Countess runes & making runewords

[Professor Frink]

Did some playing around in excel, and assuming my math was right (everything assumes players 1) you get an average of ~1.69 runes per countess kill.

The approximate average "value" of a countess run, based on the cubing formulas (2 or 3 for an upgrade) and assuming the gem reagent is free:

Code:

Norm   El:366               Ith:1.51         Sol:0.0021  Lum:.000 0085  Zod:.000 000 000 026
Night   El:252,947        Ith:1040        Sol:1.43      Lum:.0059         Zod:.000 000 018
Hell      El:52,102,795   Ith:214,414   Sol:294       Lum:1.21          Zod:.000 0036

This is a little misleading though--Almost all the value winds up coming from the top few runes, which drop rarely (the top 6 hell countess runes drop in 1% of runs and make up 98% of her rune value); This makes it take substantially longer to actually get any rune lower than the top one droppable.

Assuming you convert all lower runes to higher, the approximate number of runs needed to get a particular rune at hell difficulty:

Code:

rune      runs
Zod(33)    274,109
Cham(32) 137,055
Jah(31)     68,527
Ber(30)     34,264
Sur(29)     17,132
Lo(28)       8566
Ohm(27)   4283
Vex(26)     2141
Gul(25)      1071
--- limit of hell drop ---
Ist(24)       535
Mal(23)     417
Um(22)      358
Pul(21)      308
Lem(20)    223
Fal(19)      155
Ko(18)       113
Lum(17)     79
--- limit of nightmare drop ---
Io(16)        57
Hel(15)      40
Dol(14)      30
Shael(13)  21
Sol(12)      16
Amn(11)    12
Thul(10)    10
Ort(9)        7.8
--- limit of normal drop ---
Ral(8)        7.3
Tal(7)        5.7
Ith(6)        5.9
Eth(5)       4.5
Nef(4)       4.1
Tir(3)         3.1
Eld(2)        2.7
El(1)          2.7

If you're looking for a lower rune, doing hell runs instead of nighmare runs will cost you only 2% of your 16 and lower drops and replace them with (potentially valuable, even if you don't need them right away) 17-24 drops; aside from that it works out identically, so it's probably always in your best interest to do hell runs as long as you have access to Act 1 hell and your character is capable of doing them quickly (and safely, if you're HC). Running normal countess gives you about 3% more 1-8 runes than hell and 2% more than nightmare.

It is not terribly effective to try to cube up more than a few levels; You'd need to find a lot of gems, have a lot of mule space handy, and go to a lot of trouble for not much reward.

Incremental gain from each level of cubing depth, vs target rune (depth = 1 means never cube, just wait for the rune to drop)

Code:

current    benefit from next level
depth     Pul                    Ist
  1         44%                  75%
  2         13%                  25%
  3         5%                    15%
  4         2%                    6%
  5         0.9%                 3%
  6         0.4%                 1.2%
 10        0.0001%            0.05%
"no el"   0.00000003%    0.0000007%

below about Pul (the higest rune that takes 3 runes to make) averages about the same, and above Ist cubing is your only option.

I'd probably discard any sub-pul runes that couldn't be turned into something i needed more of in 2-3 upgrades. I don't get enough higher level runes to worry about what to do with them...

It'd take a lot more space than i've already used to show how i got these numbers, but if any of them seem suspect let me know and I'll do some spreadsheet formula checking.

-- frink

p.s. is there any way to do something that looks like a table on this board?