The Official Diablo 3 Thread

[Dave]

It works as expected - 50% chance to knockback, a lot of people use it or Buriza-Do Kyanon (80% to pierce, 15% to freeze) on the Scoundrel follower for CC/fun.

[Dave]

November Logs:

11/2/2012

RMAH Log: +$25/25/13 - Sold another Nat ring, my old Devil's Tongue Sword I bought for 15m, and Won Kim Lau I bought for 2m
GAH Log: 14m balance - Bought a fist, and swapped to Inna's. Nothing selling again!

Monk Log: Plvl 53! Farmed up 10 sets of keys for no reason other than if my brother actually plays again and I can get him a Hellfire Ring hopefully. Farming for terrible drops like everyone I assume. I seem to get a lot of Tal Rasha / Zuni set items, but when i try and sell them realize they are going for 50k... and that's not really even worth listing. Been trying to incorporate Tempest Rush into my Monk farming build, but is is annoying that the IAS I stack is the main reason why its difficult to maintain. Also bought a fist that looks like a spiked vibrator, but it's pretty good dps.

11/6/2012

RMAH Log: +$84 - Sold/flipped 3 Nat rings, my MP5+ Fist of Az'Turraz for $25, and some random crap for a few bucks.
GAH Log: 7m balance - Bought a Nats Ring for 35m that I sold for $22. Now I need to look for a fist again!

Monk Log: Plvl 56! Same old A3 MP0 runs for the occasional thing to sell. Sold my good fist for $25 and windled my in-game worth to almost nothing which is fine. I'm rapidly losing interest in continuing farming this patch.

11/21/2012

RMAH Log: +$100 - sold some crap - Nats, Tals, gems, shen fist, rare amulet.
GAH Log: 544m balance - flipped Fiery Brimstones after an official blue post that said they were looking for ways to make them more valuable - instantly they shot from 10k to 80k each, and I invested the 79m I had and and sold at 75k. Gold is down to $0.40 atm but I keep listing at $0.45. Ahh well.

Monk Log: Plvl 63! 20min farming run when I get really bored. Pretty much done gearing my tailwind spec to do MP0.
DH Log: Beat Inferno finally after borrowing a Nat Ring from the AH.
WD Log: In Act 3 now after getting a ZUni set for cheap.

11/30/2012

RMAH Log: +$99 - Ancient Aim (rare amulet) , +$190 - 540m, +$0.75 from 3 shitty legendaries
GAH Log: 5m balance - sold all my gold and just been buying minor upgrades to bide the time until PvP comes out.

Monk Log: Plvl 66! Finally got a Lifesteal Skorn for 3m that I use to snapshot Sweeping. Upgraded a fist for 3m and randomly buying some cheap gear for pvp, since it's supposed to come out sometime early next year.
DH Log: Retired again after I invested a few m from my flipping episode to get a cheap manticore and dml quiver.
WD Log: Beat Inferno and have a decent MF set for when I tired of monk and want to fear some crap into oblivion.

[Vyrosama]

November Logs:
DH Log: Beat Inferno finally after borrowing a Nat Ring from the AH.

I wish the AH worked that way for me ... and then when I return it I get more money than I started

[Dave]

December Logs:

12/22/2012

Played some SC2 and WoW trial more this month. Vacation + family over = some random times to play.

RMAH Log: +$60 - Rare Ring, Set Knife, Set Pants
GAH Log: 17m balance - random crap

Monk Log: Plvl 69! Same Ole. Made a PvP set that will probably be fail
WD Log: Plvl 17. Got a cheap Echoing Fury upgrade and nothing else but grind some xp/loot.

12/31/2012

Mixed some Gran Turismo 5 and pimped out my Civic to the top!! Then got destroyed on the performance tournament and went back to D3.

RMAH Log: +$6 gold, +$10 Skorn
GAH Log: 2m balance - random crap

Monk Log: Plvl 72! Same Ole. Changed farming skills out of boredom a few times, added a higher dps snapshot sruff. Apparently the PvP stuff they were working on for the past 7 months was crap and they are starting over, causing a crash in the gold price as people are cashing out again.

[Dave]

January Logs:

1/9/2012

RMAH Log: +$6 Shenlong Fist +$2 Rare Shield +$6 Skorn +$3 14m
GAH Log: 11m balance - random crap

Monk Log: Plvl 76! ALmost halfway to Paragon 100 in terms of XP required. Decided to upgrade my snapshot gear to 325k and then went shield to get some crit and vit. Did get my first double-legendary drop finally, one was even ok!

