going to be enough for to get people moving in the right direction? Anyone who has spent hundreds of hours playing this game knows that actually getting an upgrade from a drop is very rare. More often, we are hoping to get an upgrade for someone else that will sell for a significant amount of gold. We then head to the AH with our new found riches and hope someone else has found an upgrade for us. That doesn't seem right, so should be thankful for the AH? No. The AH is the reason top tier items are only available to the top 5% of the Diablo 3 population, and most of them are bought out by bots then placed on the RMAH.

So now legendary items will roll stats based on the monster it dropped from. This is another great idea. This opens up the possibility for more items being useable, and gets away from the cookie cutter item builds that have developed. Hopefully it will also allow more skills to come into play. My concern here is that they will reduce the drop rate of the legendary items to not flood the market.

Item customization might be the biggest game changer of them all. The general feeling is that any customization to an item will automatically bind it to your account. This is going to make those items one step away from being OP, to being completely OP. For example, let's say you have an Echoing Fury that is 1250+ DPS, 150+ main stat, .24+ AS, 2.7%+ LS and 90+ CD, how much more valuable does that item become with a socket? This is just one example. And since these customizations become account bound, how valuable do these items become prior to customizing? I have a feeling more items will be sold via third party sites (d2jsp) to exceed the 2B cap placed on the AH. This brings up the question: what will it cost/take to customize an item? Obviously gold, Demonic Essence, gems and possibly brimstones will all be required. Does it scale with item level, or maybe some sort of item score (think diablo progress)?

And with all that being said, how does the game get rebalanced after all these changes? Everything mentioned above is going to make gearing up your character go from several months to a couple of weeks, once the AH has been restocked. Will it be possible to gear up a character that one shots everything in MP10? Does an endless dungeon that gets more difficult the further you go down become the new end game? If so, that essentially creates a ladder system for Diablo 3, something that a lot of players want to see.

These are just some of my thoughts and ideas based on the information I have read in blue posts and what not. Let me know what you think!

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