Hey!
I was wondering where people go to drop either HRs or Good loot ? like HoZ, Shako, soj arach etc etc
I have been farming the entire past week mix of Andry,Pit,Contess,Summoner,Mephisto,Trav,Diablo and so far i’ve dropped like 2 pair of treks and thats it lol ? i’m running on a blizz sorc with 280-300 mf
I’m even farming in some p8 games or alone in private and loots doesnt seem to drop more in p8 am I doing something wrong or we really gotta go on some forum to get gear
There are two things you need to understand for drops in D2. First, the drop formula. Search for it, you’ll find it. Some areas/bosses have better drop rates/loot tables than others. Also, search for this.
tl;dr drop rates are fairly low in this game. You can do hundreds of NM Andariel runs and not get a single soj. You can increase drop rates playing in games with 8 players but then it’s an 8 people click fest to determine who gets it if it does actually drop. If you play solo, the drop rate is much lower.
Also don’t just farm bosses, clear the entire area. Some less travelled areas like Ancient Tunnels, Pit, etc. have certain higher frequency of some drops. Learn the meta.
I think Mr.Llama made a good video yesterday exactly on this topic.
Common places to farm are…
Trav (HR’s, ‘accessories’, gold, uniques)
Cows (Bases, gems, charms)
Lower Kurast (super chests, HR’s, charms)
Tower (mid runes, uniques, keys)
The Pit (ALL Uniques, good for lighting bulds)
Ancient Tunnels (ALL Uniques, good for cold builds)
Chaos Sanct (All drops)
A5 Pindle (Pindleskin + the first WP for those 2 super unique kills, very fast)
There’s a couple others for very specific things like 45 lifer GC bases since he is aside maybe some terror zones the only mob who can reliably drop GC’s in that level range.
I should mention as well if you can teleport and have over ~300% Magic Find, Mephy and Andy are good for getting some baseline uniques. Other than that if you can actually fight TZ’s, Hell TZ’s are the meta for leveling. Even Nightmare TZ’s around level 70-74 are actually quite good for getting drops as MOST uniques can drop there and its extremely easy to full clear.
Pindle drops everything but very low drop rates. You don’t want to farm Pindle if you’re looking for something specific.
except for the lit immune rangers that live there… the things that are the most scary there as well rofl.
Farming is entirely dependent on how fast you can do it. If it’s taking you too long to murder trav, then don’t do trav. But if you can kill them all in about 5 seconds, it’s a good farm.
For my cold sorc, I find ancient tunnels, even the stony tomb, to be best. But I also do pindle for hours on end. If I get bored of those, then I’ll just do Meph. Tho you can’t expect too much from him beyond a shako here and there. Make sure to get the weapon in armor racks in there because those are higher level than he can drop. Also the super chest behind him. Can get some high runes from that.
An underappreciated farm site is the arcane sanctuary. Specifically ghosts. They drop a lot of high runes. But you have to make sure you kill them over a surface area, not in the space area because they won’t drop anything.
How do you get them to die over land so they actually drop things, unless you are waiting forever for them to fly over every time?
Just skip ones that will take too long. Most are pretty easy to kite while you’re killing other things. Just position yourself to where their flight path will be preferable.
A high rune can take a long time to find. You might not even find 1 today or the next day. But general rule. Clearing high monster density and Specter’s is the way to go for HR farming. Some areas include:
Arcane Sanctuary (clear Specter’s and find item on corpse if you are a barb)
Halls (clear flayers in packs)
Clear Pits
Clear Ancient Tunnels
Clearn Arachnid Lair
Clear any TC 85 area
As for items and runes all-around, clear chaos and kill Diablo. Boss monsters are generally the best for finding specific unique and set items you are looking for. Clearing a TC 85 area 100’s of times also is good for finding items too. Generally unique monsters drop items but sometimes normal monsters do too. Depending on how the RNG is rolling for you.