1/23/2012

RMAH Log: $80 Balance, flipped 2 fists from $30 balance to $50 paypal, sold 47m, Fist $15, 27m, Xeph $5, IK Gloves $4, Xeph $3.5, Skorn $20
GAH Log: 16m balance - random crap
HC AH Log: 4m balance - flipped some low level crap from a few k to a few hundred k, bought a a nice -lvl req dagger for 1m and flipped for 4m. No HC-RMAH so its nice having a stable active economy.

Monk Log: Plvl 78! Just past half-way to Paragon 100! Cashed out all my mediocre snapshot gear since the 1.07 PTR went live and the snapshot got fixed. Played on the PTR for a while since it had dueling enabled. My crappy pvp gear worked pretty good, was actually sort of fun for a few days.
Hardcore Monk Log: Yep, I got bored enough to start a Hardcore character and used a Monk. Currently Level 41 in Nightmare Act 2! Been sort of refreshing using skills I remember loving and never using again.

RMAH Log: $100 Balance, flipped a fist for some more balance.
GAH Log: 38m balance - random crap sold I didn't need/care for.
HC AH Log: 2.5m balance - bought myself a nice Fist of Az'Tur (2) and an Inna's Radiance (1.

Monk Log: Plvl 79 out of boredom! Waiting for the next patch!
Hardcore Monk Log: Pushed her to 60 this weekend. Doing the exact same stuff I did early in Diablo 3... repeat farming of Warrior's Rest! Picked Poison as my resist, and debating switching over to Fire. We'll see!

GAH Log: 18m balance - trying to flip a fist I can't sell!
HC AH Log: 4m balance - bought a bunch of life-regen items incase I disconnect!

Monk Log: Nothing! Apparently Wave of Light will be awesome next patch, so just planning on using it. Can't upgrade any items with my budget so it's nice to not feel the need to check the AH
Hardcore Monk Log: Stuck with Poison resist, and manned up and killed Diablo! Now it's endless farming and praying to not die I guess

I upgraded my Diablo 3 to the Collector's Edition, so after contacting customer support, was able to get a standard digital edition key which... I gave to Vinny! Now he must farm gold for me for the next 7-8 years until my kid can use a mouse.

[Vyrosama]

Would you ever/have you party with ppl in hardcore mode? I feel like there's too much at stake!

[Dave]

Would you ever/have you party with ppl in hardcore mode? I feel like there's too much at stake!

Yep, its a lot less risky to farm in groups so you can split up dangerous packs and stuff. Plus it helps against disconnect deaths for someone to kill the mobs before you die. I usually group with a few people form a starcraft 2 forum (TL) tho most people have quit by now! lol

[VLSmooth]

TL = TeamLiquid?

[Dave]

Yep, when I get really bored I listen to WoL replays on twitch or yt. Of course I suck at Sc2 still. Can't macro more than 1 base much less micro two unit types lol.

Hurry up and level to 60 vinny!

[VLSmooth]

I used to read some TeamLiquid articles, especially ones about mouse sensitivity and mouse skills; crazy difficult stuff.

I think I discovered TeamLiquid and Day9 at the same time; I'm playing his Bastion playlist right now actually:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL ... RErvRLiZCs
(click bastion p01 and just let it go!)

Yeah, I really like Bastion.

If you want to "learn to be a better gamer", watch Day9's Newbie Tuesday videos (pretty amusing too!):
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9636F0243659B1D4

[Dave]

Febuary Logs:

2/14/2013

RMAH Log: $104, sold another Nat's Ring & 2 more Fists for $80 total paypal
GAH Log: 70m balance - flipped an axe 16>75, spent 35m to sell a fist for $18.

Monk Log: Plvl 82! Farmed some plans with the next 1.07 patch, not too impressed. Same build as before. Tried to craft some of the new bracers, no luck so far and likely to not be worth it anyways. May just sell everything until the market drops more.

2/28/2013

RMAH Log: $50. Converted some fists to paypal, sold a bunch of 15k 1.07 plans for $1 each... which makes no sense, but people are dumb.
GAH Log: 50m. Bleh

Monk Log: Plvl 84! Crafted a decent bracer, trying my hand at amulet and gloves when I get the crafting mats. Prices are dropped pretty fast on everything, no real desire to roll the dice now. Switched to farming Act 2 on MP1 to farm the vota for essences. Plus I switched to 2 rare weapons to take advantage of the Wave of Light damage.

I'm actually playing some more SC2 now that the expansion is coming out in March. They updated the menu interfaces to something slightly better. Did some challenge maps to bronze mostly. Unlocked hard ai because I'm that good.


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March Logs:

3/25/2013

RMAH Log: $60. Cashed out a few more Nat's Rings, some more patterns
GAH Log: 95m balance - gave up selling anything other than gold find items - buy for < 50k, flip for 500k. Apparnetly people running bots are the only ones buying rares anymore.

