Rune drop rates for Travincal council members

I'm trying to find the optimal /players setting for running the High Council on my SP zerker, looking primarily for runes. The drop calculator I've been using only lists the drop rates from the three superuniques, not their minions.

I've also tried this one which seems to give rune drops for entire packs of certain types of monsters, but it is unclear how they are calculated. Also, from my experience, only Ismail and Geleb spawn with minions while Toorc always spawns alone, so only the first two and their minions can be thought of as "packs" from what I can tell.

Does anyone know a reliable source of drop rates for the minions?

It depends on how fast you can kill them really. Drop odds that i have on hand for a

Ber rune one just the minions is 1:80k on players 1. Players 3 it jumps up to 1:61k.

If kill speeds are close enough in time between players 1 and players 3 than do players 3. Its all about how fast you can pull that slot machine (how fast you can kill them, and new game).

Players 5 only bumps it up to 1:56k and the challenge of killing them obviously gets much harder. So if i had to suggest anything i would say players 1 because its more likely faster (more kills/minute) but if you can kill them on players 3 in a similiar time frame with not much of a difference in difficulty than do players 3 the odds are quite a bit better

If you really want to get technical, you can study the game's drop tables with modding software.

IIRC, most diablo 2 data is compressed with Blizz's own MPQ file format. There are MPQ editors that you can find online and download for free. Inside you will find TXT files with tables defining just about every aspect of the game, and these tables can be opened in excel for easier reading. You can look up full and complete information on any monster, item, map, etc.

https://d2mods.info/home.php has a database of modding guides to show you how to do this. Tutorials for making a "drop" mod would be helpful, but you would simply read tables instead of actually modifying anything.

Statistics from the drop tables can give you mathematical inputs to calculate things like the "expected" number of rune drops per run or the expected number of runs until you get the specific rune you're looking for.

If you time a bunch of council runs, you can calculate information like the average time per run or runs per hour. That knowledge can be combined with drop statistics to calculate useful information like expected rune drops per hour or expected number of hours until some targeted rune drops.

if this calculator https://dropcalc.silospen.com/item.php is correct. council minions have same chance to drop rune as those 3 unique monsters

but at this high numbers u can only count on luck, some people in 1k runs get 7 hr and some get none.

Phins_up22 wrote: 2 years ago

It depends on how fast you can kill them really. Drop odds that i have on hand for a

Ber rune one just the minions is 1:80k on players 1. Players 3 it jumps up to 1:61k.

If kill speeds are close enough in time between players 1 and players 3 than do players 3. Its all about how fast you can pull that slot machine (how fast you can kill them, and new game).

Players 5 only bumps it up to 1:56k and the challenge of killing them obviously gets much harder. So if i had to suggest anything i would say players 1 because its more likely faster (more kills/minute) but if you can kill them on players 3 in a similiar time frame with not much of a difference in difficulty than do players 3 the odds are quite a bit better

Thank you for those numbers. I found a third drop calculator which seems to give similar results. I originally noticed the large increase in drop rates from the superuniques when going from 1 to 3 players, with diminishing returns beyond that. I felt like p3 might be the optimal setting with good gear, for runes at least. But I wanted to make a calculation to make sure.

Sean wrote: 2 years ago

Statistics from the drop tables can give you mathematical inputs to calculate things like the "expected" number of rune drops per run or the expected number of runs until you get the specific rune you're looking for.

If you time a bunch of council runs, you can calculate information like the average time per run or runs per hour. That knowledge can be combined with drop statistics to calculate useful information like expected rune drops per hour or expected number of hours until some targeted rune drops.

This was sort of my plan, and I ran the numbers for a

Ber rune (using the drop rates from the site linked above). In case anyone is interested:

For players 1, there is a 1/83693 drop chance per monster (same for superuniques and minions, apparently). In each run I kill 11 in total (3 SU's + 8 minions), so that's an 11/83693 drop chance each run. So over a huge number of runs, a

Ber should drop every 83693/11 ≈ 7609 runs, on average. My average time per run is around 1 minute 3 seconds (have Grief, no Enigma). Thus my expected time per

Ber is

(63 s/run) * (7609 runs) = 479 367 s or about 133 hours

For players 3, the chance per run is 11/60868 and a

Ber should drop about once every 60868/11 ≈ 5534 runs. After 20 runs, my average run time was around 1 minute 20 seconds, but let's say 82 seconds to account for the small sample size. So my expected time per

Ber is then

(82 s/run) * (5534 runs) = 453 788 s or about 126 hours

However, since I'm horking with a 55% chance, I should divide both times by a factor of 1.55 (as one run gives me 1.55 times the drops, on average). Rounded up, this gives me the final result of

Players 1: 86 hours per

Ber

Players 3: 82 hours per

Ber

The difference is actually smaller than I thought it would be. But my gear is by no means optimal yet, and better gear should decrease the run time for players 3 more than for players 1 (where I already pretty much 1 or 2 shot everything). So will most likely stick with p3 unless my average shoots way up after more runs.

dont forget that runes like

Vex/

Ohm/

Lo etc also drop there at a slightly better rate, so if your after a

Ber, you could theoretically get 1 in alot less time if your planning on cubing up to

Ber

As far as I know, when horking successfully, the monsters' no-drop value is set to 0, meaning you get the maximum amout of possible item drops.
So more players are not that important.

