This could be by far the most interesting Diablo II video I have ever watched. Being a numbers nerd myself I really appreciate these kinds of analyses. Well done! :)
Thank you! There is more to come, currently working on gathering data for another video in this style :) good to see some more people out there interested in the analysis of D2's drop system. Cheers!
christophe Dohet As far as I remember the rune drop has nothing to do with MF. It's only affected by number of players in the game (tunable in single player). Please correct me if I'm mistaken :-)
Thank you very much! :) There are two more of these videos to come, it's just that that crunchtime is getting in the way of things right now :P Cheers!
Omg I love you! Thank you for the awesome presentation, the numbers and advice. I'm also very happy to see you doing this without perfect uniques and cta, hoto and other rune words. It's very inspiring to see that playing untwinked is very much possible on hell difficulty. Thank you!
Glad you enjoyed it and found it useful & inspiring :) I think the singleplayer experience of D2 is much more compelling than multiplayer for exactly the reason you touch upon: the item economy and how it limits the challenge of the game to a small sliver of it. Cheers!
Thanks, the video was really well done. Its interesting seeing d2 being explored still after all these years. Theres so much info out there on it, but this is one of the best explanations of an aspect of the game Ive seen.
Great video! Statistics you showed is really useful and your dedication is commendable! Good Sir, you earned one more subscriber! P.S. Long live D2 and its community! :)
When I looked around TH-cam I felt the same... most is using characters that don't need any running in order to beat the game at all :) seems kinda pointless to me then, but people like different things. Cheers!
This video made me subscribe to your channel in a matter of a few minutes. Love the attention to detail, will be watching your videos from now on. Great job.
it's aways nice to see a Diablo II gameplay. i usually create a room with a barbarian without the Countess quest done, then i enter with my sorceress and go for countess, i get some high level runes in her chest (vault), it adds about a 10 seconds in every run but for me work more than before without doing that. Nice video! Cheers!
Thank you for checking in mate! :) To those who don't know, Indrek's videos were my inspiration (the diary format) to making this video. If you like D2, check out his stuff!
Sensational guide. I also play sp and have been wondering about the statistics for a long time. Well done. Have you done a video about TC87 uniques? That would be fascinating.
word! Ive dl'd the game and wanna get back into it but feel a little overwhelmed when keeping efficiency in mind. These videos are very helpful thanks for the work
More to come on this :) I'll make a big "runeword feasibility" video too based on a normal vs. nightmare vs. hell countess analysis - the latter being mostly done :s just takes a lot of time. Cheers!
Thanks for this video. It would be more fitting to suggest that you got lucky on the dol runes than getting unlucky on the io’s, as that would have less deviation from the pattern (I.e. io being every 2nd rune and dol also being a 2nd rune but you happened to get more than would be typical?)
On the other hand, I don't see any actual human sitting down for 300 runs in 10 hours without a mental break or 10, so those of us who don't smoke basically do the low-level rune cubing for free. That said, cubing 14,281,868,906,496 El runes to get a Zod isn't very likely in a human lifespan. Also, I could argue that time spent editing a video for youtube would be equally wasteful :-P
This is a very interesting analysis. I would say, you should mention that the time estimates for single countess runs should be decreased for single player as the map layout is known. I can't imagine how many countess runs I did in my day, but I only ever got an Ist once.
Stealth Ruchen are you playing SP or online? If you play SP I can recommend lower kurast super chest runs on players 6+ :) runes are quite common drop.
countess 1:14 summoner 1:12 Nila 1:13 those numbers are for 1 player in the game, with more players those numbers go down to around 1 in 8 for 8 players
Very nice video man! Its odd that you never found an Ist though. I went through a 5 month stretch a few years ago in SP where I found maybe 10 Ist runes before seeing a Mal or an Um. Also found a Jah & Ber within a few weeks of each other but had not seen anything else above Gul to that point. Insanely strange drop rates sometimes.
It's not so much that they are strange, it is the low probability and hence lack of statistics that is confusing :) it is entirely probably to not find an Ist rune in 300 runs, it is actually likely to not find one. Mal and Um are slightly more likely to drop for the countess, but during normal play, I don't know. Cheers!
Really nice analysis. Makes me wanna play d2 again, I havent played it for like 10 years or so. I saw a key drop in one of your runs, but as far as I remember, you are not able to open the portal to the upper bosses in single player mode? Is it still like that? Which char/build would you advice me to play, in order to farm the endgame areas, both considering efficiency, and equipment that is obtainable for the build? That being for single player mode.
D2 holds up till this day, it is no less good nowadays compared to yesteryear. :) You are correct about the keys, that stuff is needed for Uber-Tristram and unfortunately that is not available in Single Player mode. For farming I would suggest what I did, you go for a pure lightning sorc all the way though normal and nightmare. Some of the best farming spots don't have lightning immune enemies. If you want to advance to act 5 in hell you do need either frozen orb + mastery + a bit of trickery to defeat the chaos sanctuary or you go for dual element (and a lower-resist charges wand you can buy). If you then want to optimize your build for farming you can respec your character (that's new). As you can see I don't have any good equipment either. Cheers!
nice video.. started playing d2 again 2weeks ago... this game doesnt get old at all.. only downside it the 3month and your account gets deleted thing^^.. best vid ive seen so far researching rune drops
very intersting video! well done! but it is for single player, if you play on internet, the map change all the time and a single run take more than 2 minute (unless you have heavy stuff), on the other side, rush character to hell A4 is less than 5 hour : it is more like 40 minute/1hour (if you have a friend of course) and you get first kill on bosses aswell. so i think getting character to hellforge hell is worth more than making countess runs
Yes, Hellforge runs become a lot more valuable in comparison if you can get there a lot faster :) online does skew it in the favor of hellforge for sure. All numbers are still relevant though, you just need to multiply them with the factor for how much faster (or slower) you can run these.
