I haven’t even looked at the AH yet. So far, so good, I’m in Act 1 nightmare.
My plan is to keep my auctions balanced: Keep track of how much I get from selling things, and only use that money to buy things. That way, it basically just means that I don’t have to care about class or redundancies (like, “that’s a good bow, but I already have a good bow”) when I find good drops, but I still need to find good drops.
Of course, my plan is also to sell and re-buy gems instead of upgrading them, but we all know how that’s working out…
I’m in Act 3 Inferno now, just killed the Siegebreaker and whenever I’m playing the game it just feels like I’m grinding items/gold to sell/buy on the auction house and it’s just not very fun. It might be time to take a break and play something else for a while.
OOC, DYK if they’re actually selling for those prices?
Yes–I’m talking about bids I’ve seen.
I see plenty of items where the minimum bid is in the millions of gold, but how can you tell if an item has had any bids actually placed on it (barring you bidding on it yourself)?
Here’s some fellow’s handy tactics for Inferno. Enjoy. 
I’m torn between feeling really bad for the player in the video and laughing my butt off.
I’m about to give up on my witch doctor. I’ve got a 47 barb and 33 wiz. I’ve gone back to the wd 3 times now hoping he gets better and at lvl 24 he still pretty much blows. Most of his skills are worthless so I find myself using the same tired ones over and over. The cool down on soul drain is way too long too. Most of his skills seem to proc for less than 100% of the weapon damage which makes them feel lame.
I don’t see what’s supposed to be funny, sure he could stop and snap off a shot or two more often but otherwise that’s how you play DH on Inferno. 
So I bit the bullet and actually bought a couple items in the AH.
All of my previous problems with dying are gone, and I’m suddenly in the “It’s so easy it’s boring” camp. Breezed through the rest of normal and am now act II nightmare, and the only time I died was when I turned away from the game for a few seconds to figure out what my dog was chewing on and turned back to see that I’d been killed by a group of champion ravenous dead. Basically, my dog got me killed by the Blue Man Group.
So, yeah. The game is kinda boring now. Thanks auction house!
So I just got Acid Cloud and that’s a big help. And I’m using the gargantuan plus dogs. Getting better.
I would suggest trying Poison Darts with the Splinter rune for your main attack (180% weapon damage) along with Grasp (Unbreakable Grasp) for slowing mobs. Haunt with the Resentful Spirit rune is a good skill for helping you take down those tougher opponents. Acid Cloud is an awesome AoE right up to inferno, with the Acid Rain rune at level 26 you can practically take out an entire room of enemies in seconds. The Gargantuan makes for a great distraction up until Hell, allowing you to kill things in relative safety. If you’re not using Spirit Walk then I’d start now, it becomes an essential skill before too long and it’s great for repositioning yourself during a fight, escaping sticky situations or just for restoring some mana/health. At level 28 you get the Flash Fire rune for Firebomb which was my main attack up until Inferno. None of those skills have long cooldowns and if you have a reasonable weapon then enemies will just melt before you.
Of course there are many other ways to build a WD but that’s probably how I’d do it if I were to start again. There is plenty of room for other support skills too like Hex or Big Bad Voodoo. Fetish Army is a great oh-shit move to have. They provide a great distraction and do pretty respectable damage, the only downside being the long cooldown.
Just beat it on normal with the WD and came back to find this post.
Yeah, once you get Acid Rain the WD becomes a lawn mower that’s for sure. Basically I would hit them with Acid Rain, then Soul Drain them to refill my mana and then pound them with Fire Bats. Gargantuan and Dogs kept everything distracted nicely.
Though he is certainly more fun now I think the way the Soul Drain works is too much of a gimp for the character during boss fights. It’s such a huge part of his DPS (up to 5 large INT boosts per cast) but it requires there to be multiple mobs to make the most of it. When you are one on one with a boss your DPS drops WAY down and there isn’t really much you can do about it.
Poison Dart with Splinter is pretty much the only way to go but I think that is a flawed skill too. You should be able to have the triple shot poison dart with a passive rune so you can chose other effects along with it at some point. It’s pretty much impossible to use any of the other runes for Poison Dart because they drop the attack speed down so much.
So now I have a Barb, Wiz and WD all in NM. Need to decide which one to carry through.
WEll, here’d a gripe. I just beat the game and the entire ending movie sucks.
[spoiler]It’s just Tyrael giving a pointless speech.
What happened to Leah?
What happened to Adria?
What happened to me? Did I get to nail Eirene?[/spoiler]
One gripe I have comes from lag. I suffer from lag, and it gets me killed very quickly when it hits. I just wiped by Izual four times on normal. He just suddenly lands next to me and erases my hits points, taking me from full health to zero instantly.
Leah turned into Diablo.
Adria will turn into Baal in the expansion pack.
My gripe is mostly general, but I’ll end with specifics.
Playing with other people is better, in theory, but in reality, it kinda sucks. When you’re playing by yourself you can go at your own pace, pause to focus on TV, or to piss, or to get a beer, or to smoke, or whatever. It’s just fun at your own leisure. However, when you’re playing with others you feel like you have to focus on sticking with the others and pulling your own weight. Otherwise you’re the asshole who’s not keeping up. It ends up feeling like more of a job than a game. This has been my experience with any multiplayer game, from D2 to Starcraft, to Internet Spades, to D3.
My specific gripe with D3 is that this problem is compounded by the fact that you can’t have your “follower” (AKA merc/hireling) with you in multiplayer games, as well as the time requirements in switching skills. While (in singleplayer) I don’t have a problem with the new system of requiring time to do stuff like change skills, cast a TP, ID items, etc… it compounds all of the problems inherant in multiplayer. I’m switching my skills around or IDing a rare while my SDMB friend is rushing into battle thinking “Why the F is that guy just standing over there? I’m getting my ass kicked over here.”
It makes you even less eager to play with others.
I know what you mean. There really is only one choice of rune with Poison Darts. Then again we don’t have a lot of flexibility with passives either unfortunately. Currently I feel the damage bonus, spirit vessel and mana regen passives are almost essential with a high attack speed Dart build.
Yeah it does; I have to restrain myself from upgrading my gears all the time through the AH.
The problem is that you’ll only get gear below your levels now. I rarely see anything that drop which can use now. It’s always something that I can sell or pass down to the AH.
It’s not as bad as a MMO, because you can always get gears tailored for your class through quests - but then again, most MMO has a AH. (Funny though I rarely use on in TOR, only to sell my stuff).
If D3’s quest rewards include level appropriate gears … like back in D2 where you have the Imbue, and the socket quest. It seems that earning money from the AH influences Blizzard’s design of the game to a large extent.