Rune Drop Rates

General Discussion
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I know this has been discussed a lot but I’d like to open a dialogue on runes and the accessibility of higher tier runewords.

We all know runewords are amazing and that there are some that stand leagues above the rest. How hard should these be to obtain though. Should they be earned? Absoloutely as all things should be, but how long is reasonable. I’ve had discussions with players in various venues about avg times to find high runes and often the case would be like 50-100hrs doing lk runs. Anything else I’ve heard often 100+ hours and run counts in the thousands. This is for a single high rune.

Now I’ve played this game since I was a little kid, Ive put in I don’t even know how many hours into d2 over 20 years. Being an adult though I see arguments favoring a demand for near zealotry level dedication to experience higher tier gear. 100hrs for a decent chance at maybe getting a single high rune like say ber. Lets put some perspective on this.

100hrs = 2.5 full work weeks of time. Lets say you take 8hrs of time, say 4hrs a day on the weekend. Thats 25 days with playtime taking place, 12.5 weekends, 3.13 months for a single hr rune in the realm of ber.

Now these values can vary a lot based on rng. Im only taking the values I see thrown around a lot. Since release I can say I’ve found 1 Jah, 2 Puls, and 2 Mals, and 1 Ist. I’ve done some trading due to some other very fortunate drops but nonetheless thats not a lot there. Now I play several characters for variety sake so lets take a look at what some of those characters want at high tier. Beast, Pride, Infinity, Hoto, Enigma, Grief as some examples. For Enigma and Infinity alone we are talking 3 Bers. Hoto is Ko, Vex, and Pul.

Now unless you are playing a smiter and I think maybe 1 or 2 other builds you aren’t really touching ubers and Dclone requires an almost cult like secret society requirement to ever see. The amount of demand for some of these things in my opinion is too much.

I love d2 don’t get me wrong. But bar trading you’ll be hard pressed to experience any high tier gear before you begin to suffer burnout and frustration. And well…trading for high runes requires dealing in equally rare gear like Shako or Griffon’s Eye. Never completed a trangs or tals set, never seen an soj or maras in my life. You look at build guides and they call for items that seem almost mythical in rarity. You see everyone seemingly wearing them but for the life of you cannot seem to ever come across one.

Drops dont and should never be the pinata candy drops of Diablo 3 that takes away all value of rarer gear, but at the same time drops also shouldnt be so rare that it required the player to no life the game if they ever want to see some of the really cool gear. There has to be a middle ground somewhere. What is that middle ground. The drops arent perfect as is, not to anyone looking at it objectively and with nostalgia goggles off. If you have the free time to play like llama more power to you, but there are far more players that do not have that kind of time availabile due to real world responsibilities like family and work (and not knocking on llama, d2 is his job and his content is awesome. Has helped me learn a ton about d2s intricacies from him).

So whats the middle ground between hardcore and casual players. How accessible should gear like enigma or hoto be? With even more runewords coming how will players be able to ever meet the demand of rune needs with the current drop rates of runes. Its like “Man runeword X sounds really cool but I cant spare them cause I need them for runeword Y”. So what do you guys think.

Please respond constructively. Rationalize your viewpoints and discuss respectfully. Don’t flame or attack anybody. Thanks and looking forward to the discussion.

16 Likes
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No, i found high runes using different methods far more often. You talked to wrong people.

So your calculations work with wrong base data.

Also you should make difference between Offline and online.

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Dedicated D2 player can have top runewords in like 1-3 months. Casual can have in 6 months - 1 year based on how effective he plays. If you are casual and not playing effectively,it might take several years to make top RWs or find elite uniques.

And i think its ok like this, if you raise drop chances, it will have negative effect ad people will be bored fast as they will have anything.

All players need motivation to play. Now you have motivation to play to find stuff you didnt before and if you do, it will make you very happy. Its very rewarding to finaly find something you are trying to get for months or years. But if you find your fourth soj, you will no longer jump in air in joy, you will just say hmm nice another soj.

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When a mal rune was dropped from carver for me in 1.12, that was a fiesta! Awesome! I can finally try a sanctuary rune word!
When a vex rune drops from wrath for me now, it is ok - one more vex, will sell it later. Which character I didn’t made yet?

Rune drop should be reduced back to 1.12 to bring back that wonderful emotions.

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1337 weeks.

Just stop opening new threads and join the existing whining posts

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Nah, rune drop in 1.10-1.12 was just painfully terrible. You could do thousands of travincal runs and get nothing. Now you have actualy chance to drop runes if you are investing some time.

