Why just not improving drop rate of high runes?

General Discussion
1023

Yeah, MF is actually a bad idea. The whole MF mechanic is bad. The game is filled with so many inconsistencies. What ends up becoming the point of getting better gear if you never use it because the only point is to stack more MF and weaken your char?

Even now, I never run any char with maximum damage gear or even maximum defensive gear. I’ve got good items that never see play because I wear MF gear instead.

The problem with bots and low drop rates go hand in hand. It’s like illegal drugs and drug cartels. The drug gangs exists because drugs are illegal. The botters exist because farming for the best gear is essentially humanly impossible.

It is not humanly realistic to outfit a given character in BiS gear purely from self-found farming. Even playing 8 hours a day for years, you wouldn’t be able to get all the BiS gear for something like a Javazon all self-found.

From a PvM perspective, maybe that doesn’t matter, but from a PvP perspective, that makes the game pretty terrible. Thus, especially for PvP the field is leveled by using bots to make teh BiS gear available for everyone so the game is competitive.

Imagine if like in NASCAR some race teams were able to randomly find a single part that made their car 40% faster than anyone else’s, and the chance of finding such a part so rare that any given race season it was pretty much guaranteed that only 1 team would find the best part and 2 or 3 other teams would find a couple of second from best parts and most teams would be stuck with stock parts.

The whole season would just come down to luck and who found what parts, and skill we have noting to do with who won. There would be zero interest in the sport and it would die out. So the irony of D2 is that PvP was really only viable BECAUSE OF botters.

Either the natural drop rate of BiS items needs to go way up or there needs to be more stuff like D-Clone that have guaranteed drops, or the game needs to just continue to have botters and be a black market pay to play game.

1024

Bots are not a rational reason for better drop rates, because user is always slower than bot. All this begging for better droprate is partly understandable, but then giving way to that will destroy D2, as D2 was successful exactly because of scarcity. Once you are showered with items it is no longer a reward.
Now, I know, people with families couldn’t care less. But that does not change that the overall experience would decline. Already Terror Zones and Andy does shower you with items. There are powerful builds to play in full games, also HRs are dropping ok.
To be blunt, once you give way to the beggars, it is never gonna be enough. And I still hear the moaning, crying and complaining of the classic (pre LoD) crybabies about item drops. Nothing has changed. If people cannot invest that time for whatever reason, they should play other games.

1025

I have seen someone find 2-3 ber runes on livestream in the past couple weeks. This is the same person. So your theory of only botters having HRs is already invalid.

I’ve only ever found a Sur yet have gotten HRs every game. You can easily TRADE for them. Surely in your “thousands” of runs you have found gear worth an HR…

You don’t realize if you start handing HRs out like candies, you’ll get your end game sooner and then get bored sooner as well. Once you’ve gotten the best build/gear for your character, there’s practically nothing else to do.

Every time I play I enjoy the grind trying to get my character’s end gear. I almost feel like a merchant, finding good deals from other players or trading up gear for HRs, and slowly piecing together for that enigma, etc. If all I had to do was 50 chaos runs for all the HRs I’d need, the end game would last a couple of days.

Also, if you lower the rate for HRs, say by 10x, the bots will just get 10x more of them, and the market will be flooded with more of them. And they will price them lower. And there will still be those “credit card warriors” as you put it, who still do not want to farm for them, and they will buy even more of them now because they’re priced cheaper.

Even if HRs had a 1 in 100 chance of dropping from any boss, there would still be people that would pay for them.

The reason people like d2 is because of the loot mechanics. The RNG, massive assortment of gear, and the extreme rarity/chance is why it has persisted for 20 years.

If you refuse to trade for HRs and have the worst luck in the world, why not play another game that gives you the best end game gear easily? Then get bored of it and move onto another one.

Hardly any game lasts 20 years. And what you’re proposing would make it worse.

If you want to advocate for something, try to get Blizzard to implement better measures to get rid of the bots.

1026

I kinda like the separate gear between MF and PVM/PVP. Finding the right balance between MF and damage adds another element to the end game content. Gives you more stuff to do, makes it a bit more challenging.

If you got rid of the bots, the PVP would probably be better because everyone wouldn’t just die in one hit. Everyone would have worse gear, so it would actually be a lot more nuanced than just telespamming and dealing 30k damage in one strike.

And if someone does find those HRs for their gear, they would only have 1 piece of uber gear. Players could develop strategies to take them out with a combination of carefully considered but technically worse gear.

This is what makes tournaments and stories engrossing. If someone has a big genetic advantage, for example, the underdog has to be smarter or have more persistence to win.

Having everyone exactly equal would be boring. And unfortunately, I don’t think d2’s PVP is nuanced enough that having everyone with the same uber tier gear results in a solely skill-based battle. As I said, everyone being weaker would probably make for better PVP.

