Farming the Fields of Misery

One of my favorite areas to farm in Diablo 3 is the Fields of Misery in Act 1. Since my Monk is now level 56 in Hell difficulty, I will center this discussion around what you can expect to gain from farming this zone on Hell. You can obviously farm it on Nightmare or Normal and I suspect it will be very popular in Inferno.

Fields of Misery is the zone right after defeating the Skeleton King, which makes it fairly easy if you have made it so far. It gets easier as you find or buy upgrades.

To get there, the best thing is to select the quest "Khazra Den" from the quest interface. Take the highlighted waypoint and exit through the north cemetery gate whereupon you'll find yourself in the Fields of Misery. Proceed to clear the entire area methodically, including (and especially) all the random dungeons you may encounter.

Make sure to complete the Khazra Den quest because it is very easy (the mobs inside are pushovers, plus no nasty random bosses) and it gives you some nice XP. Also make sure to turn in the quest once you are done farming the area, for another XP reward. Now, if you are 60, this doesn't apply, of course, so feel free to skip this quest.

The cool thing about the Fields of Misery is that there are a bunch of dungeons and random events that spawn and, on every run I have undertaken, there were no less than 3 of these. Each of them gives nice loot in the form of drops from rare spawns or even more loot from Resplendent Chests. Here are the ones I have encountered.

Scavenger's Den
This is your cookie-cutter 2-level mini-dungeon with a few champions/rares inside and a Resplendent Chest at the bottom.

Decaying Crypt

Another 2-level mini-dungeon with a shitload of zombies inside. The zombies are very good for XP because the Spewing Horrows keep puking them so if you want you can even avoid killing these lady-zombies and let them puke zombies over and over again.

On level 2 there's a Resplendent chest and a small quest given by a ghost. She asks you to kill 3 elites that spawn but they're very easy, just watch out for the frozen orbs they sometimes summon. The reward for the quest is very puny, just one blue item. Oh and make sure to clear the room before starting this quest, as you don't want hordes of zombies to assault you while you're killing those elites.

The Secluded Grove
There's a Resplendent Chest in the middle of this grove with a rare elite tree called The Old Man who attacks you when you approach. As you fight him, 3-4 other trees spawn. It's a very easy fight, just make sure they don't surround you because you won't be able to escape their vicious poison. I died stupidly on my Monk due to this and my overconfidence.

Sheltered Cottage
This is a tiny area on the north side of the Fields of Misery which spawns a single room inside a cottage called Pillaged Home. As you get close to the entrance, a Moon Clan Warrior bursts out the door and you can enter the house after killing him. The small room inside has a Bloody Chest and a bunch of lootable dead bodies.

Forsaken Grounds
This is a farm with a farmer who hands you a quest to destroy 4 Plague Nests. Another easy quest. It only gives a little XP and gold as reward.

Forlorn Farm
Another farm quest. As you approach this area you'll find the body of a large beast on the ground. Clicking on it will start the event. A bunch of Burrowing Leapers spawn followed by a rare Leaper named Burrow Bile. They are an easy kill. After dispatching them talk to the farmer and he opens up his cellar to you. Enter it and you'll find a Resplendent Chest. Also watch the dialogue between the farmer and his "wife". It's hilarious.

Lonely Dwelling
There's also a very rare house which spawns in a tiny area called Lonely Dwelling. The house is called House of Curious and has a merchant inside who might sell rare weapons and rare dyes.

Statistics
Thoroughly clearing the Fields of Misery with all the dungeons takes between 30-40 minutes. At level 56 it rewarded me with a total of 427K XP, or a little over 1/5 of the experience required for the next level.

I made on average 37K gold from drops and from vendoring all the junk I found. I also got 2-4 rares regularly each run, despite having only 8% magic find. Check out these pants, for instance, which were a very nice upgrade and something that I couldn't even find on the AH for a decent price.

Apart from this I also found 4 Tomes of Blacksmithing and 6 Tomes of Jewelcrafting, as well as 5 Radiant and 3 Square gems. You can figure out the market price of these on your own. Easily a few thousand.

This is one particular run that I recorded exactly but all my runs were very consistent in terms of rewards.

I highly recommend farming Fields of Misery if you've reached a point where Act 2 feels a bit too hard and this is valid anywhere from Normal to Inferno. OK, Normal is a bit too easy so you probably don't want to waste a lot of time there. One word of caution: all the underground dungeons have 2-3 packs of champions or rares inside. You were expecting that weren't you?

