Greed’s Domain. The Vault. The Goblin Treasure Realm. Whatever you call it, this area – added to Diablo 3 in patch 2.1 – is much sought-after by players in need of gold. One trip to the Vault can easily net you tens of millions – if not hundreds of millions – of those shiny, shiny coins that you desperately need to craft gems and enchant your gear. While running low on gold eventually becomes a non-issue, here are some tips to the Vault for those still getting started in their demon-hunting adventures.
How to find The Vault
First off, The Vault has a random chance of spawning when you kill a goblin outside of a Rift. Inside Rifts, there is no chance at getting The Vault to spawn. Otherwise, in Adventure Mode, there is roughly a 1 in 50 chance that killing a goblin will result in the golden portal to The Vault opening.
While you can find goblins as you go about running bounties, letting The Vault remain a random and exciting bonus, you can optimize your chances of finding it by specifically hunting for goblins.
There are a number of areas that spawn goblins fairly consistently, and some players include all of these areas in their goblin hunting runs: Tower of the Damned, Tower of the Cursed, Northern Highlands, the Cave of the Moon Clan in the Southern Highlands, the Caverns of Aranea (to hunt Arsect the Venomous), and the Core of Arreat.
When split farming in a group of four players, it is advantageous to have every player scout a different area, but when I farm by myself, I focus only on the Core of Arreat. Why? It’s a small area, it has a predictable and easy-to-navigate path, and it spawns goblins fairly regularly (roughly one fifth of the time, as a conservative estimate). Change your build and items to optimize your mobility, run through the area, and only stop to kill goblins or once you reach the steps leading down to the next area. Once you’ve either killed a goblin or reached the stairs, town portal back to town, leave the game, and try again.
Once you reach the end of the Core of Arreat, if there are monsters attacking you, it may be quicker to simply let them kill you, revive in town, and leave game to remake. Or, you can equip the Barter Town Pads shoulder slot items to town portal out while monsters are attacking you.
How to Maximize your Gold Find
Once a Vault portal has spawned, you want to take your time to swap to your gold find gear in order to get the most out of your trip. Reset the fourth tab of your paragon points and dump everything into gold find: you can get 50% right there. Beyond that, equip gear that has gold find as a secondary stat. Every item slot – apart from most weapons – can roll with up to 35% gold find. Amulets can roll up to 80%. Here are some additional items that will further boost your gold find:
Sun Keeper (one-handed mace): Increases damage against elites by 15-30%. +26-60% Extra Gold from Monsters. Weapons can’t normally roll gold find, and the extra damage versus elites will help with the fight versus Greed, the boss of the treasure realm.
Devil Tongue (one-handed sword): 26-80% Extra Gold from Monsters. This sword can roll even higher gold find than Sun Keeper; if you can dual-wield these two weapons, do so for maximum gold find.
Kymbo’s Gold (amulet): Picking up gold heals you for an amount equal to the gold that was picked up. +75-100% Extra Gold from Monsters. This amulet rolls higher gold find than any other, and the heal effect is powerful, considering you will have roughly 500,000 hit points and will be picking up millions of gold.
Goldskin (Chest armor): Chance for enemies to drop gold when you hit them. 100% Extra Gold From Monsters. The chance for enemies to drop gold is actually quite low, but the 100% guaranteed gold find buff makes this the single greatest gold find item in the game.
Blackthorne’s Set (Amulet, pants, belt, boots, & chest pieces available): 3-piece set bonus: 25% extra gold from monsters. If you can somehow squeeze in three pieces of Blackthorne’s set into your gold find gear – such as by using two pieces and a Ring of Royal Grandeur – then you can add another 25% gold find.
Legacy of Nightmares (2 rings): 2-piece set bonus: 15% extra gold from monsters. It’s a small gold find bonus, but if you can fit in these two pieces without much sacrifice, then go for it.
If you are completely maxed out on gear and paragon points, you’ll have over 750% gold find – and that’s before factoring in bonuses from difficulty level, which are listed below.
