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: 23 hours 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).

mikelessar wrote: 22 hours ago

That's wrong, although you are on the right track....

Perhaps I should have phrased it better. If you're looking for low runes, it's worthwhile. What I was trying to get at is that some comments on this site for The Countess list

Mal,

Um, and

Vex, etc. To me, a 1% chance for anything

Ko or above seems like it would be inefficient farming. I've had better drop rates for high runes in The Pit.

On a direct note/question. What build are you using and how are your times? I was running online so I spent more time looking for The Tower than anything else. Are you planning on posting your results when you hit 1000 runs? I think that would be interesting and I don't have the heart now to do that many runs.

I've had better drop rates for high runes in The Pit.

Tbh, your sample size is not nearly big enough to compare the drop rate for high runes in different areas. The high runes have drop rates at 1:xxxxx (

Ohm at Countess is ~1:30000 for example). So it is just pure luck and you can only increase your chances by killing thousands of mobs. That is why cow runs are famous for rune drops. High council as well, because the minions can drop multiple items at once and the drops have a higher quality.

Btw, I found many runes >

Mal at Countess runs with the highest beeing

Jah from a elite Ghost in tz. But, again, sample size is way too small so that also means nothing.

Edit:

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

P(5 Keys) ~ 13,4%
P(9 Keys) ~ 9,9%

So almost the same propability. Again, even for a propability of 1:13.6 (drop rate for

Key of Terror) your sample sizes are way too small to come to valid conclusions.

Edit2:
As if the game wanted to proof my point, I just found this in the Cow level

I'm assuming these were non-TZ numbers? These days I pretty much will run whatever is TZ.
Non-TZ numbers are sad.

mikelessar wrote: 22 hours ago

RackAnewShoe wrote: 23 hours 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).

Ith makes Caster belts if you can't afford

Arachnid Mesh or offline SP can't find one. Therefore it does have value. There's also the fact that

Caster Belt can roll with high fire or lightning res which can be more important sometimes.

Amu + 2 rings w/10 % FCR apiece plus 35 FCR Spirit Shield + 10 FCR

Caster Belt makes an easy way to hit the 75 FCR breakpoint for paladin or necro if you don't have a 20 FCR

Circlet or

Magefist/Trangs gloves.

I don't know why anyone would say

Shael doesn't have value. Attack speed breakpoints and FHR breakpoints which

Shael provides are some of the most important mechanics in the game for chars to be effective and survivable.

I could name off a million different examples where anyone would use a

Shael to hit a breakpoint for either of these things.

Rune farming

The Countess I find is generally done best by Lightning sorc or FoH smiter with Enigma. Thats the 2 chars I've had best luck with anyways. Need

Teleport to make it worthwhile farming, otherwise it's just way too tedious and I'll be wanting to throw my controller at the screen after like 2 runs. Both the above mentioned chars i could spam 20-30 Countess runs in a row quick, taking 60 sec or less every run (esp on offline SP with static maps). Getting bogged down with all the trash mobs on the way makes it very inefficient for this objective.

My experience for high runes is it's best to use a char with powerful density clearing in any area with high density and as high player count as possible (i think most people are aware that P7 and P8 are the same for drops). Obvs cow level has been mentioned a million times, but

Chaos Sanctuary for Hammerdin or FoH are also ideal. For Chaos, the density is definitely there and (nonTZ) Chaos is lvl85 whereas cows are only lvl81 (hence unable to drop some bases).

Within 100 Chaos runs, I've dropped

Mal,

Ist,

Vex,

Gul,

Arachnid Mesh,

Gore Rider, TGods, perfect Gheeds, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting. While you might very well see those rune drops farming cows, it's not likely you'll see any of the rest of those drops.

BigD wrote: 8 hours ago

Within 100 Chaos runs, I've dropped

Mal,

Ist,

Vex,

Gul,

Arachnid Mesh,

Gore Rider, TGods, perfect Gheeds, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting. While you might very well see those rune drops farming cows, it's not likely you'll see any of the rest of those drops.