You can always drop a LO rune from countess hell, not only on the first kill. The countess has 2 drops with different TC for every kill. The runedrop can drop up to IST and the killdrop can drop up to LO. I have dropped a VEX on a countess key run before and that surely wasn't on the first kill.
Just so you know the Countess can always drop up to Lo rune. The chance of it is minimal though. The reason is because the Countess drops both a normal drop + a special rune drop. The extra run drop can be up to five extra runes. It is however unlikely she drops more than three runes.
This video has me more curious about this and I have embarked on one of my own. On my first run I got 2 from the countess, but got three more as random drops from monsters while in the tower - and not junk runes either (Thul, Sol, and Fal). Very curious to see if the drop rates are designed the way you show them here.
That is very nice tower drops along the way :) You'll need quite a bit of statistics to see it all average out to something like the distribution I got.
u can find good runes in cow generally pul/um/mal ist ending with gul nigthmare/hell or travincal/throne of baal i hope i helped of course area lvl and mob lvl we are taking into consideration so drop can be higher runes that I mentioned most often fall
Well, for me it also answered an age old question of "Why were my Countess runs so unsuccessful?" I used to do hellforge quest for six of my own mules at once instead but you probably can't pull this off on Bnet.
Can you do a video where you test if you get better runes when you haven't gotten the Countess quest but joined a game where you couldn't complete the quest?
That would take far too much time :) Also it seems like higher player numbers massively limit the number of runes dropping from her, as she has limited drop slots and the normal items get generated first.
Hey! This was really a nice video to watch and I quite wanna get back into diablo 2 again I use to play it loads with my family and we'd be a party of 4, between the 4 of us we got quite far even with the 5th chapter expansion pack can you recommend a class for me to play in terms of fun? also not too challenging perhaps, I dont want to get stuck on chapter 3 wondering where I went wrong thanks
The best classes to start out with are probably fissure druid and trap assassin (firebomb, wake of fire, death sentry) :) quite fun to play, too! Cheers!
I've found two guls, cham and jah doing Ancient Tunnels in Act II, each run takes me about a minute and while I don't know how much time it took me to find these runes I do know that I leveled my character from 88 to 93 during that time, so it was a while.
yeah, sad thing is, in single player that cham and jah runes are perfect for shoving it up my ass, cause my blizzard sorceress would never have a need for them. They look cool in the stash though
That's why I use GoMule in Singleplayer for when I "want to play with myself" (not as in wanking) to share stuff between my self-found characters. For me that feels fine if I before I find something have determined that this is going to be one of the "shared" characters hehe. Cheers!
I challenge you to do a Diablo 2 Hardcore Ironman build. You cannot use any shop in town other than getting quests. I.E you could use the Hammer quest in act 1 or the socket quest in act 5 or get skills from said NPC's
I guess you want to exclude all AoE spellcasters then, right? Because playing trapsin of fissure druid (at least through normal) could be done without too much of a hassle, beyond that it gets tedious (and stupid?).
Rolling through Nightmare on my summon necro. Can't wait to start farming Hell Countess and The Pits. I picked Necro since I can use the Amp Damage + Corpse Explosion combo to clear rooms without needing good gear (kind of a catch 22 situation with other farming builds where they need good gear but lack it because they can't farm yet without that good gear). The skeletons are just the meat-shields. I also put 10 points into Dim Vision. It's the next best thing to Teleport. I just spam-cast it around myself while running through an area and all the normal monsters ignore me completely.
i have 161 runs of data from earlier this year, i see the same low level distribution features for the first 8 runes, but no absence of io runes, which is simply a statistical fluctuation that will smooth out with much more data i presume
It would be very interesting if you could do 4 more run sets, and then compare each set, then compiling the 1500 runs together. I think a higher run count will smooth the curves out. (And yes, I know it is a huge undertaking, but I think you can handle the challenge) (Liked, subscribed)
That would indeed be a massive undertaking that would take a lot longer than what I did instead: write a simulator that uses the exact game drop mechanics to simulate Countess Runs :) the series of me making that tool is on my channel. Check it out!
Hi Michael! I used nothing fancy to make this, standard tools: Adobe Photoshop CC, Premiere Pro CC, Audition CC, and Google Drive (Spreadsheet) for the stats tracking. No special libraries or anything. Cheers!
Hell LK i found cham and sur in about 2 hours :) I would think the distribution was a bit wonky bc of the low sample size (you would probably need about 5000 or more to get something clearly representative)
Definitely too small a sample size for Hell Countess, yes! The sample size was decent for nightmare and good for normal, which I show in part 2 :) gratz on those gg finds!
Great video! However why do you not use Lightning for killing The Countess? Blast her with Static Field a few times and Lightning will 2-3 shot her instead of spamming Chain Lightning and running out of mana.
So many D2 OCD people pointing that out xD yes, you are correct, but this isn't about saving 1-2 seconds per run by being super focused. Chain lightning does half the damage and uses twice the mana when confronting a single enemy. As soon as her minions are gone (which chain lightning disposes off faster) I can't be bothered to switch skills, it is entirely irrelevant and in many hours of running it's just a matter of comfort, too. I can buy mana potions every few runs when selling stuff anyway.