Monk Log: Plvl 86. Tried going to farm MP8 with some life leech weapons for a while with palm and wave, but didn't find that very interesting. Sold all that stuff and went back to TR MP0 and got bored and decided to do some DH instead.
DH Log: Plvl 7 > Plvl 17. Stole most of the crafted items from the monk and tried out the legacy Nats Set to utter disappointment, then tried new Nats set to mediocre results, then just went for neither and used the passive nighttalker to get back Disc since I had high crit% anyways. Did the normal builds for a while then settled on a strafe build I saw and it's actually pretty fast. Need > 175k dps on DH to equal the bell dropping of a 95k dps Monk, but whatever, its new to me. Leveling from 7 to 17 was pretty fast, and picked up a MF set to get almost 250%. Not sure how long I will keep doing DH, but keep crafting shoulders hoping for the best.

3/31/2013

RMAH Log: $97. Sold my Xeph amulet and a few more Nats
GAH Log: 50m balance - Bought a manticore for 75m trying to flip. Still making gold find income but its pretty volatile

Monk Log: Plvl 87! Back to Vota farming and going to give cota a try again if i cant find a cheap sword
DH Log: Plvl 26! Settled on a fan of knives + rocket barrage spec to speed clear Act 3 mp0. Dropped life steal from the manticore for more dps and only 25% mf from cap. Just 8 more paragon levels before I can start dropping mf gear!

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April Logs:

4/15/2013

RMAH Log: $100. Few more marq gems for no sane reason
GAH Log: 125m balance - gold find market swings up and down, stock a few items in the completed tab

Monk Log: Plvl 90! Picked up a decent MP10 grouping set for when 1.08 hits. Seems like a good change coming, but the xp bonus is going to make me hit p100 too fast I think. Still trying for an uber amulet.
DH Log: Plvl 31! Grinding away!

4/30/2013

RMAH Log: $103. Nada
GAH Log: 158m balance - nada... flipped a few cd/ls/os swords for a tiny bit of profit.

Monk Log: Plvl 91! Haven't really played for a week or two at the time of this writing just to update it..
DH Log: Plvl 32! Nothing happening... got a less gooder set to not have to swap gear between monk/dh out of laziness.

====================================================

May Logs:

5/26/2013

RMAH Log: $110. Same Balance left, +$$$ from patch fiasco in another post
GAH Log: 250m balance - just selling random crap now.

Monk Log: Plvl 98! After the 1.08 fiasco, spent a good bit of time grouping in MP10 act 1 mostly and cyclone striking my way to massive xp and shitty drops. Still no good amulet crafted, but got a decent looking fire sword - need a twin or a lightning one now. There was an anniversary buff for a week that gave another boost to MF/XP that was fun too. Settled on a solo MP8 combo strike build since my dps is pretty crappy as my gear isn't sellable for actual money. Such is life!

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[Dave]

Heh great explanation of how the recent gold dupe happened in D3. About as good as my grad coding in c prus prus.

Since Blizzard has posted that they have fixed the bug and are just cleaning things up now, I wanted to share what I think caused it.

The gold "dupe" involved creating a RMAH auction for billions of gold while staying under the $250 limit. The example I saw in a video was 6 billion gold (600 x 10,000,000 at $0.39 per stack, for $234). When they posted this auction only ~1.7 billion appeared to be for sale, with the rest "missing" until they sent it to their stash and ended up with more than they started with. The exact numbers from a duping video:

Create RMAH auction for: 6,000,000,000 gold
Auction shows up as: 1,705,032,704 gold
This much is missing! 4,294,967,296 gold
The missing amount, divided by 2: 2,147,483,648 gold

2,147,483,648 (or 231) is the maximum value you can store in an int32 in programming. I'm no programmer, but I took one class in high school and was taught about the limits of different variable types. See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9459 ... or-a-int32

Simply put, their RMAH gold selling code wasn't written to handle numbers over 2,147,483,648 properly, and the result was duplicate gold being added to people's stashes.

How could something this basic make it to live? I think it was coded at the last minute and not really tested. The final patch was version 1.0.8.16416, while the last PTR notes were for 1.0.8.16256. That last PTR version, 1.0.8.16256 from April 23, had no mention of changing the gold stack size on the RMAH from 1mil to 10mil. The final version two weeks later on May 7 had the change.

Sometime in the last two weeks they made changes to the gold selling code. As far as I can tell the change never made it to the PTR, and selling over 2.1 billion gold was never tested internally (it should have been!), so it shipped with the 1.08 patch. Since the RMAH was originally coded to only sell stacks of 100,000 gold, there was probably some old Int32 code left written when the idea of buying and selling billions of gold in one transaction was unfathomable.