Yeah player count only matters for the first drop, from the kill, not for horking. But it may be be worth doing p3 over p1 anyway for better drop chance from the kill.

Verband wrote: 2 years ago

As far as I know, when horking successfully, the monsters' no-drop value is set to 0, meaning you get the maximum amout of possible item drops.
So more players are not that important.

Christ. So horked drops are essentially the same as players 7 drops? This explains why such a large proportion of good drops seem to come from horking.

Due to this, I feel like the optimal thing to do might be to respec and dump 20 points each into

Find Item and

Find Potion and go with players 1. This could give me above 75% chance to

Find Item, probably without affecting run speed much at all since p1 monsters are so squishy compared to p3.

Engelmark wrote: 2 years ago

Due to this, I feel like the optimal thing to do might be to respec and dump 20 points each into

Find Item and

Find Potion and go with players 1.

Personally, if single player, I'd go for the p3 strat for the greatly increased initial drops and adjust

Find Item however I needed to pull that off. My main argument for this is the issue of diminishing returns of hard points in

Find Item itself combined with the value of the initial monster kills.

With 20 hard points into

Find Potion and an overall skill level of 18 in

Find Item (meaning with hard points + bonus to skills) you have a 70% of successfully horking. Going up to 75% requires level 29

Find Item, an increase of 11 skill points. Since barbs tend not to wear much by way of +skills, that's a large investment of hard points. Now, 5% more hork chance is definitely something, but it may not be a good trade.

Say you have +8/9 to skills (+2

Arreat's Face /

Shako, +1 Highlords or +2 Amulet, +3 Torch, +1 Anni, +1

Battle Command) . To hit the 70% hork chance, you only need 9 or 10 hard points into

Find Item after maxing

Find Potion. That frees up quite a lot of skill points for damage or survivability.

Why that matters, I think, is that even with max hork chance, an average of 25% of your kills are going to be failed horks. However, going up to p3 significantly increases the drop chances for 100% of the trav host. If I read your earlier numbers right, it goes up by 1/20,000 per monster for a

Ber? And figure the p3 increase for

Ist,

Gul,

Vex,

Ohm, etc. I'd say that's better in the long run.

Now, saying all this is assuming the trade off is 75% hork chance OR p3. What the actual trade offs are will depend on your setup, obviously, but I still expect the best setup to always be on p3.

Winterkill wrote: 2 years ago

Engelmark wrote: 2 years ago

Due to this, I feel like the optimal thing to do might be to respec and dump 20 points each into

Find Item and

Find Potion and go with players 1.

Personally, if single player, I'd go for the p3 strat for the greatly increased initial drops and adjust

Find Item however I needed to pull that off. My main argument for this is the issue of diminishing returns of hard points in

Find Item itself combined with the value of the initial monster kills.

With 20 hard points into

Find Potion and an overall skill level of 18 in

Find Item (meaning with hard points + bonus to skills) you have a 70% of successfully horking. Going up to 75% requires level 29

Find Item, an increase of 11 skill points. Since barbs tend not to wear much by way of +skills, that's a large investment of hard points. Now, 5% more hork chance is definitely something, but it may not be a good trade.

Say you have +8/9 to skills (+2

Arreat's Face /

Shako, +1 Highlords or +2 Amulet, +3 Torch, +1 Anni, +1

Battle Command) . To hit the 70% hork chance, you only need 9 or 10 hard points into

Find Item after maxing

Find Potion. That frees up quite a lot of skill points for damage or survivability.

Why that matters, I think, is that even with max hork chance, an average of 25% of your kills are going to be failed horks. However, going up to p3 significantly increases the drop chances for 100% of the trav host. If I read your earlier numbers right, it goes up by 1/20,000 per monster for a

Ber? And figure the p3 increase for

Ist,

Gul,

Vex,

Ohm, etc. I'd say that's better in the long run.

Now, saying all this is assuming the trade off is 75% hork chance OR p3. What the actual trade offs are will depend on your setup, obviously, but I still expect the best setup to always be on p3.

Thanks, I think you may be right. There is also the (not completely insignificant) fact that you get a lot more experience on p3 than on p1 (I'm at 90 currently and I get about a bar per ~25-30 runs). But I will probably still make another test once I've respecced to get

Find Item to approximately 70%.

haha, I never realized

Find Potion adds % to item find. LOL I am a noob

Slypnir wrote: 2 years ago

haha, I never realized

Find Potion adds % to item find. LOL I am a noob

Well I don't think it used to. I thing they added that synergy in 2.4. But don't quote me on this.

Update!

Out of curiosity, I made a couple of plots of the probabilities of finding at least one of the different high runes (

Vex-

Cham) versus the number of runs. They turned out better than I expected so I polished them a bit and thought I'd share them here. The first one shows the drop chances without horking, the second shows the same chances but with

Find Item at 70% (this seems to be the sweet spot before diminishing returns really start to kick in).