The best and most efficient high level runes run was Hell Travincal Run with Barbarian and his Find Item ability, killing and searching High Council of Zakarum members. Several Jah, Ber, Vex, sometimes Ohm dropped there for me, and jewelry (including skill charms and rings like Raven Frost/Dwarf Star). I did this 5 years ago on HC Ladder . First getting cheap IK Set, MF gear to switch and farming there. I got super rich really fast, getting myself Enigma then other things thanks to skiller charms and good runes. If you can try it out.
Suvisak I mentioned that it was a small amount, but it is irrelevant for rune drops because the treasure classes with runes are gone through *before* any "magic" items are even considered. :) So the MF is relevant only to what other goodies I found during my runs. You can calculate the exact number by adding it up when I show the equipment.
Thanks for the video it is quite informative and well made :) What I conclude from the statistics you got from these 300 runs is that Hell Countess running for runes is really not worth it.... and also boring as hell. The main reason is that in addition to the drop rates of interesting runes (pul um mal ist) being pretty low and capped at IST, you are not gonna get any other kind of valuable stuff either because the area level doesn't permit it. So for me countess running in hell seems like a waste of time unless you are Key running (Key of Terror). Better spend time doing some Pit runs (and chaos runs if your character can handle it) with alvl 85 areas you have the possibility to find HRs and I'm sure the drop rate of mid tier runes like Pul/Um/Mal/Ist would be just as good as countess runs as well... + you can find valuable elite socketables and the best elite uniques/sets items + rares will have higher mod possibilities. I'd suggest the analysis of these runs for future videos : • 100 Pit Runs hell (low Light immunes) • 200 Lower Kurast chest runs I know these would take a lot of time to make though
You are quite right in many of the points you make. I'd like to point out though that you are mainly talking about a multiplayer perspective. In Singleplayer getting to and running the places you talk about sometimes requires some more base stuff, and there is no quicker way in the game to get up to approximately an Um rune than the Hell Countess as far as I know. It is a good area to level a character, too, due to so many boss packs, which gives you decent drops and the chance to get many of the really useful uniques. But again, if you are talking multiplayer then nah, not really worth it.
you mention using gomule... i was unable to get gomule to work on the latest patch (1.14D), but would love to. right now i have diablo 2 loaded on 2 computers so that i can start a TCP/IP game, join, and trade items. pretty cumbersome. gomule or atma would be great, but i'm NOT a programmer, so no idea what i'm doing wrong. do you by chance have a link for where you downloaded gomule from? maybe i used a bad site? i REALLY wanted a mod that would allow me to make ladder runewords on SP, but none of those worked for me either. i've been playing D2 since its inception, but just started playing SP a few months ago. got tired of the realms and resets. wanted to beat the game "on my own" so to speak, but now i have a lightning sorce and zealot, both over level 85, neither of which can best the ancients because their gear isn't up to snuff... SO HARD to find/make good gear on SP. any advice you can offer?
The only problem I had with GoMule was to find my diablo savefiles in Windows 7. :) Singleplayer is so much harder (and more fun IMO), yes, the only advice I can give really is to use a "lower resist" charges wand to break some of those immune enemies. For farming items I'd go with Hell Mephisto. Easiest for farming definitely is the Sorceress.
I like the statictics u did on the countess *thumbs up* though 300 is a low number of runs to evaluate it properly especially for the less likely rune drops in lower numbers as u've already mentioned :) Nice stuff though. rune hype!! :D
yes, it is far too low a number :) for these runes you would probably need something like ~3k runs to make for better stats, but that would be 100h of running the Countess xD rune hype! (MrLlamaSC would be proud of the double Shael drop on run 300)
so are you doing this in single player or multiplayer because when i try to farm on multiplayer i have to make a new server and the layout is different
Yeah, I was a little unlucky to not get an Ist rune these runs :) but it does sound like that is not a problem you had! Indeed 600 runs will get you to about level ~86?
Close, got me to 85. Now I'm running meph trying to get an Arachnid's Mesh. Already found two shakos, a stormshield and a skulders. Would be nice to find a Skin of the Vipermagi or a +2 Sorc skill ammy.
How about hell taxi for forge, thats seems pretty viable for me. Still what i used to do was just killing countess, "horazon", nihlathak for mby lucky key, and then go fast council and then cows. Everything else was just too time consuming compared to results i had.
That's a pretty good video, however, you could have taken into consideration classic-rushing someone to act 4 hell, converting and doing the hell forge quest. If done right, that could be done in less than an hour (probably closer to 30-45 min if you're geared well enough). The maths would be interesting there.
Kurast chest raiding is something I tried briefly, seems like you need a good map for that with good chests close by. Also at the moment everything there kills me really fast, making it a bit of a crap-shoot :D
Hi, thank you for answering :). If you want good map, just reroll it - switching to other difficulty should help, or create a lan game. This will change your map, and you can do it, till it's playable for Kurast. Btw.. yesterday played with my sorc (created couple days ago) on hell for the first time on Hell after like 5 years.. :D and in the den evil, I dropped Uniq. Shako.. made me tears.. this game is briliant... :D love it.
Nice drop right there! :) Yes, I'm aware of the map re-rolling, but thank you for pointing it out. Too bad the sorc can't dual-wield those wizardspikes I found xD makes hitting the 105 breakpoint real easy!
