Real Life Highscore

Ever since the release of patch 1.0.5 I have been Paragon levelling in Diablo 3. Although I am a huge fan of Act 1 this lead me to start doing the popular Alkaizer run in Act 3 and luckily I found that I quite enjoyed doing them and trying to improve my XP per hour. In this pursuit of efficiency I have discovered a good number of tips and tricks that I’ll  be sharing with you today.

General Tips

• Having a predefined list of the names and types of gear you plan on picking up will take the decision making out of your runs and increase your overall speed. What is on your list is up to you but remember some gear slots and types have more potential value than others and the smaller your list is the faster your runs are going to be. I explained what I pick up in patch 1.0.5 and why in this recent video.

• Always try to be moving forward and avoid backtracking as much as possible. If you find yourself kiting to stay alive then you may need to adjust your build, gear or the monster power you are playing on. Ranged classes can stutter step fire forwards through their run to increase overall run speed.

• You should play on a fairly low Monster Power if you are farming for experience and gear, even if you can handle higher. The time to kill mobs scales exponentially higher as you move through the levels and this quickly outweigh the magic find and experience bonuses. The rule of thumb for whether you should farm a higher monster power is if you spend less than 10% of your time fighting elites in your current monster power. However, even this rule can be quite subjective and the only real way to find out the most efficient monster power for you is to work out your experience per hour on each setting.

Core of Arreat / Tower of the Damned 1

• Start the Alkaizer run with the checkpoint in the Core of Arreat right at the entry to the Azmodan fight. You can get this checkpoint by starting a game on the ‘Kill Azmodan’ quest and by running right to the end of the Core of Arreat zone.

• The reason why we begin in with these two zones is because both have a chance to spawn 1 to 3 elite packs and both have a low density of trash mobs. Our aim is to build up our nephalem stacks to five as soon as possible to maximize our magic find and experience bonuses for the rest of the run. For this reason you are best off skipping all but the most clustered mobs in these areas to simply find and kill the elites faster.

• When clearing the Tower Level 1 it is best to do it in a counterclockwise circuit. This is because from the south side of the loop you can see any elite packs hiding on the stairs before you actually get to the stairs.

Arreat Crater 2

• Arreat crater 2, or AC2, has some of the best mob density you will see in the game and it will be a huge source of your paragon experience. For this reason it’s a good idea to make sure you have 5 NV stacks by the time you go in there. To pickup an extra stack if I missed one I will take the waypoint to the Tower of the Cursed level 1. Often an elite pack will spawn to the left of the waypoint and after you kill it you can simply run up the stairs to start at the end of AC2.

• Despite being such a good zone for mob density AC2 can have a pretty unforgiving layout. To avoid backtracking if you die or reach a dead-end you can simply teleport back to town and enter from the opposite end. In my case this is the AC2 waypoint itself but if you began there originally then it could be the tower of the cursed 1. The rule of thumb I use to decide whether I should portal or backtrack is if the backtracking will take more than ten seconds then i will waypoint instead. We will use this same technique to avoid backtracking in other zones as well.

The Keeps Depth

• There are three zones that make up the keeps depths and each one of them has some utility. However, Keeps 2 is our primary target because it has excellent trash mob density, possibly the highest in the game.

• Keeps 3 has a lower mob density but will contain a lot of elites for it’s size. For this reason I will sometimes clear Keeps 3 after the Core of Arreat and tower of the damned zones if I was unlucky with elite spawns. Dont be afraid to mix up your run a little bit like this on the fly to take advantage of these high elite spawn areas.

• To enter Keeps 2 simply waypoint to keeps 1 and walk through the door. However, occasionally an elite pack will spawn in the room to the south of the keeps 1 waypoint so it’s worth checking here first.

• Similarly to AC2, if you die or hit a large deadend in Keeps 2 then you can avoid backtracking by taking the opposite waypoint to what you began with.

Fields of Slaughter & Rakkis Crossing

• The final two zones are Fields of Slaughter and Rakkis Crossing and whether you choose to clear Rakkis or not will influence the way you run the fields.

• Rakkis crossing is not recommended for players trying to keep up Archon or Wrath of the Berserker as there can be stretches of no mobs that can cause you to drop these buffs. If this applies to you then the best way to clear the fields is with a big loop starting and ending at the waypoint. Make sure to poke into the centre briefly as elites will often spawn there.

• If you do plan on clearing Rakkis, however, then a sideways S shape is the most efficient way to clear the fields. Head right from the waypoint and double back through the middle. Then clear from the left side to the top of the zone where the Rakkis zone begins. This will take you through all of the mob dense areas and will have you finish the zone at the beginning of Rakkis without requiring a waypoint.

 Ending Your Run

• If you only have half an inventory of rares when you finish your run save Identifying and sorting them out until the next run. As long as you don’t ru out of space in your second run you will save time overall.

• You can speed up the time it takes to ID rares by right clicking the next rare when the current one’s progress bar is around 80%. This will remove the waiting time between IDs. Its not a huge deal but you dont really have anything else to do while ID’ing anyway.