You do realize though that that was an extremely lucky outcome, right, and not something to draw (too many) conclusions from?

Vex has a 1:800+ chance to drop on p7 in

Chaos Sanctuary. Even

Gul is 1:500+. I.e., someone could do a thousand CS runs and not hope to (on average for a 1000 run batch) find more than 1-2 of either of those runes in total. Similarly,

Arachnid Mesh is 1:500+ in

Chaos Sanctuary at p7 with 300 MF.

ShadowHeart wrote: 8 hours ago

BigD wrote: 8 hours ago

Within 100 Chaos runs, I've dropped

Mal,

Ist,

Vex,

Gul,

Arachnid Mesh,

Gore Rider, TGods, perfect Gheeds, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting. While you might very well see those rune drops farming cows, it's not likely you'll see any of the rest of those drops.

You do realize though that that was an extremely lucky outcome, right, and not something to draw (too many) conclusions from?

Vex has a 1:800+ chance to drop on p7 in

Chaos Sanctuary. Even

Gul is 1:500+. I.e., someone could do a thousand CS runs and not hope to (on average for a 1000 run batch) find more than 1-2 of either of those runes in total. Similarly,

Arachnid Mesh is 1:500+ in

Chaos Sanctuary at p7 with 300 MF.

Perhaps yes. But I've done way more cow runs than that without anywhere near that kind of good fortune. I couldn't tell you how many more, but for sure alot more. In fact I've dropped Tgods and

Gore Rider from Chaos both twice in an unknown amount of runs, but I've gotten neither of those things once from Cows.

Maybe I should rephrase - what I'm getting at is that yes, Cow Level can be good for rune drops due to density - but other areas can be better depending on your build. FoH doesn't affect cows for example and even Hammerdin tends to shred undead mobs faster than cows. Or if you're playing

Frenzy/Zerker barb obvs Trav is better because they don't clear density very well and horking the Council can almost double your loot sometimes.

Oh agreed. I just didn't want anyone to get the wrong idea about the actual odds of finding that much goodies in 100 runs of... well anything, really. One can always have lucky streaks - and unlucky streaks.

Maybe I should rephrase - what I'm getting at is that yes, Cow Level can be good for rune drops due to density - but other areas can be better depending on your build. FoH doesn't affect cows for example and even Hammerdin tends to shred undead mobs faster than cows. Or if you're playing

Frenzy/Zerker barb obvs Trav is better because they don't clear density very well and horking the Council can almost double your loot sometimes.

And one should take into account that at the way to

The Countess and in

Chaos Sanctuary as well there are mobs with the "Ghost TC", meaning these mobs will have a significant higher chance of dropping runes.

rixsen wrote: 7 hours ago

Maybe I should rephrase - what I'm getting at is that yes, Cow Level can be good for rune drops due to density - but other areas can be better depending on your build. FoH doesn't affect cows for example and even Hammerdin tends to shred undead mobs faster than cows. Or if you're playing

Frenzy/Zerker barb obvs Trav is better because they don't clear density very well and horking the Council can almost double your loot sometimes.

And one should take into account that at the way to

The Countess and in

Chaos Sanctuary as well there are mobs with the "Ghost TC", meaning these mobs will have a significant higher chance of dropping runes.

Yes, absolutely. And the fact that these areas are guaranteed to have those monsters makes it efficient to that end.

rixsen wrote: 15 hours ago

Tbh, your sample size is not nearly big enough to compare the drop rate for high runes in different areas.

Noted in my original post.

rixsen wrote: 15 hours ago

The high runes have drop rates at 1:xxxxx (

Ohm at Countess is ~1:30000 for example). So it is just pure luck and you can only increase your chances by killing thousands of mobs. That is why cow runs are famous for rune drops. High council as well, because the minions can drop multiple items at once and the drops have a higher quality.

Btw, I found many runes >

Mal at Countess runs with the highest beeing

Jah from a elite Ghost in tz (emphasis mine).

rixsen wrote: 7 hours ago

And one should take into account that at the way to

The Countess and in

Chaos Sanctuary as well there are mobs with the "Ghost TC", (emphasis mine)meaning these mobs will have a significant higher chance of dropping runes.

