02-07-2004, 05:34 AM
I'm amazed at how little information there seems to be regarding rune-hunting. Although I'm willing to admit that there may be no 'good' ways to find high-level runes, there must be a 'best' way. The Hellforge seems to be currently accepted as the best way, but it is arduous and there are few additional benefits. So I've been trying to figure out a better way. I've initially come up with two possibilities, neither of which appears to be very successful, but then with the drop probabilities for high-level runes being what they are, it's hard to tell. PLEASE let me know if I'm making an error at some point.
First idea was killing carvers. Going by D2Data.net's stats (which I'm now dubious about), carvers can drop reasonably high-level runes (at least up to Sur) with a reasonable chance. I think about 1 in 50,000 drops will be a high-level rune (higher than Vex). Carvers are easy to kill, and are pretty numerous, so they seemed a likely candidate. However, I killed a couple of thousand of them on 5 player, and got a total of 2 Ith runes, so I was disheartened. Still, if the drop rate is accurate, it can't take too long to get a good rune from the little blue guys.
Second idea met with a bit more success. I noticed that I was getting most of my runes from chests, barrels, urns etc. And in other rune-finding stories I've read on the net, it seems that a lot of them mention good runes dropping from non-monster objects. I can't find any data on drop probabilities for these objects, but runes must feature fairly highly on them (or perhaps they just can't drop many TCs?). Anyway, gearing my barb up for defence and running around Durance 2 only opening chests netted me a Dol and a Lem (and a Herald of Zakarum, strangely enough) in under 30 mins. It was 8-player (from my experience, I think this does make a difference with chests). But this may have just been luck, because the next hour didn't get me anything more. Might be worth investigating.
First idea was killing carvers. Going by D2Data.net's stats (which I'm now dubious about), carvers can drop reasonably high-level runes (at least up to Sur) with a reasonable chance. I think about 1 in 50,000 drops will be a high-level rune (higher than Vex). Carvers are easy to kill, and are pretty numerous, so they seemed a likely candidate. However, I killed a couple of thousand of them on 5 player, and got a total of 2 Ith runes, so I was disheartened. Still, if the drop rate is accurate, it can't take too long to get a good rune from the little blue guys.
Second idea met with a bit more success. I noticed that I was getting most of my runes from chests, barrels, urns etc. And in other rune-finding stories I've read on the net, it seems that a lot of them mention good runes dropping from non-monster objects. I can't find any data on drop probabilities for these objects, but runes must feature fairly highly on them (or perhaps they just can't drop many TCs?). Anyway, gearing my barb up for defence and running around Durance 2 only opening chests netted me a Dol and a Lem (and a Herald of Zakarum, strangely enough) in under 30 mins. It was 8-player (from my experience, I think this does make a difference with chests). But this may have just been luck, because the next hour didn't get me anything more. Might be worth investigating.