Gems, Runes, and Farming Oh My!

General Discussion
1

Hey all, played D1 and D3 back in the day plus almost every ARPG since. Not a ton of DII. Had a few quick DII R questions:

  • I am currently a level 14 Sorc and I am only at The Countess so far. I LOVE farming bosses and mini bosses over and over but I am sure I’ll reach a level where I need to move on correct? Is it ok to keep farming these part of Act I?

  • I didn’t play any end game with the original D2. Should I save all gems and runes? Not sure if they get more powerful later.

  • What is the best off spec skill for a fireball Sorc for fire resistant enemies?

  • Is gold worth anything besides gambling?

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  • Most players will tell you that farming the Countess for her runes is THE thing to do. With those and the right item with the right number of sockets, you can create gear that will be useful through normal, nightmare, and even parts of hell difficulty (you’re a fireball sorc, so I would advise the Leaf runeword).
  • not as easy to answer this one as the other questions. Gems can be upgraded through the cube and perfect gems have their use (the best crafting recipe is to use a perfect amethyst with a blue amulet, any jewel and a RAL rune to create a caster amulet with random stats). You could also keep all runes and upgrade them through the cube but there are 2 main drawbacks : one, they take A LOT of space. Like, 2 shared tabs will be used for them. Two, to upgrade the better ones, you’ll need chipped gems of every kind, flawed gems of every kind, normal gems of every kind, etc… I let you think about the headache.
  • The best offensive skill huh? Static shock probably. It takes a percentage of the enemies’ HP and works against bosses (though at a reduced rate). You won’t be able to deal the finishing blow with it obviously, but you can something like a mercenary to finish them. As a heads up, Fireball probably won’t carry you through Hell difficulty - most sorcs respec to cold (Blizzard or Frozen Orb) when they reach level 30+ (personally, I like to wait until level 37 or so).
  • Gold has 2 uses : buy stuff, and gambling. For those who don’t play a sorc, buying a staff with Teleport charges is a great idea (might cost something like 100 000). And for those who don’t play Necro, buying a wand with Lower Resist charges is great too (to lower the enemie’s resistances to your main element, and it can even break immunities). Other than that, gambling is the main way to use your money. Oh, and resurrecting your mercenary, if you use one, will be costly.
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  • lvl 10 = 2 act.
  • you can get better quality gems/runes later, you are can use low-level gems/runes with no regret.
  • if you want dual element sorc, you should plan dual element sorc.
  • gold = gambling; also you can repair items with charges, but it is extremely expensive so almost nobody do that. Also, previously, you can sell full stack of gold (30M or smth like that) for pul rune, but I don’t know new prices.
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can never go wrong with farming countess, aslong ur having fun i think its good to extend your playtrough for as long as possible

5

Make alts for storage, now that we have both shared and personal storage, anything you want to keep long term can be held by an alt instead of taking extra space in the shared stash. I moved all my runes onto an alt, gems to one that has the cube and upgrading as I collect. Classes I’m not yet playing are hoarding their class specific items since there’s no reason to keep them in the shared stash if no one else can use them.

Rares and Uniques are great hand me downs since nothing is bound to a character except quest items, no more dual wielding horadric flails at level 1 Barb lol… I think they fixed that a long time ago, I just don’t remember when. Keeping a lot of merc weapons too. And if you’re not thinking of doing two different builds, extra class slots for more mules.

6

Countess for me so far be like, here buddy have a dozen Rals. Eths? F off loser.

7

You should google to find some sorc builds, so you wont have to respec later due to making mistakes when using your skill points and attribute points.

There are some great runewords, like spirit, that are endgame gear and are used for endgame gear, so you will be using some of the low runes you are finding now, you can save them for you and for trading. You wont be using gems for gear at endgame, but almost every gem class can be used in crafting, only perfect topazes, diamoinds and skulls are not used for crafting, but all of them are worth something and are tradeable. Perfect amethysts and rubies are worth like 2x a normal p. gem and skulls are worth like 4x a normal pgem.

Gold is only worht for gambling, dont underestimete gambling, i got a magefists in day 2 after a few gambles, it is pretty easy, iirc one out of each items gambled are unique, so if you are looking for magefists, for example, wich are the only low level unique for that skin of gloves that, you just need to gamble and the first unique you get will be magefists.

About what is best for your sorc, better read some guides, you can try the fireball/orb build that can clear almost every area in hell alone, you wil have troubles with dual fire/cold inmunes only, but your merc will do that jopb when you have it geared. I recommend that you use that build, there is also a meteror/orb build that is similar, but both orn and meteor are timed spells and the fb/orb deals more dps if you use correctly and more important, it is more funny.

8

Thanks for all the awesome responses thus far!

One thing I forgot to ask, without looking at cheat sheets, is there a way to experiment with runes or better just to use a guide?

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Use a guide. There is no semblance to it – i.e. runes spelling out words.

Also - yes - farming countess early on is okay… Especially since you’re a Sorceress. You’re going to want to get some runes for Leaf, Stealth, and eventually Lore (think this requires NM runes).

It’s either do it now or later.

Just don’t stall yourself. The experience likely won’t be all that great. Best to move on briskly.

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I will definitely use a guide because I don’t even know what lead, stealth and lore are :slight_smile:

I love the loot hunt of farming mini bosses and Act I is just legendary in atmosphere. I just don’t want to “overlevel” I guess.

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You won’t over level. The games experience can taper off pretty quick.

12

There’s a formula in place that reduces exp gain when you’re too far ahead of the mobs, and eventually zeros it out. So don’t worry about overlevelling!

There’s also a sizable level gap between the end of one difficulty and the beginning of the next one, so baal runs in particular are great ways to close it.

13

Originally it was intended players experiment with rune words (even Act5 NPC tell you about this), but it is too hard to make one yourself, because you need correct item, slots, runes and rune order.
I am agianst any guides, but runewords is almost impossible to create without cheat sheet, so yes, you should use it.

1 Like
14

That sounds about right. I wanted to experiment but it sounds like a lot of wasted time, energy, and inventory space :wink: