100 Hell Countess Runs

With ladder ending I decided to do make a couple of Cure and Bulwark helms to dump on nonladder. I ran Hell Countess about 20 or 30 times without seeing an

Io, so I though to myself, "what is the actual value of running Countess a bunch?" So I decided to do 100 runs.

Some preamble, I started in ladder with an 90 FoH paladin, then switched to nonladder with an 89

Fireball sorceress. Some of the runs were TZ's some were not. I made no distinction between ladder/nonladder and TZ or not. I started the experiment clearing the path down to the next level, but once I switched to my sorc I would only stop to kill large packs of elites or big groups of Ghosts.

Countess only drops. 100 runs gave me 184 runes, 5

Key of Terror, and two instances with no drop at all. The most common rune was

Ort with 24. The highest was

Mal at one. 50% of all runes were

Ral or less. 75% of all runes were

Amn or less. 95% of all runes were

Hel or less. For mid to high runes I got 7

Hel, 3

Io, 2

Lum, 1

Ko, 1

Fal and 1

Mal.

My

Key of Terror rate is one

Key per 20 runs.

Mobs on the way down gave me a

Hel, a

Lem, and a handful of

Amn and less. There were also a couple of decent charms and rares that would be good for a SSF or early ladder character.

Notable other drops on the way.

Frostburn,

The Oculus,

Magefist,

Bloodletter, Gavel of Pain,

Hellcast,

Bloodthief,

Jade Talon,

Undead Crown, and

Tal Rasha's Adjudication. That last ties

Mal for the best drops (IMHO).

In summary. Countess is not worth running for runes unless you're making Honor, Insight, or Spirit. I would snag anything worthwhile if you're

Key farming, but if you're looking for mid to high runes, it's probably not a great idea.

The mathematician in me knows that 100 is not a good sample size, so I'll probably keep track of other runs as I go, but I need a break from Countess.

Edit: After posting this, the site gave me a recommended forum post: forums/100-countess-runs-and-average-qu ... 95130.html from three years ago

We have about the same results except @Domin92 had almost twice as many keys.

RackAnewShoe wrote: 1 hour ago

In summary. Countess is not worth running for runes unless you're making Honor, Insight, or Spirit.

That's wrong, although you are on the right track. The low runes from Hell Countess are mostly for crafting (

Hel,

Ral,

Sol,

Amn,

Nef etc) and for rerolling runewords. Apart from

Ith and

Shael, almost every low rune has some value, especially on ladder where even

Io and

Lum are valuable.
By the way, I'm doing 1000 Countess runes right now and in 941 runs so far I got 6 Ists from her (but nothing higher).