rune hunting Can anyone give me some tips on rune hunting... which monsters typically drop the most/best runes... gear to wear etc. Do runes count as magic items for magic find?
It pays off more to kill regular monsters than bosses. Their chance is 10-20 times lower than for the top end rune droppers, but reaching a boss needs more time than killing 20 regular monsters. However, if you encounter a boss, kill him The best rune droppers are regular hell monsters from late act 3 on, those from the high level areas and cows. They can drop any rune. Monsters in the act 3 jungles can drop up to Cham and they are particularly easy to kill. Ghosts etc. are perhaps 50% better at dropping runes.
If you need low-mid runes go for the Countess in the tower in Black Marsh, Act 1. If you are really lucky she will drop a higher rune (best I got from her is Ist). And no, MF does not count. Equip all your killing equipment and kill as many monsters as fast as possible is probably the best advice, but don't expect to see any high runes soon.
gogo flayer jungle! zillions of small flayers blowing arrows at you that barely dont hurt. You can wipe out 10 of those in the same time as 2-3 regular monsters with almost any caster char. its fun too!
I agree 100%. A lot of players find the Flayer Jungle annoying, but the sheer amount of slaughter that can be perpetrated there really appeals to me. I also use find item on pretty much every enemy corpse, so the high density of enemies is potentially very rewarding.
just to make it even more tempting, flayer jungle is great for exping mercs too. works all the way from lvl60 to lvl85 (havent got my char higher than that yet...) Find item sounds like a nice idea, since the amount of corpses is quite high
i started doing hell travincal runs. the council members have (relatively) good chance of dropping runes. still i've done about a hundred and got nothing higherthan ko. i think you need to do about 1000(probably much more) to have a reasonable chance of finding anything higher than ist. still i've found some nice charms and a 3/17/18 eschutas. the other goood source of runes is the hellforge. try creating a char rush em to hell hf just to get the runes, then do away with them.
the council never drop anytihng for me hellforge is a good way but now people are cheap. after you get to a certain point, they just "disconnect" themselves. they leave game, no acc is left by them, you get no clue who he was unless you recroded it before.
yeah i don't rush people i don't know. what i've beean doing recently is rushing a freinds horrible characters with messed up stat/skill points before he decides to scrap them. and giving him in return nice equipment(full tals, guardian angel, hoz) and advice on how to build them properly.... And then getting their forge drops. And now he's got chars capable of rushing my messed chars.
One off the best ways (except for the forge quest) is hell cows with: 1 paladin for conviction (not supposed to kill anything, just herd), 1 javazon with that funny "lightning all-over" skill (never played a javazon ), and one barb using find items on all the corpses (incredibly boring to make, but pays off). Needless to say, these have to be good friends of yours. You get more drops with more players, but then again, splitting the runes can be hard and you don't need worry about "pickit", grabbing etc
nice idea this one. i'd just like to add that it can be done solo. lightning fury 'zon is capable of killing cows in hell without the the conviction pally, but of course it will take a bit longer. you could then exit the game once most the cow are dead, and rejoin with the find item barb and go around all the corpses left in the cow level.
One nice thing about lightning-javazon is that she doesn't kill cow-king by accident as he is immune. I don't know if conviction can break that immunity though.
My retired conviction pala has +4 all worth of items and the con (lvl 24 )listed -145% to enemy resistances. According to darkness (might be outdated) the Cow king has 100% lightning res, meaning it will be broken. This is how breaking immunities work, right? Conviction -def/-res is capped at lvl 25 btw. Mine had -92/-145 at lvl at 24. An infinity merc might not break the king (not sure), but then again, you probably don't need runes that bad if you can afford it
