Darkartiste has slain the beast. It only took 27 hours, but I’ve completed the four-act epic of Diablo 3 with my monk and am wiser for the experience. Already eight hours into the Nightmare level, I’m finding the difficulty level lives up to its name. How can you survive? Here are 10 tips to help you succeed alone.

Destroy every barrel, search every body and explore every inch of the map. I said there is no shortage of gold, but the more you explore, the more monsters you kill. Every dead body rifled and every barrel, vase or bookshelf toppled means more gold or items to sell. Utilize your town portal to get back to town quickly to empty your bags so you can get back to the action.

Stick and move when fighting the yellow or blue mobs. Elite monsters (named individuals ringed in yellow) or Champion monsters (groups of three or four ringed in blue) are tougher to take down and often have special abilities that can wall you off or freeze you in place. Especially as melee, standing in one place is usually a bad idea as flames, poison or ferocious blows can drop your health to zero in a few seconds. Constantly move, grab health globes, and pick your spots to use your special attacks. Certain mobs will drop health globes as they drop in health. Use only what you need and save others for later in longer fights.

Get extra experience by reading lore or fighting well. The journals found in satchels or bookcases will give you some good back story as well as limited XP. Also, having a big killing spree where you massacre a large number of monsters will yield extra XP. As an extra tip, listen to the lore (or read it later) when it is offered as it can give you tips on a new monster and how it attacks.

Use your shift key for certain battles. Movement in the game has your character following the mouse cursor. Targeting can be a bit troublesome on monsters that move quickly and you could literally find your character running in circles. Holding the shift key down will allows you to stand in place and let the mobs come to you. This strategy is not as good for the elite and champion mobs as mentioned above, but for large groups, or that last one or two mobs eluding you, it helps quite a bit. Also, holding a mouse button down automatically repeats an attack. You don’t need to keep clicking for each attack.

Use your gold to max out your jeweler and blacksmith crafting skills. Once they are maxed out, you will only be able to increase them through gathering blacksmith pages (five pages plus 15,000 gold for each Grand Master skill up) or jeweler pages (10 pages and 10,000 gold for each skill up in Master). There is no shortage of gold in the game, and crafting rare items (and even some exceptional magic items) will make adventuring and killing easier.