Hi man, well, dropped Vex HYPEEEE :D today from LK chest :) I was there like 100 times today and in past.. Also always doing countress, got 2 mals, 6 lems, 1 pul rune and some low ones. Approx 200 runs in total. Thank you once more for this statistic video, it's cool, really :). Please do some on LK chests, if you will have time, just reroll map with changing difficulty, so you will have 2x2 houses - 2x(one with 2 chests, one with one chests - has weapon rack aswell). It's nice spot, got some nice scs from there aswell.
Michal Drda Ahh a Vex is not something I've found so far, awesome! Yes, I'm pondering on a Lower Kurast Chest run, just need to get the two other Countess videos done first :P so much to do with that still. Cheers!
the way you made the video and the way you narrated it, masterpiece dude, such an excellent job!
Thank you very much! :)
not sure if german or british oO
Mensur Grišević german i guess. I'm german, too and you can hear it when he pronounced "zweihänder". His english is quite good, though.
This could be by far the most interesting Diablo II video I have ever watched. Being a numbers nerd myself I really appreciate these kinds of analyses. Well done! :)
Thank you! There is more to come, currently working on gathering data for another video in this style :) good to see some more people out there interested in the analysis of D2's drop system. Cheers!
christophe Dohet As far as I remember the rune drop has nothing to do with MF. It's only affected by number of players in the game (tunable in single player). Please correct me if I'm mistaken :-)
I agree, very interesting and thank you for putting the time into this video.
As I thought :-) thanks for the confirmation!
omfg omfg omfg omfg omfg me gosu korean me love you long time =D
holy heck, this was only made a few months ago :o
Very quality Diablo content man! Appreciate the video!
Thanks for watching. Cheers! :)
The production quality of this video is perfect. Pure analysis. Gets to the point and doesn't waste time on introductions or theory crafting.
Cheers man, I appreciate that! :)
This is an absolutely superb series, really great work!
Please make more like this!!!!
Thanks mate, cheers!
This is a most excellent and well constructed video! Great information, well spoken, entertaining, informative.
Thank you very much! :) There are two more of these videos to come, it's just that that crunchtime is getting in the way of things right now :P Cheers!
Awesome video! Absolutely loved it!
Omg I love you! Thank you for the awesome presentation, the numbers and advice. I'm also very happy to see you doing this without perfect uniques and cta, hoto and other rune words. It's very inspiring to see that playing untwinked is very much possible on hell difficulty. Thank you!
Glad you enjoyed it and found it useful & inspiring :) I think the singleplayer experience of D2 is much more compelling than multiplayer for exactly the reason you touch upon: the item economy and how it limits the challenge of the game to a small sliver of it. Cheers!
Thanks, the video was really well done. Its interesting seeing d2 being explored still after all these years. Theres so much info out there on it, but this is one of the best explanations of an aspect of the game Ive seen.
Thank you very much! :) More info coming too. Cheers!
Do 300 Lower Kurast Super Chest runs!
I agree! great idea. I am doing that currently btw :)
yes please provide in depth analysis :D
I do lower kurast all the way travical
by far it will be so much potent than countess runs
This is amazing.
I really love how you find a way to apply math for something useful
Nice video man. Def appreciate the effort that went into making this.
Thanks for watching! :)
Really nice commentary and a lot of effort put into this, gj mate!
Thank you! :)
would you believe? i didnt even know this video existed on your channel, and this is by far the most viewed vid! masterpiece dude.
I think most of the current D2 audience on this channel comes from checking out this video :) cool to see there are exceptions xD
I can tell you put alot of work into this video and it was amazing keep up the good work :)
Thank you :) Most probably there will be a follow-up video to this with more good info. Including Normal and Nightmare Countess data. Cheers!
Awesome! I look forward to seeing it :)
Love this video dude, GREAT job putting it together.
Thank you! :)
For science! Great video overall. Loved your voice and structure. Quite enjoyable.
Thank you! :) Glad you enjoyed.
Jesus man, if you think about it...it took you almost one day out of your life just to make all these runs...Thanks for the video!
About 30 hours in total to do the runs, documentation, analysis and editing :) Cheers!
what if he did this every day for one month 0_0
*****
Just take the rune find numbers and multiply by ~30 (and I would think that 10-20 Ist runes would drop too) :P
Great video! Glad to see the best game ever made still getting some love after 16 years :)
It still holds up effortlessly even today. :) Cheers!
Wow, what a well-worded look into the World of Diablo II. gg.
Great video! Statistics you showed is really useful and your dedication is commendable! Good Sir, you earned one more subscriber!
P.S. Long live D2 and its community! :)
Thanks mate! Welcome to the channel, there's plenty to discover hehe ;) Cheers!
Good job. Your dedication is amazing
Thank you very much!
Very nice guide! I only play Single Player and it's nice to see a video based around that and not just uber geared realm characters.
When I looked around TH-cam I felt the same... most is using characters that don't need any running in order to beat the game at all :) seems kinda pointless to me then, but people like different things. Cheers!
This video made me subscribe to your channel in a matter of a few minutes. Love the attention to detail, will be watching your videos from now on. Great job.
Glad to hear that! :) Welcome!
Awesome Video. Love the narrative too
Fantastic effort on the video. Keep up the good work.
Thank you! More will be coming :)
it's aways nice to see a Diablo II gameplay.
i usually create a room with a barbarian without the Countess quest done, then i enter with my sorceress and go for countess, i get some high level runes in her chest (vault), it adds about a 10 seconds in every run but for me work more than before without doing that.
Nice video! Cheers!
Now that's an interesting technique to up her drops! :D
+Samuel Sann So you leave with the barb and enter with your sorc and you get the increased drops although your sorc already killed her?