1027

Maybe it’s people that have time when not working to play the game. If you have a family, damn, it’s gonna take longer for you. Sucks to have a family I guess, lol. Jokes aside, I managed to find a few HR’s when the game launched, but I was basically playing this game every moment I wasn’t working. Sure I had time to mow the lawn and what not, and eventually after about 2 months I had enigma, CTA, Hoto, and a filthy hammerdin to run it all with.

I miss trading shako for Ohm. Don’t think I’ll see that price ever again. Oh well. Good luck.

1028

You cannot get rid of bots. Via a videocamera detecting the image and physical Mouseinputs you can become truely undetectable at the Software side. Then you only need to buy, lets say 3 Accounts and let the bot switch between them in a truely believable, human manner. No algorithm would be able to detect that.

And having only one piece of uber gear, this is invalid too. These: https://pasteboard.co/dYjKrNy0ZgCG.png are my runes after Infinity, Enigma, Fortitude, Grief and 2x CTA. This is Single Player, but would translate to more than one Enigma in Bnet Single Player, too. All obtained via normal playing.

There is absolutely nothing special involved in getting rich in D2. You dont need any talent, you just have to invest some time. And if you are not willing to invest that time, thats fine, but your assumptions are just wrong.

1029

Come back here when you have learned about that little thing called math.

Seems like you are very confused by it.

1030

With a zerker barb in Travincal (for example) you are pretty much guaranteed HRs after some 2000 runs. No insane gear, nothing a cold sorc could not find. Bnet, Single Player.

Dont believe me? Just try out this Travincal rune drop simulator (at the bottom of the page). https://d2runewizard.com/articles/guides/farming/travincal-rune-farming

Oh and by the way, show us just 1 (one) source, for the 1 in a million odds for a hr, please. I want to comment on it.

1031

But D2 has always been botted. So from the beginning, especially in pvp, there has been a reliance on bots. The bots artificially increase the availability of high runes.

Increasing the drop rates would reduce the demand for botting. It would devalue items, thus decreasing the demand for botting as well.

There is some “magic” point at which increased drop rates would reduce botting and result in approximately the same overall availability of high runes, just more coming from people and fewer from bots.

1032

Increasing the HR drop rates would ruin the game. All the hard earned stuff, without value. D2 became great exactly because of scarcity.

The discussion is kind of meaningless anyway, as Blizzard will leave the drop rates where they are. They just introduced terror zones (more unique drops), and the rune drop rates are since 1.12 (I believe) in territorries where they are better obtainable by high intensity play. They increased the Rune Drop rates roughly by a factor of 10 back then.

1033

Not even close to 1 per 100 hours. It’s more like 1 per 10-15 if you are going for just runes, IE Trav Horking.

For P1 TZs it around 1 per 20-25 hours. You’ll end up with around 12’ish just leveling solo.

1034

So I have heard about bots. They have video camera to mouse inputs for botting games now, didn’t know that but never thought much about it.

But surely they can improve detection to some degree. My point was this guy should be focusing on bots as the problem rather than trying to alter the HR drops and change the game for the worse.

RE: your runes. That was the point we were trying to make to Adventurer: you can certainly get HRs without being a bot.

1035

This is the real reason so many of the above posters are against any reasonable drop rates :cry:

Unfortunately, Blizzard’s financial plans are designed solely for such botters repurchasing accounts ad nauseum :frowning_face:

1036

Lol no. They are already common enough. If they were any more common there really wouldn’t be much of a reason to play.

If you found a diamond you’d be pretty happy right?
How happy would you be to find a sack full of manure?

Other than Last Wish you can SSF most runewords fairly easily. You can make about whatever you want just from the runes you find on the way to 99. Sure luck can work against you at times, but if that really bothers you it’s not like you can’t trade. Personally I’d rather just keep grinding but to each their own.

1037

I’ve been playing since the ladder started and grinding non-stop at least 4-5 hours a day when I can because of my job which adds up to a lot of hours per week, anyways short to say, I have found nothing of real value in that time. Not a single HR and no item that is even good like not even a Shako was found. I have 330MF and I have done all of the methods that people say are good, trav, cows, chaos, speed clearing. I am using a hammerdin which has 8000 damage hammers and I can clear very fast with him but still yet not found anything good.

This is precisely why there is problem with this game and namely there needs to be a way that rewards your hours you put into the game somehow. The magic find needs to influence rune drops because runes are a main currency in this game and the only people who is getting them fast is botters. Us regular player is getting nothing good.

We simply need something like sunder charms that is a charm that lets the rune value that is found be based on our magic find level.

