Best Farming Locations

Have beat the game on normal but would like to farm up before pushing through the next two. Any advice?

There's generally not a lot of need to farm up until you've cleared Hell.

If you have some rune words you want to make, spending some time running Countess is fine, but you can probably do Nightmare Countess just as easily.

If you want to level a bit to give some comfort at early Nightmare, maybe just do a few

Baal runs in normal?

Eldritch and shank are nice for leveling and finding items, and aren’t difficult even with bad gear

Liam0313 wrote: 1 month ago

Have beat the game on normal but would like to farm up before pushing through the next two. Any advice?

Normal leveling path:

Lvl 1–15:

Tristram runs
Lvl 15–24:

Tal Rasha Tombs
Lvl 24: Do Normal Ancients
Lvl 25–45: Normal

Baal runs

Make Stealth and Lore

After that, push into Nightmare.

Hope that helps.

My favourite spot for farming until nightmare is

Pindleskin . Its very fast to achieve lvl 40 , a lot of good bases can be found there , like Partisan for runeword Insight and all the loot you found are easy selable every exit/enter

Farming usually refers to gearing up with magic find, super chests, and boss runs for items? Seems like you want ramping which is leveling up until pushing past the power curve for an area or difficulty making play easier overall ... plenty of options for both but focusing on the latter these are common ones prioritized by speed more or less!

EDIT: I took for granted that it is wildly understood that there is not much of a point in farming Normal difficulty for gear. Nightmare boss crushing can yield some reasonable unique drops at the sweet spot of 200% MF on p7 but really farming Hell is where it is at for the best items, runes, etc. There are entire books and websites dedicated to just item find and farming in D2 so I would need more than one post just to scratch the tip of that random Iceberg in Hell!

Rush:

By far the fastest is having a friend, or a friendly stranger, blast you through straight to Hell Act 4 for chaos runs. Most quests can be skipped by just nuking the act boss and moving on so any sufficiently powerful build with

Teleport and waypoints can rush new toons through all difficulties. With this method you can go from L1 to L85 in about an hour. Old-school pros had multiple accounts to be able to rush their own toons on another machine long before the respec option was added. Some of us might use virtual machines with Windows XP for the legacy experience of 800x600 pixels to this day

Player Count:

It is no longer a secret that the developer debug switch for testing the multi-player difficulty and rewards offline is exposed to end user. `/p#` or `/players <number>` allows you to "pretend" you have a party of players in game with you so if you can handle the HP increase on p8 then you will get about 5x more XP! The formula for both the monster HP and XP scales like so x * (n + 1) / 2 where x is the value and n is the number of players in game or players setting. In D2R they added UI overlays and menu options to simply set this so you do not even need to use the chat console commands anymore!

Terror Zones:

After killing

Baal and unlocking the next difficulty stay awhile and clear

Terror zones repeatedly. These scale to your current level to the max per difficulty so there is no longer any reason to leave Normal below L45 or Nightmare below L75 since it is so much easier to grind experience than ever before! This is arguably the best feature EVER added, even better than runes, as it allows you to play more of the maps and areas without sacrificing efficiency. Back in the day only

Baal himself was L99 and so you basically got almost no experience at all from killing anything else at higher levels which got very redundant!

Ramp:

This is the classic strategy relying upon Max Schaefer's near perfect game design balance. Specifically the acceleration wave convergence ratio which ironically is probably why we are all still playing this game 25 years later. You can break this design pattern by intentionally replaying areas that have difficulty spikes with more champs, uniques, supers, etc.

Tristram &

Barracks,

Canyon of the Magi &

Tal Rasha's Tomb,

Chaos Sanctuary,

Frigid Highlands &

Throne of Destruction, and so on. Run these areas a dozen times each before moving on to the next area or just go back to nearest ramping zone when you get stuck or feel like your demon slaying speed is slowing down.

Reroll:

Sometimes you get unlucky and pack of "

Fanaticism aura super fast instant death almost guaranteed" are blocking your path forward. You do not always need to be a hero. Running away via TP or Alt+F4 on HC then reloading a new game that is less likely to be deadly can be a good idea sometimes. At higher levels and difficulties even SC death is devastating and sets you back hours or days even if you manage to recover your body without getting killed again!