Nice job man, the statistical info was very useful :)
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it, more is coming :)
Cool, hope to see some Nightmare results in future :)
Nightmare & Normal data collection is done (300 runs each) :)
KillrobPlays That's nice! I will be watching your videos this week, I just found your channel today ^^
Thanks man :)
Seven09 Awesome :) Welcome!
Very interesting!
This is great. I like the statistics.
Thank you for checking in mate! :) To those who don't know, Indrek's videos were my inspiration (the diary format) to making this video. If you like D2, check out his stuff!
I also love your (Indrek) videos :) I hope you do more in the near future!
KillrobPlays too bad he not making video anymore.
malawigw yea i know....i mean its been a year that he not making any diablo 2 content...he just stop..
malawigw its 5 month ago....his latest
Sensational guide. I also play sp and have been wondering about the statistics for a long time. Well done. Have you done a video about TC87 uniques? That would be fascinating.
Thank you! :) I don't think I'd ever be able to do a guide about that, but more D2 data analysis is coming soon! Cheers
not played diablo 2 for many many years but this video was way too good, love it!
Cheers mate!
Amazing!!! Good work :D
Thank you for watching! :)
really apreciate it,diablo 2 is really the best action RPG,so old yet so many people still play it and search for vital find infos
word! Ive dl'd the game and wanna get back into it but feel a little overwhelmed when keeping efficiency in mind. These videos are very helpful thanks for the work
More to come on this :) I'll make a big "runeword feasibility" video too based on a normal vs. nightmare vs. hell countess analysis - the latter being mostly done :s just takes a lot of time. Cheers!
friggin rights boys
Thanks for this video.
It would be more fitting to suggest that you got lucky on the dol runes than getting unlucky on the io’s, as that would have less deviation from the pattern (I.e. io being every 2nd rune and dol also being a 2nd rune but you happened to get more than would be typical?)
Thanks so much for this vid. Realy helpfull and gives quite the insight in how the drop mechanisms work in this game.
Cheers mate, glad you enjoyed it!
Interesting vid. I had never considered the "time spent cubing" vs time spent doing more runs comparison before.
Not necessarily an intuitive thing to even consider :) but yes, what seemed the logical thing to do really isn't :D
On the other hand, I don't see any actual human sitting down for 300 runs in 10 hours without a mental break or 10, so those of us who don't smoke basically do the low-level rune cubing for free. That said, cubing 14,281,868,906,496 El runes to get a Zod isn't very likely in a human lifespan. Also, I could argue that time spent editing a video for youtube would be equally wasteful :-P
Amazing video, you got a sub here !
Thank you and welcome :) Already working on a follow-up video to this one. Cheers!
I remember years ago doing those runs, thanks for the video :)
love this video, it makes me want to play D2 again.
This is a very interesting analysis. I would say, you should mention that the time estimates for single countess runs should be decreased for single player as the map layout is known. I can't imagine how many countess runs I did in my day, but I only ever got an Ist once.
Good point :) that potentially does save quite some, especially when not running with a sorc or enigma.
good analysis! fantastic job dude
Thanks man!
epic viedo, nice work dude!
cheers mate! :)
Only 1 Um rune in 300 runs... God I need 2 Um runes for my Necro's armor runeword >.
Stealth Ruchen are you playing SP or online? If you play SP I can recommend lower kurast super chest runs on players 6+ :) runes are quite common drop.
got 2 mal for ~150 runs,6 terror also(actually main target of runs lol)
I got some of my best runes in nm 1 kills in chaos and very uncommon items.
this is really good! I'd love to see one like this for uber key farming in countess, horazon, amd nilathak
There are two more videos on this coming :) there is more to know about the Countess. Thanks for watching & commenting!
countess 1:14
summoner 1:12
Nila 1:13
those numbers are for 1 player in the game, with more players those numbers go down to around 1 in 8 for 8 players
Do 300 rund of nhilathak. That guy drops hight runes!!!
great video man. I found a zod after 1 week of returning to d2. insane!
woot! :D
Very nice video man! Its odd that you never found an Ist though. I went through a 5 month stretch a few years ago in SP where I found maybe 10 Ist runes before seeing a Mal or an Um. Also found a Jah & Ber within a few weeks of each other but had not seen anything else above Gul to that point. Insanely strange drop rates sometimes.
It's not so much that they are strange, it is the low probability and hence lack of statistics that is confusing :) it is entirely probably to not find an Ist rune in 300 runs, it is actually likely to not find one. Mal and Um are slightly more likely to drop for the countess, but during normal play, I don't know. Cheers!
Really nice analysis. Makes me wanna play d2 again, I havent played it for like 10 years or so. I saw a key drop in one of your runs, but as far as I remember, you are not able to open the portal to the upper bosses in single player mode? Is it still like that? Which char/build would you advice me to play, in order to farm the endgame areas, both considering efficiency, and equipment that is obtainable for the build? That being for single player mode.
D2 holds up till this day, it is no less good nowadays compared to yesteryear. :) You are correct about the keys, that stuff is needed for Uber-Tristram and unfortunately that is not available in Single Player mode. For farming I would suggest what I did, you go for a pure lightning sorc all the way though normal and nightmare. Some of the best farming spots don't have lightning immune enemies. If you want to advance to act 5 in hell you do need either frozen orb + mastery + a bit of trickery to defeat the chaos sanctuary or you go for dual element (and a lower-resist charges wand you can buy). If you then want to optimize your build for farming you can respec your character (that's new). As you can see I don't have any good equipment either. Cheers!