I can play 4 or 5 hours a day if I’m lucky but a botter will have 8+ clients running 24-7 a day and wondering why we find nothing good compared to botters. That is because the deck is stacked against us regular players. We do not have the odds of an 8 man botting team that is running 24-7 even while the botter runner is asleep…

1038

As a casual player myself, I have a report for you on high runes…

Playing two to three months out of the ladder seasons playing 1 to 2 hours a day in both the original game and D2:R as of 1.13C, I’ve dropped on average about 2 high runes per ladder season. A low of zero, and a high of six, counting Ohm and higher. My typical game would start at Act 1, and I’d go through up to Act 5 and would farm all of the T87 areas that I could.

The hot spot for finding runes is… :drum: drumroll :drum: The Chaos Sanctuary!

High runes are supposed to be rare…

Stop comparing the average players loot to what a 24/7 bot rakes in.

1039

Another Joe Schmoe coming in with his opinion thinking hes right.

I’ve got news for you. Just like the A3 Glitch that allowed people to bypass the quests in the original LOD being fixed in D2R. the drop rate for Hr’s also needed to be fixed but never was. The original developers had a bug in their code for HR that they tried to fix by making it 10x more common, but there is still problems with it, the HR rates are still too low and for a game where ladder seasons are only a few months long, you will never get those HR’s you need to make the ladder only runewords. Its just not possible.

It will have to be fixed later on, like what happened with Sunder charms and such. People like you who are wrong will be shut down once again. There is no point to make ladder only runewords where 99% of people cannot make them because they don’t have the runes. That is the actual bug that we are talking about.

1040

Heh. I have play history. All you have is whine.

Go play D3, I feel it’s more to your liking.

1041

there is no mentioning of any bug relative to high rune drop rates in patch 1.13c

in fact, the buff to HR drop rates is listed under the “Specific changes/improvements” category and not under the “Major or Minor Bugs” categories

Major Bugs

  • Fixed an item dupe bug.
  • Video improvements for Intel Mac machines with OS 10.5 or greater.
  • Fixed an issue where some players could kill other players while in town (“TPPK”).
  • Fixed an issue where some players could disconnect other players when they had too many active states.
  • Fixed two issues where players could stack auras in an unintended way.

Minor Bugs

  • Uber Mephisto now checks for both Uber Baal and Uber Diablo to be killed before spawning summoned minions (Before he would only check for Uber Baal).
  • The game will no longer stop and then restart the game music after the window loses and then regains focus.
  • Fixed an issue where the game window would minimize when running in windowed mode when it lost focus.
  • Fixed an issue where the game window wouldn’t center properly when it was created.
  • Fangskin should now properly drop loot in Hell difficulty.
  • Fixed an issue where auras were not re-applied to your mercenary after it was resurrected.
  • Fixed an issue where if you had two items which provided auras to a mercenary and you unequipped one, the aura from the remaining item never became active.
  • Fixed an issue where the Paladin class runeword ‘Principle’ wasn’t having all of its stats applied properly.
  • Fixed an issue where the Paladin’s Charge ability would become locked out if Holy Shield faded while charging.
  • Fixed an issue where the Barbarian’s Leap ability could become locked out if they were hit when they started to leap.

Specific changes/improvements

  • Respecialization is now possible! Completing the ‘Den of Evil’ quest will now additionally reward 1 free respec which can be saved. Players who have already completed this quest should receive 1 free respec in Hell difficulty.
  • Increased the drop rate of high runes.
  • Support for blit scaling in windowed mode. The game can now be maximized to the largest 4:3 resolution supported (hooray widescreen users).
  • Some rare drop items now have an orange color. i.e. Runes and items required for Uber Tristam.
  • Modified the gold bank limit to be a flat cap not bound by level.
  • Removed the requirements to create a hardcore character.
  • Greatly reduced the explosion damage dealt by Fire Enchanted monsters.
  • Uber Mephisto and Uber Baal’s summoned minions no longer give experience.
  • Removed Oblivion Knight’s Iron Maiden curse.
  • Hellfire Torch Firestorm proc rate has been reduced to 5%.
  • Users can now toggle the display of text over the Health and Mana globes by clicking on the bottom area of each orb.
  • When creating a single player game, each difficulty button is now bound to a unique key: Normal ‘R’, Nightmare ‘N’, and Hell ‘H’.
  • The ‘Enter Chat’ Button in the battle.net waiting room is now bound to the ‘Enter’ key.
  • Added the windows system buttons to the game window (MIN, MAX, CLOSE).
  • Added new command line parameter ‘-nofixaspect’ which allows users to not fix the aspect ratio to 4:3 when maximizing in windowed mode. This lets the game ‘stretch’ to fill your monitor.
  • Added support for ‘-sndbkg’ command line switch. This enables sound in background.
  • Added the following aliases for pre-existing command line options, ‘-nosound’, ‘-window’, and ‘-windowed’.
1042

Uh huh and where is the mention of A3 skipping the spider den, kurast dungeon or sewers? That isn’t in there either.

Checkmate.
Just because a bug isn’t listed doesn’t mean jack.