- Hard: 75% extra gold
- Expert: 100% extra gold
- Master: 200% extra gold
- Torment 1: 300% extra gold
- Torment 2: 400% extra gold
- Torment 3: 550% extra gold
- Torment 4: 800% extra gold
- Torment 5: 1150% extra gold
- Torment 6: 1600% extra gold
These difficulty bonuses serve as multipliers on your total gold find, following this formula:
Difficulty-modified gold find = (gold find value) x (difficulty percentage/100) + (gold find value)
For instance, if you have a base of 500% gold find, at Torment 6, you would actually have a whopping 8500% gold find. In other words, with maxed out gold find, you’ll have over 12,000% gold find.
Other helpful items
Here are some other items that can help with your journey in The Vault. They won’t increase the amount of gold you find more than any other item, but they do have other beneficial effects.
Avarice Band (Ring): Each time you pick up gold, increase your Gold and Health Pickup radius by 1 yard for 10 seconds, stacking up to 30 times. This ring drops from Act 3 Horadric Caches, making it easy to farm. The legendary effect isn’t game-changing with respect to maximizing your efforts in The Vault, but it serves as a simple quality-of-life change to enable you to collect your loot more rapidly. As a bonus, it rolls +32-35% Extra Gold from Monsters.
Boon of the Hoarder (Legendary gem): 25% (+1% per gem rank) chance on killing an enemy to cause an explosion of gold. At rank 25, Gain 30% increased movement speed for 3 seconds after picking up gold. Originally, you could only find this item in The Vault, but as of a couple patches ago, it began to drop in Greater Rifts as well. This gem also serves as a quality of life improvement by enabling you to speed through The Vault more rapidly while giving you some bonus gold along the way.
Broken Crown (Helm): Whenever a gem drops, a gem of the type socketed into this item also drops. You can find gem goblins in The Vault – wear your Broken Crown in order to double up on gem drops.
Custerian Wristguards (Bracers): Picking up gold grants experience. While this item may seem like a no-brainer for fast paragon leveling, its effect is actually underwhelming. The gold to XP ratio is 1 to 1, so if you pick up 75 million gold in The Vault, that will translate to 75 million XP. While that may sound like a big number, to put that into perspective, it takes about 167 million XP to go from paragon 99 to 100, and 321 million XP to go from 199 to 200. Free XP is still free XP, but the slight XP bump is what makes this item optional. As a bonus, it rolls +32-35% Extra Gold from Monsters.
Gladiator Gauntlets (Gloves): After earning a massacre bonus, gold rains from the sky. Another underwhelming item, the gold that “rains” from the sky amounts to only a few thousand, a drop in the pond relative to the millions you’ll be picking up in The Vault. You also won’t be getting massacre bonuses often in this realm. Still, if you want to absolutely maximize the amount of gold you get, you can use these.
Goldwrap (Belt): On gold pickup: Gain armor for 5 seconds equal to the amount picked up. The armor you receive is equal to the amount of gold you pick up, so you can be virtually invulnerable throughout most of the Vault, before the boss fight. As a bonus, it rolls +32-35% Extra Gold from Monsters.
Fighting Greed
Before we let you go, here’s a quick tip on fighting Greed, the boss of the realm. Greed is similar to The Butcher, with an identical charge attack. Every time you evade one of her charges and she strikes a wall or the central gem, however, she will drop a treasure goblin off her back. She has a total of roughly six goblins, and you can count on her back how many she has left.
Unlike normal goblins, these goblins cannot be interrupted when they are escaping, so you have to kill them fast. It’s advisable to not kill Greed too quickly so that you can farm the goblins off her back; however, if you take too long to kill her, the fight may just abruptly end. If this happens, though, there is no adverse effect other than being unable to farm the remaining goblins off her back.
CJ Miozzi is a Senior Editor at The Escapist and is also known as Rhykker on Youtube. You can follow his livestreams on Twitch and Tweet to him @Rhykker.
