The bosses are not worth farming on their own, no. But if you have five stacks of NV they usually drop 2-3+ Rares.
The whole system is set up to encourage players to do more than just boss runs and farm complete areas/acts instead.
Once you hit 60, the Nephalem Valor stacks each give 15% MF/GF as well as 1 additional item drop from a boss mob. So at the maxxed 5 stacks, you’re getting 7-8 items (including 2-3 rares) from each boss kill. If you can do a run where you can max stacks and then get 2+ bosses fairly quickly (Warden and Butcher at the end of A1 Inferno being the obvious example), it can be pretty profitable, or at least get you a good number of die-rolls towards something decent.
So… If I have no desire to use the Auction House, can I expect to find enough items on my own to complete the game? I’m hoping to at least beat hell mode.
Hell mode? Sure. Possibly. It would help if you were able to swap gear with friends, and depends on how good you are, gaming-wise.
Inferno? Not.
Something apparently unprecedented happened the other day: I crafted a good item. It’s a level 51 bow with 240 damage. Yeah, there’s probably better on the auction house, but that’s by far the best bow I’ve seen for that level.
And I’m really wondering how the auction house actually works. It seems like everyone is saying “Oh, nobody actually farms gear, everyone just buys it off the auction house”. But for every buyer, there is a seller: Where are all of these items that people are buying coming from?
Btw, how much are y’all gaming with each other? I see quite a few dopers online when I am, but the SC/HC divide keeps us from playin’ together. I might advance my SC monk a bit just to be able to die a lot and eventually have some fun in inferno with y’all.
There usually seem to be about 2-3 games going with 2-3 players each, at various levels, when I’m on.
My son (TripleBrown) and I teamed up with Chronos last night just like we did 7 or 8 years ago! Yeah, and I died quite a bit just like the old D2 days! Three Demon Hunters laying waste to anything that moved…but I kept thinking I was a barbunter…so I died like every 5 minutes.
Which leads to an interesting positive-feedback loop, where each one keeps firing because the other two are still firing, so there must obviously be something there to fire at. I’m pretty sure that most encounters, we burned half our hatred actually killing monsters, and then the other half just filling the empty air with arrows. It felt sort of like that scene from Predator.
Oh, and I finally found something my Demon Hunter can’t handle: Corrupted angels. Their zipping-around-the-battlefield ability is just too much for me.
Yeah, I thought the phase beasts from act3 were bad, until I saw the corrupted angels. Those things have at least 5 times the hit points as the phase beasts, and hit just as hard.
Corrupted angel elite packs with “extra fast” and “invulnerable minions” is one of the few literally impossible trait combos for me to handle.
With millions of people playing the game, a few hundred are lucky enough to get good drops. Feel free to try it yourself: I can tell you that neither I nor anyone I know have been able to successfully gear up any of our characters for progression in Inferno past Act I from farming alone. One lucky item here and there, sure. But that’s not enough.
And that’s enough to account for a few hundred folks who have bought something on the auction house. The numbers still don’t add up. Every item on the auction house was, in fact, obtained by a non-auction means (dropped by a monster, or possibly crafted or bought from a vendor).
Unless you’re arguing that there are a small number of people with so much magic find that they’re getting everyones’ drops? I suppose that’s possible, but it seems unlikely to me.
You might have noticed that most items on the AH are priced ludicrously outside of the affordable range of any but the most dedicated gold farmer. Most don’t sell and are re-listed repeatedly, since there is no penalty for a failed auction (bad decision, Blizzard.) Also, a lot of people resell old but maybe still good gear when they get an upgrade, so many items are re-listed for that reason as well.
But fine, you’re skeptical. Go farm Act I Inferno a couple dozen times and let us know how quickly you’re gearing yourself up.
It’s how I described it: a significant portion of good drops are pooled into the AH. It’s not remotely because great items appear regularly in the game as you play it. That’s not Diablo III.
This isn’t true. Monsters gain 75% hitpoints for each new player. Their damage is the same. This means that you should be more efficient in a party given that you are adding 100% more damage and only 75% more hitpoints. Of course, monsters doing 40-50k damage in one shot isn’t going to help anything.
Other classes other than Barbarians 
Really what happened was a few broken classes raced through Inferno and have save points into Act 4*. Most of the needed gear you see is Act 4 “vase loot” from my understanding from word of mouth.
*Some great gear drops Act 3 as well. But there is an active flourishing market to pay someone to drag you into a good farm spot save point in the last acts.
I’m convinced that my level 42 wizard sucks. Maybe all wizards don’t suck, but mine does. I’m having much more fun with a monk in normal 20 some levels and it’s been a lot easier and more fun.
But that implies the opposite of what was argued above. That if you are playing one of these “few” ( and a few out of five seems like it would be most of them ) broken classes, you don’t need absolute elite gear to survive Inferno.
As someone who hasn’t set foot in the AH and would rather not, hasn’t played outside of normal difficulty yet ( I’m slowly advancing one of each class more or less simultaneously ) and is playing SP only, I’m curious what the real deal is here. Not that it will completely kill my enjoyment if I can only get through Hell. I’m not compulsive about completing games. But it will annoy me a bit ;).
Have you tried the build I posted earlier? It’s something like this:
-Electrocute with chain lightning, for dealing damage to groups.
-Cold ray with sleet storm, for dealing with up-close-and-personals (arcane orb is a good alternate)
-Diamond skin with prism, to cheapen spells and avoid damage
-Mirror image, to avoid even more damage
-Magic weapon, to make those hits hurt
-Venom hydra, to dissolve all enemies into embarrassing piles of goo.
Since starting with this combo, I’ve tried new spells at each level, but nothing comes close to the awesome power of this combination. I really recommend it.
Nor is it difficult to “drag someone to a save point in act 4”. All you need to do is
1: Friend each other.
2: Kill Hell Diablo to get the newb into Inferno
3: Player already in Inferno starts a game on an easy quest (say, Tremors in the Stone in Act 3, or Fall of the High Heavens with the right build in Act 4)
4: Newb joins game.
Presto, newb now has a save point in act 3 or 4, with almost no effort. It’s easy enough to do that I’m honestly amazed there’s a market for doing it for pay.
No, I haven’t actually. I think more than anything I’m just tired of holding the shift key down to stay in place.