Have you farmed Fields of Misery? Know of any other nice farming spots?

Farming Azmodan for experience

I will say this from the start: this method of farming Azmodan is not my own discovery. I saw it a couple of days ago in a video that showed how to level low level friends with your high level character. Unfortunately I can't find the link to that video.

Apart from explaining how to do this (if you haven't seen the video and don't know what this is about), I will also put some numbers to the strategy, namely how much XP and gold you can expect for each farming run.

Just keep in mind that these Azmodan runs are primarily for experience, not gold or loot. The boss himself doesn't drop anything of significance, unless you get lucky with a blue item with perfect stats. If you do a full clear of the zone leading up to him, you can expect to find a group or two of champions/rares, as well as loot in the form of gold and items of all sorts.

This strategy revolves around the quest called "Kill Azmodan". You should have access to this quest once you've finished Act 3. Because I have moved on to Hell, I can go back and farm him as often as I please. The beauty of this is that after killing Azmodan you will get the quest credit in the form of XP and gold and then you will get another identical credit shortly after when you return to the Keep.

Strategy

1. Select the quest "Kill Azmodan" from the quest interface. I do this on Nightmare. It is certainly possible to do it on Normal or Hell if you wish. I'm guessing that on Hell it won't be very lucrative because you are probably already 60 by the time you will tackle this quest. But whatever.

2. Log into the game and teleport to the last waypoint on the list, called "The Core of Arreat". From there on, head in a northern direction until you reach Azmodan's lair. The layout of this zone never changes so you will never get lost.

You can choose to skip the monsters in this area, if you can get past them quickly without being killed. Stunning/fearing/disabling them will obviously be of great use here. If gaining the most XP in the shortest time possible is your only goal, then this might be advisable.

3. Do your thing and kill Azmodan. You will get the first quest reward.

4. Teleport back to the keep. Right next to the portal is a soldier called Lieutenant Lavail with a yellow quest mark over his head. Talk to him and he sends you to the Armory and from there immediately to the Keep Tower. Go there.

5. Once you get to the Keep Tower you will receive the second quest reward. Both rewards are identical and that's what makes this very lucrative: you get at least 89K XP for this quick run.

6. Log out of the game. Rinse and repeat.

Caveats

To make this quick and safe you will obviously need a lot of DPS and health. To give you a reference, my level 51 Monk has 2200 DPS and 14K health and this run is a walk in the park for him in Nightmare. It shouldn't be too hard to acquire equipment that gives you these stats considering that there are others who are much better equipped than I am, at the same level.

Occasionally you will run into groups of champions/rares with some ugly affixes on them. It's not worth dying for these idiots. Just run back to the waypoint and teleport back to town where you can log out safely and restart the quest, or alternatively, try to run straight to Azmodan, bypassing all the nasties.

Some statistics

As you can see from the images above, each of the two quests gives 44,800 XP and 1940 gold.

A typical run netted a total of 127,628 XP + 7000-8000 gold from gold drops / quest rewards / vendoring drops. Then there's a variable amount from gems and crafting pages (AH value) that you will also find.

To get from level 52 to 53 you will need 10 such runs. Each run takes 5-7 minutes (with full clear), meaning that you can level your character in only 1 hour with Azmodan runs, on Nightmare difficulty.

Muling 101

Some time before Diablo 3 was released, I talked about obtaining free storage space in the game, without paying a lot to expand your shared stash. I would like to expand on that idea, especially now that I've had time to play around with several options.

In the end, I bought all the space in the first shared stash tab, for a total of 40K gold. That's not a huge amount considering that I have over 500K gold and my Demon Hunter is only level 38. On the other hand I don't want to pay 400K to unlock the rest of the shared stash. I'll do it later but now's not the time.

Your first character, or your main, will be a trailblazer and will literally make the game much easier for your alts, by equipping them with the best equipment she finds in her adventures. You will find out soon enough that there's a lot of equipment that you will want to pass on. There needs to be a way to manage all this chaos.

So I've come up with a method that works really well for me. Here are the steps.

Step 1
Create your main. You do have a main class, don't you? My main is the Demon Hunter.

Step 2
Create your 4 other characters, one of each class. You are going to try all of them eventually, are you not? I have:
Demon Hunter - male
Monk - male
Witch Doctor - female
Barbarian - male
Wizard - female

Step 3
Create 5 more toons for the remaining character slots. These are the mules. Create one for each class. As a suggestion, create the opposite gender as your actual characters. For example, if your actual character is a male Demon Hunter, create a female DH mule. I named mine MULEONE through MULEFIVE.