Kind of my point. Countess herself is not reliable for high runes. If one is teleporting past everything looking for high runes from

The Countess, they are likely to be disappointed. If they hit the elites on the way down, then may pick up something on the way.

Knappogue wrote: 15 hours ago

I'm assuming these were non-TZ numbers? These days I pretty much will run whatever is TZ.
Non-TZ numbers are sad.

Both TZ and non TZ. I didn't think that

The Countess special rune drop changed with TZ and the focus of the limited experiment was to see about

The Countess herself.

BigD wrote: 8 hours ago

Rune farming

The Countess I find is generally done best by Lightning sorc or FoH smiter with Enigma.

I started with FoH (without Enigma), switching to sorc made life much less painful.

it's just way too tedious and I'll be wanting to throw my controller at the screen after like 2 runs

Exactly.

taking 60 sec or less every run

This one throws me. I keep seeing people talk about 60 sec

Mephisto or Countess or

Andariel runs and it takes me a whole minute just to find the damn tower or get through

Durance of Hate Level 2.

Black Marsh is just an open field and I know Durance fairly well. How are people getting these run times down so low?

mikelessar wrote: 22 hours ago

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).

That's not a bad sample size and only 6

Ist for @mikelessar. (how many people are doing 10000 runs? That's why bots are our real source for high runes and SoJ)

I think my general point still stands even with everyone's input. Running Countess for low runes is effective. Running Countess for low runes and hitting elites on the way down hoping on an occasional mid or rare high rune is effective. Running just Countess in hopes of having an

Ist or

Mal factory isn't going to work. There are other areas that are more likely to drop high runes and also some other good gear and bases.

RackAnewShoe wrote: 4 hours ago

I think my general point still stands even with everyone's input. Running Countess for low runes is effective. Running Countess for low runes and hitting elites on the way down hoping on an occasional mid or rare high rune is effective. Running just Countess in hopes of having an

Ist or

Mal factory isn't going to work. There are other areas that are more likely to drop high runes and also some other good gear and bases.

I mostly agree. However, it depends on the circumstances and which runes you really need. If you play online with resetting maps, Countess runs take longer and you can trade. So farming runes in

Terror Zones (with LOW Magic Find), especially in high-density areas like Chaos, Worldstone Keep and Cows is best. If you drop a high rune, you can trade it for multiple

Mal and

Ist.

Offline SSF, however, is different. If you really need

Mal and

Ist, running Hell Countess (and killing elite and champion packs on the way, yes) is not a bad idea if you have a good fast map. Maps don't reroll and with a good map you can do a Countess run in under a minute. If you need about 200 runs to get 1

Mal and 1

Ist from

The Countess and her minions, that's not too bad.

Of course, you can run

Lower Kurast, but a

Ber will not help you if you need a

Mal or

Ist and you can't trade.

If you don't care which medium or high rune you will drop, since you are planning long-term and do not need a

Mal or

Ist fast, then playing

Terror Zones is also the best approach in offline SSF.

It should be added that there are also numerous Weapon Rack / Armor Stash and plenty of superchests (A1 ones dropping up to

Lo afaik) on the way to countess. Popping those on the way to her does not take much time and is another source of income

RackAnewShoe wrote: 23 hours ago

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.

I generally run

The Countess for keys, and as a consolation prize I find a significant number of

Fal,

Lem, and

Pul, but I also seem to find a decent count of

Um and some

Mal, and less often

Ist. When I get more than 10 of anything under an

Ist I cube them. Sadly that has lead to an oversupply of

Ist which is starting to reduce my stash. As a result the number of

Um and

Mal have now started to increase, and I'm too lazy to trade. Another benefit of running

The Countess is I've found two perfect War travs, and a few Shakos.

Edit: Forgot to mention a number of those are TZ Tower runs, and I once had

The Countess drop a

Jah in a TZ run.