Hammering up the lower kurast ruins

Slicer is now just shy of level 80, 2 more before I can use the amulet I crafted back at level 75. I can still hardly believe I got so lucky to have crafted a cool amulet appropriate to the character I'm playing.

Baal runs turned out to be a bit of a PITA (pain in the a**). Running seemed to take forever and the same large useless items kept dropping. For a little while I switched between normal and nightmare just so I could get a shorter map, but that takes time too. I

Why run Lower Kurast in Hell mode? It's rumoured that there are chests which drop the awesome Ber rune! But some of those people ran LK thousands of times to get the Ber rune. I have no such ambitions. My purpose was to cube up Flawless gems that would later be used on a grand charm in hopes of getting a +skills charm. I tried cubing up a few times and got some interesting results, but no +skills. I saw mention somewhere that the charm has to originally be high enough level. When I cubed the charm up its level seemed to jump all over the place. On top of all this doing Lower Kurast with the /players 8 switch gives loads of experience. In 5 runs I leveled from 77 to almost 80 (one or two good baddies should do the trick).

One trick that helps with nasty monsters that quickly deplete your mana is to orient them around the waypoint. You can do this 2 ways. Either trap the monsters on the waypoint and attack them with your hammers/spells from the other side of the waypoint. You can also, as I've done in the screenshot above, trap them around the waypoint and then you stand on the upper part of the waypoint and kill the monsters the same way.

In 5 runs here's some of the swag I scored: approximately 17 flawless gems, a couple of Amn runes, a sol rune, a hel rune, a couple of ort runes, some other minor runes, a couple of large charms with 14% and 15% fire resistance, a small charm with 7% magic find, Taebaek's Glory set item, and about 7 jewels of various sorts. In actuality I found a lot more, but nothing else really worth reporting. On one run I found 8 flawless gems, so much was dropping that I had to keep going back to town.