The reason why this works for me really well is twofold. First, I can locate them visually very quickly by their portraits. Second, because their names are in all caps, they are easy to spot.

Step 4
Play each mule to level 2. Reach the point where you get the quest "Rumford at the gate" where Leah asks you to go back to the gate and help Rumford. Complete the quest by killing the Wretched Mother and the zombies outside the gate. Once the quest is done, log out. Pick "Change quest" from the menu and make sure to select "Rumford at the gate". Then you can log in to your mule.

The reason for all this is that this quest places you the closest to the shared stash as you'll ever be.

Step 5 (optional)
Buy all the space in the first shared stash tab. Believe me, this is highly indicated. It will be much easier to transfer stuff between characters and mules.

Now that the initial setup is done, you can start transferring stuff back and forth. I like to be organized so I will send Dex equipment to the Monk mule, Str equipment to the Barb mule and so on. When I need an upgrade for my alts, I can just log in on the appropriate mule and select whatever I require. This way I won't have to clutter my alts' inventories with gear that will only be usable in 5-10 more levels.

For example, once my Monk turned 10-11, I transferred items up to level 15 from the mule to his inventory. At level 15 I will transfer more items, this time up to level 20. By doing this, I will ensure that he always has access to nice upgrades when he levels up.

Eventually, once all of your characters reach level 60, you won't need these mules so much because there won't be a lot of hand-me-downs. Instead, this is the moment when you can make full use of the shared stash. After all, the method I outlined can be a bit time-consuming if there are lots of items to be transferred, but the biggest advantage is that it keeps everything organized, by class, making it extremely easy to pick the items you need.

One final tip that I'd like to share is that you can see all the items on all your characters at a glance from the Auction House interface. Just look under the "Sell" tab. The only caveat is that you can't see any details for items that are not fully repaired (they will appear in red).

I'd like to hear your thoughts on this but I find this method very convenient for me. It certainly beats spending 400K on the shared stash. Suggestions and improvements are welcome!

How to get free storage space

I love Diablo 3's shared stash and I'm sure you do too, unless you're some kind of weirdo who doesn't like nice things :) Hey, but even then, it's who you are, I'm not gonna judge.

The problem with the shared stash, at least at the beginning, is that it doesn't have a lot of space.
The stash has 3 tabs and only the first tab is enabled when you start the game on a fresh account. Each tab has 10 rows x 7 slots = 70 slots, for a total of 210 slots (for all 3 tabs). The first 2 rows in the first tab are free but from there on you will have to pay gold to unlock additional slots/tabs.

Each 14 slots (2 rows x 7 slots) costs 10,000 gold. To unlock the second tab you'll have to pay 100K. The third tab costs 200K. The second and third tabs come with the first 2 rows free, meaning that you will have to pay an additional 40K (4 double-rows x 10K) to fully unlock each tab.

The total to unlock the full 210 slots in your stash is 100K + 200K + 40K x 3 = 420K.

That's a lot of gold! In the beta I haven't focused on unlocking the additional tabs, though I will if I have time to earn the required gold. But in the full game no one will have that amount of gold from the beginning. Furthermore, it will be a much better idea to sell all your gold during the first few days/weeks instead of spending it on personal comforts. So what to do?

I'll tell you what I'm gonna do. I won't even buy a single 14-slot "slice". Eventually, I will expand my entire storage, but not right away. Here's why.

In the full game my priority will be to level a "main" class to 60, and I already decided on the Demon Hunter. I won't focus on any other class until then. However, I do want to level all classes to 60 eventually. That means that I can safely create all the classes at level 1 and "park" them until I need to play them. These will be my mules. Whenver I need storage space, I will transfer stuff from my main to the stash and then to the mule. Each additional character will provide 60 extra slots.

In addition, I will have 5 character slots remaining. I can easily create dummy level 1 characters for these slots, which will give me an extra 5 virtual storage "tabs".

The total storage for those 9 additional characters is 9 x 60 = 540 slots, which is a lot more than what the fully upgraded stash can offer me.

So all of this space will be absolutely free and I can be certain that it's more than I will need for the next couple of months. The best use for my gold won't be from expanding the stash early on. Stash costs are fixed and won't change (barring a patch), while gold prices will be on the decline from day 1.

The only disadvantage to this strategy? There's a certain amount of juggling involved with swapping items between characters. But that's a small price to pay for how much gold you are saving, gold that you could sell for real money instead.