D3: You’ve Defeated Diablo III

As hellspawn go, Diablo has to be feeling pretty useless. We didn’t beat Diablo 3 last night; we beat Diablo #412. He dies so often, and it’s not exaggerating to say that he was the wimpiest boss we faced in Inferno mode.
Once we dropped to Monster Level 0, the run was no different than it had been in Normal, or Nightmare, or Hell — it’s always the same game.
Stingite and Spode will likely keep playing, trying to grind their Paragon Levels to 20 or more. Hardcore D3 players consider that the game really starts once you finish Inferno and begin the Diablo 3 metagame, farming to get better gear so you can raise your monster level and farm better gear and so on, until you’re getting legendaries and set pieces you can sell on the real money auction house and get rich selling stuff to other people who are farming inferno mode, grinding paragon levels, to get gear to sell on the real money auction house.
I guess someone must be making a decent living off of D3, but I’m guessing that someone works at Blizzard.

This is how we ended the game; Sting and Spode at paragon 9, me at 7, Calrain at 5.
Since we only had the spider lady, Azmodan, and Diablo to kill last night and that only took about an hour, we had time left over. Sting got us playing “The Realm of the Mad God” for a bit. This is a permadeath retro-looking MMO, where you level as fast as you can before you die, unlocking things along the way for your next incarnation.
I also upgraded to the final level of the Staff of Herding, allowing me to play Whimsyshire in Inferno mode. THAT cost a cool 1.1M gold, but what else was I going to do with all that money? Upgrades cost upward of 10M gold on the auction house, and there’s just no way I’m going to pay that much for a marginal upgrade.

Ding 9 in Realm of the Mad God! Pretty sure I just killed a dragon….
Next week: we start DC Universe Online. Calrain is already level 7 or 8. Spode just started downloading the game last night.