New player cow farming question

General Discussion
1

Do the regular Bovine have same drop rates as Cow King for uniques? I got Magefist and Wizardspike, looking for Mage Plate or Herald of Zakarum which I think can drop in Nightmare. The rest I will have to pray in Hell I guess.

I am farming nightmare for a couple of items (I cant beat hell with my real gear, nevermind my MF gear). Should I just kill King and reset or clear the map?

I am using blessed hammer but no teleport and it takes me a little time to kill the Bovines.

I might not even be going about this the right way, but this is the build and loot table I have been using

I have been using the loot tables at silospen but it just lists Bovine so it makes it seem like King has same drop rate, but he always drops greens and a few yellows. Not sure about unique drop rates though
and the hammerdin build at yesgamers (sorry it wont let me post links)

Thanks!

2

the cow king himself is supposed to be able to drop anything the way i understand it, but he mostly drops sigons gloves and cathan’s rings for me.

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3

So, every level in this game has this thing called an “area level.” The area level will determine the level of the monsters. So an area level of 54 will have monsters being level 54. This is important to know because it determines the “treasure class (TC)” of items. The higher the Mlvl (monster level) the more higher level items they may be able to drop. However, not all enemies are the same. The Mlvl will vary depend on the type of monster it is up to a maximum of +3 for yellow monsters.

For example, if you’re doing the Den of Evil in Hell mode, it has an area level of 79. This means the Corpse fire will have a Mlvl of 82 while normal monsters will have a LVL of 79 and blues will be Mlvl of 81:

  • Yellows +3
  • blues +2

Why is this important? Well if you’re looking for a specific item, it helps to know the TC (treasure class) of that item so you can know where it can be farmed so you don’t waste your time farming areas that cannot give it to you.

So to keep it simple:
Treasure class is determined by Monster level. Your monster levels is determined by the Area level. You can quickly Google Area levels to figure all of this out.

You can also Google Treasure class if you want to know the class level of a specific item. Most wiki’s will provide it to you, since the game provides none of this for you.

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4

This exactly he is dropping low level set pieces for me as well is it because my mf is too low?

5

no, magic find is applied after the “base” item to be dropped is determined by the random number generator according to the loot table.

so say the cow king drops a piece of chest armor. the first thing that happens is the game decides which kind of chest armor it’s going to be. is it a breastplate? is it chain mail? is it laquered plate? is it a dusk shroud?

once that roll has been calculated, then comes the “quality” roll. this is where magic find comes into play. the base item has been determined, so then it takes that and looks at your magic find percentage. higher magic find increases the chance the item will be blue, yellow, green, or unique. it does some kind of witchcraft in the background and decides if the dropped item is going to be left white first. if it is, then it decides if it’s going to be socketed, ethereal, damaged, superior, etc. then it drops it

if it comes up blue, you get a magic version of the base item.

if it comes up yellow, the same, you get a randomized rare version of the item

if it comes up green though?

then it looks at the base item, and looks to see if there are more than one set items of that type. so lets say the base item was a laquered plate. if it rolls green, the only “set” item chest armor that is also a laquered plate is tal rasha’s, so that’s the one you get.

if it rolls for a unique, it looks at a table of all unique items that are a the same type as that armor. if there are more than one, it randomly picks one. if there isn’t more than one, that’s the one you get.

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6

if you want some nice quick area level reference download the tome of d2 app.

it’s got a ton of other features too