My god, you've done an amazing job. Thank you for this video.
You are most welcome. More is to come :) almost done with my data gathering for a big Normal/Nightmare/Hell comparison of the Countess. Cheers!
Amazing video! I would love to see a comparison between /players 1 and /players 7(8) drop quantity on this same run :D
The difference is on the sub-1% level :) check out part 2 for more details on that.
nice video.. started playing d2 again 2weeks ago... this game doesnt get old at all.. only downside it the 3month and your account gets deleted thing^^.. best vid ive seen so far researching rune drops
Agreed, it doesn't get old! :) Check out part 2 of the series too for more interesting info. Cheers!
yes i did check it out^^... hurts my brain after i wile though eventough i enjoy it.
good god! ive could really had used this video 10 years ago! damn! thanks though for the video, i really enjoyed it!
Haha yeah, same here :P that's why I made the video. Cheers!
very intersting video! well done! but it is for single player, if you play on internet, the map change all the time and a single run take more than 2 minute (unless you have heavy stuff), on the other side, rush character to hell A4 is less than 5 hour : it is more like 40 minute/1hour (if you have a friend of course) and you get first kill on bosses aswell. so i think getting character to hellforge hell is worth more than making countess runs
Yes, Hellforge runs become a lot more valuable in comparison if you can get there a lot faster :) online does skew it in the favor of hellforge for sure. All numbers are still relevant though, you just need to multiply them with the factor for how much faster (or slower) you can run these.
This is really great. Do you have plans for any more?
I do have a half-finished one lying around that will be done eventually :) there is more knowledge about all this for me to share, cheers!
This was surprisingly interesting.
Holy shit this video is awesome.
MOAR
Really nice video! :)
You can always drop a LO rune from countess hell, not only on the first kill. The countess has 2 drops with different TC for every kill. The runedrop can drop up to IST and the killdrop can drop up to LO. I have dropped a VEX on a countess key run before and that surely wasn't on the first kill.
Yes, you are correct, I clarify this in the second part of the series, it was neither precise, nor entirely correct in this video.
Great video!
Great video...
Do you have any plans on doing 300 Lower Kurast superchest runs on Players 8 ??
i have found myself some nice Runes on Single Player
Eventually maybe yes, that would be a cool thing to do :)
I would really like to see a 300 Lower Kurast chest run for runes. According to people that is where you can get up until Ber runes.
That is correct, you find not nearly as many runes, but have a decent chance of some really high ones!
Just so you know the Countess can always drop up to Lo rune. The chance of it is minimal though. The reason is because the Countess drops both a normal drop + a special rune drop. The extra run drop can be up to five extra runes. It is however unlikely she drops more than three runes.
Yeah, I elaborate on that in part two of the series, also giving an estimate of how rare that non-Countess runedrop is for her going up to Lo. Cheers!
This video has me more curious about this and I have embarked on one of my own.
On my first run I got 2 from the countess, but got three more as random drops from monsters while in the tower - and not junk runes either (Thul, Sol, and Fal).
Very curious to see if the drop rates are designed the way you show them here.
That is very nice tower drops along the way :)
You'll need quite a bit of statistics to see it all average out to something like the distribution I got.
u can find good runes in cow generally pul/um/mal ist ending with gul nigthmare/hell or travincal/throne of baal i hope i helped of course area lvl and mob lvl we are taking into consideration so drop can be higher runes that I mentioned most often fall
I don't even play Diablo 2 anymore but this is just a very well made video. Good job.
Haha thank you, yes, I assume that is the case for many viewers of this video - brings back the memories!
Well, for me it also answered an age old question of "Why were my Countess runs so unsuccessful?"
I used to do hellforge quest for six of my own mules at once instead but you probably can't pull this off on Bnet.
Can you do a video where you test if you get better runes when you haven't gotten the Countess quest but joined a game where you couldn't complete the quest?
That would take far too much time :)
Also it seems like higher player numbers massively limit the number of runes dropping from her, as she has limited drop slots and the normal items get generated first.
Hey! This was really a nice video to watch and I quite wanna get back into diablo 2 again
I use to play it loads with my family and we'd be a party of 4, between the 4 of us we got quite far even with the 5th chapter expansion pack
can you recommend a class for me to play in terms of fun? also not too challenging perhaps, I dont want to get stuck on chapter 3 wondering where I went wrong
thanks
The best classes to start out with are probably fissure druid and trap assassin (firebomb, wake of fire, death sentry) :) quite fun to play, too! Cheers!
I've found two guls, cham and jah doing Ancient Tunnels in Act II, each run takes me about a minute and while I don't know how much time it took me to find these runes I do know that I leveled my character from 88 to 93 during that time, so it was a while.
The Ancient Tunnels is a great spot to run, yes! :)
yeah, sad thing is, in single player that cham and jah runes are perfect for shoving it up my ass, cause my blizzard sorceress would never have a need for them. They look cool in the stash though
That's why I use GoMule in Singleplayer for when I "want to play with myself" (not as in wanking) to share stuff between my self-found characters. For me that feels fine if I before I find something have determined that this is going to be one of the "shared" characters hehe. Cheers!
as a old school Diablo 2 player ill tell ya this is something to be proud of.
Thank you! :)
I challenge you to do a Diablo 2 Hardcore Ironman build. You cannot use any shop in town other than getting quests. I.E you could use the Hammer quest in act 1 or the socket quest in act 5 or get skills from said NPC's
Ahh man, that sounds tough! I'm a complete wuss in D2, so I doubt I'll ever do that :P Cheers!
