How do you guys "Magic-Farm"?

How do you guys farm items / runes?
Yeah, kill stuff, sure^^

But is it usefull to take down the elite mobs that you come across?
E.g. I want some Keys for Uber - and when I

Teleport to the tower and to

The Countess, I encounter quite a lot of different elite mobs.

Skip them to make it to

The Countess as fast as possible?

Or better to kill the elite mobs when I come across them?

Or Diablo - in the

River of Flame are several elites you come across. Do you take them down or do you go straight for the seals to finish Diablo asap?


What are you strategies to farm items/runes/keys/whatever?

You are going to get both sides of the coin with this question, and like with everything else in diablo2 it mostly comes down to play-style and preference.

Personally I can't stand doing more than 10 runs of anyone thing in a row before I feel like throwing my controller through the TV screen. So when farming keys I will stop and kill the elite packs along the way. Especially true for Countess because Wraiths and their derivatives like Ghosts, Dark Shapes, etc have a smaller drop table than other monsters. Meaning they have a higher chance than the average to drop Runes. If the zone is Terrorized I will stop more frequently to kill large mobs, and might even kill everything along the way if its a good TZ.

A horker barb is great at farming runes in

Travincal. But I don't "target-farm" runes, those tend to just drop while playing. Focus on TZs. I'll shift what zones I'm playing to whatever the TZ is (if its good).

The flip side is some people will run Countess or Nihilathak or which ever boss over and over again, skipping everything along the way, because keys/essences = runs per hour. There is logic to this and it is the most effective way at farming keys, BUT you are skipping everything along the way. Its a valid play style, I just cannot play with way.

For runes from

The Countess, (

Ist and lower), my advice is to skip all the mobs and just go straight for her. P1 settings makes her rune drops best, sort of in contrast to rest of the game for rune drops.

For high runes -

Gul and higher - spamming LK super chests on P7 settings is effective. Or Cow Level with your best density clearing character - besides the obvious Javazon, Necro with

Bone Spear +

Corpse Explosion is my favorite for this, because the density clearing is decently fast and he's way more survivable/not squishy as, say, a Lightning sorc. Or like buddy said, Trav runs with horker barb. FoH paladin in

Chaos Sanctuary also works but sometimes not nearly as well as the former methods because FoH loses a fair amount of its density clearing power at P5 and higher, unless your char is stacked to the

Teeth with +skills gear. Generally P7 is about 2x as much work/time to clear as P3, and P7 is generally what you want if it's runes/bases you're looking for. For rune farming, also prioritize kill speed/damage output over magic find, as MF has no effect on rune drops. Generally TZs don't either IIRC.

For MF - say youre looking for Arreats face, SoJ,

Tal's Amulet Guillaumes Face, whatever item it is - usually P3 with priority on high Magic Find. High player settings does increase the drop chances for items like these, but not as much/proportionately as high MF on a lower player count. In other words it's generally better to farm with 200% MF on P3 settings vs, say, 50-100% MF on P7 if the goal is MFing for GG gear. And in this case, its best usually to skip past all the mobs and go straight for

Andariel/

Mephisto. Andy/Meph are generally best for this because they're much faster access/less work to get to any other Act Boss. This is as opposed to if you're farming XP in a TZ, in which case you want to kill as many elite packs per hour as possible.

Another thing too, if you can't stand doing 10+ runs of any particular thing in a row, try rotating them - e.g. do Countess, then Pit, then

Andariel, then Trav, then Meph, then CS for example.

For me, I'll switch it up. Sometimes i get in the mood to spam 20 LK runs or 20+ Meph runs back to back to back, but other times I don't have the patience/willingness for it so I'll rotate it with other zones or just throw something random in there.

Knappogue wrote: 6 hours ago

You are going to get both sides of the coin with this question, and like with everything else in diablo2 it mostly comes down to play-style and preference.

Personally I can't stand doing more than 10 runs of anyone thing in a row before I feel like throwing my controller through the TV screen. So when farming keys I will stop and kill the elite packs along the way. Especially true for Countess because Wraiths and their derivatives like Ghosts, Dark Shapes, etc have a smaller drop table than other monsters. Meaning they have a higher chance than the average to drop Runes. If the zone is Terrorized I will stop more frequently to kill large mobs, and might even kill everything along the way if its a good TZ.

A horker barb is great at farming runes in

Travincal. But I don't "target-farm" runes, those tend to just drop while playing. Focus on TZs. I'll shift what zones I'm playing to whatever the TZ is (if its good).

The flip side is some people will run Countess or Nihilathak or which ever boss over and over again, skipping everything along the way, because keys/essences = runs per hour. There is logic to this and it is the most effective way at farming keys, BUT you are skipping everything along the way. Its a valid play style, I just cannot play with way.

This is my way too.

I've gotten

Sol runes from carvers on the way to Hell Countess who then dropped

Eld. I kill everything on the path down for this reason. Same with Chaos. I take the time to wipe out everything instead of seal-popping because I have had good drops from regular mobs and bad drops from Diablo on the same run.

My only SoJ came from a White enemy in the Plains of Dispair.

Also, teleporting to the boss of an area leaves everything in the way if you get killed and now you have the entire map to get through without your gear ( or even

Teleport in some cases).

Plus, I just like playing the game. Most of my 20+ years are SSF of just making a character, playing through to Hell

Baal, then making a new character with little farming. It's only with D2R that I got on Battlenet and started trading to make the BiS ultimate builds.

I would actually like to see the monster density increased in some areas just so I can kill more hordes. Early Dynasty Warriors was another good game for wiping out thousands of enemies at a time.

RackAnewShoe wrote: 5 hours ago

I would actually like to see the monster density increased in some areas just so I can kill more hordes. Early Dynasty Warriors was another good game for wiping out thousands of enemies at a time.

This would be nice. I feel like they should increase monster density specifically for TZs too, gets kinda depressing when you have

Cold Plains,

Burial Grounds, and

Blood Moor all terrorized back to back, lol.

If you look into market, the most efficient way for now is trav. According to youtube best performancer, You can get 30

Perfect Gems per hour . That is hot stuff now.

And also unique and some unexpect White drop. The most famous example is

Military Pick 15 ED, that is

Ist. or 4 socket

Thresher ,

Eth yellow dim

Blade, blue

Monarch with jeweller + something.

Second best I guess is either cow or

Baal.
pit have chance to win but not stable.

Sounds good, I guess I'll just mix it up - trav, bosses, cow

I just do whatever is Terrorized.