In case anyone is curious how they were created:

Spoiler

For a given rune, the formula used to compute the total drop chance p for a single trav run is

p = 11*([p1 drop chance] + [hork chance]*[p7 drop chance])

(There are 11 council members with the same drop chance for a given rune and players setting.)

The number of drops of a given rune are binomially distributed, such that the probability Px for x drops of a rune in n runs is given by

Px = bin(x,n,p)

Specifically, the probability for zero drops of a given rune in n runs is given by

P0 = bin(0,n,p)

and the probability for 1 or more drops of that rune is

P1+ = 1 - P0

as the total probability must be 1.

I used this formula to compute the chances for each rune (each p) and n in the range 0 - 10000 runs and plotted them.

What is interesting is that without horking, you need to complete about 5250 runs to have a 50% chance at finding a

Ber, but with

Find Item at 70% you only need to complete about 2600 runs for the same odds! (Assuming no shattered corpses of course.) So even though you're only horking at 70%, the fact that a successful hork essentially yields a p7 drop makes the horker barb more than twice as efficient per run than any one build in the game.

Anyway, I've completed 2600 runs so far (not rushing it, doing about 50-150 a day, sometimes none) and I've found 1

Vex and 2

Ohm so far.

and here is my report from levelup 92-93, something like P1 2.2 k runs. 67% item find.
11 hr (if recall correctly, haven't placed all in lucky find topic),

Vex-

Cham.think i got same number of facets (+ 300% mf). and something intresting, havent count mr drops, but its not more than hr drops or if it was, wasnt much more. maybe up to 15. but cant tell for sure. and lets say 300m gold (+500% gold).
i would say i was pretty lucky. 1 hr per 200 runs in average. longest non hr drop interval was something like 800 runs.

Yeah, in the end it is very much up to RNG, unless you do up towards 10k runs in which case you're basically guaranteed to get a few HR drops. I should get more of them eventually by Murphy's law

For mid runes I've found somewhere around 6-7

Um, 4-5

Pul, 3-4

Mal, 2

Ist, 2-3

Gul.

Ya rng is weird. I've done about 3k runs with my horker @73 and havnt even found a

Vex or

Ohm yet.

I did however find 2

Jah within like 200 runs of each other.

It's still kinda freaky to me how good Trav actually is though. I've probably made a few

Ber's worth of other stuff, like

Mara's 24 and Mara's 28
2x highlord's

Raven Frost 248/19
2x andy's face (both 10 ll 30 str, CRAZY)
2x harlequin's crest
2x HoZ
2x titan's, one being 197% ed

Wisp Projector 18 la 15 mf
vipermagi
6 facets (none perf though)
reaper's toll 227/14 (non-

Eth)
almost perf

Boneshade (-1 on

Bone Armor)
3x

War Traveler (35, 45 and 50 mf)
5-6x

Gheed's
2x gladiator's bane
vgaze

Nosferatu's Coil

Eth

Kelpie Snare
tons of skillers + useful small charms
hundreds of pgs
hundreds of millions of gold

I sort of want to roll a barb as my ladder starter next ladder. The problem is getting him started though I guess.

For me the critical time isn’t killing the council, it’s shifting through the loot - making sure I don’t miss anything. The time difference between killing the council on p3 vs p5 is negligible. A p5 run usually takes me 2.5 mins but so far I’ve found a

Ber, 2 jahs and some mid runs and 2 maras, one perfect in like 1000 runs. I really can’t complain-but I’d like to see a

Lo rune soon!

I run a max damage zerker with only 150 mf

Can't mention how glad I'm to find out there's someone sharing the same vibe calculating hork value this serious.
Thought it wasn't that much a thing in NA or EU since cb Grief or ba Grief wasn't really popular in Jsp other trading place.

I was kinda new to d2r actually (did play d2 when I was young , but never knows how exactly it works) , doing necro in Season 0 , fooling around like two month to get my first

Gul. Got interested in IK barb , trade my

Gul for it , and build a Enigma from zero to done in one week.

I'm from a Asia forum (baha) , and always suggesting hork barb as a great way for those struggling for rune to get start (other than

Key mages , obvs) , I love it so much that even write a tutorial way too long than it should to help one get started.

Just want to mention , while u tends to make it a visible drop rate , we compare it with actual value (at least from what we know , not 100 percent accurate).

As our calculation , if we take a random minion (like

Fallen) and value as 1 , cows should value 1.5 (since it got 1.5 rune drop rate than usual) , ghost as 3 , we could estimate that doing councils can reach a value at around 277 @73% (single council value around 13 ,

Find Item @73 makes it 14 more) , meaning doing 3C in a minute is somehow equal to a two-third of a full cow run (considering there's average 250~300 cows in one run , valuing around 400).

Also estimating that there's a highly chance for one to at least get a rune higher than

Gul in every 500 runs.

Again , we're not quite sure if that's a accurate conclusion , just want to share what we know.