I have a copy of the base game that I’ve never touched. A few days ago I decided to mess with it since I was done with this season weeks ago and I was looking for something unique to do until next season. Trouble is, I didn’t play much before RoS, and the little I did just scratched the surface, so I don’t know much about it.
So the blast from the past question for anyone who can remember is: where/how was the farming done in the base game? Was it like D2 where there was a certain mob/boss that was run over and over? Was there an area that was densely populated and easy/convenient?
Something else? Anything anyone can remember would be great.
Man, it’s a whole different world. For those who think RoS is too much of a loot storm, not vanilla. No NRifts or guaranteed drops in GRifts. T6 is the highest difficulty as far as world drops, no Cube (no cube slots, no rare upgrades, no augments, etc), no Kadala, no RoRG, no legendary gems, I haven’t seen a single crafting recipe drop yet (not sure if they do at all), etc, etc. Raining legendaries? Nuh-uh. You go to work.
Yep. Campaign only, no Cube, etc.
I’m not sure if any of the old, Vanilla farming strategies would still apply.
I didn’t start playing until May 2015, so, after RoS but before Cube.
I only played the base game briefly before buying RoS.
In Act 1 there are Cemetery of the Forsaken and Festering Woods; in Act 2 there are dungeons in The Terminus, Ancient Waterway and Desolate Sands; in Act 3 there are Keep Depths, Bridge of Korsikk and Rakkis Crossing. No one really farmed Act 2, Desolate Sands since dungeons are hard to locate and random at times. Act 4 is so small and there’s not much to farm besides rushing Diablo. I don’t know if he rewards you with a guaranteed legendary in D3V for first kill, like Leoric.
Before RoS pack, Act1 could drop loot with an item level value between 52-60 in Inferno. In case loot tables are not renewed you most likely find level 52 trash in Act 1. Any following act will increase the lowest item level you can find while looting, also will give you a chance to loot level 60+ items. Given that difficulty scale changed, if they touched the loot table after Reaper of Souls, I think this should be more consistent now but I wouldn’t know.
They do but they’re very rare and you don’t exactly need any level 60 side Sets since they’re pretty useless there. I reckon since you don’t have RoRG, you lack ability to unlock full potential of 3-piece bonuses without losing your 6-piece Set bonus. Most useful side Set you can have there should be Blackthorne or Endless Walk.
At the very beginning of the game (probably a bit earlier than he’s asking), you’d farm near the waypoint of the Oasis in Act 2, because there would be a goblin that appeared extremely often.
And since the highest item level was the same for Act 3 and Act 4, you’d farm right before Azmodan, where a goblin also appeared incredibly often.
In over 1000 hours of gametime in Vanilla D3, I never found 1 recipe though.
You literally just did the highest zone you could, repeatedly. That’s it. There were no targeted drops just as there are no targeted drops today. The only difference was that you essentially had the campaign difficulties to work with and that’s it (plus monster power/paragon beta toward the end). Players also fell asleep at the keyboard more often than they got drops. Ask me how I know that…
Fun Fact: D3V was the absolute best drug-free cure for insomnia.
Also, if you had a copy of the base game (presumably physical box w/ code), why didn’t you gift it to someone? (Note: this is just out of curiosity since that’s simply what I would have done, nothing more).
I need one more part for the Staff of Herding. I’m curious to see what Whimsyshire is like without RoS. I’m also trying to get infernal machines to drop to make a Hellfire Ring. So I got those to mix in, which may break it up a little.
It was a free gift from Bliz for participating in a research study back before RoS. The choice was D3 or a Bliz mouse pad. I already had D3 at the time, but I wasn’t interested in the mouse pad so I took the 2nd copy. Back then though, I didn’t know any other PC gamers so I just put it on an alt account.
It’s same as Reaper of Souls. I mean, Whimsyshire exists in RoS as well and it’s no different than classic Diablo 3 version, I assure you. There’s hardly any loot drops and it’s just a joke level going Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka on you: “You get nothing! You lose! Good day, sir!”. Shame that Shire doesn’t have chocolate fountains or syrup rivers.
Unless you were a really lucky player, you weren’t going past act 2 on Inferno. If by “T3” you meant hell, a lot of players did get stuck there if they were…squishy.
Makes sense. Can also be useful for alleviating stash space issues for non-BoA items or multiboxing, if that’s your thing.