That’s kind of normal. You might play a lot for a week and find nothing great. Just keep at it eventually you will find something good and all the work to find it is what makes it so exciting
There is no right farming spot. Just any areas of the game or bosses like you are
note: Jah/Cham/Zod can’t drop from Lower Kurast chests
here a some solid info on runes
for Jah % comparaison
Izual…0.000250%
Haphesto…0.000250%
Nilathak…0.000250%
Council Members…0.000171%
Mephisto…0.000189%
Diablo…0.000189%
CS Super Uniques…0.000088%
Act 5 Super Uniques…0.000088%
Baal Minions…0.000021%
Baal…0.000189%
Uniques lvl 78+ areas…0.000044%
Champion lvl 79+ areas…0.000021%
Cow King…0.000073%
Cow…0.000034%
Ghostly enemies…0.000088%
Normal Monsters(except bellow&ghosts)…0.000022%
Quill,Swarm,Flying Scimitar
Council vs Cows
Council Members…0.000171%(worth 5 cow per council member)
Cow…0.000034%
Trav has 11 council members(55 cows kill is equal to killing Trav)
.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.(22 Ghosts kill is equal to killing Trav)
Note: minions and regulars ghost CAN’T drop armors//weapons
only Champions and Pack Leader ghosts CAN
Monsters lvl required to drop X rune
Zod Mlvl 81
Jah&Cham mlvl 79
Ber&Sur mlvl 74
Ohm&Lo mlvl 69(for Hell)
Ohm&Lo can drop from Nightmare WS3 &Throne Unique monsters but not from baal waves super uniques
Gul&Vex mlvl 63
Mal&Ist mlvl 57
Pul&Um mlvl 51
CHESTS drops
Act 1 Normal: No Runes from Chests
Act 2 Normal: El/Eld/Tir/Nef
Act 3 Normal: Eth/Ith/Tal/Ral
Act 4 Normal: Ort/Thul/Amn/Sol
Act 5 Normal: Shael/Dol
Act 1 Nightmare: Hel/Io
Act 2 Nightmare: Lum/Ko
Act 3 Nightmare: Fal/Lem
Act 4 Nightmare: Pul/Um
Act 5 Nightmare: Mal/Ist
Act 1 Hell: Gul/Vex
Act 2 Hell: Ohm/Lo
Act 3 Hell: Sur/Ber
Act 4 Hell: Jah/Cham
Act 5 Hell: Zod
Do you open chests? Got several Ists and Guls from it. Last season even 2 or 3 Jah from chests within the first 3 weeks (very lucky).
My experience is that most loot comes from minor enemies / chests, not bosses alone. Also 3 Shako drops so far this season but never from any boss.
The thing is that the uniques you listed (other than shako probably) are very rare and arach has a drop restriction of 85+, which will only drop in 85 zones, terror zones and diablo / baal.
Cows is an extremely good place to farm bases, this season more than ever since people are looking for good claws, so you can farm bases and trade them up for uniques you want. Overall, if you can farm players 8 cows efficiently, they’re probably the most profitable.
Player number doesn’t affect bosses’s drop rates because they only drop one item anyway, instead it’s good for regular monsters. You can try to farm terror zone boss packs for uniques, ‘baal’ charms (which are GCs with 41+ life, they sell for something), sunder charms, but the odds of getting one of those high end uniques is extremely small, so small that mf builds dedicated to farming them will not get one an entire season (think pitzerker).
Another side note, the best rune farmer is probably a grief barb on p3 travincal, it will also get you some good uniques, but trav doesn’t drop uniques like arach, griffon etc. unless it’s terrorized.
Mephisto is lvl 87(and can drop Arachnid)
players numbers DOES affect bosses drop rate, just not as greatly as it does for non-bosses(and Pack leader ??)
what you call “baal charms” also drop from Nilathak and Diablo(45 life) even without TZ
spam farm terrorize zones when your 85+, since they scale up with lvl, your getting lvl 90+ monsters and high end loot tables, basically the best thing atm, that or hell cows/chaos for density if HR is what your looking for.
Drop rates are high enough to find everything you need.
To add to / expand on this for the OP, people also “split farm” or “split MF,” basically deciding who is going to run where so they don’t overlap and have to compete for drops while still benefiting from the increased player count (which reduces the chance for a “nodrop” on any given item drop chance).
Mw’s post gives a good rundown of some of the most useful places to run.
Act5, first WP. There’s 2 bosses on both sides.
Act1, inner cloister.
Sometimes act1 pit.
But I do little MF.
Few base rules.
If you want Runebases, don’t use MF, decreases the chance to get them.
If you want runes, MF does not affect their drop chance at all.
If you want Uniques/Sets/Rare MF works but it is diminishing returns, I usually aim at atleast 100% and after that it becomes how much kill speed do you lose for the MF gained, so I usually end up somewhere around 200% before the loss of kill speed and survivability becomes more important than additional MF.
P8 causes more items to drop, it doesn’t improve the quality of items.
Countess Special drop is worse on 8 player than on 1 player, so running her on 8 is actually not a good idea (unless Terrorized and killing the Elites on the way).
I wouldn’t advise farming for specifics, it’s not really how D2 works (you could run NM andy for SoJ for example, but many things can’t drop there you might also want and while a very fast way to SoJ it’s still only 1 in 1555 at 200mf, Terrorized Hell Andy is 2642 but can drop many nice things on the side).
Specific gear is gained faster by trading than finding.
Where to run depends on what you can runs fast while killing A) many monsters or B) Elites and Bosses (or I guess C both).
Personal favorites (note Terrorized increases drops a lot and hardly makes it more difficult).
Charms and Jewels: are NM cows, unless you kill Hellcows almost as fast.
HR’s: Travincal (with Horker), Arcane Sanctuary (but it’s basically anything you can kill Specters or similar fast, they have a better chance to drop runes due to the loot pool being smaller), Hell Cows or Flayer Jungle (if you can kill those flayers at high speed they are surprisingly nice when terrorized).
Uniques, well stick to Terror zones, I like to add Pindle/Shenk/Eldritch to runs if the build can do those, but most important is to be able to kill at least masses or many elites/bosses at very high speed (if you do Countess do skip the elites towards her, especially if Terrorized).
The problem with this is it’s on the honor system. It should be a game mechanic.