Forgot to ask, do you play hardcore D2 challenges? :)
I guess you want to exclude all AoE spellcasters then, right? Because playing trapsin of fissure druid (at least through normal) could be done without too much of a hassle, beyond that it gets tedious (and stupid?).
I dont record videos for diablo 2 on youtube , but I do enjoy playing hardcore for d2 and watching it
Your my boy wings I've been playing d2 from day one just got back into it. If you ever want to play hit me up.
Rolling through Nightmare on my summon necro. Can't wait to start farming Hell Countess and The Pits. I picked Necro since I can use the Amp Damage + Corpse Explosion combo to clear rooms without needing good gear (kind of a catch 22 situation with other farming builds where they need good gear but lack it because they can't farm yet without that good gear). The skeletons are just the meat-shields.
I also put 10 points into Dim Vision. It's the next best thing to Teleport. I just spam-cast it around myself while running through an area and all the normal monsters ignore me completely.
Interesting approach you have there! :) Nice!
i always loved the first part of the menu theme
It is brilliant! :D
new sub here. great video man! keep it up!
Welcome! :)
can't count how many forge rushes i've done where I got scammed out of a HR.
;( that sucks, mate
*4 perfect gems drop*
There are sites and programs where you can see droprates. Why do this :S?
We are creatures of habit.
I don't think I have ever got higher than a Mal in 16 years.
i have 161 runs of data from earlier this year, i see the same low level distribution features for the first 8 runes, but no absence of io runes, which is simply a statistical fluctuation that will smooth out with much more data i presume
Interesting :) good to know that this indeed seems to only be a statistical artifact. Thanks for sharing!
It would be very interesting if you could do 4 more run sets, and then compare each set, then compiling the 1500 runs together. I think a higher run count will smooth the curves out. (And yes, I know it is a huge undertaking, but I think you can handle the challenge) (Liked, subscribed)
That would indeed be a massive undertaking that would take a lot longer than what I did instead: write a simulator that uses the exact game drop mechanics to simulate Countess Runs :) the series of me making that tool is on my channel. Check it out!
Nice format.
Hi Killrob, curious how you visualized this. Did you use D3? or another library? A statistics language like R?
Hi Michael! I used nothing fancy to make this, standard tools: Adobe Photoshop CC, Premiere Pro CC, Audition CC, and Google Drive (Spreadsheet) for the stats tracking. No special libraries or anything. Cheers!
Hell LK i found cham and sur in about 2 hours :)
I would think the distribution was a bit wonky bc of the low sample size (you would probably need about 5000 or more to get something clearly representative)
Definitely too small a sample size for Hell Countess, yes! The sample size was decent for nightmare and good for normal, which I show in part 2 :) gratz on those gg finds!
Thanks a lot! Nice video!)))
excellent video!! thumbs uo!
thanks! :) cheers mate!
Outstanding video.
Thank you!
Great video! However why do you not use Lightning for killing The Countess? Blast her with Static Field a few times and Lightning will 2-3 shot her instead of spamming Chain Lightning and running out of mana.
So many D2 OCD people pointing that out xD yes, you are correct, but this isn't about saving 1-2 seconds per run by being super focused. Chain lightning does half the damage and uses twice the mana when confronting a single enemy. As soon as her minions are gone (which chain lightning disposes off faster) I can't be bothered to switch skills, it is entirely irrelevant and in many hours of running it's just a matter of comfort, too. I can buy mana potions every few runs when selling stuff anyway.
You should do a video on speed vs high mf, and which one yields better chance for high end items.
The best and most efficient high level runes run was Hell Travincal Run with Barbarian and his Find Item ability, killing and searching High Council of Zakarum members. Several Jah, Ber, Vex, sometimes Ohm dropped there for me, and jewelry (including skill charms and rings like Raven Frost/Dwarf Star).
I did this 5 years ago on HC Ladder . First getting cheap IK Set, MF gear to switch and farming there. I got super rich really fast, getting myself Enigma then other things thanks to skiller charms and good runes.
If you can try it out.
That looks like sound advice :) Cheers man!
Great video 👍
and here i need a PUL rune :(
this vid alone +1 sub. good job bud with the stats.
Ahh, yes, I think the Pul rune is something I've never found enough of either :) the upgrade recipe is so juicy!!
And: Thank you!
+KillrobPlays might of missed it in the vid, what MF % were you at when doing these runs?
Suvisak I mentioned that it was a small amount, but it is irrelevant for rune drops because the treasure classes with runes are gone through *before* any "magic" items are even considered. :) So the MF is relevant only to what other goodies I found during my runs. You can calculate the exact number by adding it up when I show the equipment.
Countness can drop higher than ist, but from her fixed special drop highest is ist, but from her as a kill it can drop up to a Lo I think
That is correct :) I point that out in the following episodes of this mini series.
Thanks for the video it is quite informative and well made :)
What I conclude from the statistics you got from these 300 runs is that Hell Countess running for runes is really not worth it.... and also boring as hell. The main reason is that in addition to the drop rates of interesting runes (pul um mal ist) being pretty low and capped at IST, you are not gonna get any other kind of valuable stuff either because the area level doesn't permit it.
So for me countess running in hell seems like a waste of time unless you are Key running (Key of Terror).
Better spend time doing some Pit runs (and chaos runs if your character can handle it) with alvl 85 areas you have the possibility to find HRs and I'm sure the drop rate of mid tier runes like Pul/Um/Mal/Ist would be just as good as countess runs as well...