Pretty sure with base game, he won’t have adventure mode and therefore won’t have bounties to get a RoRG. On top of that, base game is level 60 and 6 piece sets/Endless Walk/Blackthorne’s are level 70, so they aren’t going to drop. Pretty sure character level needs to be 61+ to get any level 70 gear drops. He also won’t have access to level 61+ skills.
It was basically just find the most dense areas. Since there was no adventure mode, best thing was to find a few dense maps close enough so you would have to load the game once. FOM was always a good area for me, especially when Decaying Crypt dungeon spawned there. With WD, you could use Pestilence to make the Wretching Mothers puke up a bunch of zombies, then go through and kill everything.
Ya, it is basically going to be a grind for the sake of the grind. The point was to only have a small number of gear lottery winners in order to funnel people to the RMAH. Gear hunt for D3V makes the gear hunt for D2 look like the gear hunt for D3R.
Don’t expect to ever have your character geared out well. I played probably 2000 hours in 2 years of D3V and found 2 Witching Hours, 1 Mempo of Twilight, a few dozen Manticores in which none had both dex and 2 sockets.
He’s talking about Vanilla Diablo 3, as it stands right now, not the game as it came out. That is, you’re limited to Level 60 with no access to Seasonal nor Adventure Mode. Diablo 3 without RoS. Strangely, you can still purchase it that way.
But yeah, the Torment Levels were introduced in Patch 2.0.1 (Feb 25, 2014), right before RoS was released on March 25, 2014.
Back then, when paragon only went up to 100 and was hero-specific (rather than account-wide) it was all about five zones in Act III. Because of “Alkaizer Runs” (that’s the streamer that got Paragon 100 world first) Blizzard nerfed the XP from the little scorpion type mobs…
I have played Vanilla back at 2012-13 with class Sets. You can check the official game guide to be sure; you’ll see at least one class Set from original five classes is indicated to be level 60. To my knowledge only Crusader and Necromancer have all five class Sets that require level 70. Alongside of those, side Sets such as Blackthornes and Endless Walk are level 60 as well, so you should still be able to loot those.
If they locked all of them behind RoS the moment it came out, I have no idea when or how that happened.
If Blizzard brought back vanilla D3 (with paragon/monster levels), but with drop rates about 1/3rd the current RoS levels vs. the abysmal drop rates in vanilla, I’d actually play that. It might be a fairly fun mode to toy with from time to time.
I stand corrected. I figured they moved all the old Vanilla sets (like Inna’s) to character 70 to match all the new sets, but I guess not.
I do not know officially if they did this or not either, figured they would go with uniformity. I can’t really test it since I don’t have Vanilla. Maybe Leviathan can let us know if he can still get the set pieces for the original level 60 sets.
Interesting topic. Just over yonder (seasonal theme: campaign only) I had the same idea. I played like this at the end of previous season, was fun, except it feels limited, most builds expect those extra powers.
I recall one of my old friends (Ava*) spending every evening around that area in Act 1. Forgot the specifics.
Partly monster density (with a flat loot table), partly hunting named mobs for their legs.
When I play such a mode I prefer to do the whole story and restart, with or without map clearing. Similar to clearing all rifts, you lose efficiency but gain some from rewards and of course the variety.
There is a side thought in the OP about raining loot - I preferred early seasons or D3V due to having to sort fewer meaningful drops as opposed to 50-100 “junk oranges” per hour. (Upgrade chance is equally low anyway.)
Holy Mother of All Evil
I just remembered why i played vanilla only for a month or two, and it was already wayyy too long.
Had absolutely no incentive to grind … there was not even a remote possibility to Loot something decent, and the only “fair enough” loot i had was on the last day of RMAH, some yellow gloves worth 700 or 1700 eur cant remember exactly, and they didnt sell ofc.
Lol @blizz was profiting a lot from RMAH tax.
Players raged about it, and closing the RMAH was single handedly the only reason Diablo 3 failed as a long term game, there just was no profit at all from diablo 3 after RMAH closed.
Game was fun as hell, but it ended really fast without any endgame.
I honestly dont know whats worse, old loot, like the examples provided, or new loot, where i also need literally few thousands of hours for the item upgrades i want.
(How many people have quad-perfect death nova offhand on your server? Because i cant see anyone at PC EU lol thats how rare it is, and i want it. Think i crafted primals like 200 times of those offhands and still nope.
Math says its 10k hours of playing necro speedruns to get it with 80% probability, but i may be wrong)
