Infernal Machine

Moving on with the advanced stuff, now we will cover the Infernal Machine event. We will skip the long intros this time, so let’s get to the point.

What is the Infernal Machine event?

Basically, pieces of this “machine” are scattered throughout the acts and a player should find these pieces in order to assemble the machine. The infernal machine event allows you to open a portal, which will lead to an arena (realm) with couple of uber bosses. There are three possible combinations: Siegebreaker and Zoltun Kulle, Skeleton King and Maghda, Ghom and Rakanoth. These uber bosses are buffed versions of the real bosses, for more details on them, just go to the corresponding page in the “Bosses and Servants” section.

The whole reason to go through the trouble of opening a portal and fighting those uber bosses is to get the ingredients you need in order to craft a iLVL 63 legendary ring called – Hellfire ring. Sure, these bosses also drop other stuff, but you don’t want to farm them for other items, because the time needed and efforts is just no worth it, if you want to farm for regular rare and legendary/set items, you are better off with act runs.

How to open a portal?

In order to activate the Infernal machine, you will need to get three keys, one in each act (one, two and three) and a blacksmith plan (act 4). Note that you need to find the plan only once, but every time you want to activate (craft) the machine, you need to get the three keys.

• Key One. Act one Fields of Misery. You should look for Odeg the Keywarden.
• Key Two. Act two Dahlgur Oasis. You should look for Sokahr the Keywarden.
• Key Three. Act three Stonefort. You should look for Xah’Rith the Keywarden.
• Blacksmith Plan. Act four Silver Spire level one. You should look for Nekarat the Keywarden.

When you get all the keys and the plan, you can then “teach” your level 10 blacksmith to craft the machine. Once you’ve crafted the machine, you should do to New Tristram in Act one and look for the house right next to the healer. Hit the door and enter; then use the crafted item to activate the machine and a portal to a realm will come up.

The Hellfire ring

Just as we said earlier, the reason you doing all this key hunting and uber boss farming is to get the ingredients for this legendary ring. The ingredients are:

• Vengeful Eye – from Realm of Turmoil (Kulle and Siegebreaker);
• Devil’s Fang – from Realm of Chaos (Ghom and Rakanoth);
• Writhing spine – from Realm of Discord (Leoric and Maghda);
• Level 10 Jeweler plan – from Squirt the Peddler merchant in Act 2 (she will be right next to the waypoint when you load the last quest from this act)

Okay, so this is out of the way. Now you know what is needed in order to craft this ring, but what does it give you? Actually, you can craft one of four different version of the ring: Hellfire ring of strength, dexterity, vitality or intelligence. Naturally each ring gives you:

• 170 to 200 of the chosen stat;
• 35% experience gain;
• Chance to hurl a fire ball;
• 4 random affixes.

Sounds cool, but is it?

Is it worth your time?

One word – NO. When the hellfire ring was initially introduced it was amazing, because that special proc (fire ball) actually did 3 to 5 million damage on a small impact area. This was just amazing, unbelievable, true legendary. Everybody was excited and we all knew that even the worst random rolls will give us the best ring out there. However, Blizzard decided this was too powerful, so they nerfed it…to the ground.

Right now this proc deals somewhere between 10k to 30k damage and the proc chance is something like 20-25%. This is really bad, because most characters crit for like 300k or more damage and their crit chance is like 25% or more. So this “proc” can’t even compete to a simple crit. This leads to the natural question – why would I want to craft it?

• High primary stat? 200 base stat is good, but to be honest a ring with high base stat and nothing more is worth like 10k gold right now on the AH.
• 35% EXP gain? This is ok, I guess for some people, but when you hit like paragon level 90+, those 10 extra levels won’t really give you that much, so this bonus EXP is good, but it is not a reason to farm keys and uber bosses.
• 4 random affixes. Everyone who have played Diablo 3 more than 10 hours knows that rolling good affixes out of those 4 for a RING will need unlimited number of attempts.

If you do a basic calculation of the possible rolls and chances, you will see that you will need to craft like 30 rings in order to get one that actually competes with those in the AH. Remember, you can buy a ring with 100 base stat, attack speed (7% to 9%), critical hit chance (3% to 4.5%) and critical hit damage for less than 100 mil gold.

In the end, this ring was a blessing from god, but Blizzard made is absolutely useless. It is neither time efficient, nor DPS efficient to farm this ring multiple times. This all leads to the point – do you really need to open an Infernal Machine? Sure, go ahead, open it a few times until you craft one ring, but there is no reason to come back.

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