+ you can find valuable elite socketables and the best elite uniques/sets items + rares will have higher mod possibilities.
I'd suggest the analysis of these runs for future videos :
• 100 Pit Runs hell (low Light immunes)
• 200 Lower Kurast chest runs
I know these would take a lot of time to make though
You are quite right in many of the points you make. I'd like to point out though that you are mainly talking about a multiplayer perspective. In Singleplayer getting to and running the places you talk about sometimes requires some more base stuff, and there is no quicker way in the game to get up to approximately an Um rune than the Hell Countess as far as I know. It is a good area to level a character, too, due to so many boss packs, which gives you decent drops and the chance to get many of the really useful uniques. But again, if you are talking multiplayer then nah, not really worth it.
cool vid, really needed.
you mention using gomule...
i was unable to get gomule to work on the latest patch (1.14D), but would love to. right now i have diablo 2 loaded on 2 computers so that i can start a TCP/IP game, join, and trade items. pretty cumbersome. gomule or atma would be great, but i'm NOT a programmer, so no idea what i'm doing wrong.
do you by chance have a link for where you downloaded gomule from? maybe i used a bad site?
i REALLY wanted a mod that would allow me to make ladder runewords on SP, but none of those worked for me either.
i've been playing D2 since its inception, but just started playing SP a few months ago. got tired of the realms and resets. wanted to beat the game "on my own" so to speak, but now i have a lightning sorce and zealot, both over level 85, neither of which can best the ancients because their gear isn't up to snuff... SO HARD to find/make good gear on SP.
any advice you can offer?
The only problem I had with GoMule was to find my diablo savefiles in Windows 7. :)
Singleplayer is so much harder (and more fun IMO), yes, the only advice I can give really is to use a "lower resist" charges wand to break some of those immune enemies. For farming items I'd go with Hell Mephisto. Easiest for farming definitely is the Sorceress.
I like the statictics u did on the countess *thumbs up* though 300 is a low number of runs to evaluate it properly especially for the less likely rune drops in lower numbers as u've already mentioned :) Nice stuff though. rune hype!! :D
yes, it is far too low a number :) for these runes you would probably need something like ~3k runs to make for better stats, but that would be 100h of running the Countess xD rune hype! (MrLlamaSC would be proud of the double Shael drop on run 300)
so are you doing this in single player or multiplayer because when i try to farm on multiplayer i have to make a new server and the layout is different
Correct, this is all in singleplayer. The drop stats are the same for players 1 in multiplayer, but you can't run it as efficiently.
Every few years when I get an itch to play D2 again on single player I normally use Hell Countess as a means to cube up to Vex for a Hoto.
Woah, how many runs do you do to get to the Vex though :P that looks like it would take ages!
Probably 600ish. It's a fairly decent place to level up when you get to hell and I seem to have better luck at getting ist than you.
Yeah, I was a little unlucky to not get an Ist rune these runs :) but it does sound like that is not a problem you had! Indeed 600 runs will get you to about level ~86?
Close, got me to 85. Now I'm running meph trying to get an Arachnid's Mesh. Already found two shakos, a stormshield and a skulders. Would be nice to find a Skin of the Vipermagi or a +2 Sorc skill ammy.
Nice man! :) Good luck finding the rest of your gear.
How about hell taxi for forge, thats seems pretty viable for me.
Still what i used to do was just killing countess, "horazon", nihlathak for mby lucky key, and then go fast council and then cows. Everything else was just too time consuming compared to results i had.
The numbers for hellforge are in there, just multiply them with how much faster you can get that done, like I mention in the video.
Impressive work.
Thank you!
That's a pretty good video, however, you could have taken into consideration classic-rushing someone to act 4 hell, converting and doing the hell forge quest. If done right, that could be done in less than an hour (probably closer to 30-45 min if you're geared well enough). The maths would be interesting there.
I provided all the maths for that and said so in the video. just take the hellforge rush values times five and you have exactly that.
That's true, that's one way to be stupid on youtube :D still, great video
Cheers mate! :)
Cool video man, please do lower kurast chests video :) thank you!
Kurast chest raiding is something I tried briefly, seems like you need a good map for that with good chests close by. Also at the moment everything there kills me really fast, making it a bit of a crap-shoot :D
Hi, thank you for answering :). If you want good map, just reroll it - switching to other difficulty should help, or create a lan game. This will change your map, and you can do it, till it's playable for Kurast. Btw.. yesterday played with my sorc (created couple days ago) on hell for the first time on Hell after like 5 years.. :D and in the den evil, I dropped Uniq. Shako.. made me tears.. this game is briliant... :D love it.
Nice drop right there! :) Yes, I'm aware of the map re-rolling, but thank you for pointing it out. Too bad the sorc can't dual-wield those wizardspikes I found xD makes hitting the 105 breakpoint real easy!
Hi man, well, dropped Vex HYPEEEE :D today from LK chest :) I was there like 100 times today and in past.. Also always doing countress, got 2 mals, 6 lems, 1 pul rune and some low ones. Approx 200 runs in total.
Thank you once more for this statistic video, it's cool, really :).
Please do some on LK chests, if you will have time, just reroll map with changing difficulty, so you will have 2x2 houses - 2x(one with 2 chests, one with one chests - has weapon rack aswell).
It's nice spot, got some nice scs from there aswell.
Michal Drda Ahh a Vex is not something I've found so far, awesome! Yes, I'm pondering on a Lower Kurast Chest run, just need to get the two other Countess videos done first :P so much to do with that still. Cheers!