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… and that no one is forced to make them outside of the most competitive PvP. There are builds that can clear any PvE part with gear you get by leveling up. Min-maxing is a long-term goal, not a basic requirement.

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The fact that this is even discussed proves rune drop rates is a problem. It needs to be buffed. That is all.

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lol nice try.
it beeing discussed only shows one thing: There is alot of people (mostly used to D3 system with items raining from sky) that are inpatient and/or dont play efficient.
i play resurrected since launch and now i have fully equipped hammerdin and javazon with all needed high runewords completed.
And i have a full time job, relationship, family etc.
if there was no trading system in D2 then i might even agree on raising drop rates but currently its fine

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It saddens me that OP went through the time to make such a well worded post in hopes of some actual discussion and this is what he gets. Do better.

Anyway, I would agree that rune drop rates do seem to be a bit lackluster, and the dry spells have caused me to lack motivation to play as frequently. That said, I don’t think they should be increased by that much, since it should still be an exciting affair when something worthwhile does drop. The game as it is right now, doesn’t have much substance; all it really has is playing the casino and praying for a jackpot.

If everyone suddenly had the carrot, the treadmill would stop working. I would expect the devs would need to add something more to the game first before they started improving drop rates. The current state of the game has the end game goal to be min/maxing your character. (Some people may disagree and say that pvp is the endgame, but since there is no pvp ranking system, and overall pvp balancing is arduous at best, I’m less inclined to agree with that perspective)

If the end goal was reachable too quickly, the players might lose interest. I don’t believe that things are perfect as they are though, and current drop rates may be losing players too. I’m not sure where on the spectrum drop rates would need to be for optimal player retention, but I do think that somehow gameplay should feel a bit more rewarding for the time investment. How they go about achieving that, may or may not actually be related to drop rates.

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Problem are people who want everything easy. Just because something is discussed, doesnt mean there is problem lol. Your logic is weird.

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Please respond constructively. Rationalize your viewpoints and discuss respectfully. Don’t flame or attack anybody. Thanks and looking forward to the discussion.

You must be new to this forum. People here aren’t interested in adult-level discourse. Flaming and attacking is all they know how to do.

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The fact that this is even discussed proves rune drop rates is a problem. It needs to be reduced. That is all.

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3 things that I think could be interesting:

  • make act 3 flail quest drop a rune, like forge (sounds like this might actually be planned for 2.4?)

  • allow rune-breaking cube recipes. For example, if you can transmute 2 bers to get a Jah, then you should be able to transmute 1 Jah + some gem to give you 2 bers. I feel like this would accomplish 2 things: rune value would improve for the runes that should be more valuable anyway, regardless of what the meta runewords are (I.e Cham and Zod), and also would give players the ability to actually make a decent amount of good runewords if they were lucky enough to find those rarest runes.

  • allow players x command online for people that are capable of farming solo

Side note: if you think #2 sounds extreme because 1 zod could net you 8 bers, I honestly believe that might actually be pretty reasonable. I’ve played this game 20 years and have never found a single zod, or even seen one drop and go to another player. If you ask me, that kind of luck deserves to be rewarded more than just being used in a botd which isn’t even that great of a runeword.

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Never. This would be totaly broken. If you really want to downgradw then jah= ber. One ber, not two. And there should be some price in top of it.

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You are bang on kid, especially when there are 50 threads all talking about the same thing. Lol

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I dont care how many topics about same things is out there. It doesnt make it true. Rune drop is fine under current setting, prove me wrong kid.

Its just people who dont want to dedicate some time to find them. Or dont have good game knowledge how to find them.

They cant increase rune drop just because you suck at finding runes dude.

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:stuck_out_tongue: .ereht did uoy tahw ees I

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The whole point of this discussion is to address the low drop rate. If you find 1-2 high runes a year, this would give you more options with what you happen to find. I get what you are arguing, but I think this is about giving more options to the casual farmer. Would it inflate the d2 market with more high runes that usual? Yes, but I don’t think that’s going to harm much. The market crashes pretty quickly as it is now already. I just think that it’s ridiculous that you if you get lucky enough to find a Cham rune, you still would literally have to find 5-10 of them to equal the value of a Ber rune. That’s unacceptable, and the only other way to give more value to the highest runes is to make more meta runewords (I see this becoming a big problem in a few years if they add new and better runewords every ladder season).

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every time i see “i played d2 for x hours in the past” i cringe

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