So I stopped playing for about three weeks.
A few moments ago I launched it for the heck of it, I thought I would bash some skeletons and zombies some more in Act 1's Crypts to burn a few minutes, which I did. Then I thought "alright, let's look at the GAH to see how it goes". I have 5 million Gold left, I thought "well maybe I should upgrade one piece of gear, just one".
I checked...
Wow, lol, so according to each one of my gear's stats, if I want to upgrade any one of them it's going to cost me anywhere between 8 to 20+ million Gold per piece of equipment. By "upgrade" I do mean increasing the stats by any amount. So for example one of my rings have +78 Strength, +61 All Res and a socket with a +38 Vitality gem in it, that's it, there's no other stats. So for an upgrade for that ring specifically I checked for rings of +80 Strength, +60 All Res (which means I might find something like +64 or +65 instead) and +45 Vitality. That means that my "upgrade" would consist of around +5 to maybe +10 to Strength or so, maybe +5 to +10 to All Res and maybe + 5 to +10 to Vitality. Well... lo and behold, the cheapest such Rings (checked from Levels 58 to 60 in the filter) are between 6 to 15+ million Gold.
I would have to give my 5 million Gold plus the extra Gold I would have made from multiple farm runs (for a day or two of doing that) just to upgrade stats of one item by single digits? No thanks. When I do a COMPLETE Act 1 play-through I can sometimes get around 400K to maybe 500K Gold, but it takes me 5+ hours... and that ring is the cheapest of the items I use on my ONLY "main" character that is the closest to "upgrade-able" according to the costs of items at the GAH and the Gold I have left. Now, unfortunately (or... fortunately) I'm not a "hardcore farmer" so... I decided to close the game and I think it'll remain closed and un-played for another couple of weeks.
How do Inferno players manage with upgrading? Do you guys rely on the horrible drops? I swear I found more useful blue items in D2 on a regular basis. It's not fun when you find an iLvl63 2-handed Doom Mace with 300 DPS, and much less to find an iLvl63 Bow with Strength on it which I might be able to sell for 1K Gold from the Trade channel.
I can't cope with that crap for too long, I hope the next patch will make things better.