The rest is history!

edit: Wow, lots of great comments here and in /r/programming! It looks like they probably used and "unsigned int" which would go up to 232 or 4,294,967,296, not the int32.

[Vyrosama]

The more important question is, how much did you make off this and what are they doing to "correct" the market if at all? Did the duping destroy the economy?

[Dave]

The more important question is, how much did you make off this and what are they doing to "correct" the market if at all? Did the duping destroy the economy?

Well, everything is pretty much back to normal now. Both auction houses went back online on friday and they report 85% of the gold that was duped was removed (the 15% remaining was apparently allowed to go to the normal folks whose auctions were bought out by the dupers, and not auctions that were used as a gold shelter for the dupers that wanted to launder the gold lol).

Basically what happened:

With 1.08 patch, Blizzard lowered the gold minimum auction from 1 million gold for $0.25 to 10 million gold for $0.25. As semi-explained in the above post, that caused a stack overflow of some sort where making an auction for 6 billion gold only subtracted ~2b from your gold, and when you cancelled the auction, was given 6 back. Effectively creating gold. I had nowhere near 6 billion gold, and had given up even trying to sell gold on the RMAH since 3rd party sites were selling for $0.04 or so.

What did the dupers do? They essentially had unlimited gold wealth, and since all gold auctions are capped at 2billion, they basically bought out EVERY good item to sell on the RMAH for real money. Then they bought out every single radiant star gem to sell on the RMAH. Obviously this affected the economy greatly.

What I did do? I always like playing on patch days since the auction house is usually moving fast and prices surge naturally due to increased player presence, but I noticed the gem prices start to sky rocket. Radiant star gems were going from 25m to 50m to 75m, and I decided to quickly sell the 4 I had when the price was 75m; bumping my wealth to almost 500m. I check the gem price again - 90m! At the same time on the RMAH, the gem prices had dropped from $1.5 to $0.25 since dupers didn't care how much gold they were spending to cash out, and gems were the highest volume commodity. SO now I'm like, wait... if Radiant gems only cost 20m to craft, and sell for almost 100m, time to craft my ass off while this bubble lasts!

I basically bought a shit ton of lesser emeralds (Perfect>Flawless>Stars) to craft into radiant stars (which sold instantly) until the Auction House went down after a few hours. Near the end the only available gem were flawless squares and spending 20 minutes to craft 729 of them into a single radiant. Overall I sold around 50 radiant stars for on average 175m profit after fees, for an end gold horde of 9.2 billion gold. Sound like a lot huh? Apparently dupers were pushing into the trillions.

So after Blizzard verified the dupe they shut down the auction houses (game was still playable) Tuesday evening. It took until Friday night for them to come online - luckily I was online at that exact time and was able to list my 9billion gold on the RMAH for $0.25/m putting me near the front of the soon-to-be MASSIVE gold selling queue. Luckily someone richer than I bought it all leaving me with a net paypal balance of $1600 or so. The key here was being online at the right moment to put my gold for sale FIRST, since the ratio of people selling to buying is way greater than the normal auction length.

As for the effect on the D3 'economy' gem prices are back to slightly over crafting cost (~25m) and the typical surge of backlogged AH demand has temporarily boosted some prices, but overall a lot of good items were removed from circulation (banned with the dupers) so super high end items are a bit more expensive. Gold was reverted back to $0.25/m until they can figure out how to code properly so no massive inflation has occurred. Since I cashed out all my gold for $, I don't search for too much with my amazing 30m leftover. 1.08 increased the XP gain by a lot - I'm up to plvl 94 not even playing too much.

[Vyrosama]

... leaving me with a net paypal balance of $1600 or so.

Wait how long did you spend grinding gems to sell (basically $/hr avg). I can only imagine what the pro dupers made off with. I wonder if they can even pursue damages... although I guess if they are in a different country makes it kind of tough...

I still have $30 in blizzard bucks!

[Vyrosama]

no more updates??? has the economy completely crashed at this point?

[Dave]

Pretty much stopped playing at all. I'd log in every few days just to post some auctions in the morning and sell a few 5k patterns for $1 because people are stupid, and have a little over $100 in balance I'm too lazy to move. Pretty much lost all hope after the focus on console release pushed back any itemization changes until november or so.

[Dave]

no more updates??? has the economy completely crashed at this point?

That and today you can buy 50 million gold for $0.25. A yet ago it was about $1.25 per million so slight inflation occurred in the gold economy.

[Dave]

Expansion announced, early 2014! They are making paragon account wide so I don't need to bother playing Demon Hunter anymore, and logged on my Monk to prepare already. Then I got bored and logged out.

[Vyrosama]

the new diablo 3 commercial for consoles made m laugh
